Now Tell Us All About the War

Major funding for it, now tell us all about the war, is made possible by a grant from Vietnam Combat Veterans Construction and Historical Renovation, a regional corporation specializing in the Useful Renovation of Classic Structures. The story remains pretty much the same, the story is about the idealism and innocence of youth and how war ends youth, swiftly, surely, and abruptly. In his book The Rumor of War, Philip Caputo wrote,

we learn what fear feels like and what death looks like and the smell of death, the experience of killing, of enduring pain and infecting it, the loss of friends and the sight of wounds, we learn what war was about, the cares of it and the forms of it, and we began to change. For the generation born after World War II, the war was Vietnam and for that war there were pain to memorialize, to organize, to take whatever talents they had to tell us all about the war. In the book The Rumor of War II, Philip Caputo wrote,

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. . . . . I just can't, sir. Sometimes, man, every time I talk about it, it just hurts. The GI is right. It just hurts. As he once paid the price of going to the country that was the war, he now pays through the effort of sense-making, the price of coming back. The war is not over. It will only be over when we have made it so through a common effort of signification. When we have learned of what cost it was waged for everyone to touch,

then, and now, and beyond, then it will be over. Then we can say goodbye to it, but not before. . You hear the word Vietnam. It sounds like a dirty word. People want to change their channel. Ah, this is another Vietnam show. Well, they should listen once in a while instead of just changing the channel. Because maybe for too many years, they changed too many channels, and always turned to page three. I talked to you in the editorial, so to speak. Ten years ago, all I would have gotten back was a lot of strident bullshit. And I, as a warrior, would have been blamed for the war. You have to remember that we were coming off, I mean, historically, it wasn't that far away from World War II. A country was being run by, and most of the people in the positions of responsibility were people who came out of World War II and Korea, where we still accomplished certain objectives and did it in an acceptable way. And here, all of a sudden, we're people challenging.

Everything this country was all about. And every notion we had about soldiers and about altruism and our power and everything. I mean, you know, soldiers who handed out chocolate bars from World War II became soldiers at me life. And the images just changed, and people couldn't deal with that completely. Don't ever, ever, ever discard a generation that you send to war. And if you commit a generation to war, stay with a generation. You know, follow them all the way through. Don't just tell them they go to war. Reminds me of Archibald McLeish, who wrote a poem after World War II. It said, you know, these are young dead soldiers, and they do not speak, but they're heard in the still-high houses. And what they're saying is not, is that, you know, we're young and we've died. And we're asking for you to remember us.

But whether or not we died for anything and whether or not it means anything is no longer for us to say, but it's for you to make our deaths mean something. Something has to live beyond the normal lifespan of these individuals. Otherwise, the whole event of Vietnam will be lost to history and to a historical interpretation by people who have not been to Vietnam or by people who don't know what they're talking about. To not forget to remember is to do honor. And I think it is important for us to do honor. To people of our, you know, our own men who fall in battle. It is important for our national soul to honor those men. I think, well, we lose the capacity to honor men who have fallen in battle. For this country, then we are going to lose something as a civilization.

I think that that is an end on to itself. Because to forget is in a way is a worst dishonor than to condemn. I have photos of us all together, polished boots and brass in front of whitewashed barracks. They're hanging on the parlor wall. We are as we once were, the wholeness of our limbs, two eyes blinking at the sun when all had all needed to woo the world. I was writing that book and putting myself in the place of a young guy who knows nothing as most soldiers know very little about politics. And the purpose of that book is to do it from that perspective. Mine is not to ask the reason why. I will go if you send me. Trusting you, my government, trusting you, my elders, that you're sending me

because you know what's best. You were raised that if you're a man, you don't run from trouble. You face it. You were raised that this country gave you and your family a lot of opportunities. They would not have had otherwise. And you therefore owe your country something. And I grew up in the Kennedy era, and that ringing phrase was very much with me. So we answered the call to arms and felt that we were doing our duty. Our father's fought imperialism. They fought Nazism. Now we're fighting communism. And we didn't know what all these isms were. And I couldn't tell you about Nazism or imperialism. Nor could my father's for the most part, and yet they fought it. And our father's told us to go off and fight communism. So we believed in our fathers. Personally, I say that what I did was right. I believe that in my country said that I had to do it.

