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welcome home 8/14/2013 6:01:04 AM
Handling a live snake in Vietnam--can't hold onto it; can't put it down. That’s yours truly, the author, with a cobra. It’s not a pet. You’d think after a year flying combat in Vietnam, with all the harrowing close calls, the near misses, encounters with live ammo and exposure to my own demise a number of times I’d be smart enough to leave a snake alone. Well, the snakes ate the rats in the company compound, so I did leave them alone. As noted in my book, The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life I remember many times being awakened by a rat scurrying across my blanket at night and escorting the fellow off onto the floor with a thud and a disparaging squeal–from both of us. I never once removed a snake from my bed. So why the picture? It’s metaphor in today’s post. Symbolism for the serpentine way the war in Vietnam affected me and my fellow veterans, and still does lo these many, many years, and many gray hairs and life experiences later. It’s like that snake; I can’t seem to let it go, and I can’t put it down. And it does keep the rats away at times. Let me explain.
I was in Peru Indiana recently, a little town forty miles north of Indianapolis, where fellow veterans are reconstructing a Vietnam era Huey. The organization is called American Huey 369. It’s a 501 (C)3 set up for the express purpose of reconstructing, preserving, demonstrating and flying the iconic helicopter of the Vietnam war, the Bell UH-1 Huey. I wandered around the rebuilt Huey, ran my hand over her Olive Drab skin, admired the restoration the organization’s done, an amazing job. I climbed into the cockpit again, settled into the left seat, put my feet on the pedals, took the cyclic in my hand. I don’t have to mention how the memories flooded into my brain, the countless missions, the danger I felt in that seat, the smells of combat-weary grunts, the stink of cordite when I landed in hot landing zones, the stench of death when I lifted body bags out of those same jungle LZs. The crackle and snap of machine gun fire from every direction, and the zip of tracer rounds whipping past the cockpit. The rumbling whine of that trusty Lycoming engine, 1,300 horsepower behind me keeping the blades flashing overhead. I sat in that cockpit a good long while, in the calm, quiet early morning in Peru Indiana.
When I climbed out, a woman greeted me. “Welcome home,” she said. She was the wife of a veteran, and it was obvious that she’d used the phrase more than once. I thanked her, but I wondered, did I ever really come home from that war? Did any of us?
Aside from Philip Caputo’s great Vietnam book A Rumor of War, published in 1977, there were few books about that conflict until much later. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried was printed in 1990. John Del Vecchio’s The 13th Valley in 1999. Karl Marlantes’ epic Matterhorn not until 2011. A friend asked recently if I’d experienced any aftereffects from Vietnam, the prevalent PTSD, flashbacks of my time there, problems adjusting afterward. It’s a question I’ve asked myself, do I still carry that snake around? Do the things I carry about Vietnam still affect who I am? My own memoir came out last year, fully 41 years after I left Vietnam. There must be some reason for it, and I believe I know what it is.
Sitting in that Huey cockpit last week I was ambivalent about all of it: the war, of course; the reaction to it of my colleagues, some of whom are still fighting it; the public’s dismissal of it back then, the war’s fading memories, its relegation to the dubious category of misadventure. I was embarrassed to have served there, it’s that simple. Though my Vietnam experience gave me a marvelous career, I knew as I sat in the cockpit of a UH-1 forty odd years ago that my presence in Vietnam was not welcome, that our cause was misguided, that we’d lost our way. I knew we would lose.
Something else that affects me: I have a tough time looking back, living in a past that was not all that affirming, not nearly so glorious as some have convinced themselves it was. I don’t do ‘my country right or wrong’ very well, and I’m afraid it shows. Sure, there were heroes. Men (and women) who saved others at the peril of their own lives in Vietnam, as in all wars. American troops fought in Vietnam as they always have, doing the job, dying along the way despite their feelings one way or another for the ideology or righteousness of the conflict.
In the picture I’m holding the snake at arm’s length, as you can see. As if I’m afraid to let it go, or at least not sure how to go about doing that. It’s entirely possible that I’ll never figure it out, that the snake is with me forever, keeping the rats at bay, but too close to be a pet. And I suppose, regarding the war in Vietnam, it may be the same for all of us.
