"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen." -Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
This is the final post for the May 2010 Big Read. Inspired by Tim O'Brien's powerful novel TheThings They Carried, over the past month community members and staff of the Everett Public Library and Sno-Isle Libraries shared their memories of the Vietnam era. We have done so in book discussions, lectures, movies, conversations among ourselves, and in this blog. We've talked about music, food, first kisses and neighborhood street games. We told our stories about our brothers, husbands, fathers and grandfathers who fought in Vietnam; sometimes they told their own stories.
Yesterday, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1040 gathered together in Veterans Park, Lynnwood, to remember and to honor all military personnel who gave their lives in service to their country. Later in the afternoon, many of these veterans came to Lynnwood Library to share their experiences and thoughts. Most had served in the Vietnam era and some had served in Vietnam. Although painful at times, they shared with us and treated questions and differences of opinion with wisdom and compassion. This last post is in tribute with gratitude to them.
Photo credits: Memorial Day, Veterans Park, VFW Post 1040 by rg, Lynnwood Library, Sno-Isle Libraries. Some rights reserved.
"If you can't accept death, you'll never get over it. So what the Memorial's about is honesty. . . You have to accept, and admit that this pain has occurred, in order for it to be healed, in order for it to be cathartic. . . All I was saying in this piece was the cost of war is these individuals.
And we have to remember them first." -Maya Lin**
At the age of 21, Maya Lin, a Yale student of architecture, created the design that would become the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. The Wall, as the Memorial is called, consists of two 246-foot long polished black granite walls that intersect at a 125 degree angle. As of May 31, 2010, 58,267 names of those who died in Vietnam are inscribed on the Wall. The names are listed by date of death.
The Wall was dedicated in 1982. Today it is the most visited of our national monuments. Over 25 million people have visited the wall, and many leave behind flowers, letters and other tokens of remembrance. The objects have been collected by The National Park Service and now form The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection. Representative objects from the collection are displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in an on-going exhibit Personal Legacy: the Healing of a Nation.
Photo credit: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Smithsonian Institution, 1992. http://photo2.si.edu/legacy/legacylinks.html/
*Truckin' by Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and lyricist Robert Hunter.
The Vietnam War affected all our communities – large and small – across the entire country. Growing up in a very small community in the foothills of Whatcom County, I felt that impact first hand within my own family. As the war escalated, my mother, a World War II veteran and an active member of the local American Legion post, found herself torn between her own patriotism and the escalation of a war that she could not personally support. For my father, a disabled World War II vet, his trips to the Seattle VA Hospital brought him in close contact with young men in their early twenties returning from Vietnam. As a teenager visiting my Dad at the VA Hospital, I was impressed by the gentle and understated support he provided to his young roommates. Even though over thirty years separated my dad and these young soldiers, their combat experience bound them together.
For many residents of Snohomish and Island counties, the reading of Tim O’Brien’s TheThings We Carried forged a similar connection. Just the thought provoking question of “What were you doing during the Vietnam War?” reminds each of us about a piece of our own history. Many of us growing up in the sixties were impacted by the Vietnam War, whether it was from direct involvement overseas or the experiences of a family member or close friend. As I reflect back on this time in my life, I remember the large political and philosophical division the Vietnam War created in our country that shaped our perception of our government, elected officials, and politics.
Thank you for your participation in the Big Read and your willingness to share your memories.
Jonalyn Woolf-Ivory Director Sno-Isle Libraries
Photos courtesy of Jonalyn Woolf-Ivory. All rights reserved.
Many Americans think real-life war is like a John Wayne movie. American soldiers are upright, brave, and honorable. When someone dies, the soldiers act in ways the audience understands. When the story ends, everyone knows the moral.
Well, Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried explodes this fantasy. In real life (and also in the book) O’Brien was a grunt in Alpha Company, in the northern part of South Vietnam. Most of the population there were Viet Cong sympathizers. For Alpha Company, death was always just a step away.
In this novel, nearly everything is shocking and unaccountable. The deaths of several soldiers are related over and over again in obsessive detail. Each retelling has a slightly different account of what happened and what witnesses did and said. When Curt Lemon is blown apart and his body sprayed into a tree, a soldier detailed to retrieve his body parts sings “Lemon Tree” as he tosses them down.
O’Brien says, “…war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.”
After a soldier named Kiowa disappears into a riverside morass of human waste during a mortar barrage, Alpha Company has to probe thigh-high muck for his corpse. Years later, one of the soldiers drives endlessly around a lake in his Iowa home town, thinking about why he can’t talk to anyone about Kiowa’s death.
“…nobody in town wanted to know about the terrible stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds. But the town was not to blame, really. It was a nice little town, very prosperous with neat houses and all the sanitary conveniences.”
Most of us live neat, sanitary lives and honk our car horns when we see someone waving a sign that says “support our troops.” Meanwhile, our nation today occupies two countries and our grunts are sent to war for tour after tour, whether they want to go or not. The toll on them is horrendous.
O’Brien shows that war is never moral, never uplifting, and is absolutely obscene and evil. Yes, soldiers are sometimes kind and brave, but sometimes in the ghastly fog of war they freeze in terror, defile corpses, and wantonly kill. From our easy chair, we can’t comprehend this. Nor can we judge them.
O’Brien achieved catharsis through writing about Vietnam. In real life, the guy who drove around the lake wasn’t so lucky. No one listened to him and he hanged himself three years later.
O’Brien wrote this beautiful, awful book, and we should listen. When war is fought in our name, we should learn its nature and costs. You’ll never do that by watching The Green Berets.
Cameron Everett Public Library
Photo credit: Soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swampy area, 1969. ARC Identifier 531457 / Local Identifier 111-SC-651408. Item from Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860 - 1985
The turbulent events of the world in the 1960’s were only background noise to my life. In the early part of the decade, I was more concerned with the events immediately surrounding me. But the issues of the times increasingly had an impact so that by the end of the decade, I felt the impact more often and could no longer easily shake off the conflicts.
Many issues of the 1960 were race or religion issues.
I grew up in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Seattle. I was not really aware of the differences amongst all the neighborhood families. Until that is the summer of 1961, when I was at one of the Seattle Seafair parades. The Seattle Chinese Community Girls Drill Team marched down the street in the parade in all their glorious red and gold. It was a wonderful site to see and I was totally captivated by them. “Mum,” I asked “may I join this drill team?” “No,” she answered. “You're not Chinese.”