I went and did it, and I did the best that I could. And if other people feel shame about it, leave them loose sleep. The politicians feel bad about it. Leave them loose sleep. I carried out my mission, my goal, my objective, and so did my men. They were damn good. What was ignored through all of that was the devotion to duty that tremendous sacrifices made, that passion with which people fought, as strong and as valiant as it any war in American history. And for that, the soldiers got no credit. What we did was no different from what they did at Lexington, what they did at Gettysburg, at Shiloh, what they did at Normandy, what they did at Inchan, it was war. Like it or not, it was war. And we participated. It hurts to be shot.

Dead men are heavy. Don't seek trouble. It'll find you soon enough. You hear the shot that gets you. Scared to death on the field of battle. Life after death. These were hard lessons true, but they were the lessons of ignorance. Ignorant men, trite truths. Sometimes I think that what a lot of Vietnam veterans have is a sense of betrayal by their leaders. And getting us involved in a war that was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to win in the first place. And then of creating military and political policies that really made it impossible. To win. Or even to come out with a half-ast settlement out of the thing. A number of us were very, very disturbed because we were just taking casualties with no goal, with no purpose. And we were in the river boats and we were running up and down rivers all through the Mekong Delta. And we never saw the enemy first.

We were always ambushed. We went through the line of fire in the ambush. We took our casualties and hopefully suppressed the fire and met up our casualties. And that was that. We never secured land. We never really gained any territory. We never communicated with the people except with bullets. And we began to feel this incredible waste and sense of absurdity in these missions. We were rushed down to the outskirts of Saigon near Cambodia inside because they anticipated a large movement coming across Cambodia and hitting the capital again. And it was complete chaos. And so we thought what we would do, just until we could establish radio contact with people, where we could discern what was a friendly Vietnamese unit and what was an enemy Vietnamese unit. And everything else, plus it was raining and it was a mess that we would spend the night in the Buddhist monastery. So we went through the gates and there was a ceremony going on and the incense was coming up. It smelled the incense and the beating on the gong and the chanting.

And we waited about five minutes, ten minutes, it stopped. We took off our shoes, went to the door to ask permission if we could stay in the monastery grounds. And the monk opens the door and in the background there's a television and the monks were watching Jonathan Winters. I mean, American television station. We had one officer, a good one, who just leaped up in the middle of a firefight and said, it's just kids and they're all fucking dying. Just kids, kids, kids. They had to take him away. There was a severe, a tremendous division between the frontline troops and the rear echelon troops over there. There were always exists in all wars, but it was final and absolute in Vietnam. I mean, broiles beautifully communicates this, what happened to him when he went over to Vietnam as a Platoon commander. And he was just got over there. And he was out in the boom, he was out in the boom docks with his Platoon and he got a call in the radio from some staff major.

That headquarters, back at the name, was being heavily bombarded with rockets. Broiles had said that he being a new guy and a new lieutenant in his own mind, he equated this with Pearl Harbor or some catastrophe. And he tells his Platoon that the saddle up that we've got to go out and find this rocket battery because they're blowing the hell out of headquarters. And his guys all just got up and cheered. You get an attitude. They can kill you, but they can't eat you. Don't sweat the small stuff. My men used to say, there it is. There it fucking is in the tent. Like, what are you going to tell me? What are you going to show me? What is it in the whole scheme of things that is going to give me any more insight on the whole situation? You ain't showing me shit. That is dead, that's it. When I got back to the States, I was very much against the war. Not because I was against the premise of why we were supposed to be there.

