Welcome home brother.
I too am a disabled veteran of Vietnam with PTSD.
Thank you for the wonderful story.
I am surfing the members of our Tribe to get to know everyone better.
I started at the bottom of the list, where I'm at, and am working my way up.
Here is something you may enjoy reading.
God bless
Oldwarrior
aka
Nagin'l'ta (He who scouts ahead)
Let me give you the bottom line up front: I'm proud I served in Vietnam.
Like you I didn't kill innocents, I killed the enemy; I didn't fight for
big oil or for some lame conspiracy. I fought for a country I believed
in and for the buddies who kept me alive. Like you I was troubled that,
unlike my father, I didn't come back to a grateful nation. It took a
generation and another war, Desert Storm, for the nation to come back to
me.
Also like you I remember the war being 99 percent boredom and one
percent pure abject terror. But not all my memories of Vietnam are
terrible.
There were times when I enjoyed my service in combat. Such sentiment
must seem strange to a society today that has, thanks to our superb
volunteer military, been completely insulated from war. If they thought
about Vietnam at all our fellow citizens would imagine that fifty years
would have been sufficient to erase this unpleasant war from our
conscientiousness. Looking over this assembly it's obvious that the
memory lingers, and those of us who fought in that war remember.
The question is why? If this war was so terrible why are we here? It's
my privilege today to try to answer that question not only for you,
brother veterans, but maybe for a wider audience for whom, fifty years
on, Vietnam is as strangely distant as World War One was to our
generation.
Vietnam is seared in our memory for the same reason that wars have
lingered in the minds of soldiers for as long as wars have been fought.
From Marathon to Mosul young men and now women have marched off to war
to learn that the cold fear of violent death and the prospects of
killing another human being heighten the senses and sear these
experiences deeply and irrevocably into our souls and linger in the back
recesses of our minds.
After Vietnam we may have gone on to thrilling lives or dull; we might
have found love or loneliness, success or failure. But our
experiences have stayed with us in brilliant Technicolor and with a
clarity undiminished by time. For what ever primal reason war heightens
the senses. When in combat we see sharper, hear more clearly and develop
a sixth sense about everything around us.
Remember the sights? I recall sitting
in the jungle one bright moonlit night marveling on the beauty of
Vietnam. How lush and green it was; how attractive and gentle the
people, how stoic and unmoved they were amid the chaos that surrounded
them.
Do you remember
the sounds? Where else could you stand outside a bunker and listen to
the cacophonous mix of Jimmy Hendrix, Merle Haggard and Jefferson
Airplane? Or how about the sounds of incoming? Remember it wasn't a boom
like in the movies but a horrifying noise like a passing train followed
by a crack and the whistle of flying fragments.
Remember the smells? The sharpness of cordite, the choking stench of
rotting jungle and the tragic sweet smell of enemy dead.
I remember the touch, the wet, sticky sensation when I touched one of my
wounded soldiers one last time before the medevac rushed him forever
from our presence but not from my memory, and the guilt I felt realizing
that his pain was caused by my inattention and my lack of experience.
Even taste is a sense that brings back memories. Remember the end of the
day after the log bird flew away leaving mail, C rations and warm beer?
Only the first sergeant had sufficient gravitas to be allowed to turn
the C ration cases over so that all of us could reach in and pull out a
box on the unlabeled side hoping that it wasn't going to be ham and lima
beans again.
Look, forty years on I
can forgive the guy who put powder in our ammunition so foul that it
caused our M-16s to jam. I'm OK with helicopters that arrived late. I'm
over artillery landing too close and the occasional canceled air strike.
But I will never forgive the Pentagon bureaucrat who in an incredibly
lame moment thought that a soldier would open a can of that green,
greasy, gelatinous goo called ham and lima beans and actually eat it.
But to paraphrase that iconic
war hero of our generation, Forrest Gump, life is like a case of C
Rations, you never know what you're going to get because for every box
of ham and lima beans there was that rapturous moment when you would
turn over the box and discover the bacchanalian joy of peaches and pound
cake. It's all a metaphor for the surreal nature of that war and its
small pleasures... .those who have never known war cannot believe that
anyone can find joy in hot beer and cold pound cake. But we can.
Another reason why Vietnam remains in our consciousness is that the
experience has made us better. Don't get me wrong.
I'm not arguing for war as a self improvement course. And I realize that
war's trauma has damaged many of our fellow veterans physically,
psychologically and morally. But recent research on Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder by behavioral scientists has unearthed a phenomenon
familiar to most veterans: that the trauma of war strengthens rather
than weakens us (They call it Post Traumatic Growth). We know that a
near death experience makes us better leaders by increasing our self
reliance, resilience, self image, confidence and ability to deal with
adversity. Combat veterans tend to approach the future wiser, more
spiritual and content with an amplified appreciation for life. We know
this is true. It's nice to see that the human scientists now agree.
I'm
proud that our service left a legacy that has made today's military
better.
Sadly Americans too often prefer to fight wars with technology. Our
experience in Vietnam taught the nation the lesson that war is
inherently a human not a technological endeavor. Our experience is a
distant whisper in the ear of today's technology wizards that firepower
is not sufficient to win, that the enemy has a vote, that the object of
war should not be to kill the enemy but to win the trust and allegiance
of the people and that the ultimate weapon in this kind or war is a
superbly trained, motivated, and equipped soldier who is tightly bonded
to his buddies and who trusts his leaders.
