Service

I am proud to tell you that I am a veteran of the United Stated Armed Forces.  I am also proud to tell you that I am the most recent veteran, in a long family history of veterans.  Because this history is so long, I will keep it to the last century.  So, briefly, my dad’s mom was an army nurse.  She met a strapping young chaplain in World War II (please reserve your laughter for later.)  Anyway, the Army nurse and the Chaplain fell deeply in love.  They produced two sons and two daughters.  First a daughter, then a son.  Then another son, then another daughter.  The first born daughter became a nurse.  The first son joined the Army.  The second son joined the Marine Corps.  The last daughter went to college and got her master’s degree in public administration, and became a social worker.  So, I guess you could say that all four offspring were public servants.  All four are veterans. 

So, two WW2 veterans, produced two Vietnam veterans.  One of those veterans was my father.  David.  When his parents returned from war, they were met with a hero’s welcome.  My grandfather completed seminary at Emory University.  After many moves and birthing many children, my grandmother was offered a medical administration job in Port Hueneme.   My uncle joined the Army, my dad couldn