But because I realized, especially from the Cambodian situation, on that border, the North Vietnamese could do anything they wanted to do. People would say, North Vietnamese aren't in Cambodia. What do you mean they're not in Cambodia? They just killed my friends. They just killed the villagers. I saw two villagers wiped out by North Vietnamese. Vietnamese wiped out. Not Americans. And you're trying to tell me that they're not there? That turned me against the war. The fact that we just were political ponds. And that should never, ever happen to American boys again. I was in Cambodia. Wounded in Cambodia. Bleeding in Cambodia. And an anti-tank, not an anti-tank, but a claymore-type mine. Explode. And it was face down, thank God. And it blew my boots off my feet, ripped my feet up, mutilated my feet. I was all torn apart. I called for help. Cambodia in 1968. We weren't supposed to be there. My whole team was there. I was wounded. So many men were wounded. I said, Chris, we can't come in and get you. We can't lose a chopper over neutral territory. So I got blown away that day.

But yet, my people wouldn't come in and get me. Here I was, a proud American. Just as proud as anybody in my family, centuries before me. Proud them, smart and left. Just left. Walk around and be aggressive. Maybe someday in the far distant future, these guys might give up or they might do this. Nobody with an ounce of sense in his head is going to risk his life for his buddies and to stand by his buddies. But he's not going to go out there and kill himself for that. They say the mission is the most important thing in the military. The mission counts. What's the mission when they tell us defense? You go into a football game as I say, or a boxing game, and you play steady defense, you're going to lose. You go into a war and you play steady defense. Mark my words through my experience, through my bloodshed. You're going to lose.

I was a good soldier then. I did my job. I didn't let anybody die. I accomplished what I was supposed to accomplish, so I thought. Whoever gave Vietnam away, whoever lost the war, sure as hell wasn't me or I. It was somebody else. Was it America? Was it politicians? Was it bureaucrats? Was it this? You know, Penn Stripe State Department people? I don't know. Maybe it was the Vietnamese themselves. But when you try to stick that label of losing the Vietnam war and the Vietnam combat veteran, he has every right to tell you to go to hell. I think also what it comes down to is that 57,000 people have their name on a wall here. And they give up their lives for the freedom of those people. Those people aren't free. Just happened that it was my generation. You know, the baby boom. All the products of the baby boom came to light. Their fathers thought the big one, they won it. And their fathers didn't warn them about war and how ugly war was.

They told them about the Romanicism of war. See, I grew up with the mythology of World War II. I mean the popular mythology, the movies. This was a grand and glorious experience. It was John Wayne and Aldo Ray and music played in the background. And when guys died and those movies, they fell very gracefully. And they said something at the end, some nice little fitting epitaph for themselves. And you know, when you're trying to go over there and they don't fall gracefully and they're sprayed all over the place. And they don't say anything. And there's no background music. Well, that's part of the harshness of the loss of innocence. There is an excitement and an exhilaration from combat that is unmatched. You're getting in touch with these things way down deep in your alligator brain that hardly ever get touched.

And there's a thrill to it. It's like a pillow fight. But it's distorted. It's the best pillow fight in the world. And when it's all over, there are people lying around and there are pieces of people lying all around. And coming home, I have to ask myself, how could I feel so terrific doing something so horrible? We lay in mud, struggling while the waves of death broke over us, swallowed us, and cast us loose on a sea of madness. 18 in the blood felt like tears on the blade of my bayonet. And youthful dreams laid dead amidst spent cartridges and broken bodies littering the earth. After that, there was no innocence and there was no future to believe in. I mean, that was part of the confusion of Vietnam was that there were moments of extraordinary beauty and tenderness and communication.

I mean, you know, traveling those rivers, which were teeming with life and full of just this extraordinary exchange between human beings. And then 15 minutes later, you could be in the middle of a firefight in some small canal. The paradox of warfare is that yes, it is one of these awful and awesome experiences and horrifying and so forth. But at the same time, there are redeeming aspects to the experience, one of which I had pointed out was the solidarity one fellow, the one fellow man with one's comrades. This is something everybody that seeks in ordinary life, feeling of a connection with other people, solidarity. Well, we had that in the foxholes and trenches of Vietnam, but to a far greater degree than anybody can have an ordinary life. And it's paradoxical in that that intensity of love for one's comrades, literally where you will sacrifice your life for him and he for you, is dependent upon the very horror of war.

