The Vietnam Reader (39 page)

Father, father, we don’t need to escalate.
You see, war is not the answer
for only love can conquer hate.
You know, we’ve got to find a way
to bring some loving here today.

Picket lines (sister)
and picket signs, (sister)
Don’t punish me (sister)
with brutality, (sister)
Talk to me (sister)
so you can see
Oh, what’s goin’ on (What’s goin’ on)
What’s goin’ on (What’s goin’ on)
What’s goin’ on (What’s goin’ on)
What’s goin’ on (What’s goin’ on)

(background talk: Right on, brother. Right on.)

Mother, mother, everybody thinks we’re wrong.
Aw, but who are they to judge us
simply cause our hair is long.
You know, we’ve got to find a way
to bring some understanding here today.

Picket lines (brother)
and picket signs, (brother)
Don’t punish me (brother)
with brutality, (brother)
Come on, talk to me (brother)
so you can see
What’s goin’ on (What’s goin’ on)
Yeah, what’s goin’ on (What’s goin’ on)
Tell me what’s goin’ on (What’s goin’ on)
I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on (What’s goin’ on)

(background talk, etc.)

War
E
DWIN
S
TARR
1970

War!
Hunh! Yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.

(repeat twice)

Oh, war I despise
cause it means destruction of innocent life.
War means tears from thousands of mothers’ eyes
when their sons go off to fight and lose their lives.
I said:

(chorus twice)

War, it ain’t nothin’ but a heartbreaker
Friend only to the undertaker.
War is an enemy to all mankind.
The thought of war blows my mind.
War has caused unrest within the younger generation.
Induction, then destruction—who wants to die?

(chorus twice)

War, it ain’t nothin’ but a heartbreaker.
It’s got one friend, that’s the undertaker.
Oh, war has shattered many young man’s dreams,
made him disabled, bitter and mean.

Life is too short and precious to spend fighting war these days.
War can’t give life, it can only take it away.

(chorus three times)

Peace, love and understanding,
is there no place for them today?
They say we must fight to keep our freedom
But Lord I know there’s got to be a better way.

(chorus, with sound of marching)

Born in the U.S.A.
B
RUCE
S
PRINGSTEEN
1984

Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Got in a little hometown jam so they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “son don’t you understand now”

Had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone
He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I’m a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I’m a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.

The Big Parade
10,000 M
ANIACS
/N
ATALIE
M
ERCHAN
1989

Detroit to D.C. night train, Capitol, parts East. Lone young man takes a seat. And by the rhythm of the rails, reading all his mother’s mail from a city boy in a jungle town postmarked Saigon. He’ll go live his mother’s dream, join the slowest parade he’ll ever see. Her weight of sorrows carried long and carried far. “Take these, Tommy, to The Wall.”

Metro line to the Mall site with a tour of Japanese. He’s wandering and lost until a vet in worn fatigues takes him down to where they belong. Near a soldier, an ex-Marine with a tattooed dagger and eagle trembling, he bites his lip beside a widow breaking down. She takes her Purple Heart, makes a fist, strikes The Wall. All come to live a dream, to join the slowest parade they’ll ever see. Their weight of sorrows carried long and carried far, taken to The Wall.

It’s 40 paces to the year that he was slain. His hand’s slipping down The Wall for it’s slick with rain. How would life have ever been the same if this wall had carved in it one less name? But for Christ’s sake, he’s been dead over 20 years. He leaves the letters asking, “Who caused my mother’s tears, was it Washington or the Viet Cong?” Slow deliberate steps are involved. He takes them away from the black granite wall toward the other monuments so white and clean.

O Potomac, what you’ve seen. Abraham had his war too, but an honest war. Or so it’s taught in school.

        6        
The Oral History Boom

February 1968. A Marine awaits evacuation after the Battle of Hue.

After the mainstream success of the late-seventies fiction films such as
The Deer Hunter
and
Apocalypse Now
, Vietnam veterans felt that their story had been stolen and bastardized—that their true story still hadn’t been told and probably never would. The oral history boom of the early eighties provided a corrective to the movies’ exaggerations and omissions. Here, finally (or so the publishers’ publicity claimed) was the vets’ real story in their own words—nothing less than the truth. In the spirit of Studs Terkel’s popular oral histories
Working
and
Division Street,
the Vietnam oral history, it was said, would give America an objective, grass-roots view of the war that so far was missing.

