My friend Mike Lane, who was supposed to leave Viet Nam at the same time as I did, and was supposed to be best man at my wedding, got held up in-transit and missed our ceremony. John Duncan another returning veteran stood in for him.
We did connect with Mike eventually at Fort Campbell, but he got out of the Army shortly after his return and disappeared into the mist. (We drove him out the gate on his last day. He started taking off his Army clothes in the back seat of our ’59 Plymouth station wagon while we were still on Post, but the MP stopped us at the gate because Mike was out of uniform. We waited for Mike to put his clothes back on so the MP would release us.) When he next turned up in our lives was a few years later in the Pacific Northwest. He came to dinner at our house in Issaquah, but by then he was head-over-heels for Guru Maharaj Ji, and the Divine Light Mission. We couldn’t have a conversation with him about anything else; he was so excited about his new-found devotion. That’s all he could talk about the for the entire excruciating evening.
That was it. We never heard from him again. We called his parents in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, but they had lost touch with him too. We’ve googled him a few times since and searched Facebook in recent years, but to no avail. What happens to a person after they’ve fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old perfect master? How does a person’s entire being suddenly get that devoted to a person or cause, and what happens when it’s over? What happens when the fifteen-year-old perfect master turns sixteen? Does that change anything? What happens to the devotion when the perfect master moves on? The Divine Light Mission is long gone now, so surely Mike’s devotion has had to move on as well.
I’d love to have dinner with him again and hear about his life since last we met; hoping he had a life after Guru Maharaj Ji.