Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Viet Nam War Anniversary

Next year marks the 40th anniversary of American troops leaving Viet Nam thus ending more than a decade of military adventurism in Southeast Asia. I remember in 1975, already in college having come back a few years earlier, hearing and seeing the American military police pushing people off the gates of the American embassy as diplomats and military personnel boarded helicopters and cargo planes just hours before the North Vietnamese soldiers entered Saigon. I remember sitting on the wooden steps of our $50-a-month rental in Kingsville, Texas and just crying, suffering not closure but heartbreak. I knew too many Vietnamese who had worked for the base where I was stationed and knew they were going to get punished if only because they swept our huts and washed our clothing.
War is always more complicated than what our politicians say or even think, especially those who have never gone to war. I was torn at the fall of Saigon. I never believed we should have been there and yet I knew wonderful South Vietnamese people who had no blame in the geopolitics that consumed the world at that time. I also had friend who died there and others who came back but didn't, having left much of themselves in some rice paddy, airbase, jungle ambush or house of prostitution. All of us who went left something of ourselves there and many of us brought something from that place that remains a prized if complicated relic of a war nobody really wanted. Most raced to forget quite soon after our departure, except those whose relatives and friends left their last breath there.
My novel is about the war and my memoir (hopefully soon to be accepted for publication) is a big chunk about that place of war. There are not too many days that go by that I'm not reminded about something I left or found in that place. I know that I--along with millions of other Americans, veterans or not--will be flooded with memories of and pains from that "police action" which seems to have lasted far too long for some of us who came of age and then aged alot during that time.
I remember our family hosting a welcome back party for one of my father's friends who had been one of the early advisers in that Southeast Asian country. He came to our house with a number of drinks in him and after one discussion of what he had seen he barged out of our house to vomit on our front yard. My father, always the gentleman went out to be see if things were alright. I remember watching from my window as he grabbed my father by the shoulders and said to him with a painful voice, "be glad Garcia that your children are too young to go to this war." It would be about five years later that I arrived in Cam Ranh Bay for my own tour.
While I had begun writing before I got to Viet Nam it was there that I decided that whatever I did to earn a buck I would find a way to do it writing. More important than getting a glimpse of a career, however, was learning a bit about the world outside my immediate circles. I met great people there though it is likely that some would not get the seal of approval from many today, yet they taught me things because we were all trying to navigate a world foreign to us and doing it while trying to say alive and sane. Emotions in war create a hungering for connection that we often love, hate, desire, etc. in ways that we don't back home and so our emotions are exposed to all kinds of situations and they become raw and eventually formed callouses. Remembered correctly they can be a way to decipher life around us and mature us as nothing refines the character than the fire of adversity.
As we wind down another war remembering Viet Nam can provide perspective especially for a generation that is now graying and which saw its Age of Aquarius turn into one of hostility and divisions, some which remain even today. I think that it was David Broder, NY Times journalist who said that the lines that have come to demarcate American society were drawn during our debates about the war, American foreign policy and our Exceptional-ism. I don't know whether I would affirm such thought but I do know that since the Viet Nam era I have only seen conflicts and ideological splits.
I know that like many I will continue to be influenced by my time there and next year should be a rather sensitive time for me and many other Viet Nam vets.


For my fictionalized view of the war see my novel Can Tho.
  

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