Now, I am going to sketch this story out in bullet points. The story spans years. It spans a lifetime.

•Francis G. Cossick: got his college diploma in one hand & his draft notice in the other.
•He was exceptionally intelligent, sensitive, artistic
•He was in the infantry, a grunt
•He went through a special training program. He was always so very proud of the fact that he was the valedictorian of that program. He was awarded a wooden plaque with a silver saber on it & his name engraved on a plate
•Whatever this program was, it qualified him to immediately be in a position of some leadership
•Intensely quiet, unassuming, and sensitive, he despised behaving authoritatively.
•First day out, the quiet, Clearfield County country boy sergeant asked a young black soldier to carry the “squawk box.” The young man looked him in the eyes & said “I ain’t carryin’ that mother f*ck*r”. You carry it.” And he did.
•He was an explosives expert (I am not exactly sure what that means) but he did tell me that sometimes when they left an area, he would defuse traps he’d assembled before moving on
•One time there was a VC corpse near his bunker. The body stank & swelled & split open & nobody did anything about it He was sickened by it physically & morally so he single handedly dug a grave & rolled the man into it.
•The sight of Vietnamese children scrabbling around in garbage piles crushed him. He used to say he wanted to pack one up in his rucksack & take him or her home with him
•Many, many other stories but I skip very far ahead in my husband’s Vietnam story
•My husband & I got married when he was 37 & I was 25
•We were married for 30 years
•Every single day of every one of those years, I heard him reference his year Vietnam at least once
•4 years into marriage we had our first son 4 years more, we had our second
•My husband became Involved with Christian organizations called Point Man & Vets With a Mission
•He was planning a return trip to Vietnam with V. w.a. M. when I asked him if he would please “bring me back a baby girl in his rucksack”
•This started us on the path that would eventually lead us to our 8 month old daughter
•He traveled alone back to Vietnam to bring her home
•I have many photographs of this adoption trip, as well as many photographs from his year in Vietnam
•I also have countless anecdotes from the adoption trip as well as from his year in Vietnam
•This trip to Vietnam, (DaNang & HoChiMinh City) his interaction with orphanages, our baby’s birth mother, and most especially, his precious little daughter was both hurt & healed
•While there he was taken to visit a shelter for persons suffering gross disfigurement from exposure to agent orange
•Two years later we decided it would be healing to adopt a child from Vietnam that no one else wanted to adopt. We had heard about an 8 year old deaf child from remote part of North Vietnam called HoaBinh
•Once again, he traveled alone. He had to go twice this time: once to meet the child & start paperwork, another time to actually retrieve the child
•This portion of the story could be an entire memoir in itself
•The arrival of this child into our home marked the end of life as we knew it
•The child had active tuberculosis. She ought not to have been issued a visa but her records deceptively showed a clear chest X-Ray
•Tuberculosis is treated by the state. Adult tuberculosis patients who do not comply with treatment are actually IMPRISONED until they have completed their treatment. FERAL CHILDREN who don’t comply are simply the responsibility of their parents and their failure to comply becomes, in the eyes of the state, the parents’ failure to comply.
•Our experience with this child during state enforced Directly Observed Therapy became a living hell. Medicating her was like medicating a tiger
•Every day we were bitten, kicked, struck, spat upon, had chunks of hair yanked, & had to keep her from running away
•Again, I skip years of things that should be told.
•We knew we were adopting a deaf child. We did not know we were adopting a child with tuberculosis, multiple psychiatric disorders, & a genetic mutation that will eventually end her life & most likely derives from her parents’ exposure to agent orange
•This daughter has been in many schools, many psychiatric settings, several group homes. She is presently 25 yo & lives in a Deaf group home.
•But 4 years ago, on October 10, 2013 my husband had just driven her from a psychiatric facility for Deaf in Florida to a behavioral/educational Deaf facility in Pittsburgh
•My son, a senior at Messiah & I drove to Pittsburgh to meet them, to get her settled into her new dorm, to take her out for her birthday. When we would leave there, that night, we were to drive to Clearfield County to spend the long weekend with my parents
•But that was not to be for 25-30 minutes after saying goodnight to our daughter, my husband, who was following my son & me in his car, was struck from behind by a drunk driver traveling 107 miles per hour
•My son took his daddy’s dying pulse
•The years since that second Vietnamese adoption had been largely miserable. My husband used to “joke” that he was STILL getting his ass kicked by the NVA
•We were both driven to distraction by this child. I bore the brunt of the day to day but he bore it financially & in all of the “official” capacities with schools, medical facilities, & legal issues. It was hard on him. In the end, it killed him.