Vee-Et-Naam

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Vee-Et-Naam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mSmOcmk7uQ   R.E.M.: "Orange Crush"--"Now it's time to/ Serve your country, overseas/ Comin' in fast, over me.."


Shaped my young life.  Necessarily?   TV news, every night...real blood, real bullets and body parts, no bullshit sensationalism. Assassinations on Saigon streets, girls burning from napalm.  Life and Look Magazines in glossy black and white, next to pictures of Camelot and John-john saluting at his father's funeral--so pathos drenched.  My father talking to the T.V.  He was making things that were being sent there.    And for three months I did too.  Don't feel so hot about this.  Until I went to college, there was always Vietnam.  It is intrinsically in my mind tied with JFK's assassination, although I'm not really sure there is a logical connection, perhaps a post hoc fallacy on my part.  I remember worrying my brother would go, and because of "women's lib", maybe me, too.  It made sense to me that if women were going to be equals, they should be subject to the draft as well. The Israelis did it.   But somehow I knew instinctively this would cause my insanity if it occurred.  And I figured pregnancy would always be a failsafe, no?

My first husband actually had a draft number.  But the war ended.  The Cold War lasted until the 80's, or really, 'til Peristroika.  Reagan was the All-American hero, to all but the punks.  Bet he knew, though, like the more observant, that he was just a lucky bastard of timing.

One of the most moving moments of my life was seeing an exhibit that was held on one of the middle floors of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.  A simple theme: Things people left at the Wall.   I am only remotely connected to one person's name engraved there: Jose's brother, Oscar.  Really, the best idea for a war memorial --just the reflective names of the dead.  The monument simultaneously echoing the walls of China and Berlin, and The Robert Frost poem: Something there is that doesn't love a wall..good fences make good neighbors."

 It made me cry for people I didn't know.  Here are some of the things I saw...many, many wedding rings.  POW bracelets.  Baby shoes and crayon drawings from children the father never saw.  A picture of a grown up puppy, taken care of by other soldiers after his master was killed.  Vietnamese paper money.   Lots of letters, some open and readable, revealing endless love, dead love, women who couldn't take the pain and went elsewhere, notes that were angry at the government, at the soldier for joining up, the draft that ruined so many lives.   One girl was guiltily pouring her heart out about why she married his best friend after he'd been dead a year.  Only other person she felt close to.    Letters sealed--who knew what passions were inside.  Survivors glorying in  superiority and nostalgia for rising above hell.

A n explanation of P.O.W. (Prisoner of War) bracelets for those too young to remember.  Here's a picture that will explain it better:
You see, back home, people would wear these(not sure where you got one, or I would have probably done it, too).  Usually people who knew someone in the army tended to get these.  The had a soldier's name and rank, and the day engraved that he went missing.  You were supposed to take it off only if he was found, dead or alive.  Some girls at my school wore them, and not necessarily for anyone they knew--sorta anonymous, but I bet it made a lot of people look into the fate of the man whose name they carried on their arms.  Wonder how vets felt about this idea.  I know some were a bit cynical about the light burdens of people at home.

 Teddy bears,  American Flags, the small hand held ones, and the full tricorner, military folded ones, moved me least.  Honestly, (And this is a dangerous thing to say) I don't quite grasp --- the sincerity ---in these gestures, how does one lose a son, lover, father, husband,  friend, and the outward display that is the essence of your relationship is a patriotic flag??/ Maybe if the soldier felt it so strongly, I don't know. "Dulce e  decorum est, pro patria mori,"--some sincerely feel this, I suppose.    I do come from WWII vet stock, with casualties. (One Uncle at Pearl Harbor, another shell-shocked for life.)
 Maybe some couldn't bear to have the reminder in their house: rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Never know another's mind.   Zippo lighters,  (there's an outstanding website on the Internets somewhere that shows military issue zippos, which were plain, hand engraved with soldier poetry--amazing poet-warrior stuff), favorite foods, packs of special brands of cigarettes, joints, moved me more.  Weapons used for suicides.  A piece of the wreckage of a plane crash.  And this note:

  "Dear Sir: For twenty-two years I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was only eighteen years old that day that we faced one another on that trail in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Why you did not take my life I'll never know. You stared at me for so long. . . . Forgive me for taking your life."

