Whose Day is It?

Posted on 10 May 2015 by M.

I wonder if, when a guy has genetic testing done, whether for scientific, legal, or genealogical reasons, does he have only the Y Chromosome test done? That was the case in 2007, when a first cousin in my birth (biological) family suggested that he and I have a test done together. I think, in part, he wanted to be able to say to the rest of the family, “See, I told you we were related.” (We are – 100% – and I will always be grateful to you, Matt, for having done that. I regret I can no longer thank you in person.)

The Y Chromosome is passed down through the male line of descent. In order to track the DNA heritage of your mother’s side of the family, you have to have a Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) test done. I haven’t had MtDNA testing done, but have been looking into it. It would be interesting to see in what ways it aligns, and in what ways it differs from the Y Chromosome test my cousin Matt and I did a few years ago.

There are, however, things and inheritances that a DNA test cannot measure.

I’ve had two mothers in my life. Ruth brought me into this world. Dorothy brought me up in the world – her world, that is.

Dorothy fed and clothed me, bought me shoes and took me to the dentist. She and my adoptive father Harold and I went on family vacations (mostly to Estes Park, Colorado). She was my Cub Scout den mother, until I was asked to leave the Cub Scouts, for reasons unknown; unknown to me, anyway. She went to PTA meetings, and she sent me to military school for a year when I was nine. She and Harold paid for my college education, until I ran off and joined the Army in 1968. She reminded me several times over the years that she was the one who’d raised me and stayed up late at night when I was sick; not that woman who gave me up.

Ruth gave birth to me, and then relinquished custody to an adoption agency in Dallas. She had a three year old son back in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His father had been killed in World War Two. My father married somebody else after Ruth became pregnant, and moved to Miami.

I’ve never tried to quantify all this. Monetize it, as the current phrase goes. In a way, that’s what Dorothy was trying to do, by reminding me who had done all the heavy lifting of raising me; placing one level of value on what she did, and another, inferior level of value on what Ruth did.

I have to wonder, though, which of them paid a heavier price? For whom was it a greater burden? The mother who carried me for nine months, and then felt she had no choice but to give me up for adoption? Or the mother who did all that work for all those years, but who nevertheless seemed dissatisfied with the results?

DNA tests can’t answer those questions. There’s no metric, no control group; no scientific data that can be marshaled and formed up into an answer.

My love of words and books came from Ruth. She had two degrees and was a professional college librarian for most of her working life, save a period in the 1970’s, when she worked for John Wiley & Sons in New York City. When I met her in 1994, she had over 3,000 books in her apartment in Allentown, all neatly arranged on wooden shelves. Of course, I’ll never know what my life might’ve been like, had Ruth kept me, and raised me herself.

Growing up with Dorothy, I was able to spend time in the country, both in the farmland near Dallas where she grew up in the first quarter of the last century, and in the mountains of Colorado. I had a certain amount of freedom as a child that I might not have had if I’d grown up in Allentown. That freedom was rather overshadowed by Dorothy’s need for control, though, which is part of why I went off and joined the Army.

There’s no scale anywhere on which all of this can be weighed, Dorothy’s protestations notwithstanding. I had two mothers, and I’m thankful for the good, positive parts of me that I inherited from each of them – the gifts I received. Gifts can be both good and bad, and the less pleasant gifts I just try to deal with, the same as anyone who has only one mother. Am I a little more thankful for one of them than the other? I am, because one set of gifts helps balance the other set.

So, on this Mother’s Day of 2015, I give thanks for both of my mothers.

Thank you, Dorothy, for introducing me to collard greens with pepper sauce, and sweet potatoes, and corn bread. Thank you for piquing my interest in the natural world. Thank you for keeping all of the letters I wrote home from Viet Nam in 1969 and 1970.

Thank you, Ruth, for giving me life, and thank you for passing down to me your love of words and architecture, and your inquisitive mind. Thank you for agreeing to meet me, for the first time, in March, 1994.

Thank you both, and Happy Mother’s Day.

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A Short Visit to 1968

Posted on 8 May 2015 by M.

The first thing I saw was a helicopter. It was a medevac, or had been, 45 years ago in Viet Nam. I knew, because it had a red cross on a square, white background, which was used to mark medical evacuation helicopters. Now it was part of a traveling exhibit entitled “1968” at History Colorado (formerly and more recognizably known as the Colorado History Museum). I almost missed it, as the exhibit is scheduled to close on 10 May.

I didn’t miss the real 1968 either. Not entirely, anyway. The exhibit, once you got past the helicopter, was organized by months, and it reminded me of the currents running through America that year, of which I was aware, but not a participant. I didn’t even approve of some of them.

I grew up among people who were casually, institutionally racist. It was as normal to be a racist as it was for the sun to rise in the east. It was also normal – expected, actually – to believe and support the government, and its war in Viet Nam.

While Texas was still tending to go Democratic in elections, my mother and father were solidly Republican, so I was too. It didn’t matter too much politically, not yet, since the voting age was still 21 in Texas, an age I didn’t attain until August of that year.

