Jesse Rizzo knew he was lucky, despite the throbbing pains
through his neck and ear. For weeks, as he lay wracked with pain in
a Saigon army hospital, his ear punctured by a single bullet, he
saw doctors divvying up the patients. The worst came first as
firefights brought in dozens of casualties, wounded and dying.
Saigon, Vietnam – Jesse Rizzo knew he was lucky, despite the throbbing pains through his neck and ear. For weeks, as he lay wracked with pain in a Saigon army hospital, his ear punctured by a single bullet, he saw doctors divvying up the patients. The worst came first as firefights brought in dozens of casualties, wounded and dying.
Rizzo wasn’t happy, but he knew he was lucky. At the bedside of Gerald Hague, a farm boy from Wisconsin he’d grown close with as the two crouched in foxholes and weathered firefights, he offered encouragement. Fellow soldiers called Hague “the Hog,” a pun on his name.
“You look good,” Rizzo told him. “You’re going to make it.” Hague was shot in the chest, but survived, semi-conscious, oxygen piped into his lungs. The doctor told Rizzo his chances were good. Hague asked him to hold on to his wallet, and Rizzo grabbed it, thinking nothing of it.
Six days later, Hague was dead. The date was April 21, 1967. The Hog’s birthday.
Morgan Hill, California
As a girl in Morgan Hill, Alicia Rizzo Soriano clamored for bedtime stories from her father, stories of the men alongside him in faded ’70s photos in bunkers and Vietnamese rickshaws – young clean-shaven men whose names came easily to Rizzo’s lips. When she pointed to Hague, she said, he would tell the tale of his hurt friend and the wallet – and as he said the words, he pulled that very wallet out, for his daughter to touch.
“We were in awe,” said Rizzo Soriano, now grown and married in San Diego. “I can still remember the smell of it. It smelled like it had been somewhere. Like something old.”
The wallet itself was ordinary: the sort of long, black pigskin wallet that U.S. soldiers often bought in Vietnam, the country’s name printed within. Inside were Gerry Hague’s inoculation record, his military driver’s license, Vietnamese coins and photos of his second wife, his father, his brother and a hometown friend. It looked just like Rizzo’s wallet, he said. Like any soldier’s wallet.
In the heat of war, he said, the words God and country felt tinny, unreal. When the bullets flew in the Vietnamese jungle, he was fighting for Gerry, and Gerry was fighting for him.
Rizzo would gaze at the wallet, and tell his daughter: Someday, we’ll get it back to his family. But finding Hague’s family was a tremendous task, especially in the era before Google. In the 1980s, Rizzo enlisted a private investigator to find them, and found nothing.
“I could have not returned it and nobody would have known,” Rizzo said. “But it was always in the back of my mind.”
Three years ago, he mentioned the wallet at a Reno reunion of his unit, the 173rd Airborne Division. The word spread through Veterans Affairs groups, eventually reaching River Falls, Wisc., where a message landed on Thad Hague’s answering machine – the 3-year-old son Gerald Hague had left behind, now a grown man who knew next to nothing of his father, or his death.
River Falls, Wisconsin via San Jos
Damien Trujillo knew a good story when he heard one. When Rizzo Soriano’s husband, a San Diego radio DJ, heard that Rizzo was flying to Wisconsin to return the long-lost wallet, he phoned Trujillo, a college friend now working for NBC Channel 11. Trujillo, in turn, called Rizzo, and asked if TV news crews could accompany him to Wisconsin. Rizzo agreed.
His story would eventually land him on national television, as a guest on the Today Show alongside Thad Hague, his long-lost friend’s son.
But Rizzo remembers the off-camera moments best, before the formal ceremony where Rizzo and fellow soldiers presented the wallet to Hague and his half-brother. May 6, 2006, at Thad Hague’s home, Rizzo paged through his album of photographs, revealing the father Thad remembered only vaguely. When Gerald Hague left for war, he left a wife, a child and a pregnant girlfriend – a girlfriend he would later return briefly to the U.S. to marry. Bitterness between Hague’s first wife and his second kept Thad Hague from learning much about his father: Until Rizzo’s call, and the details it revealed, Thad Hague never knew he had a half-brother.
In the Hague family, Rizzo saw the ache of absence, and the dysfunction Gerald Hague’s death caused. He recalled scenes from “A Wonderful Life,” the Christmastime classic where Jimmy Stewart revisits his life, minus himself: This was that parallel life made real.
“The ripple effect of one life is so massive,” said Rizzo. “A person is killed, and it becomes a statistic. But it’s so much more than that.”
Morgan Hill, California
Seven years of surgeries followed Jesse Rizzo’s return to the U.S., surgeries that slowly mended his battered ear, but left him deaf on one side. Depression sunk his spirits, despite the medals he’d won in combat: a Bronze Star and an Army Commendation, both in the spring of ’67, and a Purple Heart to boot.
“To some degree,” he said, “I’m still going through it.”
After he returned to the U.S., as an apprentice at Mancini Motors, he was belittled by a draft-dodger who’d advanced beyond him while Rizzo was away at war. Eventually, Rizzo was fired: His depression and his coworker’s slights made him a lackluster worker. For a while, he drifted, lost in the physical and emotional trauma, until he decided to go back to school, earning a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Studies from San Jose State University, and later a master’s degree in Education. The love of learning launched him higher and higher: For 23 years, he worked as a principal in San Jose, and later served as a district official. Today, he works as a part-time consultant for National Hispanic University, a four-year liberal arts college in San Jose.
“Although the war was traumatic,” he said, “it did build a certain degree of character, an inner strength I don’t think I’d be able to develop otherwise.”
Then again, he added, “some men, it destroyed.”
A year after returning the wallet, a year after the clicks of flashbulbs and the glare of spotlights, and 40 years after his friend’s death, he’s relieved. A few e-mails flitted between Rizzo and Thad Hague after they met. A few friends called him to ask about the event. A DVD encloses his TV appearance. His life has calmed, interrupted only by news flashes from Iraq that revive 40-year-old memories of another war far from home, another war that split America.
“It breaks my heart,” he said. “I don’t think, personally, that it’s worth it.”
But in one small yet spectacular gesture, Rizzo found a bit of peace, one thing made right in a world of wrong.
“My dad is truly a man of his word,” said Rizzo Soriano. “He made a promise to a man, someone he held close to his heart. And he kept his promise.”
