1970 to present, Vietnam

By Anonymous

The day my dad returned from Vietnam, still wearing his dress blues, he tried to board an Eastern Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Minneapolis. But the woman at the counter explained that Eastern Airlines was officially opposed to the war, no disrespect intended, but she couldn’t issue him a ticket unless he changed into street clothes. No uniforms allowed.

My dad was stunned. A year of service to a country that wouldn’t let him on its airplanes. He argued with the woman until a representative from Western Airlines came over and offered my dad a seat on their flight.

When my dad tells this story, he likes to emphasize that Eastern Airlines later went out of business, implying that bankruptcy was a moral consequence of sorts. He tells other stories like this. He remembers a litany of lesser slights. Comments and insults and subtleties with which strangers registered their disapproval.

He served as a second lieutenant in the Marines from 1970 to 1971, straight out of ROTC. His platoon conducted mine sweeps. Dangerous, delicate business, with a high casualty rate, plying the roads and paddies for bouncing betties and toe poppers. The lucky ones might only lose a foot. And yet, somehow, my dad made it through his tour of duty without losing a single man in his command. War breeds superstition, and rumors spread through Vietnam about my dad’s platoon. They were magic. They had the touch. He got a medal.

But there was violence. Snipers and close calls and stories he only tells when he’s drunk, which was often when I was growing up. He liked to drink in the basement, alone, while playing solitaire or reading Playboy, and then slink off to bed, sometimes quietly, sometimes while screaming. My parents fought nearly as many nights as they didn’t.

If I was watching TV, he liked to stop and stand at the edge of the living room to see what was on. He has this way of twiddling his thumbs and tilting his head when he’s curious. Once I happened to be watching a documentary on Vietnam. The footage showed an anti-war convention in the early ’70s, and a group of bearded men in patch-sewn army fatigues under a banner that said Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

My dad pointed at the TV and bellowed, “Traitors! They’re lying!” I was the only one there, so once again, I was the focus of his outrage. Twenty minutes of screaming about hippies and protestors and other goddamn bastards he oughta kill.

Another time, I remember my mom sobbing, “I’m sorry I didn’t go to Vietnam! I’m sorry I wasn’t shot at! I’m sorry I didn’t see my friends die!” My dad said that no one loved him and threatened to kill himself. I was very young, 6 or 7, and knew only that this might have something to do with the bad dreams that woke him up in the middle of the night, screaming about bodies.

Who would he be if he hadn’t been to Vietnam? Why did he go? I can only guess at his motives. I wonder what he felt right before he left. I imagine fear and perhaps misguided romance, but he never mentions these things. There is much we don’t talk about.

Particularly politics. To me, the war in Iraq is an appalling tragedy, ill-conceived and mismanaged by one of the worst administrations in American history. But I’m not inclined here to go on an anti-Dubya crusade. People tend to come down on one side of the divide, and by now, seven years into a bloody century, very few minds are changing.

To my dad, it’s a matter of duty. You follow orders. It’s not yours to question. My dad talks as if the American military is morally infallible, and anything less than total loyalty is betrayal. For my dad, patriotism is moral. The ’60s demonstrators were not merely naïve or self-righteous. They were wrong. So how does it sound when his son starts talking about conscience and oil? Like a student radical.

I would have likely protested had I been alive back then. I might also have gone to war.

The thing that strikes me about the ’60s, about the much lauded social upheaval, is how reductive everything became. Suddenly you were either dove or hawk. You were hip or square. You were us or them. Hippie. Soldier. Student. Black Panther. Elks Club. Check one. The thinking lacked degrees and refinement, as it always does in a time of crisis. I don’t think I would have identified with anyone.

Last spring, I ran into someone I knew from high school at a shopping mall. His name was Mitch. We ran track team together. I remembered him as a carefree kid, funny, a bit of a swagger when he walked. Mitch looked like he’d aged 20 years. Hollows under his eyes and a limp.

He’d come back from his first tour of duty in Iraq. Mitch said he’d twisted his knee and torn a ligament while playing football a few weeks earlier. “Sorry man, that sucks,” I said. He shook his head. “No, it’s great. I don’t have to go back. I got called up again and now I don’t have to go.” I looked in his eyes and nodded.

I wanted to know. Forgive me, but trying to sound sympathetic, I asked, “So, did you see some heavy shit?” Dumb question. He blinked. His face went angry. “What do you think I saw? It’s a fucking war.” Then he turned and limped away, leaving me standing there.

But before that, when I’d first said hello, Mitch asked about my dad. My dad taught high school, and many of his former students went into the military. Some came over to the house to talk with him before leaving for Iraq, and he writes them letters, telling them things he doesn’t tell his own family, about war and hope.

They love him. Whenever I go home, I always run into kids who tell me how much my dad means to them, how much he understands, how his letters kept them going.

“Tell him thanks,” they say.

“I will.”

The writer lives in Wisconsin. He hopes you are safe and well.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 | Email This Post

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