It was appropriate that the helicopter was the first piece of the exhibit, because the war in Viet Nam hung over everything that happened that year, including events that had no direct connection to it. My life, for example. I knew about everything that was taking place, because I read about it in the newspapers and saw it on the television. It was mostly just background noise; events and movements and protests that were happening somewhere else, to other people, but not to me or my friends. And anyway, as I said, I disapproved of a lot of the changes that were washing over the country.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, I did not mourn his death. To the contrary, I thought it was surprising that it hadn’t happened sooner, and didn’t all those riots and looting and fires after King was shot just go to show you what those colored people were really like, burning down their own neighborhoods like that?

That’s how bad it was. That’s how unthinkingly I had assumed the beliefs of the people I lived with.

Earlier in the year, when a North Vietnamese and Viet Cong offensive erupted all across South Viet Nam, I was supportive of our military as they successfully fought back, inflicting huge losses on the Communist forces, although at a great cost to our own men. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese.

I was oblivious, however, to the fact that only a couple of weeks earlier, President Johnson had spoken at length about how we had the Communists on the run now. I was equally oblivious to the reaction against the war that began to coalesce after that; not just on college campuses (though not on mine until the following year), or among the filthy, laughable hippies (as I then saw them), but everywhere, among all sorts of people.

If the 2015 me – or the 1978 me, for that matter – could meet the 1968 me, I wouldn’t like him very much. But it wasn’t the 1968 me who was standing in front of that helicopter at History Colorado the other day. It wasn’t the 1968 me who watched the video screen installed within the chopper, or listened to the voice recordings that played. It wasn’t the 1968 me who gripped the glass case in which were displayed a K-Bar commando knife, C-Rations, and other memorabilia of the war.

It was the person I’ve become who was standing there, and I’ve become who I am largely because in October, 1968, my life finally intersected the upheavals and changes in America. That was the month I dropped out of college and volunteered for the Army. Because I didn’t want to miss out on my chance to go to the war, I went into the infantry.

A tightness enveloped my chest as I stood there looking at those olive green cans of food, the battered knife, the vintage helicopter. A great sadness welled up within me – a sadness I will never escape – and I cried, because that’s what happens when that sadness comes back to the surface.

The beginning and the end of the exhibit were furnished with identical sets of living room furniture from the era. The set at the beginning was very middle class 1968, and was placed immediately adjacent to the helicopter. It included a television that was playing a loop of news coverage of the war. One segment was of Walter Cronkite in Hue during the Tet Offensive, wearing a steel helmet and flak jacket, interviewing a soldier. A later clip showed Cronkite in the New York studio a few weeks later. For the first time, he described the war in pessimistic terms. That was the broadcast that persuaded Lyndon Johnson to not run for re-election in 1968.

Instead of a television, the set at the other end had a pedestal record player with a clear plastic dome top that would’ve been described as groovy in 1968. The counterpoint to the groovy record player was the coffee table. The top was inset with a glass-covered display area. Placed within it were a Congressional Medal of Honor citation, a Purple Heart, and other items pertaining to the death of a Marine sergeant in Quang Ngai province, South Viet Nam, in the autumn of 1968; the same province to which I would be sent a year later. He had thrown himself on a Viet Cong hand grenade, to save his friends. One of the papers noted that he had died “hours later, in the field.” It doesn’t say why a medevac helicopter didn’t get him to a hospital.

Between those two living rooms were display cases filled with the colorful, playful clothes and music and plastic paraphernalia of that fateful year. They made a stark contrast with the war and the murders and the riots depicted elsewhere. They were the bright, joyous yang to the war’s dark yin energy. The visual and emotional clash between those parts of the exhibit exemplified the anxiety and yearning, and the tremendous opposition of tectonic forces that battered and transformed everything about America over the course of that year. Although I was incapable of seeing it in the autumn of 1968, I too was about to be battered and transformed.

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“Wait until the war is over, And we’re both a little older …”

Posted on 27 April 2015 by M.

Forty years ago I was living in Houston and my then-wife was expecting the first of our three children. On that day, 27 April 1975, I had been back from Việt Nam fifty-four months – four and a half years. It sounds like a long time, but it wasn’t. Today, 27 April 2015, I’ve been back from Việt Nam for forty-four and a half years. That is a long time. Yet, it still isn’t.

When I joined the Army in 1968, I supported the war. That was part of the reason why I enlisted: to help fight my generation’s war. I can conjure up memories from the war, remembering moments and days and people. I remember the soft-faced innocence I possessed upon arriving in Việt Nam in 1969. I remember the first time I experienced hostile gunfire, dead bodies, smiling but untrustworthy foreigners, booby traps, midnight assaults, ambushes.

By the summer of 1970, nine months into my one year tour of duty, I had turned against the war. I had seen too much, done too much, lost too much, to just shut up and carry on until my 365 days were up. But it wasn’t enough to loudly complain or silently suffer with my friends. I had to do something about my opposition; I had to actually, physically oppose the war I said I hated so much.

I did do something. Exactly what I did is a story for another time. I just want to make it clear that I grew to hate the war, and to oppose it while I was still in Việt Nam, as well as during my final year in the Army after returning from Việt Nam.

In light of my beliefs about the war, you would think that on that April day in 1975, three days before the fall of Sài Gòn to the North Vietnamese army, I would’ve been happy that the whole awful, tragic thing was finally almost over. Or, if not happy, at least relieved. But I was neither happy nor relieved.