I wasn’t Chinese! What did that mean? I started to look around. People were different but why couldn’t I be Chinese? My skin color was not much different. My eyes were brown and my hair was dark. So what if my eyelids were a bit different and my hair not as straight? Why did this stop my joining the group? I pondered this question for years.
But I was more concerned with other issues. I had gotten old enough to join in the neighborhood games.
The long spring and summer evenings in Seattle encouraged the neighborhood kids to play outside for hours and often after 10:00 pm. Children of all ages joined in the twilight games of Hide and Seek, Kick the Can, Red Rover, Simon Says, Mother May I, and Frozen Tag. As the light of day faded into the dark of night, we tried to push the darkness away as long as we could. We ignored as long as possible the calls from our families to head home for the night.
“Mike, Michael, – it is time to come home." "Darla, DARLA! - 9:30 pm - time to come in.”
But, the world at large intruded.
I'm in the second grade on November 22, 1963, at Highland Park Elementary School in West Seattle. On this day, a special number of school bells rang. This was sometimes a way to signal for some assigned upper grade students to come to the school office. Soon, one these older students dropped off a purple inked mimeograph notice for our teacher, Miss Lynn. We knew the message must be important for it to be delivered in this method and interrupt the class. It was important. After several minutes of silence, Miss Lynn read the news to us in a hushed voice. The notice told us that President Kennedy had been shot and had died in Texas. This was sad and important news. I ran home after school to tell my mother this important news. Mum was not one to watch the television during the day or to listen to the radio. So I thought I would be the one to tell her this. My brother broke the news first. He was a high school student in the 10th grade at Chief Sealth High School in West Seattle and he'd come directly home from school to tell Mum. I was miffed that I wasn't the one who got to tell our mother.
Some people said the President was shot because he was Catholic. At the time I wondered what that meant. Sadly as the 1960’s went along and I grew older I understood what they were saying even if I could not understand the why.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Karen right over.”
February 16, 1964, the Beatles are on the Ed Sullivan show. Everyone young and old and anywhere in between had been talking about those boys from England. I like many my age begged, pleaded, bribed or found anyway I could to be allowed to stay up and watch the show. It was the talk of the neighborhood and school for weeks. Many older teenage boys wanted a Beatle haircut; several started to grow out their hair. Several fathers did not want the sons to have this hair style. My father was amongst those who did not like all that long hair and so my brother Dave was not allowed to have this style. Only one guy in his rock band won the family battle to wear long hair.
Some people say a hair style shows people who you are, Huh? How does a hair style show what is in your heart? Or who is good or bad?
“Mother May I take 3 steps?”
August 11, 1965, my family is in Watts, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California. We made the long road trip to California, down the winding coast road and the trip home mostly on Hwy 99 since I-5 was not built yet. Stop and go at all the red lights, lots of diners and motels named Flamingo. We stopped off the freeway – California had these new fangled roads – to get gasoline for the car at a Signal Gas Station. There were people milling about, several men were looking at us, a white family from Washington in this black neighborhood. This was before self-service and no one was coming to assist us. There seemed to be tension in the air. A lady ran across the street, there wasn't a lot of traffic out. A man was hammering a board over a window. Finally, one of the men comes a bit closer and then calls out, "Hey, whitey, get your ^$%^### out of here. No gas for you here.” After a minute or two, with a bit of grumbling under his breath, my dad decided it was best we leave. Dad drove us down the highway to another station while my mum intently watched the gas gage on E, Dad filled up at another station, complained about the rudeness of the previous one, and then we went down the road. That night on the television we saw the news about the race riots in Watts. Dad said, “That looks like the station we were at.” After a bit, Dad decided that the rude gas station attendant actually did us a big favor. He got the white family from Washington out of a brewing dangerous situation, and did it in a way that would not make him look like he was being nice to us.
Sadly, race issues were on the rise.
“You’re it.” “Run, run, Larry, run. Kick the Can."
I'm in 8th grade on April 4,1968, the day that Martin Luther King is assassinated. How can this be? Race. I hear rumors of it being in part because of race. I lived in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. The nightly neighborhood games were played by children of many races and religions. Terry, Jerry and Rosemary are Japanese. Darla is German and Bohemian. Dorothy and her brother are African American. Cindy is Italian. Ingrid is Native American. Maria is Mexican. Mary is Catholic. Karen is Lutheran. I am mostly Scandinavian and English. It didn’t matter because we'd learned to play together.
The final days 8th Grade at Denny Jr. High School is drawing near. June 5, 1968. I'm very interested in the upcoming presidential election. After the joy of the Robert F. Kennedy nomination as the Democratic Presidential candidate, then there is the sad news on the television. Senator Kennedy has been shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. I am saddened and never again have I had much interest in a political issue.
Violence, assassinations, riots, wars. Yes, the world had gotten my attention. The neighborhood is changing. The kids that I had played all the outdoor games with most summer evenings were getting too old for the games, and the younger kids were not out playing like we had done.
The race, religion, ethnic, image and other differences that people could find were increasing. My group versus your group. The intrusions of the world seemed to be increasing. I asked myself if they were really increasing, or was it that my awareness of them was increasing because I was aging? I’m still not sure.
I wish the world would be more like the neighbor games. Sometimes even today I still hear the voices in my head calling.
“Ollie Ollie Oxen Free” . . . on a long summer’s evening.
Diane Brown Sno-Isle Libraries
Video credit: Chinese Community Girls Drill Team on Flickr by hey skinny, under Creative Commons license, some rights reserved, http://www.flickr.com/photos/heyskinny/2807832090/.
Don was a writer I'd known in Sacramento. He'd asked me to fall by and see what he'd been writing. He was living on Page St at the time, a bit west of Baker, as I recall. The way housing worked was that some guy would let a flat and then sublet individual rooms to defray the cost. If you couldn't afford a bedroom you could rent a space in the living room. People with no money slept in the kitchen. Don had no money but had kept his bedroom by letting a smuggler use it for a few days while selling off his latest shipment. It was a bit odd to be sitting on the floor (no furniture of course) reading Don's work, while the smuggler, a jovial mountain man type, sat there in his underwear, selling kilos from a stack of about 40. Of course most things were a bit odd then.
After smoking a bit we got really hungry so the two of us went out to get something. There was a walk-in BBQ joint on Haight where you could buy a slab of ribs pretty cheap. We each got one and walked toward the park, eating our ribs. An angry panhandler glared at our affluence. I offered him a rib but all he wanted was money to get up with. I was saddened by what had become of the Haight by '68, the older heads becoming full time dealers while legions of the lost and hopeless drifted into the scene as their customers. But in the park we met a couple of girls from Redondo Beach and my mood improved.