The difficulty with this idea is that subjects interviewed about their own experience often lie, forget, or fictionalize their lives (exaggeration being one great pleasure of the oral tradition), especially those interviewed ten to fifteen years after traumatic events. On top of that, the editor of such a book decides what that book is finally going to say. The editor, like the writer, practices a conscious selectivity, choosing subjects, what part of an interview to include, what to cut, and how to structure or sequence material for maximum dramatic impact. While the testimony of the subject may or may not be certifiable or valid, the oral history is just as easily manipulated as any other form, but the public commonly accepts it (even more so than other nonfiction) as absolutely true. The problem of authority—supposedly a nonissue here—becomes that much more complex, simply because readers naturally assume complete authority and total disclosure.

The success of these oral histories in the marketplace was in some part due to the sudden and belated recognition of the Vietnam vet by Americans. With the demise of the Carter administration and the rise to power of archconservative Ronald Reagan, the country was encouraged to see its Vietnam policy, as Reagan himself put it, as “a noble cause.” In November 1982, amid great controversy (see the introduction to Chapter 13), the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated, and the ensuing national celebration of America’s forgotten heroes lasted several years. The veteran, according to official sources, had finally come home.

Nonveteran Mark Baker’s
Nam
(1981) was the first major oral history, and promptly became a bestseller. The veterans whose stories comprise the book are never named. In fact, there’s no frame of reference; the only clues to their service branch, years in Vietnam, and areas of operation are those included in their own words (though their voices sound nearly identical section to section). In addition, Baker has cut their stories into bite-size pieces and ordered them chronologically in groups to fit a typical tour of duty—induction, basic training, first day in-country, operations, return home.

Wallace Terry’s
Bloods
(1984) avoids this anonymity by concentrating on one subject at a time and giving the reader the soldier’s occupation, unit, area, and duration of his tour of duty. Terry, a journalist who spent several years in Vietnam for Time, interviewed African American soldiers both while he was in-country and later when he returned to America. His transcription of their voices changes markedly with each participant. The selections are artfully sequenced, and comment as much on race relations in the United States and the abuse of the truth by the media as they do about Vietnam.

Keith Walker’s
A Piece of My Heart
(1985) works similarly, focusing on women veterans. It tends to include more about its subjects’ lives after Vietnam than other oral histories, and therefore has much to say about the gap between the veteran and America, though this time giving us the rare and strikingly different (yet in some respects familiar) perspective of the female veteran. Vet Al Santoli’s
Everything We Had
(1981) follows the same basic format.

Bernard Edelman’s
Dear America
(1985) is different from the other
books in this chapter in that it employs letters written during the war to portray the lives of American soldiers. It’s not always easy to make out the context of these letters—that is, why the writer is mentioning this or that particular issue—and the brief biographical sketches sometimes add an inordinate weight to a piece, telling the reader that a few weeks after this hopeful, idealistic letter was mailed, its nineteen-year-old author was killed. The letters themselves were gathered as part of the design process of the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial; later, HBO produced a film version of the book, matching home movies shot by veterans to the letters, now read by professional actors.

While the subjects’ views of the war and its conduct may disagree, all of these accounts focus on typical issues: the individual versus the group or the individual caught in the system; the problems of guilt or innocence; the struggle to throw off stereotypes about the vet. In fact, much of what we see here is familiar—we’ve already met most of these people (by type) in the earlier fiction, except now we get the chance to see them looking back and judging what happened, and that judgment often comes against American society and its institutions, especially the military. In a way, many of these testimonies become protests after the fact.

The form some of these accounts take, as critics have noted, is the
Bildungsroman,
the education-novel, showing the movement of a young person from innocence to experience through a trying event. Through their testimony, the subjects of these oral histories provide a last chapter to their own stories, telling us what they’ve learned. Their words have the ring of finality, of wisdom earned at a high price. It’s important to remember that these lessons, like those in the most absurd fiction, are not raw but have been selected and constructed for dramatic impact.

Nam
M
ARK
B
AKER
1981