In the bedroom of the house we were living in at the time, I had a large map of South-East Asia that I had pinned to the wall. On it, I marked the progress of the North Vietnamese offensive that had begun in January 1975 with the capture of the provincial capital of Phuoc Long. Their offensive accelerated with the fall of the much more important, Central Highlands provincial capital of Buôn Ma Thuột on 18 March, and then the capture of Đà Nẵng on 29 March. The area I had been in, Quảng Ngãi province, was around 120 kilometers south of Đà Nẵng, and been taken by the North Vietnamese and Việt Cong a few days before that city fell.

As I write this, I have a sick, hollow feeling in my stomach. It’s the same feeling I have every time I read about the end of the Việt Nam War. It’s the same feeling I had almost exactly one year ago in Việt Nam, when I spent five days on the back of a motorcycle going through the Central Highlands with a veteran of the South Vietnamese Army. We spent one night in Buôn Ma Thuột, on our way north to Quảng Ngãi.

That hollow sickness would come up again if I looked at my map from 1975. I still have the map, but I can’t bear to look at it, because it’s a diagram of failure: a failure of the South Vietnamese Army and South Vietnamese leadership, yes, but a failure by America as well.

The American military had left Việt Nam for good by the end of 1973. Nixon declared victory and we went home. Like so many things having to do with the Việt Nam War, it was a lie. There was no American victory, unless you count as a victory the removal of American military units from the country without a Dunkirk-like retreat and evacuation. Then, in early 1975, with South Việt Nam falling apart, the American government chose to ignore the so-called Paris Peace Accords of 1973, and refused to offer any assistance to a people who had come to depend upon us.

No, I wasn’t happy on 27 April 1975, and I wasn’t relieved. I was sad, and I was angry, just as I am right now, forty years later.

So many people, of all nationalities and ages, died over the course of a thirty year war that began as the French War and morphed into the American War. For what did all those hundreds of thousands of people die, or suffer grievous wounds? Some died for an idea: patriotism, mostly, both Vietnamese and American. The majority, however, died for a lie, or a pack of lies.

The Domino Theory was a lie. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie. Body Count was a lie. Freedom in South Việt Nam was a lie, especially if you were a Buddhist or anyone the South Vietnamese National Police decided to question. Pacification and Vietnamization and Winning the Hearts and Minds of the People were all lies. The politicians and four-star generals who led us into and through the war were all shameless liars or, worse yet, clueless fools, blinded by hubris, and by ignorance.

What was not a lie were the men and women and children who died, or were widowed, or orphaned. Also not a lie was, and still is, the PTSD that so many survivors of the war carry around with them, four decades on. It is not a lie that I will never forget that year of my life, even if America would like to forget the only war we lost.

Each line I drew on my wall map in 1975 was a cut, a wound that was reopened and bled, and that continues to bleed. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore, all that blood. We’ve had other wars, fought by other young, patriotic men and women who began with soft-faced innocence; wars which have produced their own widows and orphans, and bearers of PTSD; wars that make me wonder if we’ve really learned anything in the last forty years.

I struggled to find an up-lifting note with which to end this essay, but I could not. Instead, I thought about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. If you stand on the National Mall and look east, you could almost not see that dark gash in the earth. It’s a perfect metaphor for the war, that black wall, filled with names, and almost buried.

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You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

Posted on 22 April 2015 by M.

It was 1957. I was ten years old, and had been hustled off to a Baptist military school in San Marcos, Texas. In retrospect, I was fortunate: fortunate not to be sixteen years old, African-American, and trying to enter Central High School, five hundred miles northeast of San Marcos, in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In 1957, I was completely oblivious to the torment and abuse being suffered by nine young African-American kids who were the fragile leading edge of de-segregation in the Arkansas of fifty-eight years ago. The effect of their desire for a decent education was felt not just in Little Rock, but across the South.

Few people of any age reading this need me to tell them about the civil rights struggles that came to a forceful point in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I grew up in the South. Not the Deep South of Mississippi and Alabama, but there were plenty of “Colored Only” drinking fountains and toilets and rooms in the Dallas of my youth. And those were just the obvious, comparatively benign signs of racism and apartheid that governed the lives of Black people in Dallas and elsewhere in this country.

The events of that story are as well known as are its settings. In many ways, the South has not been completely forgiven for the prominent part it played in American apartheid. There are numerous reasons for that.

The number of Southerners who abhor racism and actually do love their neighbors, regardless of background or race, has grown enormously over the decades, but there are still plenty of good old boys (and girls) whose overwrought words and angry faces perpetuate the stereotypical, reactionary image of intolerance associated with the American South.

It is against this long and sad and painful history that I read a new kind of story out of Arkansas in yesterday’s newspaper.

The City Board of Little Rock voted, seven to two, to approve an ordinance banning discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in both hiring and city services, including services offered by non-governmental vendors. The approval of Little Rock’s anti-discrimination ordinance comes soon after the legislature of Arkansas approved a law that prohibited local ordinances from banning discrimination on any basis not recognized by the state.

As it happens, Arkansas is one of twenty-nine states – twenty-nine – that do not prohibit discrimination based upon sexual orientation; or, as I like to put it, based upon who you choose to love.

