I received an email today from Common Defence, a progressive veterans group:
Hey Steve,
I wanted to check in with you about the events that have unfolded in Afghanistan in the past week. ...I'm a veteran who lost comrades to combat, cancer, and suicide....
I'm guessing you are feeling the same way. And it's important that during this complicated time, you are able to reach out and seek the help and support you need. Contact the Veterans Crisis Line by phone: 1-800-273-8255 and Press 1, by text message (838-255), or by online chat VeteransCrisisLine.net/get-help/chat.
It’s 1975 and the fall of Saigon is televised. I’m in Denver, living in an urban commune of young, lefty, peacenik Quakers, working in shoe repair, trying to take college classes and fighting the war. My fall from Saigon was eight years ago and all I ever wanted was to be a good father and husband. I came home to wife and child, a good job and a college scholarship, but how can one settle into a good, normal life and livelihood while one’s compatriots continue to fight and die, and kill, daily? Your compatriots, your replacements and theirs. How do you settle down when every settling is settling into a besieged jungle nest, every step a step down a path (Who made this path?), thumb on safety, foot wary of mines, every evening watching for enemy approach, sleep a wait for that mortar round boring into your chest? Des Moines had too much green, too many thickets, too many parks with stands of trees, little jungles sucking you back. My only peace was continuing to fight the war, fighting to end it, to bring the brothers home. Marching, organizing. I ended up in Philadelphia at the center of the movement, VVAW, lobbying in DC. Then on the road, on the streets (my wife wouldn’t have me back), finally the commune and the Quakers in Denver. Still fighting the war: demonstrating, organizing, writing, walking gingerly, scanning the treetops for snipers. Noise discipline. Waiting in my room for that mortar. Stay Alert, Stay Alive, a sign welcoming us to Vietnam shouting down to the present. My hands naked without the M16.
Then: the fall of Saigon is televised. Or should one say “liberation”? Vietnam liberated from a century of colonialism and decades of war—France, Japan, the US. The US liberated from the final ten years. I should be jubilant: liberation! And for us anti-war freaks, even victory. Chaotic? Tragic? Sure—but what do you call the previous decade?
You should have been jubilant, but with those images of people scrambling for the airports, reaching upward from the embassy, the North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front marching victorious into town something snapped. All the suffering, the rain, the heat, the leeches, the jungle rot eating your flesh, endless exhaustion among the lethal beauty of the jungle, the multiple deaths, the bullet through the head of your best friend, came crashing down. You already knew it was all for naught, but the confirmation crushed you. And you hoped to die.
How can I explain that? It was over. Everything was over and I would join those others who had the decency to die in the war.
With sense enough to know, mechanically at least, that all that was nonsense, I went to my closest friends, a couple, in the commune and confessed. Their response, “Terminal chickenshit,” continues to resonate as vividly as the bullet that pierced Phillip’s skull.
Of course, whatever I write oversimplifies.
Please, if you are a vet of any of our wars reach out if need be. If you know a vet be supportive, be there to listen, to hold. It’s not necessary to give advice, maybe better not to. Just listen and care. Affirm your love, your need for that friend or lover.
Again: Veterans Crisis Line by phone: 1-800-273-8255 and Press 1, by text message (838-255), or by online chat VeteransCrisisLine.net/get-help/chat
Thanks for reading, S.