Calvin looked at him. He said, “That is not something I can accept from a stranger.” Wayne said, “It is not something you are accepting from a stranger.” He said, “It is a job offer. The ranch needs the work done. You can do the work.” He said, “I am not doing you a favor. I am doing my foreman a favor.
” Calvin looked at the highway. He looked at his empty coffee cup. He said, “I don’t have a truck. I sold the last one in Searchlight.” Wayne said, “There’s a bus from Las Vegas to Phoenix that runs three times a week.” He said, “My foreman will pick you up in Phoenix if you call ahead.” He took a card from his jacket pocket and wrote the foreman’s name and the ranch number on the back of it and gave it to Calvin.
He said, “Tell him Wayne sent you. Tell him to expect you Friday.” Calvin took the card. He looked at it. He said, “What if I’m not what you think I am?” Wayne said, “You held the engine for 6 hours with a mortar fragment in your leg.” He said, “I think you are exactly what I think you are.” He stood from the gravel and took his tray inside and left it on the counter.
He did not speak to the owner. He drove south on Route 95 toward Arizona. Calvin Briggs called the ranch number from a payphone at the Las Vegas bus station that afternoon. The foreman, a man named Torres, answered. Calvin told him Wayne had sent him. Torres said he would be in Phoenix on Friday morning. Calvin arrived at the Stanfield Ranch on a Friday in July of 1960 and went to work the following Monday.
He was a line rider and fence crew lead for 3 years. In 1963, when Torres left to run his own operation in New Mexico, Wayne asked Calvin to take over as foreman. He said yes. He ran the Stanfield Ranch for 17 years through drought years and good years and the years when the cattle market dropped and the years when it came back.
He married a woman from Maricopa in 1964. They had children. The oldest, a daughter named Ellen, became a veterinarian. The ranch hands who worked under him in those 17 years said later, when anyone asked, that Calvin Briggs was the best foreman they had ever worked for. That he was fair and consistent, and that he never asked a man to do work he would not do himself, and that he never raised his voice except when the cattle required it.
They said his leg was the only thing slower than the rest of him, and that was not saying much. Calvin Briggs retired from the ranch in 1980. He was 50 years old. He and his wife moved to a small property outside Maricopa and ran a few head of cattle, and he worked as a riding instructor at a youth program in the valley on Saturdays.
He died in 2001. He was 71 years old. Ellen donated three items to the Arizona Commemorative Air Force Museum in Mesa in 2003. The first was the Silver Star and its original citation. The second was the card with the ranch foreman’s name on it, the number in Wayne’s handwriting on the back, the card worn soft at the corners from 17 years in Calvin’s shirt pocket.
The third was a photograph taken in 1965 at the Stanfield Ranch. Calvin and Wayne standing beside a fence line on the east range, both in work clothes, both looking at something off to the left of the camera. Neither of them is smiling. They look like two men who were thinking about the same thing. The placard beside the display reads, Calvin James Briggs, 1930 to 2001, Corporal, United States Army, 7th Infantry Division, Imjin River, April 1951, Silver Star. He held the position.
Then he came home and ran a ranch in Arizona for 17 years and taught children to ride horses on Saturdays. He kept the medal in his jacket pocket the whole time. It is here now. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already.
There are more stories coming, and unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore. Wayne got out and went inside and ordered two coffees and two full breakfasts from the waitress. He asked the waitress if the man outside was all right. She said the owner had asked him to leave the counter. Wayne looked at the owner behind the pass-through.
He did not say anything to the owner. He paid for the two breakfasts and carried them outside on a tray and sat down on the gravel beside Calvin Briggs. Calvin looked at him. He placed the face, he said, “You don’t have to do that.” Wayne set a plate and a cup in front of him. He said, “I know I don’t.
” He said, “I was going to eat inside, but the company out here is better.” They ate on the gravel in the July morning sun, which was already strong at that hour on Route 95. Wayne asked him where he was from. Calvin told him. He told him about Cimarron and his father and the ranch work. He told it in the plain sequence of a man who has told his own story to himself enough times that the telling is neither difficult nor easy.
It is simply the facts in order. Wayne asked about the leg. He asked it the way a man asks a question he expects will have a real answer. Calvin told him. The Mjen, April of 1951, the mortar fragment. He said the army doctors at the field hospital had gotten most of it, but not all, and that the piece remaining had worked its way to a position that the surgeon at Fort Bliss in 1952 had said was inoperable without significant risk, and that he had decided the risk was not worth what the procedure might fix. He said it did not stop him from working. He said it stopped him from running, which he had not needed to do since 1951. Wayne asked if he had a Silver Star. Calvin looked at him. He said, “Yes.” He said, how did you know that? Wayne said, the Imjin River in April of 1951 was not a place where men held positions for 6 hours without consequence. Calvin looked at the highway. He had not
told Wayne about holding the position. He had not told Wayne the hours or the details. He understood that Wayne had simply known the way men who have been near enough to war understand what certain facts imply. He took the metal from his jacket pocket. He held it in his palm. He did not offer it.
He simply held it in the flat of his hand the way a man holds a small object that has weight beyond its size. Wayne looked at it. He said, what do you need right now? Calvin put the metal back in his pocket. He said, work. Honest work that pays regular. He said, I know horses and I know cattle and I know range and I can work a full day.
He said it without apology and without embellishment, the way a man states his qualifications when the situation calls for stating them plainly. Wayne finished his coffee. He set the cup down on the gravel. He said, I have a ranch outside Stanfield, Arizona. He said, my foreman has been looking for a line rider and a man to lead the fence crew since March.
