‘Little words’ before he left
Navajo Times | Krista Allen Rose Johnson, originally from Gray Mountain, Arizona, holds a portrait of her late brother, Ned Lee, who died in the Vietnam War, in 1968.
Coalmine Canyon honors memory of U.S. Army soldier Ned Lee
COALMINE CANYON, Ariz.
Trailing her brother, Ned Lee, Rose Johnson carried a bundle of rabbits while he carried a rifle, Johnson recalled. “We’d go rabbit hunting,” Johnson said about her late brother, a U.S. Army soldier who died in Bình Du’o’ng, a province in southeast Vietnam, on Feb. 8, 1968. “The rabbits he would kill, he’d make me carry them.”
Four or five large rabbits were heavy when Johnson was a child. “He would tie all of the legs together and that’s how I carried them home,” Johnson said. “All he’d carry is his gun. He was my older brother.”
Lee was 21 years old when the Army recruited him for military service. Prior to that, he was at home in Gray Mountain, Arizona, after graduating from Sherman Indian High in Riverside, California.
“There are little words he said to us before he left,” Johnson said. “They meant so many things.”
One of the last things he told his family before getting on a Greyhound bus in Flagstaff, Arizona, was to direct his sisters to keep going to school and finish their education. “I’m going somewhere overseas,” Lee told his sisters, including Johnson. “There’s a war going on over there and that’s where I’m headed to. I don’t know if I’m going to come back or not. All I need is your prayers.”
Johnson said she sometimes thinks about his counsel. Lee left writings on a rock in Gray Mountain near the place he grew up. Trembling and holding back tears, Johnson stood before the “fallen comrade table” at Tsék? Hasání Veterans Organization’s 3rd annual Veterans Day program on Nov. 10. She held a portrait of Lee and a piece of paper with a rubbing of her brother’s name that is engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. “So many years after he’s gone, not a single day goes by that I don’t remember him,” Johnson said, adding that Veterans Day means a lot to her.
“I am beyond appreciative of (veterans). I love them. At (events) like this I think of my brother. And after I shed tears, it makes me feel good and I feel a lot better.”
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