This story could be told ten thousand times. It is a story known and told by brothers and sisters-in-arms after every war. It begins with a desperate promise in the midst of the fierce frenzy of battle. One is wounded, the other helps him out, dresses his wounds, gets him out of harm’s way. Then, the words, “I’m gonna see you at home.”
Simple words, expressed with a mix of fear and desperate hope in the terrible uncertainty of a desperate situation. There is no guarantee that their promise of hope will come true.
There is no way to explain such moments. They are as brief as a breath, but they are etched into one’s memory like a tattoo. You see it in the mirror of your mind on occasion and the images, the smells, the actions all come back to you just as they were those many decades ago. For some, the memories get buried somewhere deep in the background of the mind, but for others, those moments, the things done in the intense lucidity of combat, remain just below the surface and do not go away. It was that way for Dale Edge, a good man and a hard working farmer from Ashland, Illinois.
Edge came home and took up his life long work as a farmer after the war. Because of the kind greeting we Vietnam veterans received on coming home, he like so many of us, buried the war time memories somewhere deep down inside. All except one of them. That one he just couldn’t let go of over the years.
It was during a particularly intense battle that one of his fellow soldiers was hit by an RPG round and had been severely wounded. That soldier was Fred Kjorlien. He had been hit in the left leg by that round and his leg was gone. He was bleeding badly and Edge was the first to get to him. He put a tourniquet on the leg to stop the bleeding then stayed with Kjorlien, helping to get him out of the kill zone and to a medevac.
The five words that embedded themselves so deeply into Edge’s mind were Kjorlien’s, “I’m gonna see you at home.”
For the ensuing decades, Edge wondered about Fred Kjorlien. Did he make it? Did he survive and make it home.
Dale Edge is clearly an experienced and successful farmer, but he only recently got his first smart phone and it opened up a possibility to him that he could only have imagined over all those decades. He took a chance and started looking for Fred Kjorlien on the internet and when he found him, he took another chance and gave Kjorlien a call.
You will see how that turned out in this video. It is a great reunion story, one that will have echoes of familiarity for many combat veterans. It is a story that Dale Edge very honestly tells us was, “An answer to prayers.” In those brief moments under fire a bond was formed between these two men that had the metal to survive the passage of five decades of time. For Edge the reunion was the answer to his prayers for the man he had helped in the heat of battle those many decades ago; the man whose words played over and over in his mind, the fellow soldier he had been wondering and worrying about for 53 years. For Kjorlien, it was a surprise out of the past and a chance to finally be able to thank the battle buddy who had come to his aid and saved his life that day.
Enjoy this reunion. It says a lot about those who have been through the hell that is war.