What this all means is that the city of Little Rock is standing up against a law passed by the legislature of its state.

Kathy Webb, a Little Rock City Director, is quoted as saying, “I think we’re sending a message that we’re a welcoming community, that we’re diverse, that we realize that’s good for business, that we value all of our citizens.” Ms. Webb was the first openly gay member of the Arkansas legislature, and is presumably the first gay City Director of the city that in 1957 bent over backwards to keep nine young African American teenagers from attending a high school that was without a doubt better than the one to which they would have been otherwise relegated.

The usual suspects are opposed to Little Rock’s new ordinance. If I were a truly gentlemanly fellow, I would wish those opponents good luck. I guess I’m not all that gentlemanly, because I have no intention of doing any such thing.

One thing I will say though. If those who oppose these anti-discrimination laws insist on continuing to swim against the tide of history and progress, I humbly suggest they learn how to swim, or be prepared to drown.

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Fallen Angels of Death – Part Two

Posted on 21 April 2015 by M.

May, 1970

The Company commander had dropped his map out of a helicopter while he was on a recon flight. My Platoon was sent to look for it. There were twenty-three of us and we were well spread out, as usual. The RTO – the radio man – was behind me, and the Platoon Sergeant was behind him. Because sometimes, more often than you’d think, war is 90% boredom and only 10% terror, I was in a state almost like solitude or meditation: walking along, kicking up a little dust; tired, alert, thirsty. The late afternoon heat was oppressive, but off to the west, trees were back-lit by the sun. Ocher light spread across the rice paddies, turning the water into polished gold, streaked with quicksilver. It was beautiful, but I didn’t have time to enjoy it.

In the next instant, I heard a bullet pass between me and the RTO. In the split second after that, another bullet passed 12 or 18 inches in front of me. It created a small wave of air that brushed against my face, like the wake of boat. I can still feel it, if I let myself go there. So soft, that air, to have been created by a small piece of lead traveling at seven hundred meters per second.

Noise

I own a 9mm Glock. It’s a semi-automatic pistol made in Austria. I bought it in 1995, after a shooting at a local up-scale shopping mall. I was out of the state when the shooting happened, so I wasn’t personally threatened at all. But I went out and bought the pistol anyway. Just to have it. To know it was there. For several years after that, I would take it with me on road trips.

Now, the pistol sits locked in its case at the back of a bottom drawer. Some days, alone in the house, days when I don’t completely trust myself, I wish I didn’t know where it is.

A background noise of concern or anxiety is always present in my life; as if a cataclysm of some sort – cancer, violence, a terrible accident – might overtake me. The noise is louder some days than others. That Glock in the bottom drawer has the power to make the anxiety and the noise stop.

Suicide is a type of cataclysm, and it spreads, like ripples in a pond from a rock thrown into it. I have daughters, loved ones, friends: they’re the main reason I wouldn’t off myself.

Perhaps you want to tell me that life itself is reason enough to forestall suicide; that tomorrow is another day, and hope springs eternal. But that’s not enough.

Tomorrow is another day when depression may catch up with me again. As for hope, sometimes, alone in the darkness, it’s too much effort to even think about hope.

June, 1970

We were in the mountains, looking for a North Vietnamese Army hospital that was supposed to be there. The trail had flattened out, but up ahead I could see that it bent to the left and started climbing again. I was tired of walking, tired of being in the mountains, and I was wondering, If I fall and break my leg, will they send me home? My thoughts were cut short by a burst of machine gun fire from above the bend in the trail, twenty meters ahead of our point man. Then AK-47’s opened up from the left. Gunfire reverberated like a terrible echo chamber. I returned fire at people I couldn’t see and tried to make myself very small. I remember the way the light fell through the trees; the oddly sweet smell of the earth; me thinking, I don’t want to die here, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die …

After three or four minutes, the shooting stopped. I sat up and lit a cigarette. In the profound silence that settled over us, I was certain everyone could hear the quick rhythmic pounding of my heart.

Education

The Army called me an infantryman, but in reality, I was a hit man. We all were, except it was the United States government that hired us, not the Mafia.

It was the United States government that educated us in the ways of death. The education we received was, and still is, imperfect, with questionable results.

We couldn’t practice our trade in America, because almost everything we did would’ve been considered criminal. Instead, we were sent half way around the world, to a country that was alien in almost every way imaginable – except their humanity.

We want it both ways when war comes: destroy the enemy, but don’t be too messy. Or, if you are, don’t let it be seen on television, on the evening news, or on the internet. That’s why, in order to live with ourselves, we compress murder, looting, arson, theft, and assault into one short word: war. We don’t want to admit it – we don’t even want to talk about it – but those acts, if not exactly excused, are rationalized, while war itself is celebrated, in a perverse way, as selfless patriotism. A good deal of the celebrating seems to be done by people who know nothing of war.

April, 1972

I’d been home from Viet Nam about eighteen months, and was walking along a sidewalk in a small East Texas college town with the woman I would later marry. A car backfired nearby and I was flat on the concrete in an instant; not thinking at all, just reacting. It happened so quickly, I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. It’s a good thing I didn’t have a gun in my hands that afternoon. There’s no telling what I might’ve done, just out of instinct. Or fear.

