Chuck
A couple of years ago someone asked me if I still thought about Vietnam. I nearly laughed in their face. How do you stop thinking about it? Every day for the last twenty-four
years, I wake up with it, and go to bed with it. But this is what I said. "Yea, I think about it. I can't quit
thinking about it. I never will. But, I've also learned to live with it. I'm comfortable with the memories.
I've learned to stop trying to forget and learned instead to embrace it. It just doesn't scare me anymore."
A psychologist once told me that NOT being affected by the experience over there would be abnormal. When he
told me that, it was like he'd just given me a pardon. It was as if he said, "Go ahead and feel something about the
place, Bob. It ain't going nowhere. You're gonna wear it for the rest of your life. Might as well get
to know it."
A lot of my "brothers" haven't been so lucky. For them the memories are too
painful, their sense of loss too great. My sister told me of a friend she has whose husband was in the Nam. She asks this guy when he was there. Here's what he said, "Just last
night." It took my sister a while to figure out what he was talking about. JUST LAST NIGHT. Yeah I was
in the Nam. When? JUST LAST NIGHT. During
sex with my wife. And on my way to work this morning. Over my lunch hour. Yeah, I was there.
My sister says I'm not the same brother that went to Vietnam. My
wife says I won't let people get close to me, not even her. They are probably both right.
Ask a vet about making friends in Nam. It was risky.
Why? Because we were in the business of death, and death was with us all the time. It wasn't the death of, "If
I die before I wake." This was the real thing. The kind where boys scream for their mothers. The kind
that lingers in your mind and becomes more real each time you cheat it. You don't want to make a lot of friends when
the possibility of dying is that real, that close. When you do, friends become a liability.
A guy named Bob Flanigan was my friend. Bob Flanigan is dead. I put him in a body bag one sunny
day, April 29, 1969. We'd been talking, only a few minutes
before he was shot, about what we were going to do when we got back in the world. Now, this was a guy who had come
in country the same time as myself. A guy who was loveable and generous. He had blue eyes and sandy blond hair.
When he talked, it was with a soft drawl. Flanigan was a hick and he knew it. That
was part of his charm. He didn't care. Man, I loved this guy like the brother I never had. But, I screwed
up. I got too close to him. Maybe I didn't know any better. But I broke one of the unwritten rules of
war.
DON'T GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO DIE. Sometimes you can't help it.
You hear vets use the term "buddy" when they refer to a guy they spent the war with. "Me and this buddy a mine
. ."
"Friend" sounds too intimate, doesn't it. "Friend" calls up images of being
close. If he's a friend, then you are going to be hurt if he dies, and war hurts enough without adding to the pain.
Get close; get hurt. It's as simple as that.
In war you learn to keep people at that distance
my wife talks about. You become so good at it, that twenty years after the war, you still do it without thinking.
You won't allow yourself to be vulnerable again.
My wife knows two people who can get into the soft spots inside
me. My daughters. I know it probably bothers her that they can do this. It's not that I don't love my
wife, I do. She's put up with a lot from me. She'll tell you that when she signed on for better or worse she
had no idea there was going to be so much of the latter. But with my daughters it's different.
My girls are mine. They'll always be my kids. Not marriage, not distance, not even death can change that.
They are something on this earth that can never be taken away from me. I belong to them. Nothing can
change that.
I can have an ex-wife; but my girls can never have an ex-father. There's the difference.
I can still see the faces, though they all seem to have the same eyes. When I think of us I always see a line
of "dirty grunts" sitting on a paddy dike. We're caught in the first gray silver between darkness and light.
That first moment when we know we've survived another night, and the business of staying alive for one more day is about to
begin. There was so much hope in that brief space of time. It's what we used to pray for. "One more day,
God. One more day."
And I can hear our conversatioins as if they'd only just been spoken.
I still hear the way we sounded, the hard cynical jokes, our morbid senses of humor. We were scared to
death of dying, and trying our best not to show it.
I recall the smells, too. Like the way
cordite hangs on the air after a fire-fight. Or the pungent odor of rice paddy mud. So different from the black
dirt of Iowa. The mud of Nam smells ancient, somehow. Like it's always been there. And I'll never forget the way blood smells, stick
and drying on my hands. I spent a long night that way once. That memory isn't going anywhere.
I remember how the night jungle appears almost dream like as the pilot of a Cessna buzzes overhead, dropping parachute
flares until morning. That artifical sun would flicker and make shadows run through the jungle. It was worse than
not being able to see what was out there sometimes. I remember once looking at the man next to me as a flare floated
overhead. The shadows around his eyes were so deep that it looked like his eyes were gone. I reached over and
touched him on the arm; without looking at me he touched my hand. "I know man. I know." That's what
he said. It was a human moment. Two guys a long way from home and scared sh"tless.
"I know man." And at that moment he did.
God I loved those guys. I hurt every time one of them died. We all did. Despite our posturing.
Despite our desire to stay disconnected, we couldn't help ourselves. I know why Tim O'Brien writes his stories.
I know what gives Bruce Weigle the words to create poems so honest I cry at their horrible beauty. It's love.
Love for those guys we shared the experience with.
We did our jobs like good soldiers, and we tried our best not
to become as hard as our surroundings. We touched each other and said, "I know." Like a mother holding a child
in the middle of a nightmare, "It's going to be all right." We tried not to lose touch with our humanity. We
tried to walk that line. To be the good boys our parents had raised and not to give into that unnamed thing we knew
was inside us all.
You want to know what frightening is? It's a nineteen-year-old-boy
who's had a sip of that power over life and death that war gives you. It's a boy who, despite all the things he's been
taught, knows that he likes it. It's a nineteen-year-old who's just lost a friend, and is angry and scared and, determined
that, "Some *@#*s gonna pay." To this day, the thought of that boy can wake me from a sound sleep and leave me staring
at the ceiling.
As I write this, I have a picture in front of me. It's of two young men. On
their laps are tablets. One is smoking a cigarette. Both stare without expression at the camera. They're
writing letters. Staying in touch with places they would rather be. Places and people they hope to see again.
The picture shares space in a frame with one of my wife. She doesn't mind. She knows she's been
included in special company. She knows I'll always love those guys who shared that part of my life, a part she never
can. And she understands how I feel about the ones I know are out there yet. The ones who still answer
the question, "When were you in Vietnam?"
"Hey, man. I was there just last night."
http://home.earthlink.net/~dearvietnamveteran
http://home.earthlink.net/~ducducvietnamfriends/an_unknown_massacre_in_vietnam/index.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~memorial_of_honor
GREAT PTSD ARTICLE: http://home.earthlink.net/~ptsd_discrimination/id8.html
Some Vietnam experiences of a CAP Marine. http://www.CapVeterans.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~proudcapmarine/proud-honorable-vietnam-veterans/
WENT TO SEE THE BIG BLACK WALL TODAY
GOD BLESS
AMERICA TONIGHT
(turn on your speakers)
http://home.earthlink.net/~vettz_band_site/godblessamericatonight/
Eric Horner's
song "WELCOME HOME"
Lee Greenwood as a guest singer
http://home.earthlink.net/~eric_horner_site/welcome_home/
http://home.earthlink.net/~dearvietnamveteran
