Remembering Dave Trageser, 81, Vietnam Vet and Angel
He was a dear friend, who helped me years ago in Israel
It is well known that a person can have an extraordinary impact on your life, even if you see that person for only one stretch of time, face to face.
Dave Trageser was one such person, who had such a salutary effect on me.
A Vietnam veteran and a native of Buffalo, NY, Dave and I roomed together in a volunteer program on an Israeli army base in 2007.
He was a Green Party member with a moderate build, a curious mind and a heart that was open to people of all backgrounds.
We spent two weeks together in late October and early November of 2007, when we were barracks mates in Sar-El, a program associated with Volunteers for Israel.
During our time as roommates and for years afterward when we talked or corresponded, Dave impressed me with his kindness, his curiosity, his openness toward others of different religions, races, ethnicities and political persuasions.
Like Dave, who passed away in June at the age of 81, I have always supported the rights of Palestinians and Jews in the holy land. I still favor a two-state solution, which, I believe, remains the only solution.
Although I had not spoken to Dave in recent years, I can imagine that my dear friend would have been distraught at the brutality and corruption of Netanyahu, who has damaged Israel’s reputation in the world by slaughtering so many civilians in the Middle East.
I am sure that Dave would have bemoaned the present state of Israeli-Palestinian relations, to say nothing of the hideous war Trump and Netanyahu prosecuted against Iran.
While no one denies the evil of the Iranian regime and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, Netanyahu’s military response to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel has been so disproportionate and savage that the words, collateral damage, seem to be morally inadequate and inept.
The people of Gaza and Lebanon are suffering grievously, something that no doubt would have upset Dave, as it upsets me.
I will never forget Dave, who had a modest, almost self-effacing quality about him, which was reflected particularly in his words, words that he delivered with gentility.
As I have come to learn, many veterans are not unlike Dave in that they conduct themselves with unusual modesty.
This, of course, does not mean that they lack strength.
To the contrary, Dave was a man of rare courage.
He never postured or bragged, like some of the faux-tough guys, with whom we have become all too familiar.
As I noted at the outset, Dave and I roomed together in a barracks on an Israeli military base near Ashkelon, not far from the Gaza border, back in the fall of 2007.
He was, as I say, a Vietnam vet, who was decorated for his tours of duty in that war.
He was also a former mailman for the U.S. Postal Service, who was dating a woman who lived in Israel at the time that I met Dave in 2007.
Dave, who passed away last month just a few days shy of what would have been his 82nd birthday, was not Jewish. He was of German descent, as he told me.
I met some lovely people in Sar-El, but I was closest to Dave.
Interestingly, my best friend in my ulpan program in 1989-1990 at Mishmar Haemek, an Israeli kibbutz, was Iorg Rottermund, who was also of German descent and in fact hailed from Germany.
Like Iorg, Dave was drawn to Judaism and to Israel, though neither man was Jewish.
An idealist, Dave enjoyed traveling around our country and the globe, including Israel, where his then-girlfriend, whom he had met years before in the United States, had moved.
It bears repeating that Dave, like a number of veterans, was an extremely modest man.
When I asked him if he had seen combat in Vietnam, he downplayed it and said that someone had fired shots from a forest, and he had fired back.
In fact, as I would later learn, Dave had seen heavy combat in Vietnam during the Tet offensive in 1968, when U.S. troops and allies were attacked in one of the bloodiest battles in the war.
I learned about Dave’s heroism during the Tet offensive only because it was reported in a newspaper article in Buffalo some years ago, perhaps on Veterans Day, if I am not mistaken.
Dave had gone through officer training for the U.S. Army in 1967.
A graduate of Lehigh University, Dave was a very thoughtful man and a good writer.
He shared with me some memoir excerpts, essays of his adventures over the years.
I found it intriguing that when Dave was enrolled in officer candidate school for the U.S. Army in 1967, one of his colleagues was a member of the extended Bush family, whose last name, if I am remembering correctly, was Walker, a middle name of the first President Bush as well as that of Bush II.
