Telling the Painful Part

In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Bob Timberg and I worked together in The Baltimore Sun’s Washington Bureau. He covered the White House, arguably the most challenging and visible of the bureau’s regular assignments, and became one of the most respected reporters in town.

That was remarkable only because of his unique burden. Bob’s face and hands had been painfully disfigured by burn scars that often caused strangers to look away. His friends knew he’d hit a land mine in Vietnam, but neither he nor we talked about it. The war had been over for fifteen years and Bob, it seemed, had put it behind him without anger or bitterness. An amiable, thoughtful, and energetic colleague, he devoted himself to uncovering stories no one else had, including many connected to the Iran-Contra scandal.  

In quiet moments, though, I confess I wondered what rage must simmer behind that mask, what he felt about the war and his contemporaries who had refused to go and felt righteous about it. And I wondered how he had overcome the physical and psychic scars of his war to build such a successful career.

Now, twenty-four years later, he has told us in a gutsy and brutally honest memoir titled Blue-Eyed Boy.

Timberg, a handsome Naval Academy graduate, was a Marine first lieutenant delivering a payroll near Da Nang in January 1967 when the track vehicle he was riding on suddenly threw him up on a cloud of flame that wiped out his future.

He wrote about it reluctantly, he says in the Prologue, “to remember how I decided not to die. Not to let my future die.”  He has published three other highly regarded books, posted a successful 30-year career in newspapers, and edited a prestigious military journal, but he calls the decision to reclaim his future his “most significant achievement.”

In his very personal telling I found this long and arduous journey, the rebuilding of his life, his face, and his earning capacity, an emotionally difficult tale to read but one impossible to put aside. He endured thirty-five surgeries—one on his eyelids without anesthesia—a monstrous depression, and the stares of children and adults, then returned to a culture that hated his war and disdained and abused those who fought it.

But there’s neither self-pity nor self-praise here. He frankly describes his role in destroying marriages to two loving and loyal women and the anger he felt toward those contemporaries who “relied on world-class duplicity to avoid duty in Vietnam. And then claimed the moral high ground.”

The voice is authentic Timberg. You can hear it in the Prologue:

“ ‘Reclaimed my future’ has a bullshit, self-help-book sound that I hate,” he writes. “Don’t worry, I won’t resort to it again, at least I don’t think I will. But I know there is something true here, something real and fragile...something essentially human about what I fought my way through.”

We’re all the richer for his having the courage and generosity to share it. Everyone with a stake in war—and that’s all of us, whether Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the next one—should read Blue-Eyed Boy.