We’ll be back.’ He looked right at me, and that was the last thing he said: ‘If I can’t outrun a base hit to right field, I sure as hell can’t outrun a bullet in Vietnam.’” You’ll be the hitting coach and I’ll be the manager. He said, ‘This is it for us.’ I was kind of like, ‘Oh, hell, we’ll come back and we’ll manage the Little League baseball team. “And he told me, he said he’d never see me again. ‘If I can’t outrun a base hit to right field, I sure as hell can’t outrun a bullet in Vietnam.’ “The last thing he said to me, I’ll never forget it. He taps on my window and we were going to sit in the driveway and drink beer,” Hansen recalled. “The last night I saw him, he came to my house, knocked on my window of the basement bedroom. He unabashedly admits it brought him to tears.īut it’s their final conversation in their shared hometown of Logan, Ia.
One of them is a painting presented to him by Collin County Jail employee and part-time artist Colin Kimball on the WFAA set last year. When he does, he always looks up and touches Meier’s face. I sure as hell partied twice as hard because I had to party for him.”ĭown the hall in Hansen’s man cave, he has multiple pictures of Meier that he still takes in on a daily basis. I worked twice as hard as some people did for a long time. “I used to say - it was somewhat true but it was probably somewhat to justify my own lifestyle - I really do feel that I lived two lives. “I’ve never gotten over that,” Hansen said, his eyes welling up. His overall experience in the military was pretty tame, especially compared to that of his best friend, Carroll Meier, who was drafted to the Army and killed in Vietnam. Hansen ended up in Patuxent River, Md., on a ship bound for the Caribbean. In fact, he joined the Navy in hopes that he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam because he was strongly opposed to the war. He did clear up a common misconception, though: He wasn’t actually in Vietnam during the war. Hansen has alluded to being in the Navy during the Vietnam War, something that was just part of the American obligation during his young adult years.
#Dale hansen unplugged cowboys december 7 full#
It’s a recurring theme throughout his 71 years of life thus far, full of highs and lows and, most of all, stories. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but that didn’t stop Hansen. “I’m allergic to dog hair, and we have five dogs,” Hansen said. Hansen started talking, interrupted every now and then by a cough. We made the short trip to the living room and sat on the couch. Immediately, we were swarmed by three dogs. He greeted me with a smile as I made my way up the porch, and then he opened the door.
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