Sid California
Photo credits:351-4-29 on Flickr by A. Subset, under Creative Commons license, some rights reserved, http://www.flickr.com/photos/places2go/2468678004/
By the time I met Stan, the Vietnam War had been over for almost 25 years. And yet there was a part of him that was still living through it – nightly in nightmares, if not daily in unwelcome daydreams he called flashbacks. A former pilot in the U.S. Air Force, he had been taken prisoner in the jungles of Southeast Asia. He managed to survive brutal treatment at the hands of his captors, he explained, through almost constant prayer and meditation.
When he and his fellow POWs were being fed adequately, the food and water gave him strength to endure beatings. Later, when the young men were being nearly starved to death, Stan would alternate between praying the rosary and reciting what fragments of Native American prayers he could remember from his half-Cherokee grandmother. By the time he was rescued, after 10 months in captivity, he had decided that God did not exist. Or that if He did, He was a monster.
Back in the U.S., the contempt with which he was met as a Vietnam veteran was so galling and so hurtful, he said, that his homecoming seemed worse in some ways than captivity. "What was I fighting for?" he wondered. The closest friends he had had before his deployment were now active in the peace movement. They were the long-haired hippies raging against him and men like him, many of whom had been drafted into service against their wills and had fought in a war they barely understood, much less believed in.
Slowly, he drifted into the peace movement himself. He grew his hair long. He told stories of his time in captivity, of his desperate days in a jungle cage being whipped and battered. He drank and fought, battling the difficult memories. He tried that old monster God again, petitioning him with prayers. He investigated his Native American heritage and briefly changed his last name to Attakulla, after a Cherokee chief who was once captured and held in captivity by members of an enemy tribe.
By the time I met Stan, the protest days were mostly over, too. It was the 1990s. He had married and divorced and married again. He had one son, one daughter and one stepson and one stepdaughter, the latter of whom was my close friend. He didn't work full-time, but he was active in several POW [POW = Prisoner of War] organizations. The family had POW license plates on both of their cars and a POW flag flew alongside the stars and stripes on a short post on the front porch.
I remember going to my friend's house — Stan's family's house — for dinner and seeing that dramatic rectangle. I had never seen anything like it: In the center of a field of black there was a white circle that showed a man's face in silhouetted profile, with a menacing guard tower and barbed wire fence behind him. Across the top it read, "POW - MIA" [MIA = Missing in Action]and at the bottom, in a curving arc, "You are not forgotten."
Stan was cheerful and crass. He and his wife Mary talked to us teenagers like we were equals. They seemed genuinely interested in the tiny dramas of our high school lives, and I guess that helped to spark in me some genuine interest in their experiences. Nowadays, Stan explained, he could speak freely about the things that had happened to him in the war. "For years, it was just too painful," he said. "I had fought for my life in Vietnam and then had to fight for it again in America." For at least one summer I was a regular at their dinner table, as eager to hear Stan's stories as he was to tell them. "This is history," I thought. "This is history as real life."
When Stan's daughter and I went to different colleges, it was the age before Facebook or any kind of social networking, so our friendship waned to occasional phone calls and e-mails. But when she got the news about Stan and decided to share it with me, she called and e-mailed. Specifically, she sent me a link and then called me immediately, so that she could be on the phone when I opened the message and saw the page where my browser had been redirected.
"Apologies and Clarifications," I read aloud into the phone. "What is this?"
"Just start reading," my friend said, her voice shaking. "You are not going to believe it."
I started reading. And I kept reading. And my stomach churned and my heart beat faster as comprehension and apprehension came over me in slow waves.
I would like to confess and express my sincere apologies...
I have told a number of lies...
I am sorry for what I have done to my family...
It was just a story I told that got out of hand...
What I was reading were dozens of apologies made by men who had spent years of their lives pretending to be POWs. I thought back to myself and my friend sitting at the dinner table, rapt by Stan's stories.
"Whoa," I said. "Whoa. Stan? Does this mean Stan --?"
"Just keep scrolling down," she said.
I realized her voice was shaking in anger rather than from weeping. I kept scrolling down and there it was, amid a crowd of similar terse regrets: An e-mail from Stan in which he admitted that he had never been a POW and, in fact, had never even served in Vietnam. His explanation for the lies was that he had simply been looking for a way to prove his life had meaning.
*** Needless to say, this revelation was a seismic shock for my friend's family. Ten years later, they are still working through the trauma of learning about these lies. For this post I have changed names and personal details out of respect for the family's privacy, but if you visit Phonies & Wannabes page on POWnetwork.org, you will see that real names are used throughout. If an individual writes an apology for perpetrating fraud, his or her listing will be moved to the Apologies & Clarifications page, but not removed from the site. The network offers the following rationale:
For those listed here — and still complaining that you are - you lied. This is the consequence of YOUR actions.
Many lie for DECADES — and some families only find out about the lies at their death. Grief and lies! What a legacy.
You can change that. ADMIT you lied. Be HUMAN instead of a fraud, liar, phony, wannabee.
I was born in 1968, I have no memory of the Vietnam War and my public education never touched on it. Perhaps the topic was too “hot” or controversial, or maybe the school year was just not long enough for history classes to cover it.
My generation is the children of Vietnam veterans. I had friends whose father’s were vets. However, aside from the isolated black and white photograph or a shadow box full of ribbons hanging on the wall, one would never have known it. It went unspoken.
I spent my youth around service men but can only recall a few instances where personal experiences were discussed. A co-worker of my dad’s over for dinner, talking about his experiences as a helicopter pilot or maybe a couple of veterans talking after a softball game when the beer began to flow.
The only thing I am sure of about the Vietnam War is that veterans do not like to talk about it, particularly around non-veterans.
This perception is so strong that on a few occasions when veterans have talked to me about their experiences, my first thought is to doubt their authenticity.
So what was the effect of all this silence?
My generation’s perception of the war is dictated by the movies we watched. For me, the effect of these movies was to separate the Vietnam War from other wars even further.
Of course there is Apocalypse Now (1979), an amazingly memorable movie that is so surreal it is impossible to take literally. However, the problem with this movie is it is impossible not to have its images color your view.
