No More Star Spangled Eyes
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs11132009.html
By RON JACOBS
November 13-15, 2009
I'll never forget the day my dad came back from Vietnam. It was in
February 1970. I was fourteen and opposed to the war. My mom, some
neighbors and us kids had made a banner saying Welcome Home. We
drove to BWI airport near Baltimore, unloaded the banner and some
balloons and headed to the terminal gate. The actual moment I saw
him was somewhat surreal. He didn't look much different, but he
certainly seemed different. After hugs and handshakes (hugs for the
girls and handshakes for us boys), our family headed to the parking
lot and the drive back home. The first couple of days were
uneventful in terms of my dad being back in the house. Within a
week, however, a certain tension became apparent as my father
attempted to assert his previous authority over the household--an
authority that in his mind was not tempered by his tour in Vietnam.
However, it had been. It was apparent to us kids in his sometimes
irrational lashing out for seemingly petty reasons. I can only
imagine what my mother was going through. We were among the lucky
ones. His family and makeup prevented him from going over the edge
like many of his fellow returnees. Within a year or so he had put
whatever demons the war had unleashed back wherever one puts such
demons and was more or less the same man he was before his tour in
Vietnam had begun.
A buddy of mine we called R, spent a year in the Navy off the coast
of Vietnam begrudgingly helping the US launch jet planes to strafe
the people and countryside of Vietnam. He joined the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War as soon as he got his discharge papers. He
and I spent many an hour talking politics, books, and women over the
years. One conversation occurred when we were somewhere in
California's Central Valley on Veterans' Day. As we sat in the shade
of some trees in Salinas and sipped surreptitiously on a quart of
Rainier Ale, R began talking about friends of his from his Navy days.
After all, noted R bitterly, this is our day. He continued by noting
how much better vets were treated after they were dead. Shit, he
said, you even get a decent burial. And a freakin' American flag to
go with it. When you're in their goddam uniform, you ain't no better
than a maltreated dog who they're trying to kill. If you get out
alive, they just want you to go away. Especially if you have an
ailment that can be attributed to their war. R eventually married
and helped raise two children. When he was around fifty he was
diagnosed with a disease related to the war that was exacerbated by
his reckless lifestyle in the years immediately following his
discharge. He met an untimely death a few years ago while waiting
for a transplant. He did get a decent burial. And a freakin' flag.
There are many more men and women who were in the military with their
own stories. Some have better endings than others. No one makes it
through unscathed. Some just hide their scars better. That's what
a friend who did veterans counseling before he died told me.
Washington's latest wars have produced a new crop of these men and
women. Although the wars may be different, the wounds are equally painful.
Often left unsaid when the media writes about returning veterans and
their trouble adjusting to civilian life is how a veteran's loved
ones are affected. If one wishes to maintain the vocabulary of
modern war, then the appropriate label for the lovers, partners,
parents and children of the returning soldier would be collateral
damage. Think of a cluster bomb. If the returning veteran is a
casualty of the explosions that occur on original impact, then the
veterans' families and loved ones would be those who are the
casualties that occur from the bomblets that detonate later. Of
course, this scenario of injury and death is also replicated among
those whom the imperial army has attacked many more times over.
Author and antiwar organizer Beverly Gologorsky wrote a book a couple
years ago titled Things We Do To Make It Home. This book was
recently released in paperback by Seven Stories Press. It is a
beautifully wrought story of a group of Vietnam veterans, their
lovers, families and friends set in the 1990s. Twenty years after
their return from the jungles of Nam the world they live in is still
littered with the veterans' experience in combat. Like so many of
their real-life comrades, the men in the story have left much damage
in their wake. Simultaneously, there is a love that binds them all
together. That same love reaches across the lines between suburb and
city while it tears relationships into remnants barely held together
by threads of memory. There is no blame here, despite the desire to
find somewhere to place the despair and anger resulting from the
demons that define the lives these men have lived. The women who
have loved them despite their better sense, the hopelessness the men
hide with drugs and alcohol and the children who wonder where there
father really is even when he's sitting in the same room are
portrayed with an emotional and spiritual depth the reader won't find
in newspaper reports about veteran suicides and PTSD
statistics. There isn't a lot of hope in this novel, despite the
optimism voiced by some of its characters. These are men who know
they were screwed and can't seem to figure out how to get past the
war they were sent to fight. Nonetheless, they go on living life as
best as they can while often unaware of the pain they cause--a pain
directly related to the guilt they feel because of the injury they
caused to those their commanders called the enemy while fighting
Washington's war.
I had another friend named Loren. Like so many others, he was
drafted into the Army against his will. When he got his orders to go
to Vietnam, he took a truck from the motor pool where he worked and
ran it through several gates and a couple of parked cars in the
Officer's Club parking lot at the Colorado Army base he was
stationed. He did six months in the stockade and was thrown out of
the Army. He celebrated by going to a rock festival and ended up in
Berkeley. His father didn't speak to him for years, but it was worth
it to Loren just to have avoided the war. After reading Things We Do
To Make It Home, one wishes once again that more soldiers would
follow Loren's example and just refuse to fight.
--
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the
Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs'
essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on
music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short
Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at:
rjacobs3625@charter.net
.
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