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BACK HOME IN THE USA
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
A sym posium fo r peace was held in Astoria in early
N o ve m be r A m ong the subjects was the e ffe ct o f w a r upon
veterans. The following is one Vietnam veteran's response
to a y e a r a t w a r m ore than three decades afterward. A
discla im e r m ight be in order: his rem arks represent only
his own opinion, perhaps in the entire cosmos. There are
a m illion stones in a war, this is one o f them.
All through his childhood he lived in fear he would be
caught up in a war — and his sense of its inevitability resulted in
a belief that he would most likely (most certainly!) be killed. He
had much precedent to feed his certainty: World War 2 when he
was a fat happy American baby unaware that hundreds of
thousands of babies and children were being killed and crippled
all over the world, as well as millions of older human beings; the
Korean War, and the interminable years of the Cold War that
threatened worldwide nuclear obliteration while he was growing
up.
So when there was a war he inevitably volunteered for it
though he did not have to — at least on the surface. But terrified
as he was, consumed with the dread of self-prophecy of doom,
he knew his short life had been rooted on its inevitability.
So he went to Vietnam — and he survived. And just as
the conjecture of war preoccupied the early part of his life, its
soul wracking reality structured everything afterward.
He would never understand why he had lived through his
year at war, any more than he would understand why persons
near him fell dead or were blown apart somewhat farther away.
He had been so scared in Vietnam that he half wished to die so
he would not be afraid any more.
Fresh from Vietnam he cherished every day as
unexpected and undeserved. That sharp exhilaration of deliver
ance, coupled with sorrow for his dead friends and guilt for
having survived when they had not, had dulled over the decades,
yet he rarely took for granted he would be alive at the end of
every day he awakened. He balanced somewhat paradoxically
his appreciation that he continued to live with increased
awareness of having used up most of his 3 score & 10. Each day
was a rebirth but also a day closer to the crypt. His spool was
running out faster the less time remaining to unravel. Now when
he looked into the future his attention was concentrated on his
corpse laying somewhere up the near timeline.
For him Vietnam was the war. Of all history's wars, it had
been the war he was in. Only for a year, but it lasered through
his brain with stark clarity, surrounded by the rest of his years
which were ambiguous. He found it difficult to see through the
bloody prism of the war to his earlier life. He saw a separate
person moving opaquely through a dimly remembered history he
knew was his own yet was discontinuous with the person who
emerged from the war. The war was his faultline, and the parts it
bifurcated did not quite match up. He felt the portion of him on
the opposite side of the fissure would not have much to say he
would now be very interested in.
Vietnam was always immediate in his mind despite its
disappearance into the shadows of collective memory. The war
was as distant to the young generations bom afterward as the
myths of Troy. Vietnam veterans were grandparents and
generally close-mouthed about the war with their families and
friends who had not been in Vietnam. Among themselves they
chattered like crows; even if they seldom mentioned the war it
was their connective tissue against the rest of the world. He
realized each carried his own war like a sheathed membrane;
other wars appear and pass, generally displacing their predeces
sors in their rapid surge, sluicing away the immediacy of each.
The veterans seemed like old ghosts unable to detach them
selves from their vanished remote wars. He knew people were
disappointed with Vietnam vets, not so much because the war
was lost but because it had so completely undone so many of
them.
Usually he quickly identified himself as a Vietnam
veteran to new acquaintances, reasoning that if they didn’t know
that about him, they would not know him at all. He had been
an agent in a dirty, unpopular and unsuccessful war and was as
a result shunned as a leper and loser by friends and family who
were ashamed, and he was expected to pick up his life as if he
had not changed in the pitiless crucible of combat. He had been
pared to the raw edge of perception but was urged to reaccept
the illusions and vanities his experience repudiated. He had
learned that only human beings commit inhuman acts and that
the most cherished humane values served as warcries to commit
horror; that concepts about the worth of life were worthless as
arguments to preserve it.
He remembered his very small part of the war in
fragments; flashbacks of incessant dread and helpless terror
that in only moments with no chance of escape he would fight
savagely and perhaps unsuccessfully for his life. His war
reached no farther than the narrow daily routine of annihilation.
Combat is confusion and disintegration. Surviving is every
soldier's main interest. The war’s political purposes are of no use
to them. Combat soldiers live in the now; in the next instant they
are dead, wounded or inexplicably unscathed until the next shot
or explosion.
Vietnam was a series of contradictory sensations:
Exhilaration, horror and a constant fear that not only penetrated
every sense of his body and being, but which also became his
accustomed companion to such a degree that he was virtually
unconscious of it — only when he was out of country and its
dangers did the anticlimactic letdown indicate how afraid he had
been. The war taught him to live in the moment, which he still did
though perhaps not as ardently as when he measured his life in
seconds, at the most in minutes
(A young girl once asked him if he was scared when he
was in Vietnam. He said he was terrified in his first firefight and
wanted to run away —and that it never changed; his first thought
every time was to run away. His greater fear was that if he did
run the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army would most likely
be where he ran to.)