You can't have that kind of camaraderie if all you're doing is having patio barbecues. And I think what Vietnam veterans experienced was the way that most of the rest of the world has to live their life. And we also experienced that life is not Hollywood. It's not the seven o'clock news. It's a very complex world out there with very complex problems. The old cham temple of Fatbaugh, the locals say it's a thousand years old, older than the stilted Anglo-Saxon language I used, older they say than the use of bullets, ballots, and the printing press, older than the airplane and the bomb, older than napalm, was hit yesterday by a 20 year old helicopter pilot fresh from the states who founded more ecstatic than the firing range for testing his guns. Because you can go into war at the age of 19 and emerge approximately somewhere 55 or 56 a few months later.

The average soldier in Vietnam was 19 years old. The average soldier World War II was 26. Phelous in Vietnam generally had not had enough life experience to form a moral foundation for their own lives. Therefore, on Christmas Day, I met you on a road near Kwong Tree, a chance reunion of Picasso boys growing up together in a town that feared God and raised sons willing to die for their country. Who you with? Have you seen much action? What the hell is going on here? All afternoon, we remembered our shared youth, the old boat with jiffy and the slow leak, skipping Sunday school to read comics and drink, orange soda at flexors, the covered bridge near Brian's farm. Though neither of us spoke of it, we knew then we had lost more than our youth. No one has ever been in prolonged combat ever. That experience is never over for them. It stays with you the rest of your life.

There's no such thing as getting over it the way you get over a skinny or a bad love affair. Totally, when a man goes into combat as a very young man, he is killed and reborn into something else. And so that experience is as transforming as the experience of birth itself. It is and will always remain the major event of my life until I die. Nothing will ever supersede. San Francisco Airport. No more corn and stuffing ruptured chests with cotton balls and not enough heat tabs to make a decent meal.

I asked some girl to sit and have a coke with me. She thought I was crazy. I thought she was going to call a cop. I bought a ticket for Philadelphia. At the loading gate, they told me, thank you for flying QWA. We hope you enjoy your flight. No brass bands, no flags, no girls, no camera. Only a small boy who asked me what the ribbons on my chest meant. I was blown up by the incoming water. But mentally, mentally, I wiped out my life in total shambles. About a hundred jobs, four times in jail. A divorce, a wife, who was unfaithful and left me. I have my own blood brother born from the same mother will not have anything to do with me because I'm a stupid crazy Vietnam vet. That was a war where guys who came back with traditional images of the value of their service and a notion that they had somehow killed and risked death and given themselves in extraordinary ways for something real.

But they came back to this country to find out that nobody else thought it was real or valuable or worth they're being praised for. And to then be called war criminals and baby killers and village burners and monsters was to heighten that sense of betrayal greatly. When I went to college after coming out of the army, I never liked to tell people that I was a veteran not because I was ashamed. But because I knew that they couldn't comprehend and what I this was still 1970, 71, 72. What I had to compete against was Walter Cronkite. What I had to compete against was the meal I massacred. What I had to compete against was all the propaganda that was grist for the meal and the people like Jane Fonda were putting out. And none of it, as far as I was concerned, had borne much of a reality to what the soldiers were really experiencing over there. I recall when I returned from Vietnam in July of 1966, long before any disillusionment in the American public had set in about the war.

I recall coming home, I was in Denang on July 12th in a, the movie called The Replacement Battalion, which was also the battalion that you were in when you got shipped back. I was in a dusty tent on the 12th of July by July 15th. I was in a family reunion in my parents' backyard in the suburbs of Chicago. And a family in neighborhood reunion, I did not want to face these people. And I was, in fact, almost terrified about facing them. And many years later, I thought about why I was so frightened. The reason that I was frightened was that I was ashamed. I felt a terrible sense of shame, but not what you think. I did not feel the shame that I had taken part in some sort of, as Jane Fonda would say, it's sort of a moral war or that I had done awful things there.