I've visited
our young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan several times. On each
visit I've seen first hand the strong connection between our war and
theirs. These are worthy warriors who operate in a manner remarkably
reminiscent of the way we fought so many years ago. The similarities are
surreal. Close your eyes for a moment and it all comes rushing back. In
Afghanistan I watched soldiers from my old unit, the 101st Airborne
Division, as they conducted daily patrols from firebases constructed and
manned in a manner virtually the same as those we occupied and fought
from so many years ago. Every day these sky soldiers trudge outside the
wire and climb across impossible terrain with the purpose as one
sergeant put it - to kill the bad guys, protect the god guys and bring
home as many of my soldiers as I can.. You legacy is alive and well. You
should be proud.
The timeless connection between our generation and theirs can be seen in
the unity and fighting spirit of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Again and again, I get asked the same old question from folks who watch
soldiers in action on television: why is their morale so high? Don't
they know the American people are getting fed up with these wars? Don't
they know Afghanistan is going badly? Often they come to me incredulous
about what they perceive as a misspent sense of patriotism and loyalty.
I
tell them time and again what every one of you sitting here today, those
of you who have seen the face of war, understand: it's not really about
loyalty.
It's not about a belief in some abstract notion concerning war aims or
national strategy. It's not even about winning or losing. On those
lonely firebases as we dug through C ration boxes and drank hot beer we
didn't argue the righteousness of our cause or ponder the latest
pronouncements from McNamara or Nixon or Ho Chi Minh for that matter.
Some of us might have trusted our leaders or maybe not. We might have
been well informed and passionate about the protests at home or maybe
not. We might have groused about the rich and privileged who found a way
to avoid service but we probably didn't. We might have volunteered for
the war to stop the spread of global communism or maybe we just had a
failing semester and got swept up in the draft.
In war young soldiers think about their buddies. They talk about
families, wives and girlfriends and relate to each other through very
personal confessions. For the most part the military we served with in
Vietnam did not come from the social elite. We didn't have Harvard
degrees or the pedigree of political bluebloods. We were in large
measure volunteers and draftees from middle and lower class America.
Just as in Iraq today we came from every corner of our country to meet
in a beautiful yet harsh and forbidding place, a
place that we've seen and experienced but can never explain adequately
to those who were never there.
Soldiers suffer, fight and occasionally die for each other. It's as
simple as that. What brought us to fight in the jungle was no different
than the motive force that compels young soldiers today to kick open a
door in Ramadi with the expectation that what lies on the other side is
either an innocent huddling with a child in her arms or a fanatic
insurgent yearning to buy his ticket to eternity by killing the infidel.
No difference. Patriotism and a paycheck may get a soldier into the
military but fear of letting his buddies down gets a soldier to do
something that might just as well get him killed.
What makes a person successful in America today is a far cry from what
would have made him a success in the minds of those assembled here
today. Big bucks gained in law or real estate, or big deals closed on
the stock market made some of our countrymen rich. But as they have
grown older they now realize that they have no buddies. There is no one
who they are willing to die for or who is willing to die for them.
William Manchester served as a Marine in the Pacific during World War II
and put the sentiment precisely right when he wrote: "Any man in combat
who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to
die is not a man at all. He is truly damned."
The Anglo Saxon heritage of buddy loyalty is long and frightfully won.
Almost six hundred years ago the English king, Henry V, waited on a cold
and muddy battlefield to face a French army many times his size.
Shakespeare captured the ethos of that moment in his play Henry V. To be
sure Shakespeare wasn't there but he was there in spirit because he
understood the emotions that gripped and the bonds that brought together
both king and soldier. Henry didn't talk about national strategy. He
didn't try to justify faulty intelligence or ill formed command
decisions that put his soldiers at such a terrible disadvantage.
Instead, he talked about what made English soldiers fight and what in
all probably would allow them to prevail the next day against terrible
odds. Remember this is a monarch talking to his
men:
This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall
ne'er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it
shall be remembered- We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he
to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so
vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England
now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold
their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint
Crispin's day.
You all here
assembled inherit the spirit of St Crispin's day. You know and
understand the strength of comfort that those whom you protect, those in
America now abed, will never know. You have lived a life of self
awareness and personal satisfaction that those who watched you from afar
in this country who hold their manhood cheap can only envy.
I don't care whether America honors
or even remembers the good service we performed in Vietnam. It doesn't
bother me that war is an image that America would rather ignore. It's
enough for me to have the privilege to be among you. It's sufficient to
talk to each of you about things we have seen and kinships we have
shared in the tough and heartless crucible of war.
Some day we will all join those who are serving so gallantly now and
have preceded us on battlefields from Gettysburg to Wanat. We will
gather inside a firebase to open a case of C rations with every box
peaches and pound cake. We will join with a band of brothers to recount
the experience of serving something greater than ourselves. I believe in
my very soul that the almightily reserves a corner of heaven, probably
around a perpetual campfire where some day we can meet and embrace all
of the band of brothers throughout the ages to tell our stories while
envious standers-by watch and wonder how horrific and incendiary the
crucible of violence must have been to bring such a disparate assemblage
so close to the hand of God.
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