Getting Ready to Go

I am preparing to return to Vietnam after leaving there almost forty-two years ago, on March 27, 1970. I am going with a group called “Soldier’s Heart,” and it is a healing trip as much as a sight-seeing vacation. We will visit places that have significance for me and the other veterans, wives and one widow in the group and I will get to return to most of the places where I was based during my eighteen months “in-country” as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Operator. We won’t be able to go into places like the A Shau and An Lao Valleys, because they are still very remote and much of these places are still littered with anti-personnel mines and bomblets that U.S. forces placed or dropped over a period of more than twenty years. Then there’s all the stuff the French, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong planted.

In getting ready for my trip, I have been reading a lot about the war and the history of Vietnam. It is quite shocking to read how we assumed that, unlike every other country that attempted to subjugate the Vietnamese over some 3,000 years, we could succeed where so many others had failed miserably. In that regard, I am most interested in seeing how the Vietnamese have managed to move forward in the thirty-six years since the armies we fought marched into what was then Saigon, and unified their country. I was amused to note that the hotels we will stay in—they all have very professional web sites—are modern in every way and could be located in any Western or European country. These are not of the “Motel 6” variety and appear to be fancy enough that they are probably not the kind of places I would choose to stay if I were traveling there on my own. I recently said to a friend, after seeing the hotel web sites, that we had fought the war in Vietnam, apparently, to turn them into—us.

I am excited to make this trip, something which I thought I would never be able to do and I can only thank my good friend, Greg Walker, and the people at Soldier’s Heart for making it possible. Greg put me in touch with them through his work as a counselor working with special operations wounded warriors and they offered me a scholarship, I guess because of the work I have done for the past thirty-four years for my fellow veterans and active-duty personnel. But for their largess, there is no way I could ever afford this trip and I will always be grateful. I have never expected anything in return for my work assisting veterans and their survivors with the byzantine system that is the Department of Veterans Affairs, but I guess that if something were to be proffered in exchange for the thousands of hours of my life that I have devoted to this work there could be no greater gift than this trip.

In the beginning, once I made the decision to go, I thought that I might have trepidations about going back to this place that played such a significant part in the history of my life. This has turned out not to be the case, despite having been exposed to more chaotic and violent events than I can count, or even remember—literally. When I was doing research for my book (still in the editing stage), I recovered an “unusual” incident report of a mission that I was on with my CO, Andy Breland. It was an “unusual” incident because it involved a combat assault and going in to a remote area to destroy artillery rounds loaded with Improved Conventional Munitions (ICMs)—little high explosive bomblets that were deployed when the round blew apart after being fired. They were classified and could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. The helicopter carrying the load of projectiles had been shot down and the ordnance had been spread over a large area in the jungle southeast of LZ Sally, a 101st base in Northern I Corps.

To make a long story short, this incident took place as the war was raging all around us. We took fire going in, while we were on the ground with an infantry platoon and as we were taking off after we completed our mission. Members of our security detail were killed and wounded protecting us as we did our job. When I got done reading the report of this event, I realized that I had no memory of any of this. I called Andy and read the report to him. His response was that he did not remember it, either, despite the fact that he had written the report. Unlike many of my fellow Vietnam veterans, my war-related trauma mostly involves what I was doing, not what I saw or participated in, despite the fact that I’m guessing that my teammates and I were in close contact with hundreds of dead bodies that were shot and blown to pieces after battles on small, relatively insignificant places no one ever heard of, save for the people who were there—on both sides—and who were lucky enough to survive.

Being an EOD operator had its own significant trauma, which I did not realize at the time. It never really dawned on me, even after I was blown up by a bad mortar round—and managed to survive—during an ammo dump cleanup after the Post-Tet Offensive of 1969. Even after that event, I went right back to work, never consciously considering the inherent dangers of my job. A part of that is the knowledge that I survived, relatively unscathed, while others in my field did not. Then there were the American soldiers who died on operations that we were involved in. In both cases, I still wonder: “Why them and not me?” One of my counselors in a VA program I was in said, when I brought this up, that some of us died so others could live.

I have given that a lot of thought and I think it actually makes sense, to the extent that anything about Vietnam will ever make sense, at least to many of us who were there. I think it’s a matter of mathematics and maybe my son, a freaking math genius, can figure out some way to formulate this theory. In conflict, much as everything in life, I believe that everything happens for a reason. Nothing “just happens.” So, somewhere, some place, somehow, it was determined that men and women would die in Vietnam, others of us would survive and some of us “survivors” would carry wounds, some physical, some psychic, forever. For me, the wound is that of surviving. I’m glad I did, needless to say, but it’s a conundrum, just the same. I have accepted the fact that others, as my counselor opined, died so that I could live. I just can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that I shouldn’t have and why me, in particular?

I’m hoping that making this journey will help me leave as much of my feelings about this where they began, or, at least, “close enough for government work.” We were going to a couple of places that were really important to me, but the Tet holiday has made it impossible to get either plane or train tickets from Danang to Qui Nhon. We could have driven, but it would be at least eight hours each way from Danang, plus time to see the Qui Nhon area and go up to An Khe (rent a car) and back to Qui Nhon. Since I was the only person whom these places had any significant meaning for, I told the folks in charge I wasn’t making this trip to spend the better part of two entire days crammed into a car. That said, I think that being north up the road in Hoi An, also on the South China Sea, will be close enough. I will get to see many of the other places that have significance for me, however, so I am hopeful that this will be a rewarding and healing adventure.

See you in Vietnam. I will have my Skype up most of the time in the hotel. It’s fifteen hours later there.