Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is a later conflict in Rabo Karabekian’s memoir, encountered not through his own service but through the lives of his neighbors. Its human cost is concentrated in the story of Little John Karpinski, whose death in the war leaves his father, Big John, bereaved and makes the phrase “One war to a customer” resonate as a bleak account of repeated generations’ exposure to conflict.

The Karpinski Family and the War

Big John Karpinski is a potato farmer and a wounded veteran of the Korean War, younger than Rabo and Paul Slazinger, whose service was in World War II. The wars differ, but military injury and loss connect the three men across generations. Big John’s only son, Little John, served during the Vietnam War and was killed by a land mine. Rabo reports this loss without describing the event itself; its force lies in the stark transition from the son’s enlistment to his death.

Little John had struggled in high school, and police caught him selling drugs. He joined the Army while the Vietnam War was underway. When he first returned home in uniform, Big John was delighted: the uniform seemed to promise that his son had been set on a better course. The later news that Little John came home in a body bag overturns that hope. Military service briefly appeared to offer a father evidence of his son’s recovery, then brought the family an irreversible loss.

War Across Generations

The Vietnam War enters a larger pattern of wartime experience in Rabo’s account. Rabo himself was a one-eyed veteran of World War II, captured in Luxembourg after being wounded; he describes his own wartime injury as relatively painless and his return to civilian life as emotionally blank. Big John’s Korean War service and Little John’s death in Vietnam extend this sequence into another family. Rabo’s compressed refrain, “One war to a customer,” makes each generation’s conflict seem distinct while suggesting how persistently war reaches individual households.

The phrase also contrasts the scale of historical conflict with the intimate scale at which its consequences are lived. The account does not follow Little John through combat or explain the circumstances of the land-mine explosion. Instead, it locates the war in the change it makes to a father’s hopes and in the absence that follows. Big John’s loss is one more instance of the veteran and family histories that shape Rabo’s understanding of war, without making the experiences identical.

A Changing View of Men

Rabo also invokes the Vietnam War as a point of reference in describing Marilee Kemp’s view that men were useless, idiotic, and dangerous. He observes that this judgment would not become widely accepted in her native Italy until the last three years of the war. The reference places Marilee’s outlook ahead of its time in Rabo’s telling and connects the period’s conflict to a broader change in how women might regard men. This is a cultural comparison rather than an account of a particular wartime political or military event.

Aftermath and Local Change

The war’s consequences remain present in the Karpinski family’s local history. Three generations had grown up on the family farm, land that Rabo likens, in an Armenian manner of speaking, to sacred ancestral ground. After Little John’s death, Big John and his wife, Dorene, begin dividing the farm into six-acre lots. The parcels are expected to sell quickly because new houses on the property will have second-story views of the water. That subdivision is a material change to a place held across generations, set beside a loss that cannot be reversed: the family land is being divided and sold while its only son has been lost to war.