Bringing It All Back Home

 

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To Marilyn, love of my life

 

CONTENTS

      
TITLE PAGE

      
COPYRIGHT NOTICE

      
DEDICATION

      
INTRODUCTION

  
1. MAKING SOLDIERS: THE BOYS WHO BECAME THE MEN

  
2. PROFESSIONALISM: RICHARD EGGERS

  
3. FUTILITY: SUE O'NEILL

  
4. WAR AND LIES: JOSEPH GIANNINI

  
5. FOLLOW ME: ANTHONY WALLACE

  
6. THE BELIEVER: JOAN FUREY

  
7. WAR AND LOSS: MIANO, NOWICKI, AND GONZALEZ

  
8. WELCOME HOME, JIMMY: THE BACOLO TWINS

  
9. AGAINST WAR: FRIEDMAN AND LOUIS

10. BECOMING VETERANS: EDELMAN, GERMAN, AND PAS

11. WAR AND NORMALCY: ROBERT PTACHIK

12. TWONESS: HERBERT SWEAT

13. LONG ROAD HOME: NEIL KENNY

14. LEADERSHIP: VINCE M
C
GOWAN

15. THE DIVERSITY OF THE VETERAN EXPERIENCE

16. LIVING MEMORIALS

      
PHOTOGRAPHS

      
A NOTE ON METHOD

      
NOTES

      
RECOMMENDED READING

      
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      
COPYRIGHT

 

INTRODUCTION

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.

—KARL POPPER
,
The Open Society and Its Enemies
, 1945

This book explores the American experience in Vietnam by linking our soldiers' early years with their behavior on the battlefield and their progress after the war. It uses oral history to understand how veterans make sense of the most intense period of their lives in light of the knowledge gained in later years.

There are many accounts of the Vietnam veteran's experience. In 1997, the World War II fighter pilot and Princeton University literature professor Samuel Hynes published
The Soldiers' Tale
, his personal reflections on the stories men write about war. In one chapter Hynes reviewed the narratives that American veterans have written about their war in Vietnam, highlighting the gap between public discourse and the war the veterans say they really experienced.
1
Of course, veterans themselves helped to create the public discourse: in Ron Kovic's
Born on the Fourth of July
and many other staples of the Vietnam literature as told by Vietnam veterans, Hynes found what he called the “myths of war
 …
the simplified narrative that evolves from a war, through which it is given meaning.”
2

The memoirs and novels he studied suggested that the Vietnam conflict's particular “myths of war” included an emphasis on dead children, on killing, on the bewildering directionlessness of the fighting, and on destruction as a deliberate military policy.
3
According to these narratives, he concluded, “You might say, indeed, that the war in Vietnam was ironic from the beginning, that its essential meaning was the
absence
of a single coherent meaning in its events.”
4
Such meaning as does emerge in these works reinforces one idea: “the loss of faith” in the American ability to fight Good Wars.

This Vietnam myth, Hynes emphasized, worked and was broadly accepted because it provided a narrative structure for the telling of the story of America in Vietnam. This was, according to the title of one oral history, the Bad War.
5
Soldiers could not feel good about fighting a bad war. The stories of veterans' lives after the war therefore included “irrational violence, sleeplessness, alcoholism, the inability to hold a job or preserve a marriage or feel love” with depressing regularity.
6
This story, the myth of the veteran that Hynes found embedded in the literature about Vietnam, echoes something the veteran Bernard Edelman once said to me: the assumption was that “the war was fucked-up, therefore the veterans must be fucked-up.”

In fact, the Vietnam myth articulated in these personal narratives did not match the war fought by the majority of veterans. Hynes noted that as early as 1980 more than 70 percent of Vietnam veterans were reporting to the Veterans Administration that they were proud to have served and 66 percent said they would do it again. The story of their war was, Hynes asserted, “as valid, as truth-telling, as valuable, as the worst accounts of slaughtered innocents and damaged lives. The soldiers' tale of Vietnam is
all
of the stories. We must not choose among them.”
7

The only way to present a counternarrative is to listen to a wider range of voices. This work is focused on Vietnam veterans who either grew up or live in New York City, because the city's estimated eighty thousand veterans represent a diverse and inclusive sample of those who went to Vietnam. I have sought to find a balance between those who saw Vietnam as a guilt-inducing series of mistakes and atrocities and those who seem not to suffer from nightmares and disabling wounds. There are stories here of substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but also stories of redemption; stories of grief, but also of service; stories of pain, but also of transcendence.

