Long After Open Hostilities End, Inner Wars Rage On

A Marine combat veteran walked willingly into police bullets outside a Montana restaurant in 1990, knowing the bullets would end his turmoil. He came home from Vietnam with dirty hands from killing. He learned his killing skills as a Marine when he was only 18. He killed in Vietnam and this killing was supposed to stop communism from spreading.

The lives he took earlier were different. Those lives were sanctioned by U.S. policy. President Johnson escalated the killings; Marines did the killing for Johnson.

In Montana, the Marine’s last body count - as killing was called in Vietnam - was a 64-year old man working in the restaurant. The Marine had come home from Vietnam with dirty hands. He had killed.

My hands are dirty as well. Thirty years ago, I watched an old Vietnamese man die slowly just a few feet from my boot. An American soldier threw a grenade into the bunker. Grandsons, who had earlier scrambled out of the bunker, looked back at the dying old man, someone whom they had known all their young lives. The horror and fear on their young faces has never left me. I felt dirty inside and sick at heart. Thirty years later, I still feel the same sickness when I remember that incident.

That same week, I zipped a 2-year-old boy into a body bag after watching him die from shrapnel wounds to the head; I was 19, just a teenager. My hands were dirty.

To simplify the acts of veterans like the Marine in Montana and say that they are disturbed is an easy indictment. That way, we don’t have to think about the thousands of veterans who came home from Vietnam, scarred in their minds at the horrific experiences in which they took part.

Do you look with sympathy at the disabled vet with a maimed body in a wheelchair? I don’t imagine you experience that same feeling for the Vietnam veteran walking your streets carrying a backpack with weeks of dirt on his clothes, chasing ghosts in his mind for the past several decades, or the perpetually unemployed veterans struggling with ex-wives and estranged children, failing to make sense of their lives after combat in Vietnam.

These men in their early 50s are the same 19-year-olds our government sent to Vietnam to fight a war against communism; at least, that’s what we were told. Thousands of veterans are still paying the price for those decisions. Thousands of Vietnam veterans took their own lives after the war. And hidden away in Veterans Administration hospitals are beds filled with the refuse of all our past wars, forgotten by this society.

Thousands of other Vietnam veterans are filling the waiting rooms of storefront counseling centers, struggling with the unforgettable experiences of killing another man or dragging the dead body of a friend through a rice paddy in the middle of a terrifying firefight, dreading the bullets flying all around them. Angry and confused, these vets grieve in the way of combat veterans: flashbacks, nightmares,and self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes they use drugs and alcohol to numb out and escape the memories seared into their heads and hearts.

Families are not exempt from the cost of war. Disruptive relationships leave trails of ex-wives and estranged children. Listen to the stories of wives or children of Vietnam veterans. Listen to their stories of living with men who survived the heat, wet, stink, mud and blood of that battlefield, but who now relive the war again and again in their dreams.

We did the killing for you in Vietnam. Our hands are dirty, we can’t wash them clean.

When the television cameras showed the brutalized bodies of the helicopter crewman being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, I relived again in my mind and my heart with vivid clarity the blood and stench of another war halfway around the world in Vietnam. I remembered wrapping the bloody dead bodies of American teenagers my age in ponchos and loading them onto helicopters for their last ride home. How many more VA hospital beds or wheelchairs did we fill with maimed bodies or disturbed minds? Our hands are dirty and we can’t wash them clean.

For combat veterans, the significance of war is a personal memory. Soldiers names may be lost in time, but we can never forget sharing in the agony of their deaths, never be able to forget their last moments, their lost lives.

Those leaders who offer up another generation of young lives to the gods of war must also be held in judgment for their decisions. Their hands are also dirty and they may never wash them clean.

The choice to wage war is a sacred choice that can never be made lightly.