SINCE THE CIVIL WAR, someone from pretty much every generation on the Sivits family tree has served in the military. When Daniel Sivits was a kid, his uncle, Carl Sivits, fought in the Korean War. Carl came back, but he could no longer handle life, and one night he ended it with a shotgun.
This was in southern Pennsylvania, where the Allegheny ridge runs up against Maryland and West Virginia. Dan grew up in a little town called Hyndman, with his mother, his younger brother Charles, and his stepfather, Bill, a coal miner. The family lived in a small house in a hollow by Wills Creek. They were poor—“the snow comed in through the windows,” Dan recalls—but not unhappy. The boys were inseparable. They were just a year apart in age, and they looked like twins, both skinny and blond. Bill taught them how to shoot arrows and hunt squirrels, and they spent much of their time wandering along the creek and through the surrounding woods on their own. Dan doesn’t talk much about his boyhood these days, but when he does, Charles is always in the story and the mood is carefree: “We’d jump a train and go up above Fairhope, swim and walk all the way back. By the time we got back, we was black as coal because of walking in all the dirty railroad tracks, and then we had to go down here and jump in the creek and clean off before we ever came home.”
Dan was cocky, and whatever he did Charles did the same. In 1960, the year their uncle Carl committed suicide, a friend of Dan’s enlisted in the Marine Corps, and Dan thought, “Heck, if he can do it, so can I.” Besides, he says, “I wanted to make something of myself, and I wanted my parents to be proud of me.” So he dropped out of high school and became a marine. Later that year, Charles dropped out, too, and he joined the army. Dan wound up in Cuba, guarding the naval base at Guantanamo Bay during the missile crisis, and Charles was shipped to Korea to patrol the thirty-eighth parallel.
When Dan was discharged, he went home and got a job in a dry-cleaning plant in Cumberland, making a dollar and a half an hour. One day, Charles came home on leave, and the brothers spent a night catching up. Charles showed Dan pictures of the pretty Korean women he was dating. He was stuck on one in particular, a girl called Sally with big wide eyes and a Doris Day haircut. The next evening, when Dan got back from the cleaning plant, he found a piece of cardboard on the kitchen table with a note from his brother saying, “I sure hate to leave and you know yourself that I wouldn’t leave if I was sober so I’ve drunk this brew. Thanks for letting me stay overnight … You all be good and take care of yourselves.”
Charles returned to Korea, and Dan soon reenlisted—this time in the army. Dan asked to be posted in Korea, too, but he was sent to Germany. Meanwhile, Charles was transferred to the 1st Infantry Army Division—the Big Red One—in Vietnam. After six years in the army, Charles was a staff sergeant, but he had never experienced combat. On his first mission—a nighttime operation to surround a Viet Cong village northeast of Saigon—he was walking, as a sergeant must, at the head of his platoon when a Claymore mine packed with ball bearings blew up in front of him. Charles was one of seventeen men wounded in the explosion and, in the firefight that ensued, he was left by the side of the road, where he was found dead the next day.
Dan had been in Germany just a few weeks when his mother wrote asking him why he hadn’t come home for Charles’s funeral. “The Red Cross was supposed to have notified me that my brother had been killed,” Dan says. “They never did notify me. I was all by myself. Hadn’t made any friends hardly by that time. And I broke down and had some problems with not being able to cope.” In his grief, Dan had the notion that he would finish his brother’s tour for him, so he applied for a transfer to Vietnam, and this time he got his wish.