As these veterans also remind us, their experiences in Vietnam have implications for the lives of those who've fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rudy Thomas Sr., who earned three Purple Hearts while serving with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam, emphasized the relevance of his war experiences to a new generation of returning soldiers. He said:

For the past twenty-eight, twenty-nine years I've been a disabled-veterans specialist for the State of New York Department of Labor. I see veterans from Vietnam and I see veterans from Iraq and I understand. I don't like what I see now. I see a lot of young people with problems that they're not even aware of, just like myself. I had no idea what I was going through.

The veterans I see from Iraq and Afghanistan, they have problems. They're not really familiar with what's going on, and I think it's my duty to open their eyes and let them see what's happening. I had a young lady two days ago. She was fine, and then I started questioning her. I said, “You've been up all night, right?” She said, “How do you know that?” And I just started laughing.

I am experienced. I've been there, done that. I'm up all night. Sometimes I look up, open up the door, and look out. What the hell am I looking out the door for? There's nobody at the door. But it's something that I do. I look out the window, you know, and I catch myself doing it. What are you doing? There's nobody out there. But it's something that happens. And I see it in a lot of young veterans coming back now.

What they don't understand is the problems that they're having affect not only them but the family also. The family doesn't understand what they're going through.

So I tell them a lot of times, “Sit down with your family. Talk to them. Tell them what's going on with you so they will understand. Hopefully, they will have a better idea of what's going on in your mind so they wouldn't get the wrong impression from what they see.”

Just as Thomas stresses that remembering and sharing can promote understanding between individuals and among family members, Neil Kenny maintains that shared stories create connections across generations. As a Vietnam combat veteran, Kenny reaches out to the younger generation of men and women returning home from combat. He described his relationship with two of these young men. One Marine was
struggling down in Charleston, South Carolina. When I met him up here, he said, “I want real Italian food.” I said, “It's a real Italian restaurant.” He says, “What's good?” I said, “It's all good.” He said, “I've never had real Italian food.” And this kid was in Iraq, fighting for his country.

The second young man, also a Marine from Staten Island, was having trouble with PTSD.

I go to Carmine's house, and I'm talking to his mother. I said, “Where the hell is Carmine?” “Oh,” [she says], “he's up in his room.”

I [went up to his room and said], “You know, Carmine, you can't be staying in your room like this, bro. You got to get out. You got to do something.” I said, “When you were in that courtyard in Fallujah and you were down because you were hit, and you were defenseless,” I said, “you didn't really think you were going to get out of that courtyard.” He started crying.

He says, “Neil, you read me like a fucking book.” I said, “I'm not reading you like a book, my friend. I'm only about three chapters ahead of you.”

That common experience, the shared sense of what military service and combat can mean, enabled Kenny to reach out to this Marine. He has not finished living the chapters of his own book, but he is willing to share what he has learned.

*   *   *

All the people profiled in this book understood that their remarks to me were on the record and intended for publication. All were given the opportunity to edit their words, and some did so. Final responsibility for what appears here, of course, rests with me. No pseudonyms appear in this book. Throughout the text, all words spoken to me by my interviewees are presented in italics.

1

MAKING SOLDIERS: THE BOYS WHO BECAME THE MEN

On December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor galvanized public opinion in favor of war. In June 1942, a “New York at War” parade up Fifth Avenue attracted about 500,000 participants and 2.5 million spectators. The parade was intended, according to
The New York Times
, to “visualize the magnitude and intensity of the city's contribution to all phases of the war program.” The
Times
pointed out that the crowd was larger than in “any other single American city with the exception of Chicago, and there were twice as many people along Fifth Avenue as live in Detroit or Los Angeles.”
1
By 1943, it was estimated that 600,000 New Yorkers were in the armed services.
2
By one account, some 800,000 New Yorkers served in the military overall during the war years.
3
For many children of these World War II veterans, their parents' military service was a conspicuous point of pride.

The New York veteran Ed German is a painter and the host of a public radio jazz program that airs on WPPB, on Long Island. He lives comfortably on Long Island, in a home filled with works of art and the music he loves so much. He is both a public and a private personality, carefully sharing stories that reveal bits and pieces about himself and the world he grew up in. Recently, he published his autobiography,
Deep Down in Brooklyn
. He says of himself, “I don't consider myself an African American. I am an American Negro. We've been Slaves and Nigras and Niggers and Colored and Spades and Spooks and Coons and Splibs and Afro Americans and Blacks, but Negro conclusively describes for me who I am and the journey that my continental ancestors took.”
4

German's parents, originally working in agriculture, were from Georgia and came from a large family:
Between my mother and my father
, he says,
I had twenty-two aunts and uncles, eleven on each side of the family
.