First Blood (1982), Deer Hunter (1978) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), although completely different kinds of movies, ironically all offer the clearest view of my generation’s perspective on the war. It reinforced the only experiences we had with the war, of the scruffy vet in fatigues, damaged and unable to fit into society. This is the only side of the war we had ever actually seen with our own eyes. Because we had never heard or seen veterans from other wars in this light, it served to separate Vietnam veterans further.
Platoon (1986) is probably the quintessential Vietnam War movie for my generation. It managed to pay respect to those who served but still showed the horror and madness of the war. However, you could say the whole point of the movie is to show how different the Vietnam War was from others.
Luckily, my education about the war went beyond Hollywood. Unfortunately, the books I read failed to clarify the picture. The only truth I discovered is that there is no definitive narrative of the war. Every author has their unique tale to tell. Some of the most memorable include; The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold, About Face by Col. David Hackworth, Vietnam: a history by Stanley Karnow, A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan and the fictional work The 13th Valley by John Del Vecchio.
The greatest disappointment in my education came when I took a college class entitled the Vietnam Experience, covering the war at home and abroad. Here I hoped all the disparate voices would at least be explained, if not woven into a single narrative. However the professor had his own story to tell and the class turned into a semester long indoctrination session.
In hindsight, perhaps it is too much to ask for a definitive narrative about something so controversial. Maybe the only way to look at it is just as a collection of individual perspectives.
If this is the case, the most transformative element in my education came when I met someone who was the child of Vietnamese immigrants. She didn’t resolve any of the larger questions nor give me that definitive narrative. However, now whenever I meet a veteran or discuss the war with someone, I think of her family’s experiences and what they fled from after the United States left Vietnam. Leaving all the larger questions aside, for me, they are what the war was about.
In the end, it does seem that something has been learned. If the steady stream of books from veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts is any indication, veterans of those wars are not going to let their story be told by someone else. Many different voices are infinitely better than silence.
Nate Cushman Sno-Isle Libraries
Photo credits: Vietnam War Memorial by eqkrishena, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/icelandic_sheepdog/2964161598/.
It was three months past the end of my one year tour in Vietnam. Months ago I had put in my extension to stay longer, and since I hadn't heard anything I thought it had been approved. Staying in Vietnam was my best option at the time. I spoke Vietnamese and had made friends with some of the villagers, there were tensions with my family back home, and my girlfriend had already left me before I was shipped out. I worked as an M.P. for the Provost Marshall, and for all intents and purposes, this was my life now and I wasn't really looking back.
One day I was checking I.D.'s and handing out badges to the locals who worked on base. I was telling jokes and chatting with Liėn, who had the longest hair you've ever seen (a foot and a half fell on the floor behind her when she took it out of the bun she normally wore).
Liėn told me some news from the village. A family had just lost their infant boy. He had died in the night in his sleep. The family wanted to bury him in the cemetery, which was just outside the village, but the village was surrounded by a huge fence of concertina wire and passes to leave were incredibly rare now. I knew that I wanted to help this family find a way to bury their baby in the cemetery, and I thought I just might know a way to get past that fence.
To leave the village, a pass authorized by the Provost Marshall was needed, and with tensions high with the north and conflict already common, passes were never issued. I got nowhere with my initial request to the Provost Marshall for the funeral.
"I'm not authorizing that," he said, without looking up.
Then I remembered that I had done a favor a while back for a high ranking officer who wanted to get her hair styled in the village. I had used my Vietnamese to arrange an appointment for her and she was happy with the result. I called her right away to see if she could help me with the funeral. She got on the phone with the Deputy Division Commander and not long after, I heard the Provost Marshall slam the phone down and say, "I don't know who you know, O'Brien, but you've got two hours to get this done!"
"Yes, sir." I said and left.
The father carried the small, light colored teak wooden box with beautiful letters carved on all sides in front of him while the mother, brother, a cousin, and two young children followed behind. Afterward, they were more than grateful and wanted to repay me and I was invited to their house for a meal.
Not long after this I was issued orders to be shipped out. Apparently someone noticed I was overdue on this tour.
Walter O'Brien, Wisconsin as told to his daughter Jennifer S., Sno-Isle Libraries
Photo: Sergeant Walter A. O'Brien "Sergeant O'B, No. 1 MP" pictured here with "Papasan Sam" Nguyen, a local who worked as a sign maker and handyman on the base and also carved the lettering on the teak burial box.
Photo courtesy of Jennifer S. All rights reserved.
I remember as a young boy when my aunt’s husband was killed in Vietnam. My uncle was a pilot in the Air Force and left behind my aunt and three young daughters. I can still recall the funeral and how sad everyone was even though I didn’t understand. In 1987, I visited The Wall in Washington, D.C. It amazed me how many names were listed and the feelings that came over you as you approached the structure. I made an etching of my Uncle’s name and was able to give it to my aunt later that summer
In 1969, my older brother left for Vietnam and served in the Army. It was a trying time for his new young wife and my family. I recall how happy we were when he returned home one year later.
Forty years later I went to Vietnam myself as a tourist. My guide was excellent and discussed the “American War” whenever I wanted. I saw firsthand what the war had produced from persons disabled from Agent Orange to being warned where to walk in remote areas because landmines were still around. I crawled around in the Ho Chi Minh tunnels and had bats fly at my face.
During my visit I was treated like royalty by the Vietnamese people. The food was excellent and the weather was HOT. I had A/C everywhere I went and was greeted with cold bottled water and chilled moist hand towels at every turn.
Upon my return to Seattle, I telephone my big brother the next day and asked “How did you ever last a year?” He laughed. When I saw him next he shared photos of his time in the Army that I had never seen.
When I have told friends and family about my trip so many others want to go. I encourage everyone to do so. It’s important we remember.
I worked for the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Aurora, Illinois during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Having worked my way from elevator operator (that’s another story) to manager of small electrics, I got to see firsthand what people were cooking with at that time.
Believe it or not, there was a time when pot roast was cooked on top of the stove or in the oven. It’s hard to imagine that now, especially with slow cookers back in vogue. But in 1971 the crockpot debuted in American stores and this had a huge impact on the dinner table. More women had entered the workforce and finding a way to have dinner ready when you walked in the door was a task that the Rival Company solved with their product. I can remember the buyer promoting this at a staff training and making it sound almost magical. And in the era of harvest gold and avocado green appliances, the best selling color for us was burnt orange.