Another officer in Dave’s training program in 1967 happened to be a Jewish man.
While Dave and his colleagues were undergoing their training regimen, the Six-Day War broke out, a war that Israel won, after it was threatened with annihilation by many Arab states, such as Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
Dave told me that he and the other officers in the U.S. Army showed great respect for their Jewish colleague and gave him plenty of space to process the tension leading up to that war against Israel.
We are living at a time when our nation’s chief executive, who ducked the Vietnam War, brags and lies about nearly everything, including the war against Iran, a nation that he threatened to “obliterate” in 2025 and earlier this year.
Of course, neither Trump, nor Netanyahu obliterated Iran in the illegal and unconscionable war, one for which Trump did not seek nor receive approval from the U.S. Congress or the U.N.
Tragically, the war has led to the deaths of more than 100 elementary school girls and their teachers in Minab, Iran, as well as 13 U.S. servicemen and women, among other casualties.
The U.S./Israel bombing campaign also damaged ancient sites of Persian cultural heritage, as well as some missile and nuclear facilities.
As I say, I would have been quite interested to ask Dave Trageser, who, of course, had fought in Vietnam, another hideous war, what he thought of the war against Iran.
I did not know that Dave, about whom I was thinking recently, had passed away.
Carol, my wife, and I Googled his name not long ago and discovered that he had battled Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s for some time before he died in early June of this year.
I am very sorry that Dave had these conditions and that he suffered.
In the years when Dave and I talked or corresponded, he was always in good spirits, even when he told me years ago that he may very well have been victimized by Agent Orange while he was in Vietnam.
Neither Agent Orange, nor any possible trauma, stopped Dave from living a life of adventure and joy.
He was a seeker, who believed in self-realization, like so many people of a mystical bent.
He was, as I mentioned, a fine writer.
I wish that I could recall more details on some of his stories, but if I am remembering correctly, he wrote with light humor about a hilarious incident in which he encountered a bear out west, while he was camping, perhaps in Montana.
The bear may have stumbled upon Dave’s food and gobbled it up.
When Dave recounted such tales, he always did so, as I say, with a good deal of humor.
He had an inner serenity.
During the time that we knew each other, few things seemed to rattle Dave.
Perhaps, this is no surprise given that Dave had shown such heroism in Vietnam during the Tet offensive when he and his troops came under heavy fire.
He became, as I say, a mailman after he left the service, which allowed him to be outdoors much of the time.
When we roomed together, Dave was quite fit. He was a soccer enthusiast, who still refereed games when he was in his sixties, as he indicated to me nearly 20 years ago at the time that we were roommates in the Sar-El program.
Without the help of Dave, it is quite possible that I would not have gotten through the two weeks of Sar-El in late October and early November of 2007.
My fine motor skills have never been good, going back to a trauma from kindergarten, in which my teacher, among her other acts of abuse, smacked my left hand, my dominant side, and would not let me use it.
I have discussed my PTSD from kindergarten in other articles.
Without belaboring the point, I grew up thinking that I was right handed.
Not surprisingly, I lack dexterity for many things.
I still remember how Dave helped me put on my dog tag on our first day in the Volunteers for Israel program.
He was a gentle soul, who did not judge me for my lack of dexterity or anything else.
We had a great time in Sar-El, which was set up years ago by an Israeli general and mensch named Aharon Davidi.
It is a volunteer program, which enables people from around the world to show support to the Israeli troops.
We did not go through basic training, as Dave had years ago in the U.S. Army.
Nor were we involved in anything remotely approaching combat.
But we were stationed on a base near Ashkelon, not far from Sderot.
At the time, the citizens of Sderot would not infrequently hear air raid sirens, which forced them to go into shelters to protect themselves from bombs launched by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the other side of the Gaza border.
