Air University Review, January-February 1983

On Finally Coming Home

MANY of us in Vietnam shared a secret fantasy about coming home to a hero's welcome from a joyous family, a proud hometown, and a grateful nation. Most veterans of that war, however, know that reality was more like this:

I went home straight from California to O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I got home about three in the morning. Everybody in the house got up and said hello. Then they all went back to sleep. At 8:30 when my father left for work, he woke me up to say, "Listen, now that you're home, when are you going to get a job?"

I packed up and left. I haven't been home since.¹

Between these images of joyous homecoming and bitter return lie the experiences of more than two million Americans who came back from Vietnam. Contrary to the media's image of the "crazed Vietnam veteran," most of us managed to pick up with our families, studies, and careers and move out purposefully to make up for the 365 days we "lost" in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, the journey back has been a long one. It took only a few days at home for most of us to realize that our descriptions of Vietnam, told in the mystic/cryptic jargon we learned there--metaphors that unconsciously integrated killing and dying with C-rations and mail call--frightened our families, embarrassed our friends, and sometimes provoked hostility. In tacit agreement with society, we negotiated the price of our reentry--silence. We rarely talked about what happened to us in Vietnam. For some of us, silence turned to welcome forgetfulness; for others, however, silence only transferred the conflict from the jungles and rice paddies to the terribly personal battlegrounds of the heart and mind. The Vietnam War continued there because an essential and purifying ritual of coming home had been short-circuited by a society that did not want to hear about a war it had disowned.

Most of the post-Vietnam literature of the last decade, welcome for its attempt to assess "policy failures" in Southeast Asia has, of necessity, been analytical and therefore lacking in compassion. As military and political thinkers try to understand the problems of limited war in the nuclear age, they should not forget the human costs of fighting wars that have unclear goals and may, like the Vietnam War (which we seem to have neither won nor lost), come to an inconclusive end. To address this second issue, we need to search from the ground up, examining the multifaceted and contradictory views of the people who did the fighting. Except for a few novels, this personal battleground has been largely unexplored; that is, until now.

In two recent books, Nam and Everything We Had, authors Mark Baker and Al Santoli attempt to reconnoiter the sere and dreadful terrain of the mind where so many of our veterans, shunned into silence by our national distaste for lost causes, still fight the Vietnam War. Both authors refer to their edited collections of taped interviews as oral histories. The purist may find fault with this term, but not with what these books try to do--tell the story of the Vietnam War "in the words of the men and women who fought there."

Both Baker, a Vietnam-era college student and peripheral protester, and Santoli, a combat veteran who fought with the 25th Infantry Division during Tet, traveled throughout the United States compiling their interviews. For all the differences in style and approach, the authors have a common purpose in their efforts: to end the barrier of silence between those who fought the war and the society that dispatched them to Vietnam. Here, the similarities end, though, because Baker and Santoli have chosen two very different means to effect this reunion.

THE book Nam, edited by Mark Baker, who never served in Vietnam, is the more successful.* It is the less ambitious of the two books because for Baker it is enough that his veterans confront society with their stories, which for the most part reek of death and brutality. Baker feels that when the psychological wounds are drained, the process of healing can begin and the Vietnam veterans can truly come home. Lancing wounds is not a pleasant process, however, and Baker's veterans pull no punches. It is no wonder that they remain anonymous.

*Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: William M. Morrow & Co., 1981, $12.95), 324 pages. Reprint. (New York: Quill, 1982, $6.00 paper), 324 pages.

Tightly edited into eight chapters, Nam stalks its subjects through the only meaningful measurement of time there was in that war--the365-day cycle of a year in "the Nam." Baker's veterans come from places like Brooklyn, San Jose, and Johns Hopkins University. They went into the Marine Corps because the Army wouldn't take them and into the Army because, as one nurse put it, "Vietnam was the professional chance of a lifetime." For the most part they were young. Not yet old enough to vote in California or drink in New Jersey, they were old enough to die in Vietnam. Their attempts to articulate this frightening dichotomy give Baker's Nam its surreal, childlike quality. Like Alice, they all stepped through the looking glass.

The Vietnam War was different for almost everyone who served there. For many Air Force officers, especially the aircrews, it was a grand and glorious game. For some it was boredom punctuated by short periods of stark terror. For Baker's veterans it seems to have been a chance to play war with the big guys. In their first few weeks in Vietnam, these veterans saw themselves as John Waynes in green berets, Sergeant Rocks pulling grenade pins with their teeth, Vic Morrows outwitting the enemy in a tropical version of "Combat." This innocence did not last.

In a chapter entitled "First Blood," Baker's veterans tell of their first confrontations with death: friends blown apart by mines, disemboweled by bayonets, ripped by shrapnel--men killed by an enemy they rarely saw; men who died for purposes even their officers could not explain. Because no one could tell these soldiers what "winning" meant, they discerned, with the wisdom of clever children, that it made no sense to die. They changed the rules so that Vietnam became a new kind of war, a game that had as its goal surviving by whatever means. Winning meant getting out of "the Nam" alive. The enemy for the grunt was anyone--Vietnamese or American, man, woman, or child--whose actions might endanger that survival. Thus, for these soldiers, Vietnam became "a brutal never never land . . . where little boys didn't grow up, they just grew old before their time." Through a series of stark, oddly detached narratives, Baker's soldiers give us a glimpse into their nightmares:

• A rifleman, street-fighting in Saigon during Tet, stops to sever ears from a slain Vietcong. He carefully threads them on his dogtag chain because they were badges of "an effective soldier."