It seemed that every bride who registered for wedding gifts wanted or needed:
A bun warmer A hot tray A fondue pot
But the product that had a significant impact on us all was Nordic Ware’s bundt pan. A modern take on an old world pan, this cast aluminum pan gave American cooks a new format to experiment with. And when Ella Rita Helfrich of Houston, TX won the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1966 with her recipe for Tunnel of Fudge Cake, made with a bundt pan, the pan became as popular as the recipe. Snohomish had its own Pillsbury Bake-Off winner in 1971 with Mrs. Pearl Hall’s Pecan Pie Surprise Bars.
A few months ago I had a group book report assignment for school that needed to be about a different country, and we picked Vietnam. My classmates and I read books about the people and the country, and one of the questions was to interview someone who had lived in the country we picked for extra credit. I picked my great uncle who had served for a year in the army in Vietnam. I didn’t know very much about his time in Vietnam because it is not something that he talks about very often.
We called him one Sunday and asked him some questions about the climate and the culture there. He actually talked with us for nearly an hour sharing not only the answers to the questions that I had about the country and culture, but about the people and some of his experiences there.
I learned a lot from him about stuff for the report, but also some things about the war that I hadn’t read in the books. I found out things about how the different groups of people there got along. I found out that sometimes the mud was over two feet deep in the roads. I found out that you can ride a light vehicle over a land mine and survive, but a heavier truck that comes along next can blow up. I found out that if you use gasoline without diesel oil to get rid of latrine waste in barrels, it will explode and make a big mess. I found out a lot of things.
I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1970-1974. I have many fond memories of those years, including listening to the great rock music that came out of the 60’s and early 70’s. I went to some great concerts, both on and off campus.
I remember driving from Champaign to Indiana University in Bloomington to hear Emerson, Lake and Palmer and The Band. E, L & P were the back-up band, but they later went on to become a very popular group in their own right (Lucky Man was one of my favorites). I also went to hear the Grateful Dead at the Assembly Hall on the U of I campus. It was a sold-out concert and, if I remember correctly, pretty rowdy (Deadheads galore!).One weekend I drove to Chicago with a group of girls I didn’t know (I had advertised for a ride) to go to an Allman Brothers concert. It was on a Sunday night, so we drove up Sunday afternoon and came back after the concert ended at midnight. I had to be at work at 8:00 AM on Monday, so I got no sleep that night, but it was worth it. Another weekend I drove to Chicago to see Genesis, one of my favorite groups, at the Auditorium. I had an extensive LP collection (rock, jazz, and classical) and was continually in pursuit of a better stereo system. I got some great deals through Good Vibes and Playback, the two audio equipment stores on campus (one of my boyfriends worked at Good Vibes; a later boyfriend worked at Playback). At the time, for the audiophile college student, it was all about savoring the audio experience to the utmost. Each component (receiver/amplifier, turntable and speakers) played its part in contributing to the final sound. I remember going to Good Vibes after hours to sample different speakers at very loud volumes (with my boyfriend, who worked there and had the key to let us in!). Some of my favorite groups were The Doors, Moody Blues, Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Yes, and of course Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and my LP collection certainly reflected that fact. I still have all of my LP’s (about 500) sitting in boxes on the floor of my closet (in pristine condition, I might add), in addition to my turntable (Philips 212 with an Empire top-of-the-line cartridge – tracked at less than 1 gram!) and speakers (Dynaco A-25’s) that I used back then (the turntable has been replaced by a Sony CD player, however). Look in both the Sno-Isle and Everett Public Libraries catalog under the subject heading Rock music 1961-1970 to check out CD’s from that era. Sorry, LP’s are no longer available in the collections. Mary K. Johnson Librarian Sno-Isle Libraries Photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/khiltscher/ /CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
First Lieutenant, U .S. Army Company B, 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry 25th Infantry Division
Place and Date:
Hau Nghia Province, Republic of Vietnam 25 March 1969
Citation:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. 1LT Doane was serving as a platoon leader when his company, engaged in a tactical operation, abruptly contacted an enemy force concealed in protected bunkers and trenches.
Three of the leading soldiers were pinned down by enemy crossfire. One was seriously wounded. After efforts of one platoon to rescue these men had failed, it became obvious that only a small group could successfully move close enough to destroy the enemy position and rescue or relieve the trapped soldiers.
1LT Doane, although fully aware of the danger of such an action, crawled to the nearest enemy bunker and silenced it. He was wounded but continued to advance to a second enemy bunker. As he prepared to throw a grenade, he was again wounded. Undaunted, he deliberately pulled the pin on the grenade and lunged with it into the enemy bunker, destroying this final obstacle.
1LT Doane's supreme act enabled his company to rescue the trapped men without further casualties. The extraordinary courage and selflessness displayed by this officer were an inspiration to his men and are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army.
Steve Doane was one of my classmates during Officer Training at Ft. Benning, GA, and at U.S. Army Ranger School. He deserves to be remembered even by those that didn’t know him, for his selfless service and sacrifice to the United States of America.
When I heard that he had been KIA it came with the story that he was put in for the Medal of Honor and it was downgraded to a Silver Star. I always felt bad about that, until just a few weeks ago, when I found the on-line Vietnam Wall and checked Steve's spot. Apparently at some point since my first knowledge of it, they did in fact award him the MOH. Steve got to Vietnam ahead of me, and was already dead by the time I got there; he accomplished a lot in a few short months.
Many major events happened in the 1960s and early 1970s. I was born in the mid 1950s. I was a child in the 1960s. I was in high school in the early 1970s. Therefore, many of the major events were in the background of my daily life and not a major personal concern. But, sometimes the current events of the world intruded on the daily life of a kid growing up in the City of Seattle.
My brother Dave is nearly a decade older than I. He was in rock and roll bands in the early 1960s. Band practice was sometimes at our house or a nearby neighbor's. My parents, as well as many of the adults in the neighborhood, would bail their houses when the band started to play and go shopping up at Safeway in White Center. My folks said it was a great time to catch up with all the neighbors that they never see when they were all home. All the younger kids would head over to the house to listen to the band practice. The Seattle area had lots of bands all practicing for the “Battle of the Bands.”
As the boys in the band got closer to their senior year in high school, the conversations would turn toward the escalating conflict in Vietnam, the possibility of being drafted into the military, who they knew in school who had gone to fight, who went to Canada, and who got married or went to college to get a deferment. My brother got married and joined the National Guard. He spent six months in boot camp in Louisiana and Texas. He somehow got into the medical corps and part of what they did was practice giving shots to oranges. This is what I his little sister remember from his letters about what he was doing -- he gave shots to oranges. Later he had to spend a month each year at the base near Yakima, Washington, in the heat of the Eastern Washington summers practicing war games. He hated it and does not much care for Yakima to this day.