Vigilance

At home, in the civilian world, hyper-vigilance is symptomatic of a disturbance or disorder. In war, though, it’s a necessary skill for survival. During my year of war, I had to constantly be aware of where I stepped, what I heard. I had to watch for anything that looked odd or out of place, any noise or sound that might warn me and my friends. I learned that skill so well in Viet Nam that it’s never left me.

Despite all the years that have passed, I don’t like to be surprised. Like an electric shock, for an instant I’m taken back to a mental terrain I don’t like to revisit: a place where surprise could mean death, if you weren’t careful enough. Sometimes, even if you were careful, it could still mean death.

Nights are difficult at times. There are few street lights where I live, so it’s quite dark at night. Things hide in the darkness. That’s what I know. Dangerous, threatening things hide there. I know that, and I know that I’m not there anymore. Viet Nam. Not physically, anyway. But some part of me can be transported there emotionally. When I take the trash out at night, or go to my car, I often feel wary. I don’t like not being able to see. I don’t like the idea that someone could see me before I see them. At times like that, I just have to make myself live with the feeling of exposure. I have to will myself to do it; just like I did in 1969 and 1970.

January, 2011

Forty-one years later, I have returned to Viet Nam – looking, questioning, hoping. Much has changed in the four decades since I was last here, yet the area in which I lived for a year is much the same: the rice paddies, the water buffalo, the impossibly laden bicycles, and the innocent-looking green mountains. I think about how fortunate I am. A lot of people, some of whom I knew – Tom, Richard, Hugh, and others – spent their last days and hours in those mountains and rice paddies.

I have returned, but I don’t know what I expect to find. Perhaps closure, whatever that means. You close up wounds to stop the bleeding, but my wounds, the ones I didn’t know I had suffered, continue to bleed.

How do I describe an empty place, or tell someone where it’s located, or what filled that emptiness, years ago; before I volunteered for the Army, before I went to Viet Nam the first time? Before life was changed forever.

The emptiness is not just within me. It surrounds me. It separates me. Perhaps you can’t see it when you look at me, but it’s there. Sometimes I see it in others: men and women whose lives will always be marked by the almost incomprehensible things they have seen and done. I see it, and want to help them, but I can’t. I’m not strong enough, not powerful enough, to erase the memories that come in the night when, deep in sleep and alone with our thoughts, we’re unable to defend ourselves.

Angels

Centuries ago, the danse macabre portrayed Death leading people to their graves.

We too danced with death. Our lives were difficult and dangerous, and tedious. We tried to act as though we were amused by it all: how close we came to death, how terrifyingly exciting it all was. Because we were young and naïve, and thought we were too young to die, we did things that sometimes were brave, and at others, just reckless.

We tried to be friends with death in those days, thinking that if we were on speaking terms, if we were on a first name basis, we would be safer. We thought that if we became Lesser Angels of Death – and we did become that – then the chief Angel of Death would leave us alone, since we were in the same line of work. And there was so much work to be done.

Some of us got on such good terms with death that we didn’t stop when we left the war and came home. We became so entangled with death that we drank, shot up, fought, lashed out, and fell down in the darkness. People we knew – friends, lovers, neighbors – became so comfortable with death, that they forgot how much they were loved. Then they forgot how much they loved life. When they had forgotten so completely that it seemed as though life meant nothing, that love had never really existed, and all of their light had been scattered by the darkness, then, long after they had met, in Viet Nam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, long after they had parted company and thought they were safe, Death came for them.

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Fallen Angels of Death – Part One

Posted on 19 April 2015 by M.

January, 1970

An explosion jerked me back to the real world.

I’d been sitting in the sun, smoking and daydreaming, when it happened. I grabbed my rifle, jumped up, and ran in the direction of the shouting and the drifting smoke.

It was Second Platoon. Tâm, the former Viet Cong soldier assigned to our Company, was on the ground. Knowing, but not exactly comprehending, that he was dead, I watched the medic tenderly wipe blood off his face.

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“We halted near this hootch,” Rivera said. He pointed to the smoldering remains of a bamboo house. “He went inside to look around and tripped a booby trap.”

Tâm had only been with us a couple of months. Despite our initial doubts, everyone liked him. He’d told us where to look in villages for stashes of rice or weapons, and a couple of weeks earlier, he’d spotted a booby trap. Now he was dead. Because of a fucking booby trap.

After the medevac helicopter left for Chu Lai with Tâm’s body, our Platoon walked toward a small village seven or eight hundred meters away. Our mission that day was to look for hidden stores of rice, but I don’t think we were sure what we were doing any more, or why. We were just tired and dirty.

Then, as if Tâm’s death wasn’t enough, as if the whole grinding, endless thing wasn’t enough, a sniper with an AK-47 fired at us from a treeline nearby. We returned fire, then searched the village. The people had all left, and the sniper got away. It didn’t matter. Getting home alive was the only thing that really mattered.

I stood in the shade of one of the houses and lit a cigarette. The smoke drifted up, hanging beneath the roof, languid as a snake. Someone had laid plastic sheeting over the roof frame, beneath the palm thatch. I took out my lighter and lit a low, dangling corner of the plastic. Fiery, melting drips hissed like little rockets as they fell to the ground. Then tangled fingers of red and blue and yellow climbed across the roof and walls, destroying everything they touched. I stepped back into the sunlight. Black smoke rolled up into the silent sky as I watched the house burn and smoked my cigarette.

