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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (May 1, 1995)
PAGE 13 sight of dead or wounded GIs was considered bad for morale American deaths were edited out of the war at the same time the war's measure of success was a grossly exaggerated body count of enemy dead. After the euphoria of the initial buildup of troops 30 years ago, after Operation Starlight and the la Drang Valley, after Tet'68 and Khe Sanh, after Hue and My Lai, after Nixon sent the Army into Cambodia and it returned with heroin, the American public became dismayed with its soldier sons and daughters. Something solid was expected of soldiers, but the Vietnam generation was beginning to change - and into what? The soldiers w ire peace medallions into combat, smoked marijuana, killed their superiors and sabotaged weapons and equipment, and rebelled against the military by the thousands No one but the soldiers understood that the rebellion was a desperate yet rational response to the war and the inequities of the military system and its callous disregard for the lives of its lower ranks. The ratio of approximately 14 noncombatants to one combat man, the racial tensions that threatened to engulf every military installation at home, in Europe and Asia; the draft that provided escape for the upper classes but none for the poor or nonv/iite were some of the factors that heightened dissatis faction in the ranks But it was the intensifying doubts about the purpose and morality of the war itself that were the most unset tling. For many soldiers, perhaps most, there was no other fight in the war other than self-preservation mixed w th grim aware ness they were being badly used. They were brutal, murderous and insensitive.They were also terrified, anguished and spiritual ly desolate. On April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War finally ended, 10 years after American Marines landed in Da Nang and 3 years after most U S. forces had been wthdrawn. The United States spent a generation attempting to dominate Southeast Asia yet the war was lost long before it committed its armies. We knew little and cared less for the cultures and peoples that lived there and our genocidal hubris ultimately caused our defeat. The loss of the war in Vietnam shocked the people of the United States. It might have been different if the war had been wan. The people might not have been so ashamed or divided Victory is its own therapeutic morality: if the war had been won the cause would naturally have been considered just. The men who designed the war blamed its loss on the men and wamen who survived it. We were made its scapegoats and shunned as lepers and losers. Our friends and families were ashamed of us. We had been the nation's agents in a dirty, unpopular and unsuccessful war and were as a result treated as if we were also dirt. We were expected to pick up our lives as if we had not been changed in the pitiless crucible of combat. War pared us to the raw edge of perception but we were implored to reaccept our culture's illusions and vanities and conform to a perspective of history our experience repudiated. We were pariahs not entirely because we rankled the public memory: the war left us with irreversible knowledge about ourselves that people usually wish to avoid. We learned that only human beings commit inhuman acts and that the most cherished and humane values serve as warcries to commit horror. We learned that concepts about the worth of life are worthless as arguments to preserve it. We discovered it is absurdly easy to kill and that it is common to feel relief and satisfaction at the anguish of someone else We learned how to reduce flesh and blood to abstract contempt to facilitate our reduction of it to dust The price of survival has been high. Many disorders which are still evident years afterward had their origin in the terror directed at us and the terror we repaid it with. The sad dest irony is that so many who fought like beasts to live through the war have suicided since returning home. The poisons we sprayed upon the Vietnamese are killing us now though the government continues to stonewall the claims of hundreds of veterans that they are sick or dying from the chemicals. Jails are filled w th Vietnam veterans. We are alcoholics and heavy drug users. We are unpredictably violent. All sorts of syndromes have been attributed to us or invented to describe us. Studies are routinely commissioned to define or find solutions to our social depravity. We form rap groups to assist each other but these often serve to intensify our maladjustment or alienation. A number of veterans have retreated from civilization and live isolated in forests and deserts. The nightmares that seldom leave us have an incompleteness that reflects our fragmented experience in the war. For most of the decade of massive escalation hundreds of thousands of us went to war and returned daily almost without notice. We passed each other going and coming to and from Vietnam. • The war never quite slides out of my thoughts. Some times it lies quietly on the far side of my mind like a sleeping dog but eventually something triggers its loop to the closer circuit and almost everything I do, see or think about has its parallel and its substance rooted in Vietnam. I spent only a year in combat but it shines through the murk of subsequent years with a clarity missing from the rest. To survive I