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Close to Nowhere
By Linda Jones Corporal Judge Clayton Hellums comes home (Writer’s
Note: Bits and pieces of this were taken from an article on the front
page of the Oct. 14, 2010, Calhoun County Journal — with publisher Joel
McNeece’s permission.) In the late 1960s and
early ’70s, I had several friends who were serving overseas in Vietnam.
I was lucky — all my friends came home alive. Since
then, I’ve met many more friends, who also served in Vietnam.
Obviously, they all came home — maybe with nightmares, flashbacks and
other problems, but they still came home. Pop’s
cousin David came home alive. There were holes in his legs from
bullets and his psyche was deeply scarred, but he came home. Later, he developed Hodgkin’s diesease — cancer in his lymph nodes — from being doused repeatedly with Agent Orange. During
those years, I wore a POW-MIA bracelet. Sadly, in one of the moves we
made before we moved to Mississippi, that bracelet was lost. Worse, I
don’t remember my MIA’s name or branch of service. In
the Oct. 14 issue of The Calhoun County Journal (Bruce) the front page
story and photo was about an MIA who came home, 66 years after his
death in World War II. Corporal Judge Clayton
Hellums was laid to rest in his native Calhoun County with a large
gathering of family and friends in Shady Grove Church Cemetery. Cpl.
Hellums was killed with four of his comrades on Oct. 9, 1994 in
Lorraine, France. The U.S. government listed him as “MIA” until a few
years ago, when a Frenchman, Gerald Louis, discovered part of Hellum’s
dog tags. The wheels began grinding and three years after the discovery of the dog tags, the Hellums family was contacted. Ironically, exactly 66 years after his death, on Oct. 9, 2010, Cpl. Hellums was laid to rest in his native soil. The
National Guard’s Honor Guard carried Hellum’s flag-draped casket and
presented a 21-gun salute. “Taps” was played as the family wept. Pop’s
family has a KIA — and until the day he died, my father-in-law wasn’t
sure that the body of his brother, John Paul Jones, was the one in the
closed casket. John Paul was supposedly in a hospital in Korea with minor wounds. Two days later, they said he died. No other explanation. I was deeply touched by the story of Cpl. Hellums and I am grateful that he was able to “come home.”
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