My Vietnam vet grandfather (sit tibi terra levis) once kvetched, "I've felt dead bodies warmer than this coffee!"
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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Holy shit, he sounds like a character
He was. Sweetest man I ever knew, and not just because I was his spoiled rotten grandson, he was kind to everyone. Hell of a sense of humor, but wouldn't harm a fly (alright, not strictly speaking true - he squashed spiders for my arachnophobic grandmother). Adored animals, even the most rotten and mean-spirited pets. Complained and cursed about everything, but rarely seriously. He used to love hunting before Vietnam; he gave up both hunting and guns after he came back from the war. Fishing and video games became his hobbies of choice. He was an early gamer - in the 70s and 80s, my mother always remembered him and my grandmother having the latest games, and monopolizing them in the household, lmao.
Later in life, when he confided in me about some of his experiences in the Vietnam War, I realized that he very probably had felt dead bodies warmer than that coffee. He regarded the war as theoretically winnable, but also immensely pointless on the US's part, and couldn't see a reason why they were over there.
Miss him terribly. He was a big part of my life, even after I moved out of my hometown.
I envy your relationship with him. The charismatic and intelligent half of my grandparents died when I was too young to know them well. Instead I got a grumpy Croatian recluse and his crabby wasp wife. Not much there. From the stories I've heard, I would have fit in better among the other ones.
Your grandad sounds like a great fella though. Copes with humour, obsessed with video games but soured on guns. I know how that feels. His journey resonates with my understanding of that war. Thanks for sharing.
He still enjoyed talking about guns, their engineering and their history, but I never knew him to own or use one, even though everyone else in the family did.
He taught me how to play video games, along with my grandmother, and the two of them played video games together almost every day (never multiplayer, funny enough) until the day he went into the hospital for an extended stay. He passed much quicker than any of us expected.
Guess I'm still sorting that out.
You have to imagine that when you've been in the shit in Vietnam, the last thing you need is PvP with your wife. I get that.
I used to get deep into guns with my buddies, did actual stoichiometric maths, invented and tested an intermediate cartridge between .45 and 454 Casull. These days I'm happy to know my kid still hasn't seen a gun in real life. It's a cool subject but I've seen enough and I'm over it.
When someone beloved passes quickly with no goodbyes though, that's hard to process. I lost my father in law like that this year and the suddenness makes it so hard to grieve. It's like if Copperfield never made the statue of liberty reappear. How do you process that?
You have to imagine that when you’ve been in the shit in Vietnam, the last thing you need is PvP with your wife. I get that.
lmao, when I asked them about it that's the basic excuse they both gave - that they'd go crazy blaming each other for failures in co-op. When I was young, they'd pass the controller back and forth in half-hour shifts, and backseat game for the other. When I got older and convinced them of the utility of each of them having individual laptops, they'd both sit on the couch and play the same game single-player, and 'wait up' for each other.
At least when they were playing the same games. My grandfather liked survival-horror games, and my grandmother liked puzzle games; but they both liked RPGs, both JRPGs and open-world Western RPGs.
When someone beloved passes quickly with no goodbyes though, that’s hard to process. I lost my father in law like that this year and the suddenness makes it so hard to grieve. It’s like if Copperfield never made the statue of liberty reappear. How do you process that?
Luckily, we had time enough to make our goodbyes, and we all knew it was always going to be terminal. He took it much better than any of us did.
It was just... thinking we had more time than we did. We all thought maybe a year - including the doctors. Ended up being closer to a month due to unforeseen complications. We were with him in the end. That was hard too. But I'm sure I'd've regretted it more if I wasn't there in person.
It's never easy. The hardest part for me is the finality, and having to decide what the story meant even though it was all so badly written. So to speak. Real life doesn't resolve in a narratively satisfying way without a lot of revisions that always feel hacky. Then you're stuck with a script that sucks and the feeling that you should have been better at improv for the last twenty years.
I can make you Eggs Cambodict with agent orange juice
It ain't me, it ain't me, I just want my eggs well done