He strode into my office a week or so ago and asked if there was a reporter. The office manager pointed to me - and a minute later, I met Maurice Meyer. We got the background business out of the way immediately.
He didn’t know my name was Meyer. “Really?” he asked. “Isn’t that something!”
Maurice and I are not relatives. He grew up a middle child in a Catholic family in Melrose where they milked Holstein cows.
I grew up outside Oak Park in a Lutheran family where we milked Guernsey cows.
We know it’s the Guernsey cows who have gone to heaven.
Maurice is dying from cancer, cancer caused by Agent Orange he endured during his time in An Khe, South Vietnam in 1966-67.
He’s had surgery to remove a portion of his lung. His breathing is “short of capacity.”
The doctors found a new cancer cell in January. It’s in the upper lung.
“It’s kinda scary,” he said.
It would be scary, to be in Maurice’s shoes. A young man in the prime of his life, plucked off his Melrose farm and thrown into a war a long ways away and out into the woods with 1st Cavalry ground troops and getting this spray all over him.
The spray was to defoliate the jungle so our guys could see the enemy better.
It wound up getting lots of our guys. Most, not then, but many, now-a-days, 50 years after they said farewell to that God-forsaken war.
We’re learning of more and more of them here in Sherburne County.
The enemy didn’t kill them off in the 1960’s.
Our government did, but it’s taken them 50 years to die.
No war is fair. The guys who should be fighting have sat back in their offices with maps and pointers.
The guys who did the fighting were guys like Maurice.
And now he’s paying the price.
He goes every three months to the St. Cloud VA for a checkup.
“Then to Minneapolis, if it (the cancer) gets big enough,” he said. “They don’t do this in St. Cloud.”
Maurice was drafted off his farm by the Service in 1965. In Vietnam, he worked in the Cavalry’s Headquarters Company communications center.
His duties included getting out and into the field, where the stuff had been sprayed. He was home in two years. But the stuff was with him.
He embarked on a career that lasted for many years as a mechanical inspector for Control Data. He retired in 2010.
He was expecting to continue living out his life with his wife, Mary Lou, on the northwest side of Big Lake on their two and a half-acre parcel, where they’d been for the past 20 years.
But Mary Lou died four years ago. He has a daughter from each of his two previous marriages - and they and two grandchildren provide him joy and relief.
His back yard and his dog are what keeps him going. He raised 20 quarts of produce from his garden last summer, “some pints, too,” he mentioned. Green beans and tomatoes, peppers, beans, peas. And Maurice, 73, goes for walks with the dog. Hunting, which he enjoyed, was given up a while back. Breathing was a problem.
“And I’ve gotta rest, like when fertilizing the gardens,” he said.
Maurice never mentioned his condition “isn’t fair.” He doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who would complain.
Bless him - and all our comrades of the Vietnam era. You are our heroes.
Post Note: Maurice speaks so highly of Bruce Price, our county veterans office. Veterans, go see him. He can help.
