A Birth and a Death

BY TERRY SHAW

Dick Vick grew up on a farm by Lake Lillian, but in his teens his family moved to Litchfield. So, Dick went to high school in Litchfield, as did I. Dick went into the Air Force rising to the rank of Master Sgt. He was sent to Germany for duty at the Ramstein

Air Force Base. I got drafted into the Army in the late sixties during the Vietnam War. My mother’s prayers were answered, and I was sent to an Army base in Pirmasens, Germany instead of Vietnam. I was given two weeks leave to go home before shipping out, so my fiancée, who lived on a farm by Lake Lillian, and I got married. My new wife came over to Pirmasens to be with me a few months later after I had found an apartment off the base and had saved up enough money to pay for it, buy an old used VW, and send for her. She was pregnant and had never been away from her parents or out of the United States before, so it was a scary situation for her. Pirmasens was about a 30-minute drive south of Ramstein AFB and we’d drive up there often to go to their PX, which was bigger and nicer than our Army one.

Late one dark and moonless spring night, when the time for our first baby had arrived, I loaded my wife into our little beat-up $200 Volkswagen “beetle” and rushed her to the local Army clinic, five kilometers away, to confirm what we already knew. The medics said it was time, put my wife into an ambulance, and told me to follow them to the Army Hospital on the side of a mountain in a town called Landstuhl, near to Ramstein. I had never been there to the hospital

before, but the medics said, “Just follow us!”, and off we went on a wild chase up the unfamiliar curved mountain road. I desperately tried to keep my little VW close behind the speeding Jeep ambulance, praying I wouldn’t get into an accident or get lost. I could barely do fifty mph up that mountain with the gas pedal of my tiny car floored. I had some narrow misses, as I blindly screamed around curves that dark night, trying to keep up with the ambulance, afraid to lose sight of them. Finally arriving at the hospital, I was separated from my wife, and escorted into a waiting room to pace and smoke cigarettes with another GI in the same predicament.

A little after two in the morning, a nurse came in and told me that I was a father for the first time. I wasn’t allowed to see Christine, the name we had picked out if it was a girl, except through a nursery room glass that the nurse had led me to. Officially born on April 30, 1969, Christine was tiny at five pounds, fourteen and a half ounces and, we learned the next day, she had Down Syndrome.

A strange thing happened that same night at the hospital just a few rooms away from my wife’s. Something that would’ve made the hair stand up on the back of my head, had I known about it at the time. Thousands of miles from America, in a tiny Army Hospital, on the side of a mountain in Germany, a woman who grew up on a farm by Lake Lillian, who had married a man who went to school in Litchfield, gave birth on April 30th. In another room down the hall, in the same hospital, an Air Force soldier from Lake Lillian, who went to the same high school I did in Litchfield, died…on April 30th. His name was Dick Vick, and he had been in a car accident on a curved mountain road. He left behind his wife, Barbara, and four children. What are the chances of two Lake Lillian people with Litchfield connections both being in that same hospital, on the same floor, on the same night, thousands of miles from home in Germany, one giving birth, and the other one dying? We call Christine our “little angel”. God took Dick away from this earth that night, but He gave us an angel.