Mark Stephen Houston: Misplaced tattoo?

##Houston

About the writer: Mark Houston — USN Senior Chief Hospital Corpsman, Retired — makes his home in McMinnville with his wife, Shelley. He wrote this piece last summer and offered to share it with a wider audience on Memorial Day.

No matter how much time has elapsed, small things can trigger memories going back 50 or 60 years.

Last Friday my wife, Shelley, and I celebrated 55 years of marriage. Ironically, she needed surgery and it fell on that Friday.

There was a failed IV attempt on her right forearm that resulted in a large, dark, silver-dollar-sized bruise. I just saw it again tonight and jokingly said it looked like a tattoo.

That provoked a strong memory about a friend of mine named Dennis Spenelli, hailing from Detroit, Michigan.

We were young Navy Hospital corpsmen serving together at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, in 1968-69. It was the middle of the Vietnam War, and we were working on hospital wards, taking care of wounded Marines, soldiers and corpsmen fresh off the battlefield.

It was intense work at a time when all of us young Navy corpsmen were in line for deployment to Vietnam in support of the Marines fighting there. During our off-time, we lived a “devil may care, those who are about to die salute you!” attitude.

Drinking, arguing about the war and fretting about how much time we had left stateside before we deployed —that and girls — were occupying our attention.

One night Dennis came back from liberty in downtown Oakland sporting a brand-new tattoo exactly where Shelley had her IV bruise. It read, “Death Before Dishonor!”

We all stared at it for a moment, a bit stunned, as most of us hospital corpsmen shunned tattoos as something crass. In our minds, only Marines and seagoing sailors got tattoos. We were a bit too uppity to get tattoos ourselves.

Now remember, this was more than 50 years ago, when tattoos were associated with outlaw bikers. It wasn’t like today, when even grandmas are getting tats.

Part of our amazement about the tattoo was that it was upside down. So, as young men are prone to do, we teased Dennis mercilessly.

He loudly responded to our teasing with: “It’s not upside down. When I’m sitting at the bar with my elbows planted, it’s right side up!”

It didn’t matter. We still teased him.

Immediately after that, night Dennis was deployed to the Marines in Vietnam.

It seems morbid now, but each week, we hospital corpsmen still in the United States poured over the Navy Times causality log to see if any of our friends showed up on the KIA list. And Dennis showed up there several weeks after leaving Oak Knoll.

Just 19 years old, he died in the fetid heat and muck of a place most of us never heard of until we joined the military.

Dennis was a good guy. I miss him and all the others who never came home.

Sometimes the grief just does not go away. Maybe it lessens, but it still lingers in the hard and distant recesses of your mind.

No one hates war more that Navy corpsmen and Army medics, because they see first-hand what it does to beautiful young bodies and minds.

May Dennis Spenelli (Hospitalman, USN), John Sullivan (Hospital Corpsman Third Class, USN), David Hickman (Private First Class, USMC), and all the rest who fell in that distant land, rest in peace.