The rest of the Platoon was searching the other houses in the village. I looked off to my right and saw another house starting to burn. Soon, a third was shrouded in fire and smoke, and then the whole village was in flames, collapsing and dying. The fires created twisting waves of heat that distorted the day, and did nothing to burn away the silent anger no one ever talked about.

Seconds

Death was always close by during that year of my life, waiting and watching. Every time I stood up in the wide open, which I did day after day, I knew someone with a rifle could take me out. Wherever we walked – through the rice paddies, crossing a tree line, up in the mountains – an awareness of death circled around just at the edge of conscious thought. We could walk into an ambush, or in the next place I stepped there could be a booby-trapped artillery round or hand grenade, or maybe a Bouncing Betty (a ball-bearing-filled container that shot a few feet in the air before exploding). I knew people who were killed by each of those things, and others who died of gunshot wounds.

I’m not sure which would be worse: A Bouncing Betty, an AK-47 round, or a booby-trapped artillery round. You’re probably thinking, “What difference does it make? If you’re dead, you’re dead.” True, but I’d prefer something fast. So fast, I’d be dead before I had time to know it. That’s wishful thinking, of course. If something explodes beneath your feet, you’d know it, if only for two or three seconds. You have no idea how long two seconds can be.

February, 1970

The sky was clear and moonless. As I fell asleep, I could see thousands of stars.

A little before 1 a.m., Viet Cong soldiers cut the barbed wire and came in shooting, throwing hand grenades, and setting fire to the village while their mortars fired at us from a treeline off to the west. Explosions and gunfire rolled over us like waves falling on jagged rocks, my body shook, everything was stripped away only a visceral need to survive the next moment of life and then the next conscious thought was blasted terrified but no time for that just react shoot decide don’t shoot I was ready to kill and a shadow fell inside the wire not far I saw but didn’t see the grenade explode hot metal tore my face sand in my eyes and mouth blood ran down my neck pushed back by the force of it my shirt soaked blood sticky now the smell of gunpowder and smoke and fear all ran together and then … the staccato pounding of death all around me was silenced by the shock of being wounded.

I wiped my face, stared in disbelief at blood glittering in the light of a burning house and a mortar round slammed the top of the bunker. A tremendous explosion. Inches above my head.

I don’t know how long I laid there, stunned and disoriented, before a primal need to prove I was still alive drove me to crawl back to the front of the bunker, pick up my weapon, and begin firing out into the night. The noise and the recoil made me feel like I was on top of the situation, instead of the other way around.

Fires, explosions and gunfire raged for over an hour. Around 2 a.m. the Company medic told me to get on a medevac that would take me and others to an Army hospital. I walked around the perimeter through a scene that was surreal and ominous. Gunfire continued in the background, drowned out now and then by the sound of a gun ship circling overhead. The thin yellow light of burning houses lurched around, obscuring more than it revealed.

The medevac took off and I watched the village recede into the wide darkness below. Sixteen men died that night – two of ours and fourteen of theirs – and several were wounded. Amid the confusion that filled my head as we flew north were two thoughts: I was lucky to be alive, and I had nine months left in Viet Nam.

Comfort

I have issues. Anyone who’s lived with me can attest to that. I’ve tried to overcome my issues, but it feels like we’ve just fought to a draw. The struggle hasn’t been even. The issues – depression, hyper-vigilance, suicidal ideation – have advantages over me. The element of surprise, mostly. They’re among the conditions or behaviors that are indicators of something I’ve come to know well over the years, long before I knew it was called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Despite our long acquaintance, we’ve not become friends; just constant companions, if a companion can also be an adversary.

Thirty years after I returned from Viet Nam, I was diagnosed with depression. It would be another few years before anyone talked with me about PTSD; its prevalence, and its silent corrosive effects.

Medication helps. Nevertheless, even on the best of days I can be caught unawares as depression begins to fill me with its heaviness, suffocating whatever strength and optimism I might have.

On days that aren’t the best, memories of failures and regrets, real or perceived, crowd in on me. Relationships that died, or were starved to death. Drinking, getting high; disconnected and rootless, not quite by choice, but close. Nothing seems attainable on days like that, or even worth doing, for that matter.

Depression stands there, holding the door open, so his less savory friends can come in. When they do, darkness wraps itself around me like a shroud. Sometimes, alone in that darkness, I tell myself, Well, if things get too bad, I can always kill myself. Then I say that I’m not serious, that I’m only joking. I’d never do something like that, I say.

Still, there are days when despair whispers so convincingly in my ear that knowing I can do it, if I really need to, is almost a comfort to me; like an insurance policy, or a contract with an escape clause.

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BPD in the GOP

Posted on 15 April 2015 by M.

Given that we are seeing the first declarations of candidacy from politicians who would like to secure the Republican nomination for president in 2016, I think it’s an appropriate time to examine the scourge of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in the Not-As-Grand-As-It-Used-To-Be Old Party.