In the early 1970s, the war in Vietnam had escalated even more and there were protests and a greater push for peace. A decade after my brother and his friends had talked, I overheard the boys at school talking about the escalating conflict in Vietnam, the possibility of being drafted into the military, who they knew in school who had gone to fight, who went to Canada, how unlike our older brothers you could not get a deferment, and who went to Canada. But I was a girl and girls did not fight in the war. I knew people who went to war, got drafted, were wounded, killed or were missing in action. I had friends wearing MIA bracelets for their brothers or cousins or boyfriends. That was as close as the war got to me on a personal level.
My Uncle Dickie, my father’s youngest brother, was career Air Force and he served in Vietnam as well as Korea. In his one or two visits to the family, the war was not mentioned. My uncle kept much of his military life to himself and his service had little to do with me.
While I was playing hide and seek with the neighbor kids, riding my bike, swimming, talking and giggling -- for hours or as long as my father would allow –- to my friends on the telephone, all those current events of the time were not the dominant issue in my life, no not the dominant, but they did shadow much of what I did, how I think and who I became.
Civil unrest; race relations; the war; the draft; the draft dodgers; school busing; riots; the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; communes; Peace, Love and Flower Power; protest songs; flower children; and Haight Ashbury, drugs sex and rock n’roll and the breakup of the Beatles. All of this was shown nightly on the TV news – the first few years in black and white and the later years in living color. All of this provided the background for my formative years and became a part of who I am.
Diane Brown Sno-Isle Libraries
Comments about the photograph:
This is one of my brother’s bands. It is not the one I was thinking about when I wrote the above but the one he was in a year later. My brother Dave Brown –the guitar player and Lynn Whitehall – the bass player – got married in August 1965 after her June graduation from high school. He graduated in 1964.
In my brother’s words: "This picture was taken in 1965 at 26th Ave. S.W. and Roxbury (West Seattle/White Center) in the MarketTime Store parking lot."
The car is a 1954(?) 55 Vett. Dick is on baritone sax, Tom on piano, Lynn on bass, Curt on tenor sax and his Corvette, and Dave Brown on Guitar. "The Sierras" (MarketTime was an early or alternative name for Fred Meyer,)
Photograph courtesy of Diane Brown. All rights reserved.
The Things They Carried is a novel that brings back memories. While I wasn’t around to participate in the events of the Vietnam War era directly, the legacy of the war and especially the protests against it had a large impact on the city where I spent many of my formative years: Madison, Wisconsin.
If you have spent any time in Madison, you know that it has a reputation for being a home to radical and alternative ideas. One of the monikers attached to the city, Mad-Town, says it all. A major reason for this is the fact that Madison is home to the University of Wisconsin at Madison which has a continual influx of academics and students who aren’t shy about expressing their beliefs, orthodox or not.
Not surprisingly, during the late 60s and early 70s UW-Madison was a hotbed of protest and opposition to the Vietnam War. A NOVA documentary, Two Days in October, based on the book They Marched into Sunlight, artfully recreates this time and the people who lived through it by recording the events in Vietnam and on the campus of the UW-Madison over the course of the same two days in 1967.
After the war and the protests were long over, the central conflict between those who decided to go to Vietnam and those who did not still haunted the campus. One of O’Brien’s stories, "On the Rainy River," captures the agonizing decision many men had to make and how they, and society, judged them for it.
In many of the lectures I attended my instructors were clearly still grappling with the decision they had made about Vietnam all those years ago. It is this memory, or perhaps it is a story as O’Brien suggests, of a personal decision having such a powerful effect on a whole generation that came back to me when reading The Things They Carried.
Richard Woolf Everett Public Library
Image: Poster with a large image of the Dow Riot (1967) on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, with riot police beating protesters. Includes the Lyndon Baines Johnson quote, "Our foreign policy must always be an extension of this nation's domestic policy. Our safest guide to what we do abroad is a good look at what we are doing at home."
This past Sunday, the Everett Public Library screened two documentary films produced during the time of the Vietnam war. The creation and distribution of these films are a part, perhaps less well known, of the story of United States involvement in Vietnam.
Night of the Dragon, released in 1966, and Vietnam! Vietnam!, completed in 1968 but not released until 1971, were produced and distributed by the United States Information Agency (USIA) – the independent agency within the executive branch of our government that existed from 1953 to 1999. Part of the mission of USIA was to explain and support American foreign policy and promote US national interests through overseas information programs. These two films, narrated by Charlton Heston, were part of a USIA attempt to explain and justify US involvement in Vietnam to the world.
Neither of these films could be shown in the US at the time they were released. Until 1990, federal law prohibited films produced by the USIA to be shown within the US unless a special exemption was made by Congress for a particular film. Congress was reluctant to have USIA information efforts directed at American citizens.
USIA practice was to distribute its films to foreign cinemas and world leaders, and to show them in USIA libraries around the world. While Night of the Dragon was shown widely abroad, Vietnam! Vietnam! was given very little exposure. By the time it was ready for distribution in 1971, our foreign policy and the military and political situation had changed and the film was not considered helpful.
Both of these films are included in the dvd, Vietnam: A Retrospective that can be found in the Everett Public Library collection. (Nicholas Cull’s The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 will be available soon for check out – for those who would like to read about the USIA.)
There’s a saying in libraries, “Every book, its reader.”* Indeed, every piece of writing is a unique experience for each reader. For me, the beauty of The Things They Carried is its humanity. Tim O’Brien conveys the intensity and subtlety of those who experience war first-hand with powerful descriptions of what lies beyond death counts and political decisions.
Several passages from this book will stick with me for a very long time, such as, “And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains to do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen."
This book is exquisitely crafted, expressing at once such depth, beauty, and terror. To write a war story in this way is a great artistic feat and a profound tribute to the service and courage of those who endure the most grueling of circumstances.