I did do awful things there. We all did awful things there because you do awful things in war. And I was reconciled to that. The shame I felt was is that I had seen something about human nature and about my own nature as a human being that's so contradicted everything I had learned as a good Italian Catholic boy who went to a lot of good Catholic schools. That it was a knowledge I was not supposed to have. It was literally as though a door to hell had been opened. And I had stuck my head inside, saw what was really going on there. And then the door closed, and I was back in ordinary life again. And that this, if you will, forbidden knowledge was so terrible to me that I could not communicate it to all of these people who did not have it.

I show my poems to friends now and then hoping one or two might see my idealistic bombast in a new light, the sharp turns of mood, anger, defying visible foundation, inexplicable sadness. How often they wonder aloud how I managed to survive. They always assume the war is over, not daring to imagine our wounds or theirs, but it is not. I think of you and wonder if either of us will ever make it home. I think that survival coming home from Vietnam was much more difficult than what we had to face over there. It was much more confusing, was much more devastating. Being back here during that time, the late 60s, early 70s, middle 70s, than it was being there. There it was simple. You live where you die. There's hard decisions, you have to make split second decisions, but it's right there. Here you have the political confusion, you had the Hollywood movies, you had dealing with your family, you had a deal with your girlfriend, and you basically felt like you were in some surreal, at times kind of like a nightmare.

It is one thing to fight a war as openly and for as long a period of time, and as difficult a war as this, with the support of a nation and to be welcomed back, and even then that is a war which will change people. This was a war where particularly young people, disadvantaged people, those who didn't have college educations, particularly those blacks and others served in a combat situation, believing in one set of principles about why they were there, to find that those principles were not applicable, and also to find when they returned to this country that it was a country that couldn't have cared less. We were going to get rid of that ism, whatever ism it was, as our forefathers did, as someone else did before us, and we were proud yanks, proud Americans, and we weren't going to let America down, and yet America let us down. So the Vietnam veteran really caught it, caught the brunt of this upheaval, and the brunt of the guilt of the country, not being able to come to grips with the experience of fighting this war, and so the Vietnam veteran ended up carrying a burden, but it was really forced to carry a burden that the nation was unwilling to really carry.

Now how are you going to tell somebody like my oldest cousin's husband, Nendriful fellow, great father, wonderful husband to my cousin and everything, but he was an IBM salesman. His life was taken up with raising his family and getting on the train and so forth. How am I going to tell him about burning villages and people with their intestines hanging out and men going berserk in the middle of a firefight and things like that? When we returned, we had a great deal of turmoil inside because of the combat experience. When you have discomfort inside and you don't have a release for it, it festers and it builds. When we started to talk about it to people, the response very frequently was, don't tell me about it.

I've been living with this war every night on the 6 o'clock news, the whole time you've been there. I know what's going on, you don't have to tell me. There wasn't any release. When you have to hold that inside you and there's no way to release that and no way to share that with anyone. You go a little crazy. And for our friends who haven't been able to let that out, they're close to the edge. We've been there too. Don and I are lying in jungle fatigues on the damp ground. He grins at me in laughs with a quiet air. The rain drizzles through the limbs of the rubber trees and the steam floats off as the humidity persists. And how are things back in the world, he says to me in greeting? How are things back in the world, cheese? Still talking about ending the war, are they?

I've been here three years come July or as have been four. You'd be surprised about the same old rumor going around. I still believe tomorrow that let me come home. What's it like back in the world, Arnold? Has it changed much? Do you know if we'll ever come home again? Does anyone ever ask God, Arnold? Do they really care about us back in the world? You're men, you're men, you're team, you're family, part of America. You don't leave part of America on foreign soil. You know, you have to bring them back. The living, any dead, or any wounded. Back here in the world, when we came back to society, the land of the big PX we used to call the United States. When we got back here, it was shocking that Americans did not have that same feeling that we as warriors, we as Spartans had. They didn't care about the wounded. They didn't care if we were left for dying in our own society. When I was growing up, I wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to be a civil engineer. I wanted to build bridges and build houses and build is the key word. Even in the Army, I was hoping to go to an engineer OCS rather than to artillery OCS.