cut off sensitivities I believe are irrecoverably lost. I continue to feel that every day is extra and I will never comprehend why or adequately use to justify I believe I killed or was measurably responsible for the deaths of Vietnamese whose lives were worth more than my own, and that friends who died would have been more useful than I am. I am haunted by the dead. Every one who has endured combat is drawn ever afterward toward death, grimly aware escape has only been temporary. Dead friends vex survivors with sorrow and guilt and beckon for us to rejoin their company JOHN MCDONALD I was at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D C., when it was dedicated in 1982, looking for names of a few dead friends I last saw wrapped in bloody ponchos and tossed aboard outgoing helicopters I felt smothered by flags and military bands and thought the ceremony had little to do with reconciliation but was staged instead to revive a war fever that Vietnam had cooled. Yet our presence must have been an embarrassment, a tattered and crippled spectre of a lost war I felt disconnected much the same as I might have felt at a class or scout troop reunion I had forgotten names I thought I would always remember Names of the dead occupy the black marble wall of the Memorial chronologically by the days of their deaths, arranged in daily sequence in alphabetical order so that they will forever remain together, sculptor Maya Lin said. I ran my fingers in the carved grooves of names I remembered They had been dead a long time by then and I felt slightly indifferent. I realized names that should have been on the wall were missing, some of our o w i who had not been initially included for petty reasons, such as those who died of wounds later and no women; but also the names of dead allies and enemies, and especially millions of ordinary people who were shot or bombed because it was their bad luck to be in the way (They continue to die from landmines planted everywhere in Vietnam and from malaria caused by millions of bomb and shell holes that breed mosquitoes.) I thought there should be a separate wall with the names of the murdered dead of My Lai and Hue to serve as a warning that the only enemy is the malevolence we humans display toward each other. Almost unnoticed against the wall among flowers, war medals and photographs of dead young soldiers, sailors, pilots and Marines was a handlettered square of cardboard w th the names of four war dead who had not been nor are yet included They were killed 25 years ago this month. The four students shot down by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State College in May 1970. I left D.C. with friends from Oregon. We drove through Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Oregon, reaching home in Cannon Beach five days later We stopped every night at motels or the homes of friends or relatives, and each day we made several stops for food, gas and just to get out and stretch. On the back wndow of our small truck was a Vietnam Veterans of America sticker, the group that built and dedicated the Vietnam War Memorial Everywhere we stopped people noticed the sticker and almost everyone was related to or knew someone killed in Vietnam Everywhere we stopped I opened a book I purchased at the Memorial. It was the size of a small city's phone directory and contained the names engraved on the wall and where each was located I looked up names people wished to see and many touched the letters in the book as so many had embraced with their fingers the names on the wall. By the time we reached the Pacific Coast the American Book of the Dead was as well thumbed as a phone book in a public booth Until then I had not really understood the personal impact of Vietnam on America's heart Each time I opened the book and looked for a name I felt I was performing a ritual of immense unrecognized grief. Perhaps the most enduring lesson of the Vietnam War and a major reason the government would wish to suppress it from public memory or attention is that a significant number of Americans were against it. When they were rebuffed by the government they went out into the streets and risked injury and arrest Thousands of young men chose exile or jail over service in Vietnam. Other thousands who were in the military rebelled against it. Although a reconstructed myth portrays dissenters as irresponsible students, antisocial hippies and various other types of misfits and malcontents, the largest number of antiwar activists were from the mainstream, and in the spring of 1971 the mainstream peaked when 500,000 of them -th e official body count of U S. forces in Vietnam at the height of the escalation - marched through the streets of Washington, D C., to demand an end to the war Seldom mentioned and disparaged when it is, the American people ultimately forced its government to abandon its discredited ambitions in Southeast Asia It is that which disturbs our leaders most and which they wiuld have us forget: that we can and mus, if necessary curb our government's misuse of power Underneath the spectacle of pageantry and deceit of patriotism, the disturbing presence of Vietnam veterans demon strates wth the subtlety of a clenched fis, tha, war is death and horror; it is murder and depravity and sickens the souls and minds of its executioners Vietnam veterans give war a bad name SHARE THE PAIN CALL CLATSOP COUNTY W O M E N S CRISIS SERVICE 3 2 5 -5 7 3 5 ANYTIME I
