Under the Beetle's Cellar (46 page)

And that’s true. After all, he was a man who broke all his vows. When he came home from Vietnam, Walter Demming had planned, like Candide, to stay home and tend his own garden. He had vowed to avoid involvement, but he ended up intimately involved in the lives of eleven children. He had
vowed to avoid violence, but he died in an explosion of apocalyptic violence. He had vowed to maintain his privacy, to attract no attention, but he became headline news around the world, and was awarded posthumously the Presidential Medal of Honor.

Fate, or whatever force it is that delivers people to that very place they have been avoiding, devised for Walter Demming a situation that compelled him to transcend his rules and act instead from his heart and his true nature.