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From:
Dondi Allison
Sent:
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 2:30 PM
Subject:
I Was T here
Last Night
This one is from a coworker's father, I believe we are at this point sometimes.
Marty
----- Original Message -----
Uncle Marty, I got this from my dad, but I thought of
you and the rest of the ant hill gang when I read it:
This is a little long, but it does express some deep thoughts from the soul o f
a boy who became a man over night. Sometimes the flashback will hit me
late at night, I have to get up and out of bed. Not very long ago
something snapped in my head, I thought Heidi was the
enemy trying to get me...I tried to hit, kick any way
to kill that enemy. I went to the "shrink" he advised me
to do more walking...said it was good for the mind. Up until now I
thought I had it under control. Sad to say that you do
develop a numb feeling about certain things because
the pain of having those you are close to taken away
from your life, it is unsettling to say the least. My Christian teaching did
help me to have some strength, when I lost my wife
Barbara, she was killed in a car wreck, it was her
18th birthday, I really got angry, I really prayed asking for
strength to endure the pain, that lasted for about 3 years. It does give
you a different perspective on life.
Later in combat, I lost some good buddies, yes they were friends too, it was
still painful, but you become hardened to that. I had one soldier who was
hit pretty bad, he stepped on a mine, lost part of his
left leg, and his left hand, when I reported him to my
Battalion Commander, I said he was OK, he only lost
part of his left leg, and his left hand, but he's alive. My Battalion Commander
ordered me to take some R & R because I had reached the point of
isolation.
These young soldiers who are fighting in Afghanistan
and Iraq are facing the same kind of mental game, it
can affect your rational thinking and your life. Viet Nam
was the first war that Americans could watch on their TV, the film was
flown out everyday by courier, you saw it the next
day, now you are seeing the war as it happens, you are
hearing the narrative right along with it. The next time you
see a Veteran please tell them "Thank You for
Serving"...it is like a balm for his soul.
tmb
Here's something for soldiers of any war. And for those who ever knew a
soldier.
"I WAS THERE LAST NIGHT..."
By Robert Clark
"The High Ground"
PO Box 457
Neillsville , WI 54456
A couple of years ago someone asked me if I still thought about Vietnam. I
nearly laughed in their face. How do you stop thinking about it? Every
day for the last twenty-four years, I wake up with
it, and go to bed with it.
But this is what I said. "Yeah, I think about it. I can't quit thinking about
it. I never will. But, I've also learned to live with it. I'm comfortable
with the memories. I've learned to stop trying to
forget and learned instead to embrace it. It just doesn't scare me anymore."
A psychologist once told me that NOT being affected by the experience over
there would be abnormal. When he told me that, it was like he'd just
given me a pardon. It was as if he said, "Go ahead
and feel something about the place, Bob. It ain't
going nowhere. You're gonna wear it for the rest of your
life. Might as well get to know it."
A lot of my "brothers" haven't been so lucky. For them the memories are too
painful, their sense of loss too great. My sister told me of a friend
she had whose husband was in the Nam. She asks this
guy when he was there. Here's what he said, "Just last
night." It took my sister a while to figure out what
he was talking about. JUST LAST NIGHT. Yeah I was in the Nam.
When? JUST LAST NIGHT. During sex with my wife. And on my way to work
this morning. Over my lunch hour. Yeah, I was there.
My sister says I'm not the same brother that went to Vietnam. My wife
says I won't let people get close to me, not even her. They are probably
both right.
Ask a vet about making friends in Nam. It was risky. Why? Because we were
in the business of death, and death was with us all the time. It wasn't
the death of, "If I die before I wake." This was the
real thing. The kind where boys scream for their
mothers. The kind that lingers in your mind and
becomes more real each time you cheat it. You don't want to make a lot
of friends when the possibility of dying is that
real, that close. When you do, friends become a
liability.
A guy named Bob Flannigan was my friend. Bob Flannigan is dead. I put him in
a body bag one sunny day, April 29, 1969. We'd been talking, only a few
minutes before he was shot, about what we were going to do when we got
back in the world. Now, this was a guy who had come
in country the same time as myself. A guy who was
loveable and generous. He had blue eyes and sandy blond hair.
When he talked, it was with a soft drawl. Flannigan was a hick and he
knew it. That was part of his charm. He didn't care.