He said, the work is regular, the pay is fair, and the bunkhouse has a decent kitchen. He said, if you can be in Stanfield by Friday, I will call ahead tonight and tell him you’re coming. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. He had spent the following 8 years working wherever there was range work, moving with the seasons the way range workers move, north in spring and south in autumn, following the work from one operation to the next, Arizona, Nevada, Utah. Season to season, ranch to ranch, the kind of work a man with his skills could find but could not hold permanently because permanent positions required connections he did not have in the places he went and the leg made the heaviest physical labor difficult. And the kind of foreman who hired seasonal men did not always hire men with limps. He was not a man who spent time on
bitterness. He had seen what bitterness did to men on long campaigns and in long winters and he had decided early that it was a poor use of the hours available. He had made his choices and understood their consequences and had not asked anyone to adjust the terms of the world on his behalf. He was 30 years old and had been the only person responsible for his own situation since he was 22 and he had not stopped being responsible for it.
In March of 1960, a rancher in Searchlight, Nevada named Garland had offered him a permanent position as a line rider and fence crew lead at a rate that was fair and a bunkhouse that was decent and a promise that the position was permanent if the work was good. It was the first offer of permanent work Calvin had received in 2 years.
He had bought a used truck and driven to Searchlight and spoken to Garland on a handshake and gone away to sell the truck and settle a few things before starting. In April, he came back and Garland’s nephew had taken the job. Garland had not written. He had not called. He had simply given the job to his nephew because the nephew needed it and Calvin was not there and the nephew was.
Calvin had sold his saddle and his good boots and enough of his other equipment to get to Las Vegas by bus where he had heard from a man in the Searchlight feed store that a ranch supply company was hiring warehouse workers. The warehouse job had already been filled when he arrived. He had $12 remaining when the warehouse job turned out to be filled.
He had spent six of those on a room for two nights at a a rate establishment on Fremont Street and four on food over the same period. He had $2 left on a Tuesday morning in July when he sat down at the counter of the diner on Route 95 and read the menu and ordered coffee and added the price of a meal in his head and asked the waitress if the owner was in.
The owner came out. Calvin explained that he had $4 and asked if there was any work he could do for the cost of a meal. The owner said no. He said he had a sign in the window about loitering and he would appreciate it if Calvin would take his coffee outside. Calvin paid for the coffee which cost 60 cents and took it outside and sat on the gravel with his back against the wall and his bad leg stretched out in front of him and drank the coffee and looked at the highway.
John Wayne was 53 years old in July of 1960. He had been in Las Vegas for 2 days for a meeting with a production partner at the Sands Hotel and was driving back to his Arizona ranch outside Stanfield. Route 95 South was the road he knew. He had been driving since 7:00 in the morning and needed coffee and pulled into the first diner he saw.
He pulled off the highway and into the gravel lot and saw the man against the wall before he got out of the truck. He sat in the truck for a moment. He’d been on the road since 7:00 and needed coffee and had pulled in for that reason and for no other reason. He sat in the truck and looked at the man on the gravel.
30 years old maybe. Canvas jacket, dark trousers, boots that had done real work. The left leg stretched out at the angle of a leg that did not bend fully. A coffee cup held in both hands with nothing in it. Looking at the highway the way a man looks at a road when he is working out what comes next and the answer is not clear.
Nevada, 1960. A roadside diner on Route 95, 30 miles north of Las Vegas. A Korean War veteran named Calvin Briggs is sitting on the gravel outside the diner’s front door because the owner has told him to move on. He has no money for a meal. He has a limp from a piece of Chinese mortar that entered his left leg at the Imjin River in 1951 and never fully left it.
He has a Silver Star in his jacket pocket because he carries it everywhere and has nowhere else to put it. He has been sitting on the gravel for 20 minutes when a truck pulls off the highway. Here is the story. Calvin Briggs was born in 1930 in Cimarron, New Mexico, the son of a man who ran a small cattle operation on leased range north of town and a woman who had died of influenza when Calvin was six.
He grew up in the particular way of boys who grow up without mothers on working ranches, which is to say he grew up useful early and independent earlier than that. He could ride by the time he was eight and work a full day alongside grown men by the time he was 12. And his father trusted him with the herd books by the time he was 16 because his arithmetic was better than his father’s and his father knew it.
He enlisted in the army in September of 1950, 3 months after the war in Korea began. He was 20 years old. He was assigned to the 7th Infantry Division and was in the Korean Peninsula by November, which was the same month the Chinese army crossed the Yalu River and changed the nature of the war entirely.
He spent the winter of 1950 and 1951 in conditions that men who were not there have difficulty imagining and that men who were there had difficulty describing. The cold was one part of it. The terrain was another. The fact that the Chinese army had come across the Yalu in numbers that nobody on the American side had correctly estimated was the largest part.
He came out of that winter changed in the ways that winter changes men, which are not always visible from the outside and are not always named. In April of 1951, his platoon was cut off during a Chinese offensive at the Imjin River. The platoon leader was killed in the first hour. Calvin was a corporal.
He took command of what remained of the position, seven men, and held it for 6 hours under sustained mortar and small arms fire while the rest of the company withdrew to a defensible line to the south. In the fifth hour, a mortar round landed close enough to put a fragment of casing into his left leg below the knee.
He bounded himself with a field dressing and held the position for the remaining hour. All seven men came out. The Army gave him a Silver Star. The citation used the phrase “conspicuous gallantry in the face of the enemy.” Calvin read it once and put it in his kit and did not read it again. He came home in August of 1952, discharged at Fort Bliss in El Paso.
His father had died in March of that year, a heart attack in the north pasture, found by a neighboring rancher the following morning. The leased range had reverted to the owner when the lease payment stopped. There was nothing to come home to in Cimarron except a house that had been cleared out and a father’s grave on the ridge above the empty pasture.