Kara Fox Everett Public Library
* Ranganathan, S.R., The Five Laws of Library Science (Bombay: Asia Pub. House, 1963)
Photograph credit: Crack troops of the Vietnamese Army in combat operations against the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas. Marshy terrain of the delta country makes their job of rooting out terrorists hazardous and extremely difficult., 1961 ARC Identifier 541973 / Local Identifier 306-PSC-61(9069) Item from Record Group 306: Records of the U.S. Information Agency, 1900 - 2003
My husband was in Law School and I was in my second year of teaching elementary school when his Army orders to Viet Nam came. He could get circuitous travel and settle me in Bangkok before going on to his Saigon assignment. I found a postage-stamp size apartment with A/C bedroom and outdoor pool replete with shared housekeeper, laundress and houseboy. Emotions heated up when he found he’d been sent upcountry in Viet Nam as a 2nd Lieutenant to take command of a 500-inch howitzer gun near Quan Loi.
I was hired to teach at the International School of Bangkok, and the Thai Headmaster obtained an extended work permit for me. My gifted 4th grade class kept me diverted from the worry of a spouse fighting the war. Weekends I toured about, visiting and taking photos at the Wats (temples), open markets, jewelry stores, art shows at the Siam InterContinental, playing tennis on the grass court at the British Embassy and buying jasmine scented flowers and leis for the apartment.
With double holidays, American and Thai, there was ample time to visit the ancient Thai capitol at Ayutha, upcountry to Chaing Mai, to the beach at Pattaya, and out-of-country to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Vientiane in Laos and the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, South Viet Nam. When homesickness and worry overcame me I’d visit the Officer’s Club with its long bank of military telephones. I was successful once in getting patched through to Quan Loi, talking to all the fellow homesick American military dispatchers along the way. This also was a protected spot of Americana where hamburgers, fries, and ice cream complemented by the Beauty Shop treats and jewelry and gift store items you didn’t have to bargain for abounded.
More was packed into this one year, 1969-1970, than one could expect. On the way home I routed through Tokyo for the summer as I had been selected as a National Science Foundation Fellow to study Math and Science for teachers. We both arrived Stateside in August to meet family and friends in Seattle while waiting for final military orders which came through quickly for Fort Carson in Colorado Springs.
My brother Guy Blackwelder was a Vietnam veteran. He died of a heart attack alone in a trailer on top of a hill with marijuana growing all around. He was finally at peace. He had lived with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for over 34 years. Marijuana was his choice of self medication. He lived in California and was licensed to grow pot. This was his dream.
Living alone was the only way he could live peacefully. He became stressed when others were around, even people who loved him. The war was never very far away. At any given moment he might relive that horrible day when his buddy was blown up in front of him. They were walking along a path in the jungle. He heard a click and then the explosion.
He was a Marine and on the front line. Three-fourths of his first platoon were killed in action. He asked to be transferred. When he heard that his old commanding sergeant had died, he asked to attend the funeral. The request was denied. He went AWOL. They found him wandering a beach with no gun, and no helmet. When he asked the Chaplin why he had to kill, the Chaplin had no answer.
When Guy came back from the war, I asked him questions. He either didn’t say anything or he said, “You wouldn’t understand.” His marriage to his childhood sweetheart failed. He lost many jobs. He lost friends. People with Asian looks scared him. Simple arguments with neighbors easily escalated to brawls.
He wasn’t always like this. I remember a laughing easy going young teenager with a winning smile. He was a good baker and made the best cakes I had ever tasted. He was smart. I marveled that he could have passing grades without opening a book. He was frugal and wore his brothers’ clothes to save his own for special occasions. He was drafted at eighteen, so he joined the Marines.
What is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that may trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat. National Institute of Mental Health
What are the symptoms?
Signs and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder typically begin within three months of a traumatic event. In a small number of cases, though, PTSD symptoms may not occur until years after the event.
Post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms are commonly grouped into three types: intrusive memories, avoidance and numbing, and increased anxiety or emotional arousal (hyperarousal).
Symptoms of intrusive memories may include:
• Flashbacks, or reliving the traumatic event for minutes or even days at a time
• Upsetting dreams about the traumatic event Symptoms of avoidance and emotional numbing may include:
* Trying to avoid thinking or talking about the traumatic event * Feeling emotionally numb * Avoiding activities you once enjoyed * Hopelessness about the future * Memory problems * Trouble concentrating * Difficulty maintaining close relationships Symptoms of anxiety and increased emotional arousal may include:
* Irritability or anger * Overwhelming guilt or shame * Self-destructive behavior, such as drinking too much * Trouble sleeping * Being easily startled or frightened * Hearing or seeing things that aren't there Mayo Clinic
PTSD is more common in “at-risk” groups such as those serving in combat. About 30% of the men and women who served in Vietnam experience PTSD. An additional 20% to 25% have had partial PTSD at some point in their lives. More than half of all male Vietnam veterans and almost half of all female Vietnam veterans have experienced "clinically serious stress reaction symptoms." PTSD has also been detected among veterans of other wars. Estimates of PTSD from the Gulf War are as high as 10%. Estimates from the war in Afghanistan are between 6 and 11%. Current estimates of PTSD in military personnel who served in Iraq range from 12% to 20%. What is PTSD?
I miss you Guy. Rest in peace.
Love, Alphise
In the photo, Guy is the Marine with his arms crossed.
Photograph courtesy of Alphise Brock. All rights reserved.
I am certainly no expert on Vietnam War films, in fact I remember being less than impressed by most of the early choices. But then came Platoon and the perspective was so fresh and alive, that I was captured. As Mark Deming notes in the All Movie Guide "Platoon is a grunts-eye-view of the war.” Oliver Stone showed the individual soldiers’ perspective and gave a crash course in survival during the Vietnam War.
Unique perspective is the unifying team in the movies I love about the Vietnam War and Stone gives us another in Born on the Fourth of July, just three years after Platoon. Centered on an amazing performance by Tom Cruise, the movie is about the political journey of Ron Kovic who goes from Marine, to paraplegic Vet, and ends up an anti-war activist.
Another unique perspective on the Vietnam War comes from Good Morning Vietnam and brings humor into the mix. Robin Williams plays Adrian Cronauer as a young airman sent to Vietnam to work as a DJ for the Armed Forces Radio Network and he blasts the airwaves with rock and roll and a constant barrage of humor. This sets him at odds with the station and the officers in charge, but makes him a huge hit with the actual soldiers.
The movie version of We Were Soldiers Once and Young is based on actual events, like many of these films. Randall Wallace directs and gives the story unique perspective by cutting between the American troops, the Viet Cong, and the homefront, where Madeleine Stowe gives an excellent performance as the leader of the wives. This gives a great deal of depth to the film.
