“If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the
autopsy must read "Vietnam."
-Martin Luther King
To be honest, I did not want to write about
Vietnam, which still shadows my soul.
But neither could I omit it, a dark chapter in this journey of writing
that was otherwise delightful.
I cast around for what I would say, or should say. Vietnam was real enough to us in school, but
not as real as to those in the jungles, or with loved ones in the jungle. For the general public, it was a series of
bad newsreels, college demonstrations and an endless stream of haranguing
newspaper and journal articles.
What follows is a Vietnam stream of
consciousness. I could do no better.
When I remember Vietnam, I think of hopelessness,
death, escalating troops, Walter
Cronkite’s death tolls for the week (or was it daily?), and helplessness. That was the worst part, the
helplessness. Nothing worked in Vietnam
. We would withdraw troops and American
soldiers would die. We would escalate. American soldiers would die. It was a war that could not be won and it
didn’t make sense. It was an illegal war,
an undeclared war. We heard that a lot
on the microphones when students were rioting and demonstrating.
Vietnam … the very name still leaves a quiet
sadness in me, even though it has been nearly 40 years since Saigon fell and
the North Vietnamese ran over the country we tried so desperately to save. The Vietnam War was a non-war, yet we gave
far too many young American lives in the effort, including boys we went to high
school with. It tore our country apart,
destroyed the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and helped propel Richard M.
Nixon into office in 1968 when he pledged to end the nightmare.
The war did not end in our minds even after Saigon
fell and everyone came home. We were
still haunted, and so were the soldiers who returned not as heroes, but to be
scorned.
Wes encountered Larry, an emotionally wounded
former Vietnam tunnel rat who had found his way to the Missouri
countryside. Tunnel rats had an awful
job, elbowing their way through claustrophobic subterranean tunnels in search
of a possible Vietcong to slaughter around every corner. They usually entered the Vietcong tunnels
with a cocked firearm in each hand, inching along on their elbows. They often threw a grenade down the tunnel
first and had to crawl by a few former human beings who now looked like
hamburger. Larry was in a long process
of healing himself. He bought a small
farm and lived in it like a hermit for years and years, rarely coming out except
for necessary supplies and interacting with no one. With time, he healed, ventured out and made a
few friends, but only a few. My veteran
father was one of those he befriended.
He would come and pick up my father and they would eat together at
Catfish John’s, a local eatery. They
talked about the war. He felt that my
father was one of the few who would understand.
My father talked to Larry about his war experiences when he would never
tell us anything. It was a select and
strange camaraderie, but it did both of them good. At my father’s funeral, he truly grieved, but
in isolation as was his way. He sat in a
corner in the funeral home, staring into empty space, looking like someone had
pulled the plug. What I would have given
to have been privy to their conversations.
My Mexico born father–in-law would spout about
Vietnam a lot. He just didn’t get
it. Why was it such a big deal to
Americans? So what was so horrible about
it? Only a native-born American who was
an adult or young adult in that era could understand. I tried to explain it to him several times,
but he could never understand how it had scarred us. He still basked in the glory days of post
World War 2 when we were still masters of the universe and saviors of the
modern world. We exited Vietnam with
our tails between our legs and shock in our souls. All of those lives were lost and we had
accomplished nothing, nothing.
We had our fingers in Vietnam as early as 1955 as
part of our worldwide effort to contain communism. Troops were deployed in 1965 after the Gulf
of Tonkin incident in ever increasing numbers.
Vietnam was birthed like a deformed child and developed right alongside
us. Constant promises were made: we would deescalate and pull out, leaving the
South Vietnamese in control of their own fate.
But the war grew like a hydra.
One head would be cut off and several others would grow in to replace
it. We found ourselves being sucked into
Laos, sucked into Cambodia. And young
men continued to die, wonderful young men who should have had a chance at life.
The draft, gobbling up promising young men to send
to their deaths in a war that could not be won, was a huge part of the
unrest. Our high school senior men lived
with that dark cloud hanging over them.
When a boy reached the age of 18, he reported to the high school office
to register for the Selective Service.
In 1969 the Selective Service conducted lotteries to determine the
order of call to military service for men born from 1944 to 1950. If your number was
low, you were army fodder and Vietnam was in your near horizon. Being drafted and sent over was inevitable
and you sat and waited. Some young men
immediately joined the Air Force or Navy, hoping they might stay out of harm’s
way a little longer, but most of them wound up there anyway. Others rushed to enroll in college for the
academic deferment.
The news media was completely honest, broadcasting the mayhem on a nightly basis, with the news that it was a completely illegal and undeclared war. It was served up to us on a nightly basis, like a bad meal that had to be eaten.
We watched demonstrators burn their draft cards on
the evening news, and then came Kent State.
John Filo’s photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio
kneeling at the body of Jeffrey Miller, who died at the hands of the Ohio
National Guard, won a Pulitzer Prize.
Her silent scream wilted us. Kent
State students had been demonstrating against Vietnam and Cambodia.
The madness continued and we grew sometimes numb
and sometimes angry. The anger would
spill out usually on college campuses nationwide. Most of our parents supported the war. They lived in a world of America, love it or
leave it. If our nation’s leaders chose
to involve us in Vietnam and continue to deploy troops, why then that was the
way it should be.
In 1967, Richard Nixon tossed his hat back into
the ring after his 1959 disaster and ran for President yet again. A major part of his platform was that he
would end the Vietnam war, and he did.
It took a while, but he kept his promise. When the door on Vietnam finally closed, it
was closed, but we still looked at it and sensed there was something still
distasteful behind it, but at least it could remain closed.
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