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WHAT
IS A VIETNAM VETERAN?
A college student posted a request on an Internet Newsgroup asking for
personal narratives from the likes of us addressing the question: "What is
a Vietnam Veteran?" This is what [Dan Mouer] wrote back.
Vietnam Veterans are men and women. We are dead or alive, whole or maimed,
sane or haunted. We grew from our experiences or they destroyed us or we
struggle to find some place in between. We lived through hell or we had a
pleasant, if scary, adventure.
We were Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Red Cross, and civilians of all
sorts. Some of us enlisted to fight for God and Country, and some were
drafted. Some were gung-ho, and some went kicking and screaming.
Like Veterans of all wars, we lived a tad bit -- or a great bit – closer
to death than most people like to think about. If Vietnam Veterans differ
from others, perhaps it is primarily in the fact that many of us never saw
the enemy or recognized him or her. We heard gunfire and mortar fire, but
rarely looked into enemy eyes.
Those who did, like folks who encounter close combat anywhere and anytime,
are often haunted for life by those eyes, those sounds, those electric
fears that ran between ourselves, our enemies, and the
likelihood of death for one of us. Or we get hard, calloused, and tough.
All in a day's work. Life's a bitch then you die. But, most of us remember
and get twitchy, worried, and sad.
We are crazies dressed in cammo, wide-eyed, wary, homeless, and drunk. We
are Brooks Brothers suit wearers, doing deals downtown. We are housewives,
grandmothers, and church deacons. We are college professors engaged in the
rational pursuit of the truth about the history or politics or culture of
the Vietnam experience. And we are sleepless. Often sleepless.
We pushed paper; we pushed shovels. We drove jeeps, operated bulldozers,
built bridges; we toted machine guns through dense brush, deep paddy, and
thorn scrub. We lived on buffalo milk, fish heads and rice. Or, C-rations.
Or steaks and Budweiser. We did our time in high mountains drenched by
endless monsoon rains or on the dry plains or on muddy rivers or at the
most beautiful beaches in the world.
We wore berets, bandanas, flop hats, and steel pots. Flak jackets, canvas,
rash and rots. We ate cloroquine and got malaria anyway. We got shots
constantly but have diseases nobody can diagnose. We spent our
nights on cots or shivering in foxholes filled with waist-high water or
lying still on cold wet ground, our eyes imagining Charlie behind every
bamboo blade. Or, we slept in hotel beds in Saigon or barracks in
Thailand or in cramped ships' berths at sea.
We feared we would die or we feared we would kill. We simply feared, and
often we still do. We hated the war or believed it was the best thing that
ever happened to us. We blame Uncle Sam or Uncle Ho and his or her minions
and secretaries and apologists for every wart or cough or tic of an eye.
We wonder if Agent Orange got us.
Mostly -- and, this I believe with all my heart -- mostly, we wish we had
not been so alone. Some of us went with units; but many, probably most of
us, were civilians one day, jerked up out of "the world," shaved, barked
at, insulted, humiliated, de-egoized and taught to kill, to fix radios, to
drive trucks.
We went, put in our time, and were equally ungraciously plucked out of the
morass and placed back in the real world. But, now we smoked dope, shot
skag, or drank heavily. Our wives or husbands seemed distant and strange.
Our friends wanted to know if we shot anybody.
And life went on, had been going on, as if we hadn't been there, as if
Vietnam was a topic of political conversation or college protest or news
copy, not a matter of life and death for tens of thousands.
Vietnam Veterans are people just like you. We served our country, proudly
or reluctantly or ambivalently. What makes us different -- what makes us
Vietnam Veterans -- is something we understand, but we are afraid nobody
else will. But, we appreciate your asking.
Vietnam Veterans are white, black, beige and shades of gray; but in
comparison with our numbers in the "real world," we were more likely
black. Our ancestors came from Africa, from Europe, and China. Or, they
crossed the Bering Sea Land Bridge in the last Ice Age and formed the
nations of American Indians, built pyramids in Mexico, or farmed acres of
corn on the banks of Chesapeake Bay.
We had names like Rodriguez and Stein and Smith and Kowalski. We were
Americans, Australians, Canadians, and Koreans; most Vietnam Veterans are
Vietnamese.
We were farmers, students, mechanics, steelworkers, nurses, and priests
when the call came that changed us all forever. We had dreams and plans,
and they all had to change... or, wait. We were daughters and sons, lovers
and poets, beatniks and philosophers, convicts and lawyers. We were rich
and poor, but mostly poor.
We were educated or not, mostly not. We grew up in slums, in shacks, in
duplexes, and bungalows and houseboats and hooches and ranchers. We were
cowards and heroes. Sometimes we were cowards one moment and heroes the
next.
Many of us have never seen Vietnam. We waited at home for those we loved.
And, for some of us, our worst fears were realized. For others, our loved
ones came back but never would be the same.
We came home and marched in protest marches, sucked in tear gas, and
shrieked our anger and horror for all to hear. Or, we sat alone in small
rooms, in VA hospital wards, in places where only the crazy ever go.
We are Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, and Confucians and Buddhists
and Atheists -- though as usually is the case -- even the Atheists among
us sometimes prayed to get out of there alive.
We are hungry, and we are sated, full of life or clinging to death. We are
injured, and we are curers, despairing and hopeful, loved or lost. We got
too old too quickly, but some of us have never grown up.
We want, desperately, to go back, to heal wounds, and revisit the sites of
our horror. Or, we want never to see that place again, to bury it, its
memories, its meaning. We want to forget, and we wish we could remember.
Despite our differences, we have so much in common. There are few of us
who don't know how to cry, though we often do it alone when nobody will
ask, "What's wrong?" We're afraid we might have to answer.
Adam, if you want to know what a Vietnam Veteran is, get in your car next
weekend or cage a friend with a car to drive you. Go to Washington. Go to
the Wall. It's going to be Veterans Day weekend. There will be hundreds
there... no, thousands.
Watch them. Listen to them. I'll be there. Come touch the Wall with us.
Rejoice a bit. Cry a bit. No, cry a lot. I will. I'm a Vietnam Veteran;
and, after 30 years, I think I am beginning to understand what that means.
-- Copyright
1996, Dan Mouer.
This
would also include one quite famous....or infamous.... depending on how
you look at it....who in time of war.... abandon his post....blatantly
disobeyed orders....risked the life of his men....and a river fighting
boat....went over the side to an enemy soldier who was too wounded to
fight....killed him so he could steal his weapon for a war
souvenir....burned and destroyed non combatant villages....came
home....rallied aganist the United States Military with Hanoi Jane....and
today thinks he should be regarded as a real war hero.
Col. Sam Wakely Ret. |