Maybe in a way, I'm satisfying that requirement because I can still build. I'm building memories for people who can't do it themselves, but who also don't have the price to pay for those memories. Who can't afford to pay the price for those memories to rebuild them? Namely, who are afraid to go back into their memories because they might lose their sanity, but who will go to a piece of my art that may be borders on the periphery of that memory and cling to it and come out and say, one of these days I might be ready to go back into my memory, but at least now I have a bridge to go back into it where before I had to jump this cavern and it was fearful. I felt that some of these things are hitting in my own family and in the Vietnam Veterans family they may be hitting and since God did give me some gifts and I went to college and I went to law school and I received some education after the war because I couldn't be a carpenter.

I felt that I could share them because our people, whether it be with age and orange, or whether it be with trauma or whatever the need may be, they're wounded to wounded generation. And you don't leave your wounded as you learned in combat. I did a study and it was done well and I testified for the US Senate and published it in the post and all this. But while I was doing this study, this idea came to me that certain veterans have difficulties from the war. Suppose there were a memorial built that would have the names of everyone killed in Vietnam. Wouldn't this help in some way? Wouldn't this help the veterans get the assistance they need? Wouldn't this sensitize the American people to these issues? Wouldn't looking at the names for guys who had seen these people killed in the war? Wouldn't this do something good for them?

I kept thinking about it and thinking about it and I recommended to the US Congress that they build one. No big deal. Go ahead and build one. They never did it. But two years after I did the study is when I started the project. We've got a responsibility to help a lot of people who have had a harder time with it. It's true that we may be started off with more going for us in our lives. But no matter where you come from, kids are kids and adults are adults. I think we have wanted to share what we've enjoyed as people have been able to put that in perspective in our lives. And get on with our lives and feel good about ourselves in the hopes that our peers will be able to do the same. And so that we never forget the strengths that can come out of adversity.

We all went through hell. But we all were made a great deal stronger for it. And nobody's bothered to say that yet. Nobody's bothered to say you're a much stronger human being for having survived those 13 months. The biggest thing I can leave society is my name, leave my children's my name, not a material thing because maybe the next generation of my society may lose it. But my name, if I leave them an honorable, honorable name that I've done something, that's a big thing. And presently, the Vietnam Veterans name is mud. Both Bester and I have been disappointed in the stereotype image of the Vietnam combat vet that our peers have been sentenced to. For many years, there have been a lot of unfavorable responses to Vietnam vets.

And vets rather sardonically say that the world thinks of us as drug crazed baby killers. Well, we know that that is not true. And we wanted to provide to the rest of the world a more diverse image of who the people are who had been combat soldiers in Vietnam. One of the ways in which film works best is by enabling both a picture of an individual to come through to you, but also to hear what someone has to say and to see the way in which they say it. Finally, the American people, if we succeeded in building the memorial, would be allowed, would not be allowed again to forget Vietnam or to pretend that Vietnam had never happened or to sweep it under the rug or just to conveniently forget the war and the needs of the veterans. And I was compelled that I couldn't rest until this thing was done. I mean, it was just something that ate and ate, you know, inside my soul that had to be done.

And I felt kind of fortunate that I had literary leanings and that what I felt my responsibility was was transforming the words and the feelings of my fellow veterans into literature, into art, into history. That could be maybe a little bit better understood by A, our families, and B, the society as a whole. There was a compulsion to do a book about it. It was an experience that would not seem to release me. And I did feel, though not at the beginning, it was later on, I began to feel that I had something to say that other people, not only other people should hear, but I also began to feel that my thoughts experiences emotions could be universalized so that I could write something that other veterans who did not have a talent for writing or for articulation the way I did would through me voice their own thoughts and feelings.

I have often felt that I have wanted to stop talking about the war and I am porn. I mean, even as I sit here right now, between a feeling that I don't want to talk about it anymore, I've done my piece and it's been part of history and it's behind me. And yet I do and I keep coming back because I keep feeling a responsibility to have to talk about it more so that the lessons of it are not ignored so that those veterans who still have not made it home in a sense can make it home. So I do it for myself as a cathartic or event. I do it for the Vietnam combat veteran as a didactic event, but almost as a legacy. In that, when the pieces, when I'm no longer here, when a Vietnam veteran is no longer here, hopefully they'll be remembered through these pieces.

