Requiem for a humble man, Part 1

Vietnam, A Prologue and Epilogue of Our Elegy

Biography is tainted by the cult of the Great Man. Statesmen, Celebrities, Criminals, Jocks, Soldiers – people who we think make our world. The contrarian view is that they are replaceable – if the Great Man wasn't there to be cheered and to lead, someone else would step up. What makes the real world is the billions of small acts that, accreted together, put food on your table, get your children through school, make you feel better when you're blue, keep your car running.

This is a paean to a man who never made the headlines but who carried his part of the community nobly. He held up a sizable chunk of the mountain all by himself. There are a few hundred people who knew Dave Ambrose and all of them feel the better for it. Those of us who didn't know him have an unknown hole in our hearts.

Dave resembled a character out of Lord of the Rings, one of the amiable dangerous creatures of a mythical world. He stood 5 foot 10 going on 6 foot 4. His mouth split his face from ear to ear and looked like it could swallow the entire puny planet. He had a shock of white hair and the kindest eyes I've seen in the longest time, magnified by huge gold-ringed trifocals. His shoulders filled doorways and his hands were the size of manhole covers. His laugh sounded like the rumble of doom and his soul was as delicate as a New Mexico winter sunrise.

Dave worked as an electrician when he could get it, and after that he worked any job in the building trade. He said, “They can make me work long, but they can't make me work hard.” Untrue. He worked every job he could find and he worked as hard as he could. His huge hands broke plenty of tools and more than a few fittings.

His motto should have been “They can make me work stupid, but they can't stop me thinking.” I first met Dave facing off across the bar, where he regaled me with stories distracting, bemusing, shocking. Weeks later I observed him counsel a young man at a one-time local comedy event where Dave acted as the bouncer. Straight as always, he explained, “Son, if you don't quit drinking right now, you're going to pass out, shit yourself and embarrass your Mamma over there. Let me walk you over here to the back, before you screw up your life even more.” The next time we met, he explained the ideal Jeffersonian democracy in great detail and why John Adams had a stick up his ass.

The folk story has it Dave leapt from his mother's womb weighing twenty five pounds, in a New England town gone rich to poor, a town that manufactured furniture until Taiwan, then China and ultimately Ikea gutted out the market. High School flipped him hot and credulous into the Army, and Basic dumped him hot and wary into Đà Nẵng and then in-country. Two tours gave him a disdain for officers and a snaky anxiety around little yellow men. Besides getting shot at, developing horrendous foot-rot and slogging along under Agent Orange as it reigned down (yes, his verb, his pun), he ended up in a forward fire base where he wasn't in the direct line-of-command. As an untrusted outsider who could be screwed with – but only so far – he sought out drunken solace with the guy called “BB” for the body bags he deployed. Dave spent too many evenings wasted on home-cook there in the mortuary. The body bags stood in square pallets. He was surrounded by the Army preparation for failure and for flag-covered coffins.

To be continued