I was there Last Night.

[MarineAO]

A couple of years ago someone asked me if I still thought about Vietnam. I
nearly laughed in their face. How do you stop thinking about it? Every day
for the last twenty-four years, I wake up with it, and go to bed with it.
But this is what I said. "Yea, I think about it. I can't quit thinking
about it. I never will. But, I've also learned to live with it. I'm
comfortable with the memories. I've learned to stop trying to forget and
learned instead to embrace it. It just doesn't scare me anymore."

A psychologist once told me that NOT being affected by the experience over
there would be abnormal. When he told me that, it was like he'd just given
me a pardon. It was as if he said, "Go ahead and feel something about the
place, Bob. It ain't going nowhere. You're gonna wear it for the rest of
your life. Might as well get to know it."

A lot of my "brothers" haven't been so lucky. For them the memories are too
painful, their sense of loss too great. My sister told me of a friend she
has whose husband was in the Nam. She asks this guy when he was there.
Here's what he said, "Just last night." It took my sister a while to figure
out what he was talking about. JUST LAST NIGHT. Yeah I was in the Nam.
When? JUST LAST NIGHT. During sex with my wife. And on my way to work
this morning. Over my lunch hour. Yeah, I was there.

My sister says I'm not the same brother that went to Vietnam. My wife says
I won't let people get close to me, not even her. They are probably both
right.

Ask a vet about making friends in Nam. It was risky. Why? Because we were
in the business of death, and death was with us all the time. It wasn't the
death of, "If I die before I wake." This was the real thing. The kind
where boys scream for their mothers. The kind that lingers in your mind and
becomes more real each time you cheat it. You don't want to make a lot of
friends when the possibility of dying is that real, that close. When you
do, friends become a liability.

A guy named Bob Flanigan was my friend. Bob Flanigan is dead. I put him in
a body bag one sunny day, April 29, 1969. We'd been talking, only a few
minutes before he was shot, about what we were going to do when we got back
in the world. Now, this was a guy who had come in country the same time as
myself. A guy who was loveable and generous. He had blue eyes and sandy
blond hair.

When he talked, it was with a soft drawl. Flanigan was a hick and he knew
it. That was part of his charm. He didn't care. Man, I loved this guy
like the brother I never had. But, I screwed up. I got too close to him.
Maybe I didn't know any better. But I broke one of the unwritten rules of
war.

DON'T GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO DIE. Sometimes you can't help it.

You hear vets use the term "buddy" when they refer to a guy they spent the
war with. "Me and this buddy a mine . . "

"Friend" sounds too intimate, doesn't it. "Friend" calls up images of being
close. If he's a friend, then you are going to be hurt if he dies, and war
hurts enough without adding to the pain. Get close; get hurt. It's as
simple as that.

In war you learn to keep people at that distance my wife talks about. You
become so good at it, that twenty years after the war, you still do it
without thinking. You won't allow yourself to be vulnerable again.

My wife knows two people who can get into the soft spots inside me. My
daughters. I know it probably bothers her that they can do this. It's not
that I don't love my wife, I do. She's put up with a lot from me. She'll
tell you that when she signed on for better or worse she had no idea there
was going to be so much of the latter. But with my daughters it's
different.

My girls are mine. They'll always be my kids. Not marriage, not distance,
not even death can change that. They are something on this earth that can
never be taken away from me. I belong to them. Nothing can change that.

I can have an ex-wife; but my girls can never have an ex-father. There's
the difference.

I can still see the faces, though they all seem to have the same eyes. When
I think of us I always see a line of "dirty grunts" sitting on a paddy dike.
We're caught in the first gray silver between darkness and light. That
first moment when we know we've survived another night, and the business of
staying alive for one more day is about to begin. There was so much hope in
that brief space of time. It's what we used to pray for. "One more day,
God. One more day."

And I can hear our conversatioins as if they'd only just been spoken. I
still hear the way we sounded, the hard cynical jokes, our morbid senses of
humor. We were scared to death of dying, and trying our best not to show
it.