"Will all great Neptune's oceans...."...wash the things we carry.  I misquote Tim O'Brien and Shakespeare.



Oct 4, 2017:  If I were president of the world, I would make Ken Burns'/Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War mandatory viewing.  In spite of the disgust, the political screwing up, the posturing, the wrong headedness, I feel so much lighter having watched this.   So much heroicism.  It's nice to rub against truth and enlightenment, for a change.  People who watch it will be so happy they did.  It somehow makes our world make sense.

Oct 11, 2017:  The Burns/Novick series is haunting me still.  It was a lot to see over a few weeks time--I keep saying to people-- it has given me some closure about the first twenty years of my life ('59-'79).    Apparently, I am not alone.   I recommended it to один из моих хороших товарищей--Jim C.-- our once best math teacher, dorm supervisor, and spy extraordinaire.  When he got drafted (I think?) for 'Nam towards the end of the war, his ASVAB scores were so high they sent him off to code breaking, language learning Spy school.   He has always been kinda cagey about what it was he really did--he's a Nor'easter, spent time in Canada, I think he speaks fluent French...

So today he did something unusual, I think from a burst of emotion, where he needed to talk to someone who sorta got it.   Like I did when I was watching this thing, all these sad memories of strong emotion flooding back.  My childhood with a sad backdrop.  Vietnam.  I always thought with admiration of people who lived through WWII, both soldiers and civilians.  It dawned on me today, when Jim visited me in my classroom,  that we also had survived hell, but it was much longer and more emotionally conflicted than WWII.

 That war (WWII) had such obvious good guys and bad guys, and it helps psychically if you were on the good guy Allies' side..like my uncles.  Only Uncle Paul, the youngest, bore the obvious scars of that war.  But he managed to get himself situated in the worst--straight out of bootcamp--The Battle of the Bulge.  The family story is he might have spent days in foxholes with dead bodies in the Ardennes.  He was something like 18 and fragile anyway.  When he came home, he never was able to work, get married, have kids---he sent us these spooky postcards at Christmas with his crazy, shaky, spidery handwriting--all about how much he loved us and missed us(even though we'd never actually met.)  I guess my mother was afraid to let us meet him--I only learned this after I had kids that my mother was actually afraid of him.  My mom was born in 1939, and when she was just a tiny thing used to go to her grandmother's house in Owensboro, KY for long visits.  Well, right after the war, Uncle Paul was living there with his mother--he was too messed up to live anywhere else.  My mother tells two horrible stories about him, that are sort of the stuff of childhood trauma.

1)  One night, after she'd gone to bed--she heard a nightmarish sound of something moving under her bed.  It turned out to be Uncle Paul,  with a butcher knife, imagining he was back in the forest in Germany.

2) After the war, Uncle Paul got some sort of solace by raising a pet rabbit in his mom's back yard.  He spent loads of time with it, had my tiny 5- year -old mother help him feed it carrots and lettuce and garden scraps.  Then one day, in some odd fever of anguish, he went out and killed it in anger.  Afterwards, he said he did it so he wouldn't kill a person instead.

I think I know why my mother never let us meet Uncle Paul, beyond his spidery postcard handwriting, which she usually displayed on our buffet.  She always sent him very sweet Christmas, Birthday, and holiday cards, which I think is very compassionate and brave of her.

But Vietnam, excuse my French, was such a mind-fuck.  I had this figured out by age 12, maybe.   By college I was obsessed with finding out all I could about Vietnam, what I'd lived through, but only on the edges.  I mean, as far as wars go, I had it good: I never starved, or had to live through nights of blackouts, or worried seriously about bombings--Vietnam was too poor to bomb us back--odd that they never resorted to the terrorist tactics like the Muslims--they only had Buddhist monks that set themselves on fire,  which was horrific enough to see.

