If you're a baby boomer, hell even if you aren't, you need to read a book I've just finished. Because if you don't, you aren't finished with the Vietnam War yet.
Nope. Not by a mile.
Bet you haven't thought about it for a while, have you? Understandable.
The country brushed it under the rug. Or we tried to.
We never did. Not by another mile. It haunts us still. It always will.
It began our descent from world dominance. Some tried to say we bounced back from it at some point. We didn't. We couldn't. We kept trying to do make-up calls, and everybody knows what happens then.
There are about as many books about soldiers in Vietnam as there are plantations there. Lots. They say the same thing: It was about as fucked up as anything anyone had ever seen. Horrible, too, as war always is. Time goes on and another vet-turned-writer tries to tell people that the whole thing was a mess from the get-go, and what the hell did anybody expect?
I read a bunch of them. I had to teach it where I worked, and I did my best. No one, though, quite nailed the total experience.
Until now. Novelist Kristin Hannah has written the tour de force of Vietnam books, called The Women. It's probably the ultimate irony that the total, encompassing story of that awful experience has to be told by a female who was never there, about females who were.
She takes you through the peak of the war, from 1967-69, when hope and casualties were at their highest. Perhaps most importantly, she takes you back home after the service of those who gave of themselves, too--the nurses--and details the fictitious, and not so fictitious, experiences of trying to "get over" the experience, as if one ever could.
She does it through the eyes of Frankie McGrath, a good Catholic girl who eventually finds that all she's ever been taught to stand for has dissolved into bitterness, chaos, paranoia, regret and the all-consuming anger. She is left with absolutely nothing to hang onto because not even the male vets who came back acknowledge her very existence, not to mention her service on their behalf. Plenty of them never knew how she and other nurses helped wounded and dying comrades because they were lucky to get away without serious wounds.
She is failed by the military system, by a government she trusts, by a lover she adores, by the health care system, and by her parents, who swell up with pride with the memory of their son, killed in Vietnam, yet can't bring themselves to be proud of their daughter, who watched many of her brother's comrades die as well. The totality of it all proves too much to bear. In Vietnam, she becomes a all-enduring rock of Gibraltar, depended upon and admired by many. Back in The World, she dissolves into a complete wreck. Two pals she makes in Vietnam are all she has to buttress whatever sanity she has left.
But reading this leads one to get it: The nightmares. The PTSD. The feeling of inhumanness, of no longer fitting in anywhere. The lack of credit paid for what she had a right to sincerely believe was devoted, courageous service to her country, created a burden that left her alone--the one status that she couldn't maintain, yet couldn't find a remedy for. The men weren't the only ones who carried all that around.
A fraternity brother, now a retired psychiatrist, told me back in the '90s that he was still treating men who were roaming the streets of Chicago with weapons, believing that Victor Charlie was still lurking nearby. I thought that to be on the fringes of craziness. Now I wonder how many others couldn't shake that off, either. But now I know why, too.
There is recompense of a sort, symbolically centered on the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Wall in 1982. More than 58,000 names are on it, including eight nurses. What people forget is that one of the additional statues, built a few hundred feet behind the wall, depicts a nurse treating a wounded soldier. I never totally understood that until reading this book. Now I know that that statue completes the wall, gives it a wholistic meaning. And that it is absolutely necessary.
If you've never been there, you ought to go. There are several other important monuments nearby and easily within walking distance, too. But that one will undeniably catch your eye. People still bring flowers and memorabilia that they drop beneath the name of someone who never came back. You don't need to be a history teacher like me to be drawn to it. You just need to be an American.
The Vietnam War encompassed the zenith and beginning of the downfall of the United States as a force for good versus evil in the world. We learned that life and war aren't so simple. We are learning still, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Ukraine, in Gaza.
Meanwhile, read The Women. It describes an era we'd love to forget, but can't and shouldn't.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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