I recall the smells, too. Like the way cordite hangs on the air after a
fire-fight. Or the pungent odor of rice paddy mud. So different from the
black dirt of Iowa. The mud of Nam smells ancient, somehow. Like it's
always been there. And I'll never forget the way blood smells, stick and
drying on my hands. I spent a long night that way once. That memory isn't
going anywhere.

I remember how the night jungle appears almost dream like as the pilot of a
Cessna buzzes overhead, dropping parachute flares until morning. That
artifical sun would flicker and make shadows run through the jungle. It was
worse than not being able to see what was out there sometimes. I remember
once looking at the man next to me as a flare floated overhead. The shadows
around his eyes were so deep that it looked like his eyes were gone. I
reached over and touched him on the arm; without looking at me he touched
my hand. "I know man. I know." That's what he said. It was a human
moment. Two guys a long way from home and scared sh"tless.

"I know man." And at that moment he did.

God I loved those guys. I hurt every time one of them died. We all did.
Despite our posturing. Despite our desire to stay disconnected, we couldn't
help ourselves. I know why Tim O'Brien writes his stories. I know what
gives Bruce Weigle the words to create poems so honest I cry at their
horrible beauty. It's love. Love for those guys we shared the experience
with.

We did our jobs like good soldiers, and we tried our best not to become as
hard as our surroundings. We touched each other and said, "I know." Like a
mother holding a child in the middle of a nightmare, "It's going to be all
right." We tried not to lose touch with our humanity. We tried to walk
that line. To be the good boys our parents had raised and not to give into
that unnamed thing we knew was inside us all.

You want to know what frightening is? It's a nineteen-year-old-boy who's
had a sip of that power over life and death that war gives you. It's a boy
who, despite all the things he's been taught, knows that he likes it. It's
a nineteen-year-old who's just lost a friend, and is angry and scared and,
determined that, "Some *@#*s gonna pay." To this day, the thought of that
boy can wake me from a sound sleep and leave me staring at the ceiling.

As I write this, I have a picture in from of me. It's of two young men. On
their laps are tablets. One is smoking a cigarette. Both stare without
expression at the camera. They're writing letters. Staying in touch with
places they would rather be. Places and people they hope to see again.

The picture shares space in a frame with one of my wife. She doesn't mind.
She knows she's been included in special company. She knows I'll always
love those guys who shared that part of my life, a part she never can. And
she understands how I feel about the ones I know are out there yet. The
ones who still answer the question, "When were you in Vietnam?"

"Hey, man. I was there just last night."


Ed Evans
MGySgt., USMC (Ret.)
Not as lean, not as mean, but still a Marine.


This was sent to me by a Friend and asked that I forward it to all I know. This is the first place I thought of, so this is for all of you Guys.

[catman]

Thanks Sandy.

Trav

[exlrrp]

I can't tell you what a cathartic experience it was for me to go back to Vietnam. Going back to Vietnam in peace made peace for me. They did what they did and I did what I did. I have no bad feelings towards these people I only wish them well. I would be their friend.
I was 19 when I left Vietnam after a year as a line dog and lrrp. 19 is still the age of myth for most young men,its an unreal time anyway. Its the time to give up the fantasies of adolescence and learn reality.But mine was a whole lot more unreal than most.
I guess what comes back to me the most is looking at someone I'm going to kill and thinking OK fucker, its your day to die--then doing it. A 19 yeat old, making life and death decisions on a fairly continuous basis.
Looking back from 40 years later, I can see Ive never been more important in my life.
I remember the man I stabbed to death, he was sleeping. I went in to kill him (the other guys grabbed his buddy for a prisoner) and right in the middle of it I got cold feet. I would have given anything in the world to have been somewhere else but there I was, right where I'd volunteered myself to be-I couldn't back out. My friends were depending on me. So I did it.
I always felt guilty about it, like I got away with murder though it was what I got paid that fat extra$65/month to do. It was what I had to volunteer several times to do.
There's the baddestass 19 year old in the world still inside me but I don't want him making life and death decisions for me any more. I just keep him around for DoomsDay Defense.
Stay good
James

[Bill Farnie]

Thanks for this Sandy and .......

"I know man"

[DMZ-LT]

Peace , Brothers. Thank you.