Man, I loved this guy like the brother I never had.
But, I screwed up. I got too close to him. Maybe I
didn't know any better. But I broke one of the unwritten rules of war.
DON'T GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO DIE.
Sometimes you can't help it.
You hear vets use the term "buddy" when they refer to a guy they spent the
war with. "Me and this buddy a mine . . "
"Friend" sounds too intimate, doesn't it. "Friend" calls up images of being
close. If he's a friend, then you are going to be hurt if he dies, and
war hurts enough without adding to the pain. Get
close; get hurt. It's as simple as that.
In war you learn to keep people at that distance my wife talks about. You
become so good at it, that twenty years after the war, you still do it
without thinking. You won't allow yourself to be
vulnerable again.
My wife knows two people who can get into the soft spots inside me. My
daughters. I know it probably bothers her that they can do this. It's
not that I don't love my wife, I do. She's put up with
a lot from me. She'll tell you
that when she signed on for better or worse she had no idea there was
going to be so much of the latter. But with my
daughters it's different.
My girls are mine. They'll always be my kids. Not marriage, not distance,
not even death can change that. They are something on this earth that
can never be taken away from me. I belong to them.
Nothing can change that.
I can have an ex-wife; but my girls can never have an ex-father. There's
the difference.
I can still see the faces, though they all seem to have the same eyes. When
I think of us I always see a line of "dirty grunts" sitting on a paddy
dike. We're caught in the first gray silver between darkness and light.
That first moment when we know we've survived another
night, and the business of staying alive for one more
day is about to begin. There was so much hope in that
brief space of time. It's what we used to pray for. "One more day, God.
One more day."
And I can hear our conversations as if they'd only just been spoken. I
still hear the way we sounded, the hard cynical jokes, our morbid senses
of humor. We were scared to death of dying, and trying our best not to show it.
I recall the smells, too. Like the way cordite hangs on the air after a
fire-fight. Or the pungent odor of rice paddy mud. So different from the
black dirt of Iowa. The mud of Nam smells ancient, somehow. Like it's
always been there. And I'll never forget the way
blood smells, sticky and drying on my hands. I spent
a long night that way once. That memory isn't going
anywhere.
I remember how the night jungle appears almost dream like as the pilot of a
Cessna buzzes overhead, dropping parachute flares until morning. That
artificial sun would flicker and make shadows
run through the jungle. It was worse than not being
able to see what was out there sometimes. I remember once
looking at the man next to me as a flare floated overhead. The shadows
around his eyes were so deep that it looked like his eyes were gone. I reached over and touched him on the arm; without
looking at me he touched my hand. "I know
man. I know." That's what he said. It was a human moment. Two guys a
long way from home and
scared shitless. "I know man." And at that moment he did.
God I loved those guys. I hurt every time one of them died. We all did.
Despite our posturing. Despite our desire to stay disconnected, we
couldn't help ourselves. I know why Tim O'Brien writes
his stories. I know what gives Bruce Weigle the words
to create poems so honest I cry at their horrible beauty.
It's love. Love for those guys we shared the experience with.
We did our jobs like good soldiers, and we tried our best not to become as
hard as our surroundings. We touched each other and said, "I know." Like
a mother holding a child in the middle of a nightmare, "It's going to be all right." We tried not
to lose touch with our humanity. We tried to walk that line.
To be the good boys our parents had raised and not to give into
that unnamed thing we knew was inside us all.
You want to know what frightening is? It's a nineteen-year-old-boy who's had a sip of that
power over life and death that war gives you. It's a boy who,
despite all the things he's been taught, knows that he likes it. It's a
nineteen-year-old who's just lost a friend, and is angry and scared and,
determined that, "Some asshole is gonna pay." To this day, the thought of
that boy can wake me from a sound sleep and leave me staring at the ceiling.
As I write this, I have a picture in front of me. It's of two young men. On
their laps are tablets. One is smoking a cigarette. Both stare without
expression at the camera. They're writing letters. Staying in touch with
places they would rather be. Places and people they hope to see again.
The picture shares space in a frame with one of my wife. She doesn't mind.
She knows she's been included in special company. She knows I'll always
love those guys who shared that part of my life, a part she never can.
And she understands
how I feel about the ones I know are out there yet.
The ones who still answer the question, "When were you in Vietnam?" with
"Hey, man. I was there just last night."