• A young Vietnamese woman smiles and is shot dead by a Marine machine gunner. "She had to pay" for an earlier ambush, in another place, by others of her kind who had maimed two of the Marine's friends.

• Two soldiers caught smoking pot on watch are given extra duty. Mad and bored, they spend the day taking potshots at an old woman harvesting rice. When they get tired of this game, they kill her.

These are little boys trapped in Baker's vicious never-never land. They don't grow up because to do so would entail acting sanely in an insane war. "I was crazy the whole time I was in Vietnam," testifies one of Baker's vets. Self-styled insanity had become the only camouflage that worked in the moral jungle of Vietnam.

Nam reinforces the My Lai stereotype of the Vietnam vet--sadistic, crazed, morally bankrupt, and culturally unconscious. Baker chose to interview men who served as young combat veterans; nearly all were drafted. This reflects his bias, and it is a flaw. However, while Nam is a limited book, it is also one of unlimited anguish. It exposes a very real and very frightening side effect of the war--the dehumanization of our own soldiers.

Most of Baker's veterans acknowledge this loss of human feeling in retrospect, but they do not take full responsibility for it. They blame the war for changing them. Still, in their narratives, they expose the terror that they felt, and we can see that they are still human. Some of the veterans are still afraid--not of the memories of killing but of the pleasure they found in it. More than policy failure, more than tactical error, this could, and should, be considered one of the real social tragedies of the American experience in Vietnam.

WHILE Nam dwells excessively on the Apocalypse Now version of the war, Everything We Had makes an honest effort to do just the opposite.** Al Santoli's book is dedicated to restoring purpose and humanity to".. . the nameless soldier on the TV screen." Although Baker's vets are nameless and faceless, Santoli has identified his people by name and unit and by the time and location of their tours. Santoli tells us not only what his veterans did during the war but what each is doing now. As faded photographs show, Santoli's soldiers were then and are now very real human beings.

Consequently, Everything We Had is the more balanced of the two books in that it explores the whole range of human experience in the Vietnam War--honor, love, sacrifice, and even humor are to be found in the recollections of Santoli's veterans. Often these shade quickly to reflections on death and survival, but the topics are discussed with little of the brooding intensity of Nam. By offering the whole of the soldier's experience, Santoli strives to find "the war's truth," claiming with no little certainty that his veterans will deliver, bound as they are to him, and to each other, by the "combat soldier's bond of trust."

With this commitment, Santoli gives us glimpses into the wartime experiences of a breed of veterans who stand in refreshing contrast to Baker's burnt-out teenagers. From a rifleman we get a wryly humorous look at the First Cavalry's amphibious assault on the beautiful Vietnamese coast. The soldier and his comrades are stopped in midcharge by a lineup of generals headed by General William Westmoreland himself ". . . saluting the Cav on the way." The only thing missing, recalls the rifleman, " . . . was the hula girls . . . what a letdown." Humor, remorse, and compassion are facets of wartime experience that Baker ignored but which Everything We Had deals with gamely if only falteringly.

In his search for "the war's truth," however, Santoli sacrificed depth of emotion for breadth of experience. Several of the narratives are obscured with trivia and self-conscious historiography. Poignant, insightful commentaries are mixed in chronological order (1962-75) with several frankly pointless, overlong anecdotes. The result is a frustratingly uneven book.

The shortcoming in Everything We Had can be attributed to Santoli's aim of letting the soldiers tell their story. He actively entered the narrative only once, to add his story to the collection. By contrast, Baker never took himself away from Nam, providing sharp, searing transitions that interlock the chapters and heighten the cohesiveness of the book. The result is that Nam succeeds, despite its narrow emotional and intellectual range while the wider-ranging, more ambitious Everything We Had seems to hobble along. One feels with Baker's book; one observes with Santoli. Given the lessons, of the human kind, I think we Vietnam veterans prefer to feel our way home.

**Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by 33 American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Random House, 1981, $12.95), 265 pages.

TOGETHER, do these two books tell the "real" soldier's story of Vietnam? Is it possible for any edited collection of individual reflections on war, even one larger than the 140 or so stories told in these two books, ever to produce the normative experience of men and women at war? I doubt if a national poll of Vietnam veterans could do that. There is one reality test, however, that both these books pass--my own. The veterans whose anguish Nam reflects so powerfully and the veterans who speak with shades of caring and concern in Everything We Had are different facets of each of the thousands of soldiers I worked with during my 18 months in Vietnam. They are also different facets of myself during and after the war. I would suggest that any Vietnam veteran, while reading either of these books, will find one passage, one reflection that perfectly echoes, for a moment, the way it was in Vietnam.

For all their limitations, these two books do add something critical and something heretofore missing from our efforts to learn from the agony that was Vietnam: the recollections of some of the "men and women who fought there." If the social dimensions of limited war are worthy of study, and I believe that they are, it might be well to mesh these experiences from the soldiers at the bottom with the documents and testimonies of the leadership at the top.

IT IS TIME for the survivors of the Vietnam War to come home. We can help those who still live and fight the war in their minds and hearts. All we have to do is listen--to them and to ourselves.

1. Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Quill, 1982), p. 285.

Captain Suzanne M. Budd (B.A., University of the Pacific; M.A., University of California, Berkeley) is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, USAF Academy. Her previous assignments include chief air freight, Detachment 175 (MAC), Incirlik AB, Turkey, and traffic management officer, Vandenberg AFB, California.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor