Robert Donald Logue

• Wall Name:ROBERT D LOGUE
• Date of Birth: 7/19/1943
• Date of Casualty: 12/5/1965
• Home of Record: WARREN
• County of Record: TRUMBULL COUNTY
• State: OH
• Branch of Service: MARINE CORPS
• Rank: LCPL
• Panel/Row: 3E, 130
• Casualty Province: BINH DINH

I want to share a story with you tonight. A life story, of a man I never knew, but he was the man my father named me after, the day I was born on July 31, 1967.

He looks so much like my father did at that age. It is uncanny !!!

.

Robert and my father fought in Viet Nam together. Robert was killed and my father survived. My father brought the ghost of the war home with himself, and with the family he would later create, the abuse of war became clear.

.

I visited this man at the Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington D.C. in my teen age years. I knew where he was engraved. I heard the stories, but there was just something missing from the picture. My father created a shrine in his Sarasota home to this dead man. A connection I could never pin down as somewhat .. homoerotic …

.

When you fight in war, your comrades are family and you go above and beyond to care for them and make sure they survive.

.

Alas, Robert was killed.

.

My father gave me his name. I guess he thought that he would honor his dead friend with his name going to his first born son. That honor only lasted a short time.

.

For many years, my father would chase me through the house with bats, axes and anything else he could find to hit me with, saying that I was a mistake and should never have been born. It was a good thing that my grandmothers, and my aunt stood in between him and me several times because he surely would have killed me as a child. My mother never stood in the way or told him to stop. Because if she did he would go after her worse, and it was his rule that she never engage a beating …

.

In my childhood I figured out who I was, and what I would become, far younger than when I learned what those words meant.

.

Gay … Homosexual.

.

I studied it, I read about it, from the various library my father had collected and left around the house for me to read, including the library that was in the garage for me to find.

.

I knew I was different.

.

I always said to myself that I always wanted to be like my father and that if it was good for him THEN it was good for me.

.

I was like him.

.

However, he thought I was an ABOMINATION and that I was a MISTAKE and should never have been born.

.

Gay was unacceptable in our house.

.

A good Catholic family could have no room for a gay son.

.

Yet my father had Gay secrets in the house, by his hand and his decision.

.

For all the years I was living under his roof he would abuse me heavily.

.

My father was an alcoholic. It was a family disease.

.

Alcoholism IS a family disease.

.

He would go after my mother and my brother and I would invariably egg him on to hit me and not them. Was that chivalry?

.

I played the organ, and quite well. I had achieved new heights in my musical repertoire. Until the night my father took my organ bench and THREW it at my MOTHER.

.

That night I said to my father that after that alcoholic episode I would NEVER play another note as long as I lived and I never touched another organ in my lifetime.

.

When I was introduced to gay men in the form of Elton and Garcia at my step mothers, home over dinner parties, my father got more brutal with his abuse. It got worse.

.

I spent more time living at my friends homes than I did in my own to get away from my father and his abuse.

.

I never came out to my father. I just moved away to be gay.

.

A decision that dogs me to this day because when I moved away I was woefully UNPREPARED for the world at large. I made mistake after mistake. I drank my money and fucked over my father by getting my car repossessed. He paid off the dealer and I got the car back, but I know my father never forgot my lapse in judgment.

.

When I was diagnosed with AIDS, I called a family meeting. And rallied the troops to make sure I had support.

.

I did not get it.

.

My father would say that I GOT WHAT WAS COMING TO ME AND THAT I SHOULD DIE BECAUSE I WAS A FAG !!!

.

At a family Christmas dinner, my mother had a young friend in a neighbor that took care of her and took care of the house and the land while my father was about his work out of town.

.

That weekend I shopped and bought Chris cd’s and gifts out of thanks. On the way home we delivered these things to his house not far up the block.

.

My mother had a heart attack and accused me of many things.

.

That night at dinner, in front of guests, my father sat me at a card table separate from the guests, with plastic plates, forks and cups because he did not want me using his utensils, and he HUMILIATED ME in front of a house full of people.

.

The next day the family invited me out on their boat because they felt so bad for me. I never saw them again after that holiday, and it was the last holiday I ever went home to visit family.

.

My father continued to come visit me in Miami when I was so sick. He would demean me and belittle me. And the physical abuse he heaped upon me as a child became emotional abuse.

.

He never had a good word to say to me, so much that one night on the way home from dinner, he was berating me in the car, and I asked him to stop the car on the highway and I got out of the car on the highway and walked all the way home and I said to him to never come visit me again.

.

On my thirtieth birthday I was sick. I was sure I was going to die. I used to watch Touched by an Angel. On that one night I was sitting watching tv and I had my Bible and a Pearl Jam cd in the other hand and the world changed and I heard the voice of God…

.

It became clear what I was going to do.

.

“Jeremy’s spoken … from my bible and that cd.”

.

I called legal aide and set forth to change my name from Robert Kalan to Jeremiah Andrews. Jeremiah was the beginning and Andrew would come get me when I died, hence Andrews.

.

I sent that name change decree to my parents. I had once again, nailed another nail in my father’s casket, so to speak.

.

I had dishonored Robert and I had dishonored my father.

.

And the sacrifice that has existed within me from the day that I was born. I killed that part of me that for so many years, my father wanted dead by his own hand.

.

I got sober on August 23rd, 1994. And stay sober for four years. I went out and got drunk and high and regained sobriety on December 9th 2001.

.

I was working in a bar as a light man on New Years Night 2000/2001.

.

I worked until 9 am that next morning, January 1st, 2001.

.

I got home and got into bed. My phone rang and it was my mother. Little did I know that my parents were in Miami for a weeks time and were on their way back to Sarasota that morning and wanted to stop by and see me.

.

I had a lump of cash in my wallet. From my work shift.

.

When they arrived I offered to take us all out for breakfast so we could spend time together. My father said NO that he was in a hurry and gave me twenty minutes … TWENTY MINUTES… to visit with my mother.

.

We walked around the block, I don’t remember what we said, but my father waited in the car with the car RUNNING …

.

She got back in the car and that was the last time I saw my mother.

.

I moved to Canada in April of 2002. I had really dishonored my father by leaving the country of my birth to follow my maternal heritage. I became a Canadian Citizen in February of 2003.

.

I nailed a further nail in my father’s coffin.

.

My father married a woman and told her the rules. It was by his hand she was alive and that he would dictate the rules of marriage and life. He had knocked her up before marriage, and in those days that was tantamount to sin. So he was forced to marry her. We wonder what he would have done, had he not been forced to marry, hence, I was the mistake that should never have been born! Lies were told in a child’s life. Never LIE to your CHILDREN because one day those lies will come up and woe to you who said those lies, because they may one day come back to bite you in the ASS… One of those lies led to my Citizenship. They at least did one thing for me in a good way …

.

The last thing my mother said to me after a year of trying to keep up communications with Sarasota was this … “IF YOUR FATHER OR MYSELF DIE, NO ONE WILL CALL YOU AND YOU WILL NEVER KNOW WHERE WE ARE BURIED ….”

.

That was the last conversation I had with my mother more than 12 years ago.

.

Fuck me for living …