Bringing It All Back Home (23 page)

The New York VVLP believed it deserved corporate support because of the way the war had disrupted the lives of New York City's young men. The rhetoric mirrored very closely that of the memorial commission in 1985. It asserted that “at the young age of 19, they went off to war and came back to an indifferent if not hostile homecoming. Many vets feel that the world and certainly technology has passed them by.” As a result of the war, according to the VVLP, a disruption occurred in the identities of young soldiers, preventing them from claiming their rightful place in the “American economic mainstream.” By missing out on civilian experience for the duration of their military service, these young men found themselves in a position in which they could not catch up with their age cohort. Military service somehow, inexplicably, seemed to render Vietnam veterans unable to use new technology. More important, the VVLP wrote, “experts in the field of Vietnam Veterans have clearly stated that a veteran's identity hinges on his work. By not having a viable career, his manhood is stripped and there is a loss of self-esteem.” The VVLP therefore aimed to restore the manhood of Vietnam veterans by providing access to meaningful labor.
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The image of the emasculated veteran is a striking one, running counter to the usual rhetoric about military service making a young boy into a “man.”

The city's VVLP chapter—one of a number of chapters around the country—contracted with the memorial commission to run the Living Memorial Program in 1985. Quickly, tensions developed over the program, specifically because it appeared that very few veterans were in fact taking advantage of VVLP services. Memorial commission files demonstrate that the practice of what Gitelson called “triage”—accepting only some Vietnam veterans into the program, in particular those who could be placed—was standard operating procedure.
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Indeed, by June 30, 1986, the commission noted that the New York VVLP had placed exactly—and only—twelve veterans in jobs. Despite growing bitterness between the VVLP leadership and the memorial commission, the contract for the Living Memorial was renewed for two years in October 1986.
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The problem was that the pool of veterans who might have been most helped by a living memorial were “hard-core,” as one memorial commission member put it. He asserted that these veterans were not used to having jobs. They had serious gaps in their work history, and they often had fifth- or sixth-grade education levels and “junkie attitudes.”

Ed German recalls:

We would service any veteran, but one of the things that would disqualify a veteran is if he were not clean and sober. At least sober enough to go to work. If anyone came in with alcohol on their breath, they were automatically [out]. If anyone came into our program with alcohol or seemed like they were high or something, we wouldn't, we couldn't service them. We would not send them out to represent us. No way.

As the program evolved, all kinds of different services came into the program. The Living Memorial was one of them. Our staff increased, just from the VISTA volunteers who were doing job development, the staff increased, and we had all kinds of people who came on board as we began to raise funds and were able to hire professionals, and then we were able to hire psychologists and therapists and people who could help vets with some of their psychological issues and things like that.

In 1989, it cost the program approximately $20,000 to put someone in a career-track job, and there was little follow-up to see if he or she would stay. The commission was increasingly concerned that it was difficult to tell how many veterans had actually been helped, despite the $1.3 million it had spent on the Living Memorial. The commission member Robert Santos argued that an eight-week jobs program was a “shot in the arm,” not really a jobs program at all. It could not deal with the most difficult cases, including those with drug and alcohol problems. In October 1989, the memorial commission decided to close down its relationship with VVLP.

Still, there were real successes. Wenny Pas was exactly the kind of man the program aimed to help, and help him it did. A trim man when I met him, Pas could still wear his thirty-five-year-old Marine Corps dress uniform. By 1980 he was having trouble. He opened a photography business with a loan from the Small Business Administration. He was taking wedding photographs and beginning to incorporate emerging video technologies into his business when things fell apart. His marriage failed, and in an effort to keep his children fed, he took a variety of low-wage jobs. Depression and anxiety followed, later diagnosed as a result of post-traumatic stress. Pas says:

I looked around for help in the veterans' community, and what I did find was a program in the Wall Street area set up by some professional corporate Vietnam veterans.

I walked in as a client because I was in need. The guy said, “We could help you find a place, but would you like to come and volunteer and we'll give you a stipend?” I said, “Okay, listen, some money is better than no money.” That happened to be right around the time that the City of New York was just picking up on what Washington, D.C., had done in '82, and that was the dedication of the Washington Vietnam Veterans Memorial, so now there was a big sympathetic move to help Vietnam veterans …

I found a place that I could go where there were other veterans, and I found a place that was now listening to veterans in the corporate area. So I basically worked for them, and I actually did find employment. I embarked into a whole new career when the National Puerto Rican Forum, a 501(c)(3)-type not-for-profit, got granted money to establish their own job-developing program. At the time it was said that the majority of the Vietnam veterans, especially here in New York City, were minorities—black and Hispanic. So the National Puerto Rican Forum said, “Well, we're a Hispanic organization; we will help all veterans, but you know, primarily, a lot of our veterans will be Hispanic.” But they were bilingual, and so they put out a request to hire. I went for the interview, and I got the job.

So now I was a job developer counselor of social services.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission project had done for Pas precisely what it aimed to do for many of New York City's Vietnam veterans. It had restored a sense of pride and eased his transition to full-time civilian employment. He found a career as a job developer and counselor. Eventually, he was able to go to work for the federally funded Emergency Assistance Rehousing Program. Pas's position was not permanent, as he was subject to the whims of funding agencies, but the VVLP had done its job for him, activating his sense of “veteran-ness” around the themes of self-help and personal agency. Pas continued to work until the events of September 11 triggered a severe episode of post-traumatic stress and he stopped working. Today he runs a freelance photography business.

