Posted on 08/28/2010 6:47:31 PM PDT by SLB
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 I 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 we were destroyed by them 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 vets 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, tough. All in a day's work. Life's a bitch then you die. But most of us remember and get twitchy, worried, 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 rot. 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 hate the war or believe it was the best thing that ever happened to us. We blame Uncle Sam or Uncle Ho and their 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 vets are people just like you. We served our country, proudly or reluctantly or ambivalently. What makes us different--what makes us Vietnam vets--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, desparately, to go back, to heal wounds, 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.
thanks very much.
1st division, 1965-66, Bien Hoa, camp Bearcat
thanks very much. proud vietnam vet
1st division, 1965-66, Bien Hoa, camp Bearcat
Popman—Thank you.
I dropped out after my Rat Year at VMI, killed termites for a year, then volunteered - no idea why, lottery number probably would have been OK. Came from a seafaring family, mostly Navy, so I enlisted there in ‘72. Had always admired the stories of the Corpsmen, so I signed up there.
First ship a sub tender - boring: swapped with a guy in the Gator Fleet on an LST, made two West Pac cruises, the first one including action off the coasts of Cambodia and Vietnam when they fell - three months of hostile fire pay, Combat Action Ribbon and such, but never really felt the right to call myself a Vietnam Vet without having been in country. Others might disagree, but that's just my personal take on things.
The guys who were “in country” were the real VN Vets, IMO, and it never bothered me that I got no thanks or honor when I came home. I never counted myself among them, nor thought much of my “service” to the country until a rally in a small, largely Hispanic town in northern New Mexico right after 9/11.
They asked all the Veterans in the crowd to come up on the stage, where we all got enormous applause, which was nice. But as I again left the stage to resume my place in the crowd people just kept coming up to me and embracing me and thanking me tearfully for my service. It went on for a long time, and I couldn't stop crying.
I still tear up thinking about it, that someone, anyone, especially Americans from a different ethnic group, ever bothered to personally thank me, even years later, and even though I did so little compared to others. I pass the thanks I received on to you vets who really deserved it.
Litekeeper
US Army (ret)
Thanks, SLB. Welcome Home!
Dad has actually compiled a series of bound journals that document his entire military career. I'm sure there's one that covers his war experiences in Vietnam.
When I last visited with him in April this year, he showed me some of the early ones. They brought back a flood of memories for me.
He's intensely proud of his military career, and so are all of his children. Thanks for the tip.
I got choked up reading your post.
Thank you for your service, Dag. You’ve earned all of our thanks because you were there, and you would have done whatever your country asked of you. That’s enough for us.
Same here. Turning circles on the gun line and bobbing up and down at Point Yankee wasn't really the same experience as slogging through the rice paddies, and my very best to those who did.
"What Is A Vietnam Veteran?" Old. ROTFLMAO!
We used to call the National Defense Medal I received in 1991 as the DOD Award (Defender of the Drydock) or the CNN Award for watching the Gulf War on tv. Like you I just did my job, crossed the arctic circle, passed through the Straits of Gibralter and never felt like I’d done anything special.
20 years later I appreciate our military and the people serving in it far more than I ever did when I wore the uniform.
Guys, Please don’t forget the Coast Guard, we were there as well. We had EOD personnel, patrol boats and participated in Operation Markettime.
Did you just write this or sometime ago? 30 Years ago would put you there in l980.
What about the several thousand U.S. COAST GUARD that served in Viet Nam???
Thanks, Windflier. After our recent disagreements, your post means a lot to me. Let’s stay on good terms - we’re on the same side in this thing. :)
Myth 3: The suicidal grunt
Source: The support group Disabled American Veterans published a 1980 pamphlet, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders of the Vietnam Veteran,” stating that the number of all Vietnam veterans who had committed suicide had reached 58,000 – the number of overall U.S. deaths in the war.
That estimate quickly grew. A broadcast of CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Oct. 4, 1986, put the number at more than 100,000. Less than 10 years later, a California chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America projected it to be “approximately 150,000.”
Reality: Exact numbers are unknown. Suicide, with its social stigma, is notoriously difficult to pin down.
The 58,000 figure was based on an assumption that the suicide rate during the initial postwar period had continued unabated. Instead, it dramatically slackened. In 1999, the Centers for Disease Control conducted the most extensive study to date on this issue. It found that the risk of suicide increased with exposure to combat. Still, the CDC concluded that the overall rate for Vietnam-theater veterans is roughly one per 100 veteran deaths. This would bring the current total to about 6,500.
Michael Kelley, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Sacramento, has spent years tracking the wildly varying suicide estimates.
“In the final analysis,” Kelley wrote in a 1999 Washington Post story, “Vietnam veterans likely die from suicide at about the same rate and for the same reasons that everyone else in America does.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051111/news_lz1n11vets.html
Thanks for this.
Welcome home, Nam Vets.
Carry on!
We’ll “Carry on”.
Great post, thanks. I served 64-68, but never went over there.
Thank you for your service.
Thank you for your service
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