One of the odd phenomena that does occur in Vietnam at the Vietnam veterans memorial occur in the nighttime at two, three, and four o'clock in the morning and that's that is when the parents and brothers and veterans of these guys go to the memorial and they go there because they don't want anybody to see them. They just want to be there alone and that's when they put little letters and notes to the people who were killed. They put them in between the panels of the Vietnam memorial and they put them on the ground or slide them in the cracks some way. And they tell these people, you know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry we had to leave your body laying there, but we were being shot at and we were taking casualties and, you know, we had to leave you there. It would tear you up reading some of the things that people leave there at night, but it's all a healthy thing and that's pretty much the purpose of the memorial is to provide this kind of psychological catharsis.

I realized that on a personal level, I was stating through this film what many people had stated in the film as well and that was that I have come to grips with the certain part of my life and I can say to you, I am a Vietnam veteran. I'm not going to deny that. I had denied it at times before. That is part of my past. It is part of my present. It is going to be part of my future and I say it with a certain degree of a heavy heart and I say it with recognition that I gained a great deal from it. I say it with a certain degree of some sense of pride, but the film was an expression of a willingness to acknowledge that identity, to know also that creation of the film was going to enable others to in another way express that same feeling.

To embrace it, to regain a sense of personal dignity and to walk as tall as one should. In my mind, it's already changed. I can go out and walk down the street with my head up high and I can face the world now because for the first time these brothers, they came to see me. You came to see me. And now I can go out in that world and a year from now you can look at me and I'll be wearing this suit because I could really afford it. No doubt in my mind. How do I not be a veteran? My identity defined by my life's shame, unremittedly blamed by myself for being the sum total of my experience, ignorant of events until survival, make knowledge irrelevant.

I feel like a brittle leaf pinned on a twig by the wind rustling helplessly to be freed before I crumble in the breeze. It is a tender spot healed and cushioned by time until it becomes a mere plot in some dope-induced war story, but it smarts at the touch of rough skin rhetoric and it aches a warning of impending storms. I am a prophet by pain. I have the wisdom of the afflicted. It hasn't been easy. It's been extremely difficult. The world has fought. I mean the world back here in this world has fought against Vietnam veterans coming together. First of all, I don't think it should have been my job to build it. I think the country should have done something like this for the veterans. I don't think it's up to a corporal, a former Army corporal, to build a memorial when 58,000 people get killed in a war for this country that the Congress and that the President supported, I think the government should have built it.

How do you represent death, boredom, tediousness, tedium? How do you represent that and it's great dichotomy of instant terror on a canvas? It takes a lot of thinking. When you go back to these areas, it's like going back into a minefield. When's it going to get you? It's like flying that last combat assault. It's going to get you. It's like being in Vietnam again and counting the days and hoping that you get out. We had to fight the Vietnam War over again. What can I say? We did it. We succeeded. We got the memorial built. We have a very clear mission which was to put the names of everyone who died in the war on the mall in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial on any kind of design, something that was appropriate. That was our mission. It was clear and simple. Something is clear and simple and basically a pure thought. When you mix Vietnam into the equation, you're doing nothing but asking for trouble.

I suppose the fact that we had to go through all the difficulties we did is maybe we were asking for it. It was like working through amnesia. I think there were many things that I blocked out emotionally. There were many things that I blocked out factually. And each of those people who I interviewed and who I talked to, even though they were there at different times and they had very different experiences, you found a little bit of yourself in each one of them. I found a bit of myself in each one of those people. I could find it in their eyes, I could find it in their voices, and I could find it in how they're handling themselves now. I have a great deal of, I hate to use the term, but a great deal of love for these people. When I first went up to that wall, I was overwhelmed and it took me another six months to figure out what it was that was the prick point that was popping my balloon of control.

