One of my favorite reads. Written by a Vietnam Veteran, not your typical memorial. He writes with acid and has a few things to say and earned the right to say them.
"I begin to weary of the stories about veterans that are now in vogue with the newspapers, the stories that dissect the veteran's psyche as if prying apart a laboratory frog-patronizing stories written by style-section reporters who know all there is to know about chocolate mousse, ladies' fashions, and the wonderful desserts that can be made with simple jello. I weary of seeing veterans analyzed and diagnosed and explained by people who share nothing with veterans, by people who, one feels intuitively, would regard it as a harrowing experience to be alone in a backyard.
Week after week the mousse authorities tell us what is wrong with the veteran. The veteran is badly in need of adjustment, they say-lacks balance, needs fine tuning to whatever it is in society that one should be attuned to. What we have here, all agree, with omniscience and veiled condescension, is a victim: The press loves a victim. The veteran has bad dreams, say the jello writers, is alienated, may be hostile, doesn't socialize well-isn't, to be frank, quite right in the head.
But perhaps it is the veteran's head to be right or wrong in, and maybe it makes a difference what memories are in the head. For the jello writers the war was a moral fable on Channel Four, a struggle hinging on Nixon and Joan Baez and the inequities of this or that. I can't be sure. The veterans seem to have missed the war by having been away in Vietnam at the time and do not understand the combat as it raged in the internecine cocktail parties of Georgetown.
Still, to me Vietnam was not what it was to the jello writers, not a ventilation of pious simplisms, not the latest literary interpretation of the domino theory. It left me memories the fashion writers can't imagine. It was the slums of Truong Minh Ky, where dogs' heads floated in pools of green water and three-inch roaches droned in sweltering back-alley rooms and I was happy. Washington knows nothing of hot, whore-rich, beery Truong Minh Ky. I remember riding the bomb boats up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, with the devilish brown river closing in like a vise and rockets shrieking from the dim jungle to burst against the sandbagged wheelhouse, and crouching below the waterline between the diesel tanks. The mousse authorities do not remember this. I remember the villa on Monivong in Phnom Penh, with Sedlacek, the balding Australian hippie, and Naoki, the crazy freelance combat photographer, and Zoco, the Frenchman, when the night jumped and flickered with the boom of artillery and we listened to Mancini on shortwave and watched Nara dance. Washington's elite do not know Nara. They know much of politicians and of furniture.
If I try to explain what Vietnam meant to me-I haven't for years, and never will again-they grow uneasy at my intensity. "My God," their eyes say, "he sounds as though he liked it over there. Something in the experience clearly snapped an anchoring ligament in his mind and left him with odd cravings, a perverse view of life-nothing dangerous, of course, but...The war did that to them," they say. "War is hell." Rest of the essay
Friday, November 11, 2011
Remembering Veterans Day
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3 comments:
I don't think he ever left.
Ironghost, I've observed as the daughter and wife of Purple Heart,highly decorated combat veterans that it's just extremely difficult for a combat veteran to listen to someone who has never experienced combat talk about the war HE fought. And, harder still to listen to arm chair war experts talk about HIS war. And, when war is cocktail conversation, it seems to trivialize their experience.
Combat vets have very little patience for those who pretend to be warriors and those who think they know all there is to know about a war from books and film.
They know a fake and one who exaggerates his war experiences in a New York minute and they have particular scorn for those folks.
Those who face combat on our behalf are human and some are/were in their late teens. They go to war with different levels of maturity and different levels of coping skills. Some are incredibly naive and some are jaded by life already. And, some come home to supportive, loving families and some come home to loneliness and troubles.
This piece was written in 1980. We are more respectful of our Vietnam vets now. Reed left. The memories and knowledge and sometimes, sadly, the physical pain from wounds never totally leave. But,
I doubt he was PO'd everyday. Isuspect something or someone triggered this piece.
What I do know is that the nightmares come less and less frequently until they are a rarity and surprise even to the veteran. I know 60+ years afterward when my father talked about what he saw in France , a man who I had only seen cry one other time, cried.
I've lived with two heroic, incredibly strong,incredibly successful by every societal measurement combat veterans.
I HATE how what they gave up on the battlefield is so poorly appreciated and understood.
And, combat veterans never, EVER bang the drums of war or are eager to send other " boys" into combat. That's a commonality, they always seem to think of soldiers as " the boys". Telling, don't you think.
I've always been partial to Vietnam Veterans as I was born while they fought. I have a habit, I listen. Pretty simple. The stories are amazing, if they want to share. If not, no story is told. But if you listen and you hear, you will hear hell.
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