We heard no such sirens on the military base by Ashkelon.
And, of course, we were not soldiers.
We were just volunteers who cared for Israel.
I still care for Israel, as Dave did.
He was a progressive man, an idealist, who, as I stated earlier, was kind to everyone.
He told me one story about how he met a Jordanian man, who guided Dave and his then-girlfriend to a site, one of cultural significance in Jordan, if memory serves.
Dave was so grateful and generous that he gave the Jordanian man a gift. I believe that the gift involved something dear to Dave, perhaps a memento from his time in the U.S. Army.
This was a beautiful gesture on Dave’s part.
Too many people mistake kindness for weakness, as Bobby Dylan sings.
I have no doubt that there were people who mistook Dave, as they have mistaken me, for being weak because he was so kind.
But there was nothing weak about Dave, who was a true war hero, decorated for his service.
If I can expand once more to a brief discussion of international politics, it is tragic that Israel has for some time now been led by a corrupt man in Netanyahu, who clearly has to leave office.
He is a wannabe dictator, almost as treacherous as Trump.
I don’t ever recall discussing Netanyahu with Dave, but I know that Dave would have been disgusted with the inhumane and reckless manner in which Netanyahu has dispensed with rules of engagement and defied international law and norms in bombing the people of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
Again, no one is denying the evil of Hamas, Hezbollah or the Iranian regime, which brutally massacred thousands of its own citizens earlier this year.
But wars must be prosecuted in as ethical, precise and proportional a manner as possible, as Dave knew full well from his tours of duty in Vietnam.
It is more than likely that Netanyahu has committed war crimes.
And he has severely damaged Israel’s reputation in the world.
I know that Dave, my dear friend, would have agreed that Netanyahu has been in power far too long, as I pointed out in a piece for Thrive Global in August 2021, “Shalom, Salaam and Respect.”
In that piece, in which I discussed my friendship with Isam Kaoud, a high school classmate of Arabic descent, I stressed that Israelis and Arabs, Israelis and Iranians, Jews and Muslims, have much more in common than not.
I noted that when we elevate language, we can perceive links between all of us, links that are not only biological, since Jews, Christians and Muslims all trace back to Abraham; the links are also etymological, since the words for Hebrew and Arab in Hebrew share the same three letters.
I don’t recall discussing that article with Dave Trageser, but I am sure that he would have agreed that we can all get along better and that we can indeed find a common humanity in all of us through a more elevated language.
Dave did give me feedback on the article I wrote about our Sar-El program for the Jewish Journal in January 2008, a piece that was titled, “The Living Dream.” (Note: Readers can find the original Jewish Journal piece on my website, www.robertdavidjaffee.com, under Published Work.)
He liked my Jewish Journal article very much.
I believe that he used a baseball metaphor in describing it.
He might have said that we hit it out of the park.
Dave was a baseball fan, as well as a soccer enthusiast.
It is no surprise that the photo at the top of this article shows him wearing a Red Sox cap and a soccer jersey.
It saddens me that Dave and I fell out of touch in recent years.
It seems that this happens far too often in our lives.
In the past few weeks, Carol, my wife, her sister Kathy, Pepper, our puppy, and I drove across the country and headed to Niagara Falls, close to Buffalo.
We hoped to reconnect with Dave, a longtime resident of the latter city, where he was born.
It was only after we Googled Dave’s name on our cross-country trek that we found out that he had passed away in June at the age of 81.
Online, I saw a photo of Dave from his earlier years when he had a mustache.
When I met Dave in 2007, he did not have any facial hair.
But he had the same kind eyes.
I will always remember Dave for that kindness, for his warmth, his patience and understanding.
He never complained about anything, never boasted, never bragged.
He was an American patriot, who cared about Israel.
And he helped me get through Sar-El with his love.
God bless you, Dave.
R.I.P., my dear friend.
Dave is survived by Nicholas, his son, and other family members and loved ones, who admired him.