What I Learned from the Viet Nam War
When I was about 8, around 1967, my family would watch the evening news just waiting for the lottery numbers to appear. Not like the lottery of today, where someone expects to make money from the numbers, but the lottery of disruption and possible death. I’m not sure I really understood what was happening when the date of October 15 came across the bottom of the screen, but I did understand my mother’s sudden gasp of breath and silent tears coursing down her face. That number meant something bad to her, and my chronically angry father snapped off the TV and went back out to his shop without a word to my mom.
Soon after, my ashen-faced, eighteen-year-old brother Lyn came home and he and mom sequestered themselves in her bedroom. I was just a kid, but I knew something more horrible than usual was afoot.
Connecting the dots of childhood history is no easy task, and it is difficult to piece the snapshots of memory together into some sense of coherent placement. I am unsure how much time passed before it sunk in to my world that my favorite brother was going away, to a place on the other side of the planet. During this time, my parents fought often, and angrily, about something called the draft, with mom insisting on getting my brother out of the country. My father, who had been in the Navy during another war, declared it was my brother’s duty to fight for his country and my mother believed this war was not a thing to which she was willing to sacrifice a child. I think this is the first time I understood about other countries, the possibility of people I knew dying, and of a place called Canada.
On a bright Southern afternoon, my mother, Lyn, and I went to the city. We dropped my brother off at a large, brick building and continued on to the library. Hours later, I recall sitting in the car, hot from the sun, reading a Jack Kjelgaard book while I waited for my mother to come out of the place we had previously left my brother. Funny how in my memory of this day I can clearly recall the book I was reading, and I sat engrossed in Snow Dog, oblivious to the crash about to forever shake my family.
When my mother and brother finally returned, my brother had both legs encased in plaster casts and was on crutches. As the youngest, I rarely got to ride in the front seat when one of my siblings was with us, but my brother was only able to ride in back with his snow-white legs and deep smell of pain.
Only later did I learn that my brother volunteered for the Army to avoid this thing called the draft, and because of a genetic patella abnormality, he had to have both knees “reset” in order to pass the physical. Draft or volunteer, the Army had decided this abnormality could, and would, be “corrected” so my brother could go to Vietnam.
One day my brother was just gone. I have no recollection of how, or even when. I don’t believe I ever saw him in uniform, or realized he would just not be at the breakfast table one morning. I think my brother John, just eighteen months older than Lyn was on a church mission at the time, and immediately went to college on his return from that mission. I now know one could avoid this thing called the draft by these actions, although I don’t believe this was John’s purpose. It was just the way things happened.
We had a party-line telephone on our rural farm, and occasionally we would get a call from Lyn. Phone connections were never great, but these calls were particularly bad and I recall being puzzled by my parents, in the course of conversation, always saying, “stop” when they finished a sentence. I knew nothing of short-wave radio, and the manner in which one had to speak in order to use this device. I don’t think I was ever allowed to talk to Lyn, and these phone calls were always brief, and left my father more angry than usual and mother sad for days afterward.
On a rich fall day, I overheard a conversation between my parents involving words like Letterman hospital, hepatitis, and heroin. I knew what a hospital was, having spent time getting tonsils removed once, but these other words were a mystery, which no one would explain.
I learned about hitch-hiking when a caricature of my brother returned one day, wearing a green Army jacket, carrying a duffle bag and sporting long hair and what I later learned was a peace sign sewn to his military coat. Lyn was a cheerful, pudgy boy when last I saw him, and here was this skinny, crazy-eyed, angry man in his place. He told me about leaving this hospital in San Francisco and getting rides from strangers across the country to come home for Christmas. Little remains in memory of that holiday except Lyn and my parents arguing a great deal, and my mother crying a lot. I was happy to have my brother home again, and yet he was not my brother.
Lyn went to North Carolina to finish his time in the Army, and I think he told me he would be soon home again. The calls from the FBI and the Army started not long after he went away and I learned about AWOL and Authority. Finally, my brother was in Canada, and he would telephone from time to time. My father would not speak to him, and my mother would always seem to be a combination of happy and sad when he would call. I was home alone when he called one day, and so, was able to talk with him. He laughed, in his old way, and cheerfully told me of getting on his motorcycle and riding away north to Canada. I asked when he was coming home, and he said they’d have to catch him first. He told me he was calling from a phone booth, on a particular street in a particular city and explained about phone tapping and the fact we were being recorded. He ended the conversation by telling the Feebies he would be long gone before they ever arrived at the phone booth.
Two men in black suits came one day. I was again alone, and at first, mistook these men for Mormon missionaries, due to their black suits and crisp, white shirts. They began asking me questions about my brother, his friends, his girlfriend Mary Sue, and what he and I talked about when he called. Accustomed as I was to talking with adults, I was not uncomfortable with these men, at least initially. One of them began to yell questions at me, rapid-fire, and the day got decidedly darker. I quickly came to realize these men were not good men, and they meant my brother and family harm. I began to cry. The angry one walked to the family bulletin board and jerked down my signed picture of Bert Ward, dressed as Robin, and he wrote a number on my beloved picture. He wrote, “Agent Walker, FBI,” and a phone number. I sat in the corner of the kitchen with my picture, and rocked, and cried. I have no idea how much time passed before my mother returned to find me like this. She was enraged that these policemen type men had interrogated her 11-year-old daughter like a criminal and recall her dialing the number on my Bert Ward picture and screaming at who ever was on the other end of that line.
When my brother called again, my mother told him of these visitors. Later, I learned my brother returned to Fort Bragg, and turned himself in to avoid further trouble to his family, and favorite kid sister. He went to prison. I learned the FBI is bad, war makes brothers turn into strangers, drugs are everywhere, and the peace sign makes fathers angry with their sons.
My brother, when next I saw him, gave me a book called Conversations With Americans, and told me about censorship and cautioned me to never let anyone see this book but that I should read it, and understand how war makes boys turn into crazy men.
About halfway through this book of horrors worse than any ever dreamed up by my then-idol E.A. Poe, my father caught me reading it, and threw it into the fire. He screamed at my brother that this book was hardly appropriate reading material for anyone, let alone a young girl. I’ve never finished the book, and yet the images of what I read remain with me today. Young men pushing people out of helicopters and listening to them scream on their way down, doing unspeakable things to the genitals of men and women, burning children to death. Mostly, I learned war has many victims; the soldier left living, most of all.
I have a war-age son now, and our country again finds itself embroiled in bitter battle for ephemeral and dubious goals. I’ve learned he cannot go to Canada, but I have also learned there are other places he can go, and go he will. There will be no draft for my son, or cast wearing to “correct” the patellar abnormality with which he too was born. I’ve learned I can stand up to the FBI and feel no compunction for avoiding the possible sacrificing of my son’s life or his psyche, for a husband’s, a father’s, or even a nation’s views.