I’m a sixty-something, white, male American. In addition, I grew up in Texas, and I’m a combat military veteran (Viet Nam, 1969-1970). Based purely on those statistics, I should be watching Fox News every night, perhaps while wearing a tricorn hat and cleaning a 9mm semi-automatic handgun (which I would own in case those Liberal Marxist Socialist barbarians, or worse yet, The Government, ever try to come take my freedoms away from me). I should also be voting for Republicans every time I get a chance.

But I don’t. Watch Fox News, I mean, or vote Republican, either. Why not? I think it is because I’m a nice person, and most contemporary Republicans are not nice people.

Why do I make this assertion, you ask? I believe it is because the Republican Party suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

Following are a few of the characteristics of BPD and how they appear to manifest themselves in the GOP:

Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
a. Impassioned and sometimes irrational exhortations regarding patriotism, including  meaningless phrases like “Support the Troops” and “Feed Jane Fonda to the Lesbian Whales”.
b. Appeals to the Christian God to intercede and “save” the country.
c. Passionate warnings that (pick one or more) gay marriage, abortion, national healthcare, gun control laws, reasonable immigration reform, are evidence that Socialist rot is destroying the foundations of the Republic, the End Times are at hand, and the Christian God’s wrath will be called down upon us if we don’t just stop all this nonsense right now!

A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation
a. Mainstream, “adult” conservatives versus moderate Conservatives (admittedly, an oxymoron these days) versus Tea Party Conservatives versus Ted Cruz versus …

Identity disturbance, such as a significant and persistent unstable self-image or sense of self
a. We’re Original Intent, Constitutional Literalists (a.k.a., Scaliaists).
b. No, we’re Compassionate Conservatives.
c. No!  We’re God-Fearing, Gun-bearing, Red-blooded sons of the soil, and a bulwark against the onslaught of Socialism and the Radical Gay Agenda.

Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)
a. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
b. Government shut-downs
c. “I think even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
d. The House of Representatives has voted over fifty-four times in four years to destroy some aspect of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., Obamacare)

Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior
a. See “Impulsivity”, above.

Emotional instability due to significant reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety)
a. See: Limbaugh, Rush

Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
a. Rep. Louie “anchor babies” Gohmert
b. Rep. Michael “I’ll break you in two” Grimm
c. Rep. Jody “homosexuality enslaves people” Hice

Transient, stress-related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms
a. See: Tea Party, NRA, The Faith and Freedom Coalition, et cetera.

If any of these conditions describe your socio-political positions, you are probably a Republican.

Do not go to the VFW hall, a sports bar, or the local gun shop. This is a mental health emergency. Call 9-1-1 or drive immediately to the nearest emergency room.

I repeat: This is a mental health emergency!

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Of Easter Eggs and Wedding Cakes

Posted on 4 April 2015 by M.

The Governor of Indiana saw the light. Sort of.

What he really saw was a tsunami of outrage that threatened to swamp his Ship of State. Even Republican business people were angry with him for signing into law a bill that appears to have been an attempt to make an end run around the supposed Radical Gay Agenda. The good (and some not so good) legislators of Indiana wanted to make sure their fellow citizens could refuse service to whomever they wanted, if providing that service would violate a deeply held religious or philosophical belief.

Regardless of what the Hoosier politicians say, its chief target was gay people.

Bakers of wedding cakes, schedulers of venues and (purportedly) scads of other merchants did not want to be compelled to provide their services to those people. The way the folks in Indiana were talking, you’d think the Radical Gay Agenda was about imposing Sharia Law in the state.

I cannot verify 100% that radical gay people do not want to impose Sharia law somewhere in America. However, I know quite a few homosexuals – more than Mike Pence, apparently – and I’ve never heard one of them go on and on about Sharia law and what a great thing it would be for the neighborhood. Still, one never knows.

The interesting thing about the now-revised and possibly meaningless Indiana law is what it could have led to.

An innkeeper could decide s/he didn’t want to rent a room to those two guys, or those two women, who look kinda … you know … gay. To have such a couple in one of their motel rooms, with their en flagrante delicto moral turpitude, might cause the innkeeper to suffer a spiritual nervous breakdown.

Or he could just go watch TV and not worry about it.

Apparently that’s not an option for the morally up-right and the spiritually elevated. They have fundamental torment, probably because they’re worrying about what they’re going to say to Jesus about the abominations and fornication in Room 217.

Meanwhile, a restaurateur might take offense at the Hindu family wanting to have dinner in his café. They’re idolaters, you know, those Hindus. Worshiping all those gods. One even looks like an elephant. The restaurant owner’s religious sensibilities and values might be deeply wounded by this gaggle of pagans, in which case his moral right to turn them away – his duty, even – should be legally protected. Right?

The problem with injured religious sensibilities and values is that, like a back ache or an upset stomach, you can’t see it, and you can’t prove it doesn’t exist.

We could turn this story around, of course. In this version – Wounded Values 2.0 – the owner of the café is a Hindu who doesn’t like having to serve Christians. It’s their monotheistic, blasphemous lifestyle of which he does not approve. If you feed people like that, he figures, it will only encourage them, and perhaps allow them to breed.

But it’s not Hindus whose delicate moral values are threatened by Jack kissing Billy. The offended ones, the poor souls whose moral universe is in such danger, are almost uniformly white Christians.

