Although this is by no means a complete autobiographical essay on all the important issues in my life, I felt that it did touch on a few and does tell, to an extent, were I come from. I thought Id like to share it with you.
autobiographical sketch
Hmmm... Personal involvement with/connection to/distance from the Vietnam War? What are you looking for, for somebody born in 1967, whose memories begin, mostly, after the war? Are you expecting my generation to look upon Vietnam as ancient history that doesn't effect them; that we see it as personally remote as, say, Hannibal's invasion of Rome in the 2nd Century BC? Well, to be honest, I do know people my age who do think of Vietnam in that way. But you did not ask for generalities, rather my own, personal specifics. So for me, I guess I could say that prior to 1986, I did sort of see Vietnam in that way--i.e. remote and unaffecting me. But in 1986, the year I graduated from high school, things began to change for me, and my outlook on the Vietnam War became more complex because over time I came to really be touched by that war--at least more so than many people my age.
When I was young, I wasn't completely divorced from this subject which so penetrates our national consciousness. In fact, one of my earliest memories of my life is a very clear recollection of 1973, when I was five years old. I was outside in my back yard, playing on my family's swingset, early one morning, and my mother came out to me with tears in her eyes. Tears of joy. She told me the troops were coming home. I didn't really know what that meant, but my mother explained that a bad thing had come to an end and that was reason to be happy. I didn't know it at the time, but I later found out my mother had several students in her classes (she was a high school teacher) who had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. She didn't keep up with them, to find out who was killed and who survived, but she wondered if teaching and inspiring a doomed person wasn't an exercise in futility.
Another time, when I was about ten years old, or so, I was hanging out with a bunch of kids from the neighborhood and one of them asked me what I thought about what had happened in Vietnam. I was only ten and had much more important things to worry about (like comic books, Bee Gees albums, toy "Star Wars" and "Batman" action-figures), but I said something I had heard once before (maybe at home, I don't know). I said I believed that our intentions were good--it was important to stop Communism--but that the military messed up. I didn't really know what Communism was, at age ten, nor did I really care, but one kid challenged me, brought in all kinds of arguments that were over my head, and I really don't recall what happened after that, except that I felt put down.
We never studied Vietnam in grade school or high school history, so I was pretty ignorant of the whole thing, though I did pick up some stuff here and there, and by the time I was 17 years old I had a more complex understanding of the war than I did at age 10, but it was all very detached. At age 17, I felt pretty good about my country--I even flirted with the thought of joining the military--and believed that my country is right and always has been right. (I was writing a story about a Soviet spy who defected to the US because the US was good and the USSR was bad.) Vietnam raised some issues that I didn't ask at that age, but I believed if we failed there it was because our enemy was too strong, because of the jungle terrain, not because of any political or ideological or moral problems.
In 1986, upon my high school graduation, I went on a trip to Washington DC and there, for the first time, saw the Wall. I had spent the earlier part of the day seeing the White House and the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial and it was all exciting, wild, patriotic. And then as I approached that relatively new area of the Mall, I sensed a whole different mood that I was quite unprepared for. People were not chatting away loudly, like tourists, proud of their national heritage, as they had been at the other monuments I had just visited. There was an eerie calm. Respect, but something more. From the distance, the memorial didn't look like much--a little black slab buried in the ground. But as I got closer and I walked along and the Wall got bigger and bigger I saw how initial appearances could be deceiving. I had been reading some of the names. But as I descended and the Wall grew larger, the number of names just got so unmanageable. Near the center, wreaths and flags and MIA/POW signs and flowers lay strewn about, and I saw a man dressed in a uniform weeping. I saw another man taking a rubbing of a name. The blackness of the Wall was overcoming and stood in contrast to the supposed morality I believed our country stood for. I didn't quite know how I was supposed to feel, but I certainly wasn't reacting the way I had expected to. It was a feeling I could not put into words then and nine years later I still have trouble explaining how I reacted. It was partly the sudden realization that Vietnam was not as remote history as Lincoln's presidency, celebrated only a few hundred feet away. It was perhaps just as controversial, but Vietnam was alive and Lincoln was dead. But more importantly, it was there, at the Wall, that I first began to sense just how wrong that war was, how wrong every war is, how wrong it is to use force to solve political problems. From that point on, I began asking more questions and I believe that this experience was a pivotal moment in my life. I've been back to the Wall three times since, but the first time is the one I'll always remember.
The following fall, my favorite TV show became a little known and now unremembered series called "Our World." Each week, the hosts picked a moment in time and commented on what was going on politically and culturally. Several of the episodes dealt with Vietnam and this became an influence on me. I began to become more curious about what had gone on in America during the 1960s and early 70s. Why was there so much opposition? What was this counter-culture that grew out of it? At first, I couldn't understand what Woodstock had to do with Vietnam--they seemed opposites to me. One was making love not war and the other was making war not love, but I soon came to realize that the counter-culture was a direct reaction to Vietnam.
Over the next several years, while an undergraduate at Rollins College, I became sickened by many of my peers embracing Reaganite, yuppie values, and as a reaction I was drawn more and more towards the "hippie" culture, as the antithesis of that. Not that there were hippies running around Rollins in the late 80s. What I mean is when I had the opportunity to watch a movie or documentary about anti-Vietnam protests (such as "Berkeley in the 60s" or "The War at Home" or "Alice's Restaurant") I took advantage of that. I saw two movies and read several articles about Kent State (and later met somebody who had been there who told me quite a lot). I audited a course in the sociology of the Sixties counter-culture. I memorized the words to Country Joe McDonald's "Fixin' to Die Rag." I joined the environmental group on campus and wrote editorials in the school newspaper. For one feature article, I researched anti-Vietnam protest at Rollins. I even attended part of a demonstration against the Trident II missile at Cape Canaveral.