Werner Herzog brought his unique style to the Vietnam War in Rescue Dawn, another story coming out of actual events. It is the story of Dieter Dengler who is born to fly and credits the United States with giving him wings. He crashes in Laos and is imprisoned, not only by the Viet Cong, but more importantly by the jungle. Christian Bale gives a determined performance as Dengler who becomes obsessed with escaping, bringing himself to the brink of madness. When he does escape, the perilous journey brings him again to the edge as he makes his way to Thailand. This gives the movie a very personal perspective unique in the annals of Vietnam War films and is enhanced by the music used which is classical and introspective rather than rousing adventure stuff.
1969: Skinny and small for my age, I looked even younger than my 13 years, and despaired of ever looking like the girls who filled the pages of my older sisters’ Seventeen and Cosmo magazines. Within a year, the anti-war rallies would be going strong in Vancouver, BC. That year, though, the war seemed far away from our neighborhood, with its tall narrow houses crowded cheek by jowl near the city’s inner harbor. Two doors down from us lived a family that had something very unique, at least in my experience: a bomb shelter.
The Drikos family had three boys, two of whom were just slightly older than me. Their mother yelled at them a lot, so we tended to know more than we needed to about their comings and goings. I’d gone with the other neighborhood kids to look through the bomb shelter when their Dad finished it, and was impressed by the amount of food and emergency stuff it contained. The concept was completely alien to me, though, and my parents thought it was pretty extreme.
I considered the two younger boys bullies, and tried to avoid them as much as possible. Chris, the oldest, was different. He was always kind to me, even though I was much younger. He must have been eighteen or nineteen that year – old enough to be outside the orb of my attention. One hot summer day I was sitting up on my front porch, enjoying the afternoon shade, when Chris came up and sat beside me on the top step.
“I’ve joined up,” he said. “I’m going to Vietnam.”
I did not know what he meant, so he had to lay it out for me: he had joined the U.S. Army, and was heading to boot camp the following week. Why the U.S. and not Canadian? He said he wanted to serve where he was most needed.
Chris was a good looking young man, blond and tanned. He was strong, too – the Drikos’ had a weight set in their basement, and Chris had put in his time on it. I was very much aware of his arm near mine, sun-bleached hairs brushing my elbow as we chatted. When he put his hand behind my head and pulled my face to his I was both unprepared and unresisting. My first kiss. When it ended, Chris got up and tousled my hair before walking back to his own house. He left a few days later, then a short while after that his family moved, and my attention was drawn to other things. I never saw Chris again, but I have not forgotten that kiss.
Mary Campbell Oak Harbor
Photograph courtesy of Mary Campbell. All rights reserved.
The Things They Carried is widely hailed as one of the finest books about the Vietnam war. Sometimes poignant war stories sneak up on you, where you least expect them. Though it seems unlikely to say so now, I began reading Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis while preparing for The Big Read, not because of The Big Read.
I picked up Hearts due to a recommendation I heard months ago, from none other than Seattle’s favorite reader, Nancy Pearl. I remembered her saying that Hearts is terrifying because of the way its terror slowly reveals itself. Though I had previously really enjoyed King’s books, I hadn’t read one in years. Pearl’s description made me want to check in with King again.
Lo and behold, Hearts is a book that, strangely, complements O’Brien’s Things. In these two books, King and O’Brien are telling a story of survival, lost innocence, and the war’s interminable legacy. And in their own way, both books are a little fantastical. In Hearts, King brings in his penchant for terror early in his protagonists’ lives, long before they ever get to war; he uses that terror to explore the reasons why some became anti-war activists and why others became soldiers.
You won’t find Hearts in Atlantis on any “read-alike” list for The Things They Carried. There are many outstanding books about war, or that use war as a metaphor. What I enjoyed most about reading Hearts in Atlantis was not so much the book itself, but the transcendence of Pearl’s recommendation, the way the book unexpectedly balanced my reading of O’Brien’s Things. To me, this is what programs like The Big Read are all about!
The Everett Public Library currently owns 57 titles with the Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975 -- Fiction subject heading, and even more under Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Fiction. Go forth and read!
November 7, 1972. I was a college freshman at the University of Illinois in Urbana, waiting patiently in a long line to vote for the first time.
Like many people I was unhappy that the U.S. was still involved in the war in Vietnam, even though two thirds of the ground troops had left by then. The high number of U.S. and South Vietnamese combat deaths, relentless bombing of Cambodia, thousands of civilian casualties, and the wasteland created by widespread spraying of Agent Orange had convinced me that new leadership was needed.
I cast my first vote for George McGovern with the confidence of youth, sure that others would do the same and that the war would end.
Even now it’s difficult to comprehend that the voting results for my dorm floor mirrored the national results: McGovern lost by a landslide; I was the only one of 25 girls who had voted for him.
While everyone else attended a victory party, I went to the end of the hall (there weren’t yet phones in the dorm rooms), called home and talked (actually cried) to my mom and dad about the experience. It was just so hard to believe that my fellow students felt so differently about national politics. It’s a lesson I’m still learning.
Betsy A. Langley
Photo credits:
President Richard Nixon [left] from Biographical Directory of the United States of America, United States Senate.
Senator George McGovern [right] from Biographical Directory of the United States of America, United States Senate.
Having grown up in the Vietnam War era, I’d seen the images of jungles, warfare, and war protest on the evening news nearly every day of my high school life. They told us that this was the first war that came into living rooms and that it was more “real” than any other war in history. When Saigon fell, in April 1975, I felt a keen sense of sadness mixed with relief. Perhaps now our nation could begin the healing process.
That summer, when I was living in Corpus Christi, Texas, with husband (now ex-husband), the helicopters that had participated in the evacuation of Saigon were sent to the Army helicopter repair depot that was located on the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station. While we were driving through the base and past the helicopter depot, I saw these helicopters and for the first time, it seemed so real. The sight of bullet holes, cracked windows, and broken pieces of the aircraft have remained in my mind for these 35 years. And I learned that seeing something on the television news isn’t as real as seeing it up close.
Terry Beck Sno-Isle Libraries
Photo credit: UH-1D helicopters airlift members of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment from the Filhol Rubber Plantation area to a new staging area, during Operation "Wahiawa," a search and destroy mission conducted by the 25th Infantry Division, northeast of Cu Chi, Vietnam., 05/16/1966 [Online version on May 5, 2010, available through the online catalog atwww.archives.gov/research/arc/].
November 7, 1972. I was a college freshman at the University of Illinois in Urbana, waiting patiently in a long line to vote for the first time.
