One day in 2018, I received a package in the mail from my aunt and uncle in Portland, OR. Their 50th wedding anniversary was coming up later that year, so when I saw the return address, I assumed it must be an invitation.
Instead, it turned out to be one of the greatest treasures I’ve ever received. Inside the yellow shipping envelope was a postal envelope addressed to my grandparents, from a U.S. Army base in Vietnam, postmarked in June of 1968.
The letter was from my uncle, Staff Sgt. Jose Alvario Perea, my dad’s youngest brother. My grandparents that he wrote the letter to were not his own parents – they had died when he was a child. The letter was to my mom’s parents, a letter of gratitude for the hospitality they had shown him when he visited my parents before leaving for his deployment.
I heard a lot about my uncle Humphrey, as he was called in the family, while I was growing up, but I was less than a year old the only time I ever met him. Just a few months after sending that letter, he was sent to the infirmary and given medication for an ulcerous condition of the stomach, but the problem worsened, and exploratory surgery later revealed he had suffered severe peritonitis from contamination caused by a tear in the lower alimentary canal.
I know this, because shortly after receiving that letter, I called my aunt, my dad’s and Uncle Humphrey’s older sister who had raised them after their parents died, to read the letter to her. She then sent me a packet with some of his medical records and other documents.
I also called another aunt, Uncle Humphrey’s widow, who told me the story about how they met. She was a civilian employee at the base in Germany where he was stationed before his deployment to Vietnam. They met at a dance on a base in Spain, where they each had gone to celebrate the 4th of July.
After his surgery, Uncle Humphrey was brought to Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Denver, CO, before being transferred to the Veterans Hospital in Long Beach, CA. I don’t know the date he died, just that it was the previous Sunday, according to a news clipping about his death in the Albuquerque Journal that my aunt included with his records. He was 27 years old.
Several years ago, when a replica of the Vietnam Memorial Wall was brought to Fernley for the Memorial Day ceremony, I scoured the list of names, only to find that his wasn’t on it. I went online to the Vietnam Memorial Website, and he’s not listed there either. I later found out he’s not on it because his death doesn’t fit the Department of Defense criteria.
He may not have died in combat, although I have no idea how his original injury occurred, but it was him I was thinking about Monday when I met Cynthia Nielsen, who herself was there remembering her father who died when she was three years old. Like me, she was honoring a man who is buried hundreds of miles away by paying respects to others who have served and died.
It’s Uncle Humphrey I think of every time I visit the Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Fernley. All of the graves at the cemetery represent him and the place he holds in my heart, even though it’s there only through stories.
My eyes moistened a little as Cynthia teared up talking about her father and what being at the cemetery Monday meant for her – both of us remembering men we never really knew, vicariously through the veterans buried in our own community on the most solemn occasion of Memorial Day. And somehow, in her grief, I felt less alone in mine.
Robert Perea is the editor of the Fernley Reporter.
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