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"I had a great time till the war. What happened to that period of our lives? The war was nothing. It was insane. Stupid. And that busted up my life. It busted up everybody's life."
After two hours, the session is over. One of the vets ends sadly: "I want to rise out of the ashes with a little of what I left behind."
Well, everyone is getting older now. A child who was born during the Tet offensive of early 1968 is already a teenager. The last helicopter went whumping ignominiously off the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon more than six years ago. And the Viet Nam veterans are not kids any more. They are losing hair and getting fat and sighting down the road toward middle age. Why is it that so many of them, so many of those Americans who fought the war, still return to it with sharp, deep, sometimes obsessive memories—tonguing the bad tooth, re-enacting the most vivid playlets of pain and horror? Why can't they let it go? Bad war. Sorry about that. Now get on with it, son, you're pushing 40.
In the summer of 1981, the war in Viet Nam is re-emerging as an item of profoundly unfinished moral and psychological business. It is not so much a nasty secret as a subject that Americans tacitly agreed not to discuss for a time.
Some 2.9 million Americans served in Indochina. The majority of them managed to put their lives together after the war and proceed calmly enough. They have their careers, their children, some memories —not always unpleasant—of Indochina.
But nearly 100,000 vets came back with severe physical disabilities: fast evacuation by helicopter and excellent medical care saved thousands of men—many without arms and legs—who might otherwise have died. Another 50,000 fear that they may have got cancer from the blitzing American herbicide Agent Orange.
But the real devils of the war work in the mind. Something like a quarter of those who served may still be suffering from substantial psychological problems. They get flashbacks, nightmares, depression, startle reactions, and that wild red haze of rage in the brain when self-control goes and adrenaline shakes the whole frame, and some terrific violence struggles to cut loose. That is Viet Nam combat doing its wild repertory in the theater of a vet's nerves.
The nation energetically repressed the whole experience of Viet Nam for much of the '70s. All the logic of the Me Generation was actually headlong flight from the lethal surprises found in obscure Cochin China. Journalist Gloria Emerson, who wrote with brilliant indignation about the war, pronounced bitterly a few years ago: "We are a people who drop the past, and then forget where it has been put." But the war in Viet Nam cannot be discarded with impetuous American blitheness. The civic and psychic mechanics don't work that way. The men (and as many as 7,500 women) who served in the war brought back with them pain and problems — rage and guilt, sorrows and confusions — that have gone ignored and unattended for years. Now, at last, they seem to be commanding some attention.
The veterans returned in the elation of their sheer survival. But then, weirdly, they vanished into America's oblivion. This spring and summer some of them have been trying to rise out of that denial and make themselves visible. Some have staged protests