And what it was was that in the 15 years since I got out of the Marine Corps, I frequently would think about people I used to know in the Marine Corps. But I think of them in terms of, you know, Dave now works for some glass company in Pennsylvania, and Monty is an insurance man in California. And these people, you know, I've got a fantasy about what they're doing now. And when I hit that wall, I realized, here's a whole bunch of my friends who aren't doing anything anymore. Being an activist and being an advocate for any group has its pain. And I realized, you know, I've had the pain, my wife asked me, my wife, my family. They're upset about the Vietnam War and about my commitment to the warriors and, you know, having you given enough, you've given, you know, years of your life to a group of people. What's it going to mount to? If it helps just a small few that helps one person have a better life, that's important to me.

At least I can feel that I've given my part, my commitment, I didn't leave, the debt are wounded. And I've given a tremendous amount of time to a cause which I think is a worthwhile cause. Until warriors, if America would give time and give itself the opportunity, it'd find out that really, really good people, good people. And as you approach that wall, the predominant visual impact is your own reflection. And when you look up and you see the reflection of Rusty Sachs on that wall, and the name Craig Waterman or Buddy Mason or across it, it's as if you're incorporating them, they're part of you. And I had not realized that they were a part of me to that great next step. I don't know, I just keep trucking on, and I think my thanks to my children, my children, it brag. Their fathers would be at now veteran, I mean, that's an eight thing.

I see the horse-tailed men with metal legs walk gauntly through the street between the bars. Some hide behind their eyes, their only scars, or mock their hiding with their old fatigues. They seem to live by a secret set of rags whispered with every other word a curse, or played at 3 a.m. on folk guitars by we who live in shells alone like eggs. In a distant way, we are bastard brothers, delivered from the sky, to hostile lands, detached from naive dreams and former lovers, in ways that no one really understands. I don't know if I'm speaking for the others, but I wish I could have back my naive plans. I'm talking to all of America tonight, hopefully, so they'll understand and maybe not turn that channel. And listen, that it's very, very important. It's very, very serious. It's more serious than the Super Bowl. It's more serious than the World Series. It's very, very serious.

Tomorrow, it could be your son. It could be my son fighting a war. So, I mean, if we just simply realize that, yes, we are a mighty power. But by God, we do stand for something that I think upholds the dignity of the individual, that it upholds the hope and the promise of human development far more. In fact, it's not even a comparison to be made than they do. Now, having said that, that that is a, is a, is a, is a general underlying philosophy of what we do. And then we have to define in a pragmatic sense that we do have these, these interests, which if these interests are, are some way lost or violated, that we as the power that upholds these ideals will become weakened. And then once we define those, and we say, yes, we won't always use military means to secure these interests or if lost to win them back. But that if we must use them, then we will use them and we will do so effectively.

And there are certainly cases in which it's important to commit our military forces and to do it right and do it quickly and to get it over with and to accept casualties. But we should only do that when there is something at stake that's very important to this country. The vital interests in quotes and a lot of people have used this vital interest and national security thing to maybe make a mistake or two in the past. I hope that everyone goes to the Vietnam Memorial and I hope the entire country comes there eventually. And I certainly hope that every member of Congress goes there and thinks about the cost, the human cost of war. There should be in every legislative body, an advisor to that legislative body, if the legislative body has the authority to contribute monies to a war, legislative monies for a war or whatever. There should be a war that is seen war. I actually seen it.

Because I think those that have lived war are the ones that are most against war. Wars, as I see war, it's man's weakest point. I mean, I would hate to think that after what we went through that our kids will have to go through the same kind of endeavor. It's not to say that they're not going to be involved in some kind of a conflict somewhere. You know, as an idealistic poet, I would say, no war should never happen. We should never be involved. And I wish I could say that. I guess everyone would like to see a world in which there were no hurricanes, there were no tornadoes, there were no earthquakes, fires, homicides or wars. But I think there's always been all of them. And maybe war is one thing that, you know, the world can work together to have lesser, less of...

I would try myself to stop war, could give my life today and say, you kill me and not ever have another act of war. I would stand at attention and I would give my life proudly and I would give it the rest of the world. Music

Major funding for now tell us all about the war is made possible by a grant from the Epnom Combat Veterans Construction and Historical Renovation, a regional corporation specializing in the useful renovation of classic structures. Music