In my early college days, the Vietnam War was (officially) over, but the Viet- era movies started appearing: Apocalypse Now, which, having read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in university, I was enamored of.  The Deerhunter, which I vowed, having survived those Russian roulette scenes once, I would absolutely never, ever! watch this movie again--I have remained true to that vow--it was like watching all the tension and American self-loathing of a decade of war concentrated in two hours of film. Platoon, Full Metal Jacket,  Hamburger Hill---

--My Vietnam Vet biology lab partner/ memorable friend (I say again, we bonded over  dissecting this diabolic formaldahyded black cat in Anatomy class , Lucifer Sam--)  John S--really I see him as one of the true heroes I've met in life--a 101st Airborne Ranger--who volunteered! for 'Nam in the 70's!--how crazy is he!!  And smart as hell--we were both planning to be doctors then, but he was getting his all paid for by Uncle Sam and the G.I. Bill....And remained an intact human being, even if he had trouble taking off his Army fatigues.

Anyway, John had his moments of righteous indignation.  He HATED with a capital H --Apocalypse Now.   Hippie Trash.  Californication.  If you wanted to know what Vietnam was really like, Hamburger Hill was your movie--poor little grunts, in the war for two hours and getting themselves killed.   For nothing,  for a hill that would go back to the bloody VC the next day.  Body Count.  (Ice -T knew something...damn).  On a side-note, it was John, all the way from Vietnam, who introduced me to punk rock in, like, '78--the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones).

Well, I have been seriously side tracked here--sorry.   I meant to talk about my visit from Jim, my fellow traveler.  So, I guess the army trained him to learn some North Vietnamese dialect.  This is what I learned about him today.  He was in Laos.  For the USArmy--we weren't supposed to be there, it was a secret war,  I  believe, ixnay alsonay Cambodia.  I asked him, did you ever see any American soldiers there--any Caucasians? He said no--he had to survive using this North Vietnamese dialect,  rarely saw Americans--just needing NV and Thai for daily life.  And the hard part for him, as you might imagine! was not knowing who was an enemy, who was trustworthy, who was--part of the job...he was on the very edge of the tilting dominoes of Communism. Laos/Thailand.   That must have been freaky.  And lonely.  He was a bit upset, that after all these years, he was having a hard time  following  the North and South Vietnamese interviews, considering for him 45 years have gone--45  years!!!  Is that really right?

Yeah, so another South Asian movie I saw was The Killing Fields--about the effects of the Khmer Rouge (French overtones?) in Cambodia--extending the evils of the Vietnam conflicts. Only more so.

Nov 1:  So, I am sad to report, perhaps bittersweetly, that Jim my spy buddy, has decided to forgo finishing the VIETNAM series.  He looked uncharacteristically emotional, as he did during his confession to me, and said simply it was just too much to go back.  I understand

Dec 10:  Another  GRs friend has started watching the Vietnam series, so I went looking: I thought I had written more about this series somewhere, to friends, and I just found this--so it will be sort of out of context, but I like to have it all here together on one blog so i don't forget about in, for future reference?  It might sound more chatty....odd quoting myself ))

 "I remember not understanding about the "body count" every night on the news--subconsciously wondered, is that really how you tally a war? Now it makes sense. The TET offensive episode was---hhwoosh--I always knew it carried weight, but didn't quite understand why. Now I get it, in context. The whole war was just too long, too complicated, for me to wrap my head around me fading in and out of consciousness of it between games of Ditch and MARY TYLER MOORE and my dad cussing the TV news. I needed reminding that the WHOLE world protested this war, that the police response to the Yippies at the Democratic Convention in '68 was much more militant and aggressive than that sissy stuff nowadays--they literally had one police officer/returned Vietnam soldiers/National Guardsmen for every protester. 

And so weird that I know two people who were there at that '68 protest--on opposite sides. My old carpool buddy from my first teaching job was our band director--a dyed in the wool jazz-playing Chicago hippie who lived in a tent on a mountain for a year and said "man" and "far-out" as part of his natural vocabulary--he was on the protest side. My first husband's uncle Mel was a Chicago cop--the most racist, alcoholic, white rage, head-cracking person I know--and he now lives here in Florida in my old condo! "