Private Ziggy Trzecinski Bridge

[Wazza]

Tom Hamilton wrote:-

In the town where I once lived they built a bridge. They named the bridge the Private Ziggy Trzecinski Bridge. Private Ziggy Trzecinski was killed in Vietnam.

On April 25, 1979, in the autumn chill of an ANZAC dawn I laid a wreath in Ziggy's memory at the National War Memorial in Canberra.

As I stepped back to make my salute I felt a small hand forage for warmth up the sleeve of my uniform jacket and as I gazed down into the dark eyes of Catherine, my eight-year-old daughter, I thought, "Sure, I wasn't much older than you when Ziggy and I first met.

We were a gang of migrant kids. Our parents arrived on these shores with nothing but their dreams.

Our teacher, Miss Watts said our parents were very wise because you brought nothing into this world and you took nothing out. Every thing was a gift from God. Miss Watts named our gang the Screaming Eagles - the money saving crew-cuts our parents gave us reminded her WWII paratroopers. Miss Watts wanted to be a nun, but Miss Watts had an illness. Miss Watts didn't want anyone to know she was sick because she only took her medicine when she thought no-one was looking. Miss Watts took so much medicine that she kept it in a sherry bottle.

One week when Miss Watts had not been to school for several days we decided to pay her a visit. We didn't have any money for a get-well gift but Ziggy said, "If everything was a gift from God then that must include the flowers from the Bishop's garden." So that afternoon we availed ourselves of the largest bunch of flowers we could carry on our bicycles and set off on the 15 kilometres to Miss Watts' house.

Miss Watts was very sick; there were four empty sherry flagons on the lounge room floor. When she saw the flowers she cried and said she was going to put them on the altar on Sunday. As the Bishop's gardener was also the churchwarden we told her that might not be a good idea. She said we shouldn't have ridden all that way from town and Ziggy said, "The journey was part of the gift."

Years later I would remember those words. It was 1968 and Australia was at war in South East Asia. The Screaming Eagles had all joined the Defence Forces. Ziggy had joined the Army and I had joined the Air Force. On Saturday morning I would hitchhike to the town of my future wife. In the afternoon I would hitch a ride back to base, it was a round trip of 640 kilometres. But while I pledged my life to the one I loved on the streets of Tamworth, Ziggy gave his life in South Vietnam for the country he loved.

They brought Ziggy home and we buried our 'Eagle' without fanfare, for in those days a nation sent it's young men and women of to war and when they returned they abused them and daubed them with red paint. Women called me a child-killer; I was seventeen.

As a child I would rise on an ANZAC Day dawn to watch aging men march to the sound of a muffled drum and the people said they loved their country. Now each ANZAC Day as I march to the same sombre beat, I wonder if we loved our country any less.

The night we buried Ziggy, the Screaming Eagles met at the local Ex-Serviceman's Club and an old man said how strange it was that the only local lad to be killed in Vietnam wasn't even born in Australia. We told him none of us had been born here, but what was strange is that twenty-five years before our fathers were fighting each other. You see, before you can commit your love to the future you must absolve the hates of the past.

But Ziggy did receive his hero's return. In I987 Australia finally welcomed home the men and women she had sent to war two decades before. As Ziggy's brother, Bernard, watched the 504 flag bearers march past - each flag representing an Australian life lost in Vietnam - he froze in disbelief, because there carrying his own flag was Ziggy, and he hadn't aged one day in twenty years.

Bernard ran through the barricades calling his brother's name and the two men embraced and marched on together. Many saw that as a gift, for Bernard had been crippled with polio since he was a child. But the greatest gift occurred nineteen years before, when Ziggy came home from Vietnam on R&R and married his fiancee, Charlene. That night Ziggy Jr. was conceived and nineteen years later he carried his father's flag in the Vietnam Welcome Home Parade.

Sometime in the Autumn chill of an ANZAC dawn I remember those days, you see love is an immortal gift, for if you love someone or something and it dies, your love will sustain the memory.

In 1991, Catherine, the little girl who had stood beside me that ANZAC dawn years ago joined the Air Force. One day as she was driving to a base in Queensland. She passed through, Maitland, the town where I once lived. In the town they built a bridge and they named the bridge the Private Ziggy Trzecinski Bridge. As my daughter drove across the bridge one of her friends asked, " Who was Private Ziggy Trzecinski?" My daughter replied "He was a friend of my dad and he died in Vietnam". Her friend replied

"Well that's a hell of a way to get your name on a bridge."

[frisco-kid]

A salute to Ziggy and the other 503 Fallen Heroes from Down Under,

from another Screaming Eagle.