They killed my hero. But heroes never really die. Rick will live on. So long as my pen has ink, and my voice bellows out to your sons manning the ramparts today, he will live on. Rick was a volunteer in a draftee army. In some ways that made it hard for him. It’s easy today. Today we are all volunteers, and the young men and women I serve with will hear Rick’s story because I will tell them, and they will remember. It is our professional strength: We remember.

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This period of global peace has been called ‘Pax Americana,’ just as the peace under the Romans was called ‘Pax Romana.’ It has always been a peace that exacted a cost. Rick knew that. He lived that. I suspect that he’s waiting now, down in Fiddler’s Green — ‘halfway down the trail to hell,’ where all cavalrymen pull off the road for a drink — composing his next bawdy ballad and telling those men from his platoon whom he last saw in the Ia Drang what they missed over the past 30-plus years. He’ll be telling them lies, of course, but they will be magnificent glowing lies, and every one of them will have a punch line to bring tears to your eyes. Shoot, he’s probably tending the bar by now.

‘…So after you read this, get your canteen cup, / And fill it with mead, or scotch, or rotgut, / Then pour it right out, on the ground, on the floor, / For the heart of the Seventh, Rescorla’s no more. / Garry Owen.’

This article was written by Major Robert L. Bateman, U.S. Army and originally published in the June 2002 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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