The people whose words fill these pages had the courage to open their souls to a stranger. A conversation with me was sure to awaken a few personal demons and they knew that. I thank them and hope they find I have justified their trust.
"My guys die, it's no big gig to me. I tag him, book him, and bag him," Doc thought to himself. "I see too much of this shit. I can't lose sleep over him. I just can't." Doc wasn't a real doctor. The GIs in Vietnam called every corpsman "Doc," except in combat when they shrieked "MEDIC!" as they fell
He looked again at the letter from the parents of a kid who had been in his Unit. "Dear Doctor," they wrote. "Our son mentioned you in his letters home and the wonderful things you did for the guys in his Company. If you can, please tell us how our boy died." Their son had been sent home in a closed casket
"Oh, God," Doc sighed, "how am I going to answer this letter? I'm not going to say he had cold beans and mother-fuckers* for breakfast, took some shots from the other guys about being cherry* and then went out and got blown into fifty million pieces– which is what happened."
On a routine patrol with his Platoon, the boy triggered a land mine rated at 150 pounds of explosives. The resulting crater was the size of the average bedroom in a suburban home. One side of his skull was destroyed.
Six other men were killed with him. It was a common way to die in Vietnam. Thousands of closed caskets were delivered to quiet graves all over America during this country's involvement in the war in Southeast Asia. They remained virtually undisturbed, forgotten, for ten years or more.
Recently, journalists and film makers, generals, diplomats, and politicians have decided to tell America how and why that boy died. Much of their tale has concentrated on the silence of the closed casket. As the story unfolds, it either ignores the humanity and individuality of the boy inside the box, relegating him to the cold storage of statistics, history, and politics or it capitalizes on the mystery of the coffin's contents, elevating the blood and bones to a mythical realm of heroism or evil or rock ‘n' roll madness.
Something is missing from their story, something personal and palpable. They treat war as though it were a vague event from the distant past, beyond living memory. No one has bothered to talk to the men and women who went to Vietnam and fought the war.
What happened in Vietnam? What did it look like? How did it smell? What happened to you? Vietnam veterans know firsthand the statistics, the heroism, the evil and the madness. They are the ones qualified to look inside the casket and identify the body for what it is–a dead boy killed in a war, who had a name, a personality, a story all his own.
Some of the people who wage war will tell you through these pages what happened to them. Until now most of them have been as silent about their experiences and as invisible to society as their dead brothers. They are wary of strangers. Questions make them cautious. "The bullshit antennae are always out." as one veteran put it. Starting with a handful of contacts, I made my way through the Overton Brooks Medical Center from interview to interview on a verbal passport of personal recommendations. "Yeah, she's okay. Meet her and see if you want to talk."
Most wanted to know what I was doing while they were in Vietnam. Of course I hadn't even been born then. When they asked why I wanted to do this page, I first answered paretically, honestly: "For the money. I hope to someday make a living publishing web pages." But i explained that my interests wasn't entirely mercenary. The project actually begun for me in January of 1982. By chance I was born the daughter of a Vietnam veteran. Over the years we shared our home, our meals and our hearts with one another. In the course of those conversations, I discovered things about Dad and about myself that I hadn't known before. His having a chance to talk about his experiences and my willingness to listen strengthened our relationship. His stories revealed more about the place, the war and the people involved in it than anything else I had read or seen on television concerning Vietnam. It was apparent that the whole story hadn't really been told. I couldn't tell it myself but I sure as hell wanted to hear it.
I told the veterans I spoke with that I had no intentions of forging a political document honed on the guilt and condemnations. Nor was I interested in glorifying war and the soldier's lot. I just wanted to record what they could remember about the intersection of their lives with the Vietnam war and the consequences of that experience.
Because of the personal equation, these accounts are commonly called war stories. It must be assumed that included here are generalizations, exaggerations, braggadocio and –very likely– outright lies. But if these stories were told within religious framework, the telling would be called bearing witness. The human imperfections simply authenticate the sincerity of the whole. The apocryphal aspects have more to do with metaphor than with deceit.
These pages are not the truth about Vietnam. Everyone holds a piece of that puzzle. But these war stories, filled with emotion and stripped of ambition and romance, may bring us closer to the truth than we have come so far.
You want to hear a gen-u-ine war story? I only understand Vietnam as though it were a story. Its not like any of this happened to me.