The timing of this controversy is exquisite. Tomorrow is Easter: the pagan spring fertility celebration (Eggs? Bunnies?) hijacked by the early Christian church centuries ago, so the Christians could have a special day to celebrate the re-birth, the rising from the dead, of their Jesus.

As you’ve probably deduced, I’m not at all religious. The label of “Spiritual but not Religious” isn’t even quite right for me. Maybe something like “Spiritual, Uncertain About What Makes the Universe Work, and Open to the Possibilities!” In any case, despite not being a Jesus-believing, God-Fearing guy, I am going to suggest to the multitudes of morally fragile white people out there that they read the book – I mean, The Book – they so loudly profess to love and slavishly follow. For example, Isaiah 58:10.

If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.

In other words, you’ll be a lot happier if you stop thwarting gay people and instead, help them become fully equal citizens. God will like you better for it. It says so right there in Isaiah.

When it comes to love, I am resolutely polytheistic. I don’t care whom you choose to love – heterosexual, homosexual, trans-sexual, asexual, queer, polyamorous, or Republican – nor do I care how you choose to love them. The important thing is that you love that person, fully, acceptingly, with all your heart.

In the wake of the outrage about Indiana’s newest law, Gov. Pence was quoted as saying, “This is a bill that in ordinary times would not be controversial. But these are not ordinary times.”

Here the Governor has attained a wonderful clarity of vision. No, this is not an ordinary time, if by ordinary, he means a time when it is acceptable to discriminate against certain of our fellow citizens, based upon whom they choose to love. No, this is not an ordinary time. It is a time when more and more of us are realizing that it is more important to protect those who love, than it is to protect those who do not.

“God damn it, first one wants freedom, then the whole damn world wants freedom.” — Gil Scott-Heron, B Movie

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Accepting Survival

Posted on 29 March 2015 by M.

I was speaking with someone today – we’ll call her Laura – about writing as a cathartic and healing experience. Laura was afflicted with ovarian cancer. I volunteered for a war. She didn’t ask for her affliction, but I did ask for mine. Nevertheless, we are both survivors.

Laura wrote a book about her successful struggle against cancer. She found the act of writing, getting it all out of her head and onto paper, an integral part of her healing process.

Although I have written, and continue to write, about my part in the Viet Nam War, its effect on me and others, and how I see it now, years later, I’m not sure how cathartic and healing writing about it has been for me. It’s been good to talk about it, and to write about it, that’s true. Catharsis, though, is a process, not an event, and for me the process continues.

Each time I write about the war, each time I return to the places where I lived and almost died – places where many others did die – my writing about it continues and the process of healing advances a bit more. But there’s no arrival point. There’s no final destination, at which you step off the train and find yourself in a new country; quiet and happy, untroubled by dreams and memories.

That place does not actually exist. Just as catharsis and healing are each a process, so is loss, and all those processes exist side by side, in a wavering dance that goes now forward, now back, then forward again.

Being in a war is like losing a child to a horrible disease. The difference is that you are the child. You can never fully recover from that kind of loss. You can help the pain diminish over time (or you can hold onto the pain and loss, as if that will make it all better). You can try to understand what happened. You can try to explain it to people who never had children or who never went to war. They will never fully understand, though, and neither will you.

At this point, forty-five years on, acceptance seems to be about the best I can hope for. Acceptance of what happened. Acceptance of what was done to me. Acceptance of what I did to others. To whatever degree that acceptance brings me some measure of peace, I am thankful. But the memories, the regrets, the sadness and the anger, and the adrenaline rush of missing death by inches or seconds, all that will always be with me. I will never be able to talk enough or write enough to lay it all to rest. That’s what I have to accept.

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Questions for Dead Mothers

Posted on 21 March 2015 by M.

I’ve had two mothers in my life. Ruth, the one who gave me life, was 28 when I was born. Dorothy, the one who raised me, was 32 when I was adopted. They knew of each other, in a general way, but they never met. I think they both wanted it that way. It made things easier, I guess.

Knowing nothing of the other woman, it was easier for Ruth to fantasize about the better life and exciting opportunities her child was having with his new parents, fifteen hundred miles away. Perhaps not knowing helped soften the pain she felt, when she decided to give her child up.

Was that pain intensified, or was it made easier to bear, by the two-year-old son waiting for you back in Pennsylvania?

Dorothy didn’t know anything about Ruth, which made it easier to be critical, and to feel self-satisfied about raising a child someone else didn’t want. It made it easier to feel possessive, and not want him to go looking for that other woman who, after all, had given him away.

Did that sense of moral superiority ease your insecurities, in a time when so many babies were coming into the world, yet you were unable to have children?

Fate has a fine sense of irony. The mother who surrendered me to an adoption agency in 1947 really did want me, while the mother who adopted me the following year became disappointed in her choice.

If I had grown up with Ruth, if Dorothy had never become a mother – would we all have been happier?

There are no answers, and in any case, both of my mothers are dead now. I still ask the questions. I still want the answers. But my need to know is met only with silence, and the empty places remain unfilled.

 

——-

(A version of  “Questions for Dead Mothers” was published on the website “Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie” in June 2014.)

 

 

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