My Story is Her Story

  Some times when you think you have all your ducks in a row the next door that opens might be your last and that door did open and I didn't expect the outcome.

   A lot of men and women in Viet Nam got sprayed with agent orange and at the time the government said it would cause no problems. That might not have been the truth, because in January of 2000 I found out the hard way it had been eating at my lungs for years and it put me unconscious lying on the ground one Monday afternoon. I now had a left lung that was compromised and less then 25% effective. So here I was, it's now winter and I could hardly breath the cold air out side, yet alone walk and I needed to go to work. I didn't like this situation at all and my secrete only made things worse. Sitting in our living room I knew my truck was ready to go, but medically I could not, and it brought a lot of questions I had no answer for. I now had to make some difficult decisions.

   Selling something you created and loved having was like a stab in the chest. For over five years we never let the other down and when I needed her most she seemed to know what I needed and brought it forward in another gear. But now I looked across the yard and I was selling her.

I did not know the buyer because it went to a dealership and it was a few weeks later that sale drove me to tears. It was sold to an oil rig company, one that I knew could care less about equipment. Now, all that came to my mind was how could I have done that to her? All I could think of was what she thought and how she thought that she let me down.

                                         After all she was just a truck. Right?

   Over the next few years I would see her go by and I said hello each time and told her that I'm sorry for what I did, only to lose her one day to another state and I never knew what happened to her again.

Viet Nam vets carry this type of guilt all the time because of their assumed failure of that war and selling her was just another failure added to my life. But sometimes what you think and what comes around are totally different and this story started to prove it. 

Fifteen years later I was coming home from Oklahoma City on I-40 West. As I crossed the Caddo country bridge my eyes saw something I could not believe. It was HER, My truck. She was sitting in the field of another oil rig company and she had a for sale sign on her. 

                                                                 Could it be.

I went right to her; didn't even tell their office I was out there. Here, she sat, sad, lonely. unkept and broken just like me, but somehow, she knew I was there. I just rubbed her with the tears on my face, opened the driver’s door to look inside only to see what I expected. A beaten, torn down and dirty interior, but wait, I could not believe my eyes and I slowly reached over to touch it to make it real. On the dash was my name tag that western star puts on custom trucks and it was still there. Fifteen years of abuse and no one tore it off.

                                                                       Why?

   When the guy came out and saw me he could not figure me out. I just looked at him tears and all and said I built her twenty years ago that's my name there. I talked about her like a proud father and he said it was a great truck but probably was going to be sent to Mexico this month, she was too expensive to fix. I asked what they wanted, and he said it had about $20,000 worth of parts on it and that's what they wanted, and I had no way of getting that type of money. 

They say what goes around comes around and I believe that more than ever now. I went with him into their office and just like that I told them what I did with drivers now as a Health & Wellness instructor and they said they had someone in their office that just had a heart attack, so I showed them some of our programs and left, only to feel the tears run down my face. I now knew I would never see her again and the knife went deeper 

It was two weeks later that the sales manager called me about her. I didn't know why, I already knew I have finally lost her, but it wasn't what I was hearing from the Manager. Because I was willing to help them that day with their driver they were going to donate the truck to me and twenty-four hours later she came back home to me.

Over the last years I wondered what to do with her, just having her was a joy to me, but she was still broken, But I knew she came back for a reason and I now know why. 

 It's pictured below