Vietnam?

I remember Vietnam, but not in the way you might think. Here are the basic things I knew, which is where one starts when one is trying to assess things from one’s past:

I knew there was armed conflict in that Asian country, which I probably could locate on a map, since I’ve always liked maps from fifth grade social studies, thanks to our teacher, who had us build them out of papier maché. I’ve forgotten the teacher’s name (although maybe it’ll come to me by the time I finish this story), but I think he had horrible handwriting and was left-handed. However, I do remember that said teacher turned to a tall, dark-haired boy who never got grades above a C - I think that was 75 in those days - and was never going to college, but he was a boy and electrical circuits were his thing. Teacher had him do the wiring and others in our class (me, especially) made up the questions, including capital cities, major rivers and mountains, principal imports and exports, things like that. My thing was information gathering, but I remember the painting of the countries was also fun. I haven’t changed in all these years - words and images, shapes, colors. The boy was David Steurrys, and he married a girl in our class who also had a C average.

My point here is how soon our directions in life are determined, nothing more than that. David was tall and cute, but he wasn’t the guy for me.

I do not remember if we made a map of Asia, but we most likely didn’t. Europe was closer, after all.

I never knew when the war started. I never knew why the war started. I really didn’t know whom we were fighting, although I vaguely remember being told Vietnam had a north and a south and the north was full of bad guys who killed everybody. I remember not questioning this information. I do not remember when the war ended, officially. Anyway, it was all happening in Asia, which was pretty far away and we all know out of sight out of mind, don’t we? I didn’t know what other countries were involved, but vaguely remembered something about France.

Funny, but I don’t recall hearing how many were killed in the war, although I remember some horrific photojournalists who gave us unforgettable images. The problem is, I don’t know who the people they photographed were, whether they were the good guys or the bad guys. I do remember - as does everyone else - the naked girl running down the street. Maybe that was Vietnam, maybe it was a neighboring country. I just don’t know.

I remember the (boring) evening newscasts with the maps that were far less interesting than our map in the fifth grade. Lots of detail, numbers, geographical information, but it was all sliced up and it was hard to understand the bigger picture. We saw what television wanted us to see. We saw one side of the story, which was repeated nightly.

One thing I remember was the draft, which was only for young men. (I forget the age range.) There was a lottery according to date of birth. I remember funny, scared looks on guys’ faces and low whispers about ways to avoid having to go. I didn’t know if it was cowardice, anti-war sentiments, or something else. No need to list the strategies employed to avoid going to Vietnam, but I’ve spoken with other women who remember fellows starving themselves to be classified as underweight. Things like bone spurs weren’t mentioned, I don’t think. I recall the whispered 4-F classification, but most guys weren’t willing to apply for that. Conscientious objectors had an uphill battle, although some were successful. Others, like the teaching assistant for my beginning Spanish course, escaped to Canada.

I don’t think anybody was enthusiastic about the war; it was all too fuzzy and the reasoning that we had to fight in order to keep a dangerous political ideology from infecting our country never seemed true. After all, Asia was pretty far away, Vietnam wasn’t al that big, and there were few Vietnamese here. However, such dangerous world situations are still being invented today. Anything to justify war and killing. I remember thinking it must be horrible to have go so far away and for what?

I remember seeing a list of soldiers’ names on a bulletin board in my first year in college and selecting a few to send them letters. It seemed the kind and patriotic thing to do, like my mother and other women of her generation had done for the troops during WWII. I don’t understand how I thought writing letters to a stranger woould do any good, but I did it anyway. I remember meeting a couple of my ‘penpals’ when they returned, but we had nothing in common, so they just thanked me and that was that. As I recall, we never talked about their actual experiences. I remember one or maybe two had a Hispanic surname, for what that’s worth. Not that I knew any Spanish at the time.

What else do I remember? Well, thereKent State: May 4, 1970. Four dead in Ohio, as the song goes. I remember our shock on my campus, not so far away. I remember the tear gas and sniper on a dorm roof - why? - and running madly downhill to Main Street where tanks were lined up. Machine guns pointed at us, unarmed and frightened to death. I recall thinking how unfair that was. I remember being angry at students trying to destroy ROTC files that were kept in the administrative building where many of my classes were held. I thought they were so disruptive. But then came Kent State. One of my classes met at the teaching assistant’s house and I remember he played Piaf instead of teaching us intermediate Spanish. I like Steve Moskovitz, though, even if he was teaching us the wrong language.

Since I didn’t know some basic facts about the war in Vietnam until very recently, I had to look them up and was surprised. Apparently, it began in 1954 or thereabouts and ended in 1975 or thereabouts. I think we lost. More than 58,000 died, but my cousin did not. My family thought he was a hero and maybe he was - or is, because he’s still alive.

So the point of this story is to explain my horror at having lived with a household phrase - the Vietnam War - and remembering so many things that are really quite irrelevant pertaining to it. Things that never made me think, newscasters who said so much and explained so little. Even as the daughter of a veteran I stepped back and allowed the privilege of being female and geographically removed from that Asian country to keep me from questioning anything. After all, war was not pretty, war was scary.

I do remember, though, that something finally shifted in my thinking, like it has for some veterans of that and other armed conflicts. Maybe it was reading Tim O’Brien’s 1990 novel The Things They Carried, but maybe it was something else. Maybe by studying Spanish I began to see the reasons for wars and how those reasons weren’t often good ones. Maybe Central America, South America, the Caribbean were closer than far-away Asia and I finally started to understand. Maybe there were movies that told otherwise silenced truths and maybe the internet began to flood my thoughts with alternate versions of the story that pre-cable television had not offered us.

Still, I remember Vietnam, I remember years of hearing but not listening, seeing, questioning, or knowing. I remember a selfish ignorance, a shunning of a topic too unpleasant to take seriously. I remember all of that and yet know guilt is useless. However, I am not alone. People these days are taking to the streets for reasons I prefer not to include here, and as I look around at village greens, bridge overpasses, city streets everywhere, I take some courage in seeing how many of those who are gathering in these places have white hair.

Memory is collective and it is not dead. And maps still exist. We just need to use them. We need not to forget where we are and where we’re headed.