The Haunting Side of Vietnam

Now, I’m sure that it will never go away. A moral pall will hang over those of us who fought in Vietnam and shadow our paths all the way to the grave.

There is something wrong with us. There was something wrong with what we did. That’s how it goes down, and will, no matter what.

You can blame policymakers for the miscalculations of that rotten war. You can build a memorial in the capital to those who died in it. But it won’t dispel the cloud.

There will always be two sides to Vietnam with a righteous question in between. Whenever the subject is raised, America will leap for the throat. Doubts won’t fade.

I’m sorry for Bob Kerrey and for what he endures as the nation, once again, picks off the scab ... proving what? Proving, alas, that those who fought in Vietnam are flawed, even those we thought were the most exemplary. I’m angry at Kerrey if he accepted, as it appears, a valorous decoration for a deadly blunder or, perhaps, a dishonorable deed.

Most of all, though, I’m just resigned.

‘Vietnam veteran” will always be a dubious entry on our resumes. It will, as it has for more than a generation, find its way into the lead paragraph of news accounts of wrongdoing. As in, “A Vietnam veteran went berserk Monday and ....” Rarely, except in a military context, do we read the converse, “A Vietnam veteran was recognized Tuesday for ....”

Those Vietnam veterans who succeed in their lives will, in the eyes of many, be distant cousins to those ex-cons who become social workers--men who rise above the moral failings of their youth but remain tinged by it. The failures among veterans will only serve to prove “I told you so.”

Vietnam was the crossroad for a generation of young men. Those who ducked the war will be questioned, perhaps, as to their courage but rarely their integrity and never their wisdom. For those of us who went, courage amounts to little without credit for these other attributes.

Just to acknowledge that you wore a uniform in Vietnam has always raised vague questions. Kerrey himself now puts them directly: What horrible event lurks hidden in your memory? What deeds haunt you? Just what did you do?

I don’t mean to say that everyone in the country looks at us this way. But enough do to make their doubts the reigning sensibility.

I could try, as others have, to explain the murky nature of the battlefield in Vietnam, where villagers were used tactically as pawns and shields. I could tell you about the civilian casualties in other wars. I could tell you how the thinking part of the brain defers wholly to animal instinct when the flash-crack of an attack begins.

But it wouldn’t make me, or anyone, feel better. And it wouldn’t alter public perceptions about the nature of the Vietnam veteran.

I gave three years, nine months and 22 days to the U.S. Marine Corps. I was a volunteer, not a draftee. I served 27 months--two back-to-back tours--in Southeast Asia. I was 17 when my name was called to board the airplane. I turned 18 in the sky, coming of age, war age, over the international date line. I was 21 when I returned, a sergeant. There was no parade; there were no protests. I have three rows of ribbons, none for valor.

I did not slit anyone’s throat in Vietnam. I didn’t mow down any kids or women. But, yes, something haunts me.

Because of it, this is only the second time in my life that I’ve been able to write a word about my service in Vietnam.

What haunts me is this: For nine months, my final assignment in the theater, I was a Marine Corps liaison to battlefield hospitals. I was not a medic but an official friend and administrative aide. Medics were busy trying to stop the bleeding. I was supposed to deliver moral support, along with the mail.

I once calculated that I encountered 10,000 Marine casualties, fresh out of shock. They were stitched with bullets and shrapnel, their limbs broken or amputated; they were greasy with burn ointments, perforated by booby traps. They arrived day and night by helicopter from those hellholes of Dong Ha, Con Thien and Khe Sanh.

I sat by their cots. I wrote letters home for those who were blinded, paralyzed or whose arms were blown off. I lived with the sickening odor of staph infections on the ward the same way my friends back home lived with the smell of stale beer in the frat house. These Marines were frightened and in agony. Some felt they had failed in their duty. Many were disfigured. Occasionally, they died at my side. One I held in my arms. Yes, I put my arms around him to say good night and he died. Often, I was the only person in the hospital who had time to listen. They cried. They screamed. They clung to me.

I told them it would be OK. I told them--every last one of them--that they had not sacrificed in vain.

What has haunted me for 33 years is that what I told these boys turned out to be lies. Not just Bob Kerrey but all of us are doubted for what we did, even if all we did was go and give it our best.