All the Viet Cong Can Do is Kill You; The Loneliness Will Drive You Insane

This story was submitted as part of Minnesota Remembers Vietnam. We have faithfully reproduced each story as it was originally submitted for the Story Wall, and have not corrected any spelling or grammar errors.

By Linda McBrayer | St. Paul, MN

That’s a sentence from the diary my dad kept during his time in country. He was 18 when he left, newly married, a baby on the way. He was 19 when he died 6 September 1967. He was awarded the Navy Cross for what he did that day. I was three month old; he was three months away from coming home.

I grew up being equally angry and sad at him for leaving me, for not caring enough about me to want to come home to me.

But then one day in February of 2005, I got a phone call that changed everything.

A soft, gentle voice with a deep southern accent asked me if Tommy Soliz was my dad. “Well, darlin’,” he drawled, “I was your daddy’s commanding officer.”

Too stunned to speak to him that day, we arranged to talk the next morning.

His phone was busy when I called so while I waited I Googled my dad’s name; “Corporal Thomas Soliz.”

Two weeks earlier his sister had posted on a Vietnam remembrance website. I knew it was his sister since her name was in the obituaries I had. Holding my breath I sent an e-mail, subject line reading “I am your brother’s daughter Linda Marie.”

When my father died, my mother shut them all out – family and Marines – and there was a terrible fight over where he would be buried. Now, after 38 years, I had family. Then seven years later, I received another gift.

The way I came into possession of the diary is a story unto itself, but I don’t want to take away from its content. I will say that I drove to Kansas City, MO, on my 45th birthday to get it. How it made it there is not known by anyone, including the wonderful man who found it in his father’s belongings and who, with his daughter, searched to find who it belonged to.

What is known though, is that I know more about my father and the type of man he may have become than I think I would have had he lived. The diary is 51 entries of sorrow, loneliness, and a rethinking of everything he thought he was as a man and a Marine. He had wanted to be a Marine since he was twelve; his nickname in boot camp was DI for Drill Instructor; he was, in the words the man who held him as he died, a “straight up Marine.”

The diary, however, tells a different story. It speaks of a man who is struggling with his faith in a God he’s not sure he believes in any longer, struggling with a wife who may not want him when he comes home, struggling with what kind of father will he be to a daughter he hasn’t met yet. But most over all, it speaks of such incredible crushing loneliness. If you were told it was written by an 18-year-old, you wouldn’t believe it. It is eloquent, humorous, and self-deprecating. It is the only voice of my daddy I have ever known.

It should be noted that my story is not unique – children are left without fathers in every war. But it is my story, so it is unique to me. And perhaps it is important to tell my story so that these boys are not forgotten, so that families understand that fighting over where someone is buried, which may seem monumental and overwhelming at the time, can rob a small child of a grandmother, a grandfather, aunts, uncles, cousins, an identity, and perhaps most importantly, a sense of who she is and where she came from.

THIS STORY IS PART OF CHILDREN OF VETS – GO TO THE COLLECTION.

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