Vietnam: Reflecting in my 40s

Vietnam: Reflecting in my 40s

Ummm, I thought I had written about this and saved it a couple weeks ago, but I just re-opened it and found nothing...

Not sure if I thought it out more than I actually wrote...

For the record, I start a lot of blog posts and articles and save them for a while before finishing. 

How did I start it, if I already did? Let me try now, two weeks from doing an Army thing down south...

Each U.S. conflict and war has left its wounds and scars on its people and those who it engages with in those aggressive campaigns.

We (most of us) Americans like to think that we are fighting for the right when we get involved in military matters. This feeling of correctness helps substantiate the violence waged in that action, large or small, short term or long term. Right or not, the soldiers, marines, sailors, enemies, and civilians involved can become traumatized. Searching for understanding of these things can have its effects, too. Millions are left with mental and psychological wounds, along with all the physical ills.

I think that some of those effects, after-effects, if you will, have touched or impacted me.

Vietnam and its bloody long war in Southeast Asia had us questioning the rightness of it. It haunts us still, in 2019. Perhaps it haunts me, like all somber events in our human history.

Read up on it all you can; I have my own personal feelings and perspectives on it. They are many.

1. Growing up in the 1970s and becoming an adolescent in the 1980s, I was aware of the the major military conflicts and wars of my country before 1960. I knew a lot about them at a young age. Vietnam, ending for us in April 1975 when I was four, was a mystery to me. Not many people talked about it. I was unaware, and it took me by surprise when I was 10 or 11 years old.

What was this? Where was this? Who was this? Not Koreans, not Chinese, not Japanese... Another East Asian enemy, called Charlie and worse... And from my own era, not those of my parents or grandparents or before...

2.  These U.S. veterans were traumatized in large part because the wounded and otherwise non-injured survivors were pilloried and marginalized, by us, the American citizenry. Millions spat upon their efforts and service.

3. There were gross errors committed throughout our involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Civilians were too often hurt and brutalized. The nation suffered greatly; it was a long civil war where the U.S., like the Korean conflict before it,

tried to support the southern democratic government. But this was not Korea, we came to sadly learn.

4. The overall effort to stop the world wide march of Communism was noble to those of the West; the Domino Theory seemed like it was true. Thailand was saved, although ironically a few short years later the Viet Cong saved the Cambodians from their tormentors the Khmer Rouge. 

5. I watched movies and television series about Vietnam over the years, as our nation was dealing with the whole mess. Some resonated, some horrified, some showed beauty and reconciliation. I saw some foreign films, usually French made, about the country.

6. I grew to know people from Vietnam here in the United States. I also worked with and befriended Americans who loved the Vietnamese people and culture, I learned more about their food and drinks and hospitality.

7. Moving to Virginia well into my thirties, I began visiting U.S. Civil War sites, Revolutionary War markers and memorials, modern day cemeteries that hold the graves of countless U.S. fallen heroes from all the years past. I looked at their names, contemplated their stories. I reworked the campaigns of the known generals and leaders, pictured the innumerous narratives of those on the ground.

8.  I joined the military myself, rubbed shoulders and swapped tails with hundreds and hundreds of soldiers, marines, seamen, air force personnel, coast guard, international forces, those that have sacrificed. I worked overseas and I even had a Vietnam veteran roommate for a few months. I got to know my knew step father-in-law, a wounded Marine vet from the heat of the peak of the war, the late 1960s, when hundreds of ours were cut down monthly. The last major war of our country, although Afghanistan and Iraq have taken their toil on us, our psyche, our collective guilt.

9. Into my forties, becoming a more mature father and husband and uncle, (hopefully), but perhaps more acquainted with the grief of loss and longing, I found myself thinking more of the terrible losses of those who died, who left their best years ahead of them, their potential children unborn and lives unfulfilled. Vietnam was not as bad in total numbers of casualties for our troops as the World Wars or the U.S. Civil war. I observed my own dad getting emotional about it, thinking of his peers who passed away and I saw that proclivity in me. I could get teary by certain songs or memories, or recountings of the terrors and tragedies. I gathered my own stories of loss and death, both of Vietnam and other eras, including my own.  Some people believe most of my stories somehow involves someone who dies. It happens. I sometimes found myself getting hyper-emotional when contemplating the past and the remaining wounded from Vietnam. Not depressed. Melancholy in an empathic way. I consider it sublime, since we do die in so many ways for the causes to be thought of as for a higher cause, for some reason we gave up these lives so tragically but there is a meaning to each life. Silver linings populate the clouds floating over the fields of our lost ones. Many have no marked graves; they remain in the earth and sea.

10. Vietnam is now our friend. My step father-in-law went back there with my mother-in-law and his son in peace and friendship. They fear China, a bit like us in the West, the proclaimed Communist Party leftover. Our mostly young men who died there, others tortured like the incredible John McCain, have left a legacy of effort, blood, and tears for us and the world.

Mistaken mission? Improper military strategy? Were countries like Malaysia and others saved from these totalitarian regimes? Hard to know, difficult to assess. Poor analysis of the will of the nationalism of the Vietnamese versus the threat of their Communist ideology?

Mixed answers of yes and maybe to all of these.

Reflecting and remembering is the best I know to do; I will do it for the foreseeable future. You might be able to understand why after reading this. I don't know all the reasons myself, but it influences how I and we see things. Do not repeat errors of the past; count your blessings, and move forward with all possible lessons learned to make a better present and future.

Long live Vietnam.