He was not a killer, but he had killed — maybe. Who
really knew over there, except the wrong people always got
killed, the people who lived in the villages; the children and their
mothers, and the old people The only death he was absolutely
sure he was responsible for in Vietnam was a water buffalo who
had attacked rampaging Marines in defense of her calf — and
even then, after he shot the mother buffalo in the head, she
charged at him and only dropped when another Marine opened
up with an automatic burst "Did you kill anybody?" was always
the first question asked
i
I
FREDRIKA SPILLMAN
He remembered the unfettered wildness being at war
had released in him; above law and morality, or more truthfully,
abstracted from either consideration. A legal rumble his friends
had exulted underneath their terror, acting like berserker Vikings
when they were most afraid and frustrated. Killing was its own
law despite the rigid and myriad rules of combat designed to
prevent or at least disguise the war’s fervid, immutable and
indiscriminate savagery.
He had formed his own pattern of his year in Vietnam,
and his war in experience and expression was individually his
own even though he shared his portion of the war with many
still alive. The war gave his life a fracture point — the barely
remembered himself before Vietnam, the still angry moratorium
with himself on this side of the faultline.The war sculpted his life,
taught him more about raw humanity’s conduct with itself than he
might learn any other way, and though he often wished he hadn’t
learned so well or dramatically, he never regretted knowing that
he had been pared to the bone and refused the well meaning
attempts by friends to forget the war because that would mean
abandoning truth. The war made him a world class skeptic.
Some might have said he never recovered from the war,
but the recovery they meant would have him stop thinking about
the horrible massacres of Vietnamese that he participated in —
and he refused to recover from that. He would spend the rest
of his life never forgetting he had helped define genocide to
Vietnamese. It was the shining icon of the remainder of his life
and now it was more important than ever to shine that crippled
beacon upon those who planned similar genocides — in partic
ular the millenial insanity that seemed to be unraveling on a
global scale.
Nothing else was close to the proximity of having
experienced war. The paradox was that, obsessed by the war,
he found it difficult to accept seriously the daily life he had lived
since. More times than he could count he was asked how he
was able to make the transition from war to “reality." The real
question was how to make his postwar life real — that even after
more than thirty years his life was still not real to him.The war
was his real life, everything since felt counterfeit.
Back from the war he discovered his reflexes had out
lasted their necessity as if everything afterward was an illusion.
He flinched and nearly dropped on his belly when cars or trucks
backfired or firecrackers erupted. Once he threw a woman down
on a sidewalk when his foot brushed something he mistook for a
boobytrap tripwire. He might walk on a spring day in an open
field admiring budding trees and smelling flowers; a moment
later a military helicopter might fly over and he would be back in
the war, looking intently for armed enemies among the trees and
bushes.
He was angry and anguished by his close experience
for a year with death and horror, much shorter a period than his
predecessors at their various wars (the World Wars of the 20th
century especially), but very much more than enough for him.
Others saw more combat, and he felt lucky the worst of it
escaped him; yet the war was iridescently the most dramatic
part of his life. It sculpted his attitude toward life and people.
He knew the essential dividing wall between people: those who
experienced war, however lightly, and those who hadn’t; and
though he had seen little of combat in comparison to many,
he wished to see no more. Everyone in Vietnam had their own
private, intensely personal war, and if they survived they won
the war, even though the larger war was lost.
He thought his life after Vietnam had taken the quality of
a bad dream he might have had while he was still there, a night
mare of what his life would be like if he managed to survive the
war. Vietnam was the nucleus of his life, as if both his birth and
death were outer rings of less consequence. A beam of memory
sliced through him like a spear one sunset baroque with gaudy
operatic clouds — a desperate pitched ball of hope sent into
the future for him to catch by a very scared much younger him
preparing for another long night in Viet Cong country 30 years
earlier, projecting the fervent desire he would survive that night
and all other nights he was in the war and be alive to receive the
sharp ray of the past which at that moment transmuted time and
momentarily connected the two of him
He couldn’t entirely blame the Vietnam War for his
apparent comatosity, though it had much to do with his despair
and sense of sorrow, as well as shame and guilt. He was deter
mined to not forget about the war despite the advice from friends
that he should; as the World War 1 German soldier Albert says
in All Quiet on the Western Front,“We won’t take this off as easily
as a sock," which meant the war, of course
The war was an open wound, not because his
experiences were so terrible but what he helped inflict upon
Vietnamese. While many veterans did what they could to ease
their memories through drugs and drink, he used them as a
means to remember the war without going too crazy. Yet this
attitude had much to do with his lassitude and inability to think
beyond a few minutes. He seemed frozen in a moment long
past, a war of a previous century, but for him unresolved despite
the acceleration past remorse and shame by the society that
perpetrated it as a cold matter of policy. He wished to be a
conscience because someone must, like a crazy American who
lost his sanity at Hiroshima and wandered around its radioactive
streets atoning for the bomb. He knew his feelings had no place
in opulent frenzied America (except among a few), but he was
unable to change because he wouldn’t allow himself to change.
He refused to allow the victims of the war, American, and
Vietnamese (Laotian, Cambodian, etc.) to disappear into
memory’s dustbin.
He felt misplaced and with little imagination for a future.
He chose a shortcut, a war that might kill or define him, and his
part would at least be appreciated. As it turned out neither his
part in an exceptionally unpopular and erroneous war nor his
prominent role in dissent against it was much appreciated
(except among a few).
Perhaps he clung to the war because he was insufficient
at anything else. The war was his moment and it was gone. It
might have been better if he had left with it, like so many vets,
among them friends, who opted out rather than face a bitter
desolate existence.
He thought of suicide but seldom seriously. His plan,
if not killed in some turbulent manner, was to quietly check out
as if leaving a party undetected — preferably, as he fantasized,
with a large jug of red wine, a few pounds of marijuana and a
compound of lethal chemicals when he determined his useful
ness to himself was over; to leave the tribe without much noise
or fuss as his ancient ancestors once did.
Sometimes he felt the substance of himself died in
Vietnam, only the form continued. He often dreamed he was
back in Vietnam, but in another realm, another tour. His actual
experiences were in his waking thoughts, triggered by noises,
smells, sudden movements. His dreams were delusional epi
sodes of the horror, trapped at war over and over again.
He felt that a large crowd of dead young men waited for
his return into their company. Even so many years later he knew
he would not escape the war; it waited as if in ambush to finally
boobytrap and kill him.
Yet he savored living despite his feelings that he was
one of the walking dead. His definition of success was breathing.
He lived one pointless day to the next, not at all worried that
there was probably no real meaning to anything. He was
satisfied that he was alive in the world and that he was brain and
flesh to think and feel. He knew he was fortunate that he was not
killed or crippled in Vietnam. He thought much of the time of
friends who were killed and wondered what had become of the
others who lived, what their middleaged lives have been, how
many died in the intervening years.
He frequently rummaged through boxes of old photo
graphs and scratchy color slides he took while in Vietnam of
his friends on search and destroy, grabassing in villages, filling
canteens at a palm shaded well; he remembered the intensity
that was ever present of impending death incoming at any
moment. Three decades later he felt incomplete, the war
peculiarly unfinished even though for Americans it lasted a
decade. At least he knew what he had not known then, that
he would live. He was never wounded; his scars were internal.
He felt outside. He had experienced that which most
people did not wish to speak about or be informed about. His
life was of little interest and the profundity of what he had learned
of no importance to those whose lives flowed daily around his
own.
Ironically, he had been among the first counselors of
Vietnam veterans, who, having no place to go or anyone to listen
to them, initially sought help for their postwar trauma in rap
groups set up by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. (A
young friend said, “I'm not sure which might be better, my uncle
who returned from Vietnam with no memory and a pension, or
you with your memory and no pension.”)
He was an old man remembering a young man’s horror,
never glorifying it, knowing the bitter truths and deceits behind
the horror, and most importantly, knowing who its real victims
were, innocents killed, raped, crippled for no greater reason than
they were there — in itself grotesquely sinister.
He had made a personal motto for survival that guilt was
a luxury of only the living — he would save his life anyway
possible even if it required actions he knew would be uncon
scionable; and now he was alive decades later, the torment and
problems of readjustment a small price to pay for life. A friend
who had been wounded in Vietnam and died in a motorcycle
accident afterward used to say that anyone who lives through
a war should not have to die.
Underlying everything else, he knew with certainty that
he should never have gone to Vietnam. He had no right to parti
cipate in the killing of other human beings. When he thought or
talked about war he was not concerned with geopolitical aspects
but with the persons directly involved as he had once been
involved, the ciphers of little meaning or consequence to any
but themselves and the few who knew them. For him the conse
quences were personal, the killers and the killed, the shattered
lives destroying each other in the grip of forces they were unable
to ignore or mediate, even between themselves.
He saw a shrink a few times. “You're scared," the shrink
said. Of course he was afraid. He had been letting his life drain
away toward death because fear of death consumed him. He felt
that life wasn’t worth getting interested in because everything
leads to its end. He wished to be so dull and deadened that he
wouldn’t notice when he died. He usually joked when asked
about the future: “I see my corpse on the timeline."
He felt he had succumbed to chronic depression,
not taking care of business his friends would say. His favorite
pastime was hanging out in bars drinking red wine or brandy,
depending on season and time of day, which only fueled his
cycle of numbed despair.The shrink was certain his depression
was directly related to his year in Vietnam; and he knew that
a deeper pain from the war grew rather than diminished. His
sessions with the shrink were usually questions followed by
questions. He wondered if the shrink's purpose was to soften
reality for his patients or help them regain strength to struggle
with it.
But he thought of being afraid. What was he afraid of?
Death! But what else? Of living? He had no ambition or ability to
achieve wealth He wished to live quietly in an increasingly noisy