I asked some of my teachers what it was like back in the 1960s--one told me how when she first started teaching, as a student teacher, some of the students she flunked begged her to change their grades because, they said, if they flunked out they'd be drafted and sent to Vietnam. I took some of these ideas and wrote a fictional short story about it called "Academic Integrity" which examined moral dilemmas.
In early March, 1988, Gary Hart came to Rollins and announced, in an important speech covered by the New York Times and ABC News, that if he became President, he'd greatly reduce the military, partly because of the lessons of Vietnam. It was a very well-argued speech and I voted for him four days later, but he went down to defeat in that primary because of the silly Donna Rice scandal and withdrew from the race three days after that. I was getting cynical about the democratic process and government in general, because by 88 I was noticing how Reagan's economics were building up the rich, hurting the poor, and creating a wider gulf between classes. I saw this right on the Rollins campus: I had one friend who drove a Jaguar and threw money around like crazy and another friend on partial-scholarship who was so poor he was reduced to stealing to pay his tuition. Before I was a senior, it was clear to me I was no longer living in the black-and-white world of my youth.
I graduated in 1990 and then the war hit. I was 22 and if there'd be a draft, I'd be eligible. I lost some sleep over that, I remember. And I did know, though not well, two people who'd been sent to Saudi Arabia, and also had a former friend from Rollins threatening to volunteer though the whole thing. Bush's rantings and ravings struck me as insincere and I was drawn towards the protests.
Now the Gulf War was not Vietnam, but I met people who thought it was. Old people who had protested Vietnam when they were in their teens and twenties, trying to relive their youth. One guy about 45 years old tried to give me some acid. And I also met people my own age, and some even younger, far more obsessed with Vietnam and the counter-culture of the 60s than I ever was. One girl a year younger than me was in love with Tom Hayden--not the Tom Hayden of 1991, but the Tom Hayden of 1962. In fact, she had committed several portions of the "Port Huron Statement" to memory. I met a 16 year old girl who had plastered her room with pictures of Jimmy Hendrix and John F. Kennedy.
During the war, there was tension amongst the protesters between those who felt we should use the exact same tactics as 25 years before and those of us who felt that this was the 1990s--a very different world from the 60s. Some seemed confused and felt that the Gulf War was Vietnam, but, to me, the war really clarified in my mind just what my place was in history. I saw Vietnam in a much different perspective than I had a year or two before. It became remote in one way, while in another, at the same time, I felt its influence very strongly. Bush kept taking about "beating the Vietnam syndrome," which I interpreted to mean destroying the rebellious spirit. I was determined to keep that alive. And also I wondered, while holding up signs, chanting, addressing crowds, if that was not how the anti-Vietnam demonstrators felt. Probably how all political activists feel.
And then there was Bill. I met Bill at one of the early protests and we have become good friends. Bill's the only Vietnam vet I've really known. I've never had a friend like Bill before. He turns 52 this week. Bill is closer to my parents' generation than to mine, but he has much more in common with me than he does them (this despite the fact that my father was in the military, too, and served in Korea). Bill joined the Navy in 65, I believe, under the false illusion that in the Navy he'd be kept out of combat. But he served for four years on the aircraft carrier Intrepid and oh, the horror stories he's told me. He saw so many of his friends get killed he can't possibly name them all. His life was in danger quite a number of times and once he managed to save several hundred lives by taking a great risk in preventing a bomb from accidentally going off. The danger Bill was in, off the cost of Vietnam, led him to consider going AWOL several times--he never did, but the more he was in the Navy, the more his anger grew.
Bill was responsible for many of the bombs that were dropped on Hanoi and Haiphong which killed countless Vietnamese civilians. When he returned to the States, that guilt really got to him; he repented and became active with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He tells me of discussions how they plotted to get rid of Nixon--they were ready for armed rebellion. If Watergate didn't get Nixon out, Bill tells me, the vets would. He also tells me how poorly he was treated when he returned--how resentful people were to the veterans at that time--even people in his own family.
Bill's been quite an inspiration to me. In more ways than one. In 1992, I wrote a play which was inspired by a discussion I had had with Bill and one of the two characters is closely based on him. The play was called "Sins of the Fathers" and it contrasted Bill's Vietnam generation with my generation--in it I tried to deal with the issues of Vietnam and how they related to the current Bush era. Writing that play was an emotional purge for me--it got most of the Vietnam ideas out of my system, as well as the Gulf War issues, and enabled me to go on with the rest of my life.
Oh, sure, every once in a while, a Vietnam reference creeps into my poetry. It reminds me that Vietnam is not a dead issue. That it surrounds us and is very much part of our national consciousness. Unlike Hannibal's invasion of Rome, it effects our daily news. From McNamara's recent book to the bike trips along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to demands that Hanoi continue to look into the issue of POWs still in captivity. Hollywood still makes movies about it and the veterans, like Bill, are still haunted by those horrible images--how different a person Bill would be today had he never gone to Vietnam! And now Vietnam courses, like this one, are being offered in schools, as my generation is starting to discover the intriguing issues that that war generated. What was unpopular then is gaining popularity now.
This course in Vietnam War literature intrigued me because despite my interest in the war and my personal connection, I've read very few books about actual combat there--my interest had always lied more in the direction of the reaction at home than in the fighting over there. But now I can explore that area in a field I am comfortable in--i.e. the field of literature. You see, writers and poets truly explore, focus, and to some extent settle the great issues that politicians and historians can only struggle with. By turning history into art, we can see the beauty in despair, we can make sense out of the insensible, and we can learn about ourselves. Art is, as Robert Frost put it, "a momentary stay against confusion." And God knows the Vietnam War was confusing enough.