The Band That Remains
May the brotherhood that carried us through the darkest nights live on as quiet courage and compassion in every life it touched, ever expanding.
A Tribute
In my previous post I shared that Bob A ( as he was known) died a few days ago.
It is a strange thing to say those words when the bond itself does not seem to have ended. Something essential remains alive, moving quietly through memory and through the lives that continue. And love itself remains — the quiet field in which that bond still lives and moves among us.
Bob was one of the men from the trauma group that began in 1987. There were about thirty of us then. Vietnam veterans mostly. Men carrying things that, at that time, medicine and psychology barely knew how to name. PTSD was only just entering the vocabulary, and even then the understanding was thin. We were left largely to find our own way through the darkness.
So we did.
We met every week, sometimes twice a week. Candlelight meetings that could stretch for hours. Stories that had never been spoken out loud finally finding air. Sometimes the pain was so thick you could feel it in the room like weather.
And outside the meetings we held one another up.
In those early years, when the flashbacks and night terrors seemed at their worst, we created a rotating system of support. If one of us was unraveling in the night, another would come. No questions. Just presence. We kept each other tethered to the earth when the mind threatened to fly apart.
Over time our work deepened.
We began doing sweat lodge regularly. Week after week entering the darkness of the lodge, the heat, the prayers, the songs. Men who had seen the worst of humanity learning again how to sit in humility before the mystery of life.
For three years we were invited to the Sundance near Mount Hood in Oregon. That land still lives in my memory.
One morning around three or three-thirty, another vet, Gary, woke me urgently. He told me to come outside, down toward the area where the sweat lodges stood.
There was a clearing there — a wide stretch of open ground that ran straight out toward the horizon, framed by trees on both sides. The night sky was jet black in that deep country darkness, filled with stars.
And there, above the horizon, was Venus.
The Morning Star.
But what I remember most was the light on the earth itself. A patch of ground glowing with an impossible color — an ice blue radiance spreading across the field. It felt as if the sky had opened and something from another world was quietly touching the earth.
We sat there in silence watching it.
Moments like that were part of our medicine.
Not the kind found in textbooks, but the kind that comes when human beings sit together long enough in truth that the universe itself begins to participate in the healing.
The men of that group were brothers.
Donnie was one of them. Tough as they come, a small man who carried enormous loads of ammunition in Vietnam. He once told the story of jumping from a helicopter into a rice paddy and sinking straight down beneath the mud and water. The weight on his body pulled him under. Another soldier, Russ, right behind him pulled him out and saved his life.
Years later, in 1987, I was living next door to Donnie in North Seattle. I had just gotten sober and was still finding my footing. Donnie heard about a Vietnam vet staying in a nearby motel who was struggling badly with alcohol and trauma.
The man’s name was Russ.
The same Russ who had pulled him out of that rice paddy field years earlier.
Donnie went to see him. Russ joined our trauma group. The man who had saved his life in war was now being helped by the brotherhood that had formed afterward.
Russ died in September of 2024. I tried to get him into the hospital that week, but he was stubborn. The night he died he called 911 on himself when things turned. By the time they arrived however, it was too late. I arrived about thirty minutes later.
Walter is another of the remaining brothers. A big man from the Bronx with the accent to match. After our Saturday night meetings we would go together to IHOP for late-night breakfast food. Those nights were full of laughter — a strange and beautiful counterpoint to the gravity of what we carried.
Looking back, we were something like a band of traveling warrior poets.
I was not a Vietnam veteran myself. I had not fought in that war. As I remarked these men accepted me completely from the very beginning. How that happened still feels mysterious to me. It was as though something larger than any of us had gathered us together.
Today only a few remain.
From those original thirty men, most have died.
Donnie is now in serious condition at the Veterans Hospital here in Seattle. Walter and I are still here. When one of the brothers dies, we hold a memorial in the old group room where we used to meet. There is a board on the wall where the photographs of those who have passed are placed.
The room grows quieter each year.
But something else grows there too.
Gratitude.
The work we did together was not small. Those men helped one another survive the unspeakable. They built a structure of love and fierce loyalty at a time when almost no one understood what they were going through.
What has been apparent from the beginning is the responsibility to carry that forward. To pay it forward, as people sometimes say.
Every day of my life since those years has been shaped by what we learned together: that healing requires a safe place, a circle of trust, and the courage to sit in truth with one another.
Bob was one of the men who helped make that possible.
His death is a loss.
But nothing essential about what we shared has disappeared.
The brotherhood remains in the lives we continue to live, in the compassion we offer others, and in the quiet field of love that those men helped cultivate all those years ago.
In that sense, the band is still traveling, the work continues, and the love still remains - always.
May the brotherhood that carried us through the darkest nights continue to live on in the quiet courage we bring to the world, in the compassion we extend to others who are suffering, and in the remembrance that no one heals alone. What we forged together in those years—through truth, loyalty, and love—was not only for ourselves. It was a light meant to travel outward, touching other lives, ever widening, ever expanding. Nigel
teandzen.org