The memorial commission and parade had an impact that reached beyond the city's boundaries. They were the genesis of the book
Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam
. Published in 1985 to coincide with the dedication of the memorial and in print almost continuously for more than twenty-five years,
Dear America
is a collection culled from the several thousand letters sent to the commission for possible inclusion on the memorial.

At the invitation of the commission, Bernard Edelman conceptualized and organized the volume, wrote a preface and chapter intros, selected thematic photographs, and received a lot of assistance from other members of the commission, all in ten weeks, with another six or seven weeks, he recalls, of “fine-tuning.” It has since been excerpted in scores of high school history and literature texts, not only in this country, but in Finland, Japan, Germany, and Great Britain.

The book was then made into a film of the same name, directed by Bill Couturié and presented on HBO in 1987. It also had a theatrical release in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Letters drawn from the book were read by voices familiar to film and television audiences of the decade, like Michael J. Fox, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Robert De Niro, and Ellen Burstyn. Edelman recalls:

I did a lot of work for the film as associate producer. It's extremely well done, I think. The film and the book serve kind of an unsaid mission of the commission: to educate people on what the war was about. To me, it talks about the human landscape of the war. It's about the boys, the young men and women who served in Vietnam. It's not political. It does show the footage from the POWs, which was NVA footage, we know that, and it's acknowledged there because when we had one of the screenings, one of the guys got up and said, “You're using propaganda.” And I said, “We're not using propaganda if it's properly labeled.” I made sure that it was thus labeled. The punch line is at the end when the POWs are returned, were repatriated, and there's Springsteen singing “Born in the U.S.A.”

I like to think that books and films like
Dear America
open eyes and minds a bit, just like
Saving Private Ryan
did in a very big way. And it's taken the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (where, whether or not we agree with them, we embrace those who have served under the Stars and Stripes when they come home) to “rehabilitate” the Vietnam vets.

Maybe America has grown up; unfortunately, it's taken two more wars for that to happen.

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WAR AND NORMALCY: ROBERT PTACHIK

Even the luckier returning Vietnam veterans who seemed to have an easier time reintegrating into the civilian world of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s eventually realized that the war would never be completely behind them.

The return of the hostages from Iran in 1981, the construction of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who made a special effort to single out Vietnam veterans for praise, all contributed to a reevaluation of the significance of Vietnam and Vietnam veterans in American life. So too did the construction of the New York City memorial in 1985. This can easily be seen in the life of a single veteran, Dr. Robert Ptachik.

One of Ptachik's letters home appears on the memorial. The letter reads:

4 Apr 67

Dear Family,

… I got a shrapnel wound in my shoulder and one in my knee. There is some good in this though. Within a few weeks I will probably be back in the States … I'm really getting lazy. All I do all day is lay around and heal. It's hard work …

Love,

Bobby

Seriously wounded in Vietnam, Ptachik had written the letter to his family while recuperating in Japan. Finding the good in the bad, making his family comfortable with the fact that he was wounded but “okay,” Ptachik expresses his drive for “normalcy.” If we read between the lines, he may have wanted to reassure his family that he would not be a burden. Once he returned, he would make it; he would fit in.

Ptachik arrived in Vietnam in early January 1967. He had been in-country only three months before being wounded by a booby trap near Cu Chi on March 27.

I remember—some of this I remember clearly as if it happened yesterday—we were in an area of dry paddies, [a] rather open area. One of the things that you try to never do is to walk on the dikes. That was always very appealing because the dikes were flat, the paddies were lumpy and bumpy and you'd sprain an ankle. And Sergeant Davis for some reason was walking ahead of me on the dike. And he tripped a booby trap. And I just remember, I still have this memory of feeling like the world was a spring that had been compressed to an inch wide and then let go and the whole world was reverberating. I guess it was the pressure in my ears.

I was actually blown back quite a bit from where I was, and I was fortunate in that I didn't really feel any pain. The first thing I saw was that my left hand was all bloody because I had a minor wound there, and it turned out, though, that a piece of shrapnel went in my right shoulder and came out my back and bled quite a bit. It damaged the nerves; I never really felt anything. And it also turned out I had shrapnel in my right knee, but I didn't know that until the next day.

Sergeant Davis got much more seriously wounded than I did. A couple of the medics, one came to him and one came to me and put the dressings on my shoulder, front and back.

Someone had just been shot by a sniper a few minutes before, and there was a medevac chopper that had just picked them up and that chopper came back, so I was medevaced out on the chopper within ten minutes. I was able to walk to the chopper. Davis was a mess. He got the shrapnel, I guess, on his right side, and he wound up losing an eye and a lot of his hand, and he was in bad shape; he was screaming the whole way back.

The helicopter flew to the Twelfth Evacuation Hospital at Cu Chi, the same hospital where the nurse Sue O'Neill would be stationed in 1969. At the time, Ptachik thought he was all right. Indeed, he helped carry the stretcher with Davis on it into the hospital. Quickly, the medical staff insisted he lie down flat on a stretcher.

Within a relatively short time they took me into the prep room and started cutting my clothes off. The last [thing I] remember, basically, was one of the doctors saying to me, “Did you get wounded in the leg, too?” And I said no. And he said okay, and then the next thing I remember it was the next day.

I woke up in a hospital bed, and I had my arm in a sling and my right leg in a splint. My left hand was wrapped up from my thumb injury. But the thing that I think is the most striking to me: We had been out in the field for almost a month, and I'm sure [you know] from speaking to other people you get filthy. And when I woke up the next day and I got to look at my body, they had washed and shaved, I'd say, from here over, and the rest of the other side was all still black. [
Laughs.
] And I'm wondering, couldn't they wash all of it? But I was not in pain; I was very fortunate, because of the nerve damage.