Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 12, 1991 TAG: 9102120404
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In 1971, his kid brother Tony Hogston was sent to Vietnam.
Helen Felty could do little but watch her two sons shuttle in and out of combat. Privately, she agonized. She refused to watch television news. She wouldn't read newspaper war stories. When Tony sent her an intricately carved clock from Southeast Asia, she refused to wind it. Still does.
Helen wanted no reminders.
She wanted none when the clock arrived. She wanted none when Mike re-enlisted, cured of the malaria, and when the Army sent him to South Korea. He would die there, near the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas, in 1976 of carbon monoxide poisoning from a charcoal fire in a Korean home.
Eleven days after she stepped out of the Kmart where she worked and learned Mike was dead, his body came home.
"I got to touch his face. I got to bury him," she said. "That's more than lots of other mothers."
Mike, who was 28 when he died, is buried in Saltville.
His wife, now remarried, and their three children still live in Abingdon. Tony settled near Helen in Salem.
Everywhere, there are reminders. Mike is gone and he's a reminder. His family. Tony and his wife, Jean, also a veteran, and their sons. The clock that is still on the wall. Everywhere Helen Felty turns, there are reminders.
"You don't get over it," she says. "You just learn to live with it inside you."
Helen has no family in the military now that we are at war again.
It is scant relief.
Each day brings vigils, protests, rallies, and marches, but for every American waving a flag and for every protester shaking a fist, there are thousands more silently groping for expression.
Helen Felty has been silent, because to speak out on the war - pro or con - would be to conjure up those nightmarish years. It would be a reminder.
Last week, she changed her mind.
She lives on a slowly sloping hill, a pasture and a half behind the Wal-Mart store on West Main Street in Salem. Helen shopped in three stores before she could find the camouflage fabric she wanted - jungle-colored. No shades of desert sand.
Outside her home, along a dead-end street with little traffic, she tied the camouflage into ribbons. She hung them from her car and from her dogwood tree. From the mailbox. From the spinning plastic soda bottle ornament that dangles from a tree. From the porch.
"These are not," Helen Felty says, "for this desert thing. It's for everybody. It's for all of us. It's for these Vietnam vets who never got all this praise."
"I didn't want yellow ribbons or red, white and blue," Helen said. "It wasn't what I wanted to say. This I did because it makes me feel good."
She can stand inside her storm door and look outside at the camouflage ribbons riding the gusts.
"I saw a lot of camouflage on my sons," she says. "It reminds me of them."
by CNB