For Auld Lang Syne

My algorithms last night brought me the story of a combat Marine whose first war experience was in 1968 at the brutal siege of Khe Sanh. His was a good story. He was from a good, middle-class family in Connecticut. His parent's plan for him was to go to Notre Dame in South Bend like his father did. I think his mom went to St. Mary's but don't quote me on that. The young man didn't really have the grades for Notre Dame, but worse than that, he didn't have the football talent either. Dad, an FBI agent and an alum, wrote letters to get him in there anyway, but the son knew it wasn't for him. He gave it two years before it became evident that, yes, he really didn't have the grades, and he flunked most of his courses and left school. His father (and mom) was livid, seeing it as an act of rebellion and a personal affront to them. The boy went to a USMC recruiter in New Haven and signed a contract. His dad had sternly warned him that losing his college deferment meant he was eligible for the draft, and here his boy was volunteering in direct defiance of him. Dad called his son an "asshole" and refused to speak to him in the following days before he went off to boot camp.

Pretty rough stuff. It actually struck me as incongruous given that dad was a WWII Navy veteran and a career FBI man. I would have expected him to be proud. Go and figure dads, right? 

The son thrived in bootcamp, making the rank of PFC in training, and was shipped off to Vietnam with an artillery MOS- not the combat infantry he had hoped for. His parents skipped his graduation in South Carolina, as the only graduation they had planned for was the one in South Bend. First month was uneventful. No one shot at him. But then his unit was moved to a hill in Khe Sanh Valley where all hell would break loose as the Tet Offensive began all over South Vietnam. He and his mates were under siege for five months. He made Lance Corporal and then Corporal in one day, because attrition had been such that there were no officers to be FO (Forward Observer) and the officer in charge simply didn't want a PFC sitting in on his meetings. I guess rank really is everything. And maybe nothing at all. 

We will skip the brutality of combat here. I think we all know how awful it is and that the reality of it is that it is a thousand times worse than what we imagine. Boys have been going off to war to become men for thousands of years. For many generations it seems like a rite of passage. Go off to war, make new friends, kill and come home, hopefully in one piece. It is almost always stupid, insane and unnecessary. He did his year in-country and came home. 

His parents had not completely turned on him. They wrote and received letters from him that year. One letter he did not write was the one telling them he was coming home. He knocked on the door one day and mom nearly fainted. Dad came home that afternoon and, ever the hardcase, was angry that his son had not called him to tell him he was home safe, or home at all. The errors of youth. Nothing personal on the son's part. 

In time, he readjusted to civilian life. Dad, who like a lot of dads of the time, had been a smoker since he was fourteen. He was in the hospital dying of cancer. The son visited and they talked their one time about Vietnam. Dad had reacted as he did at his son's decision to go to war, because dad, in his job at the FBI knew how fucked up the war was. The government had little intention of winning. All of dad's FBI cohorts were of this opinion. They had that inside information that one gets in government if you open your eyes to it. Dad had and that's why his son was an "asshole" for going. 

Well, the real assholes were in Washington, but dad couldn't or wouldn't say that at the time of his boy's enlistment. Think of dad's generation going off to war with the very real mission of fighting fascism. Then think of the next generation going off to war for the profits of various corporate overlords. This is my take now. Ostensibly, Vietnam was about fighting communism at the time, but we all know better now, just as the dad did then.  

I like service after the sale in storytelling. I was glad this one didn't end at Khe Sanh with the ubiquitous, "I survived Hell" theme. The boy who went off to war became an old man who learned from the entirety of his experience, before, during and after. He thought he had been tough on his old man. I got that. We always think we know our parents, but do we? We can spend most of our lives with them but still only know them as mom and dad, not as people. If we are lucky, we might fill in the blanks later. We may get that wrong, but we are ahead of the game if we try. Our parents turned out- as we did- to be as fallible as we are. Imagine that!

In 2000, he returned to Vietnam as tourist on a rainy day and made his way up the hill. Amazingly, he found artifacts from his months there on that hill. Not all had been swallowed up by nature as happens after humans leave. An empty can of C-rations. The remnants of foxholes the Marines had dug. A locket with the photo of a Vietnamese woman and child. Still-live RPG and mortar shells. Those are a problem after every war, but this hilltop in the Khe Sanh valley had lost its importance three decades earlier. His mission this time was to read the names and death dates of his comrades. He did this and let the paper be gone with the wind. The rain stopped and a mist overtook the hill. He looked about ten yards off and saw the silhouettes of a half dozen or so helmeted men wearing their GI ponchos. He looked away, thinking he was imagining it, but when he looked again, they were still there. He saluted and then they were gone. 

Surreal? You betcha! I don't know enough about life and death to discount ghosts and any realm of the afterlife, so I won't. He saw what he saw. I believe that. 

As all old warriors should, he saw the ungrateful insanity of war. In town, he met a former NVA officer. A former enemy. Clearly, both had done what they had to do at the time. Their calls to duty were similar. They both lost friends and had to move on to the next thing in life. Good that they were able to meet that way, as former enemies. Not everybody gets that chance in any aspect of life; to discover where you have been and the good and bad that molded you into the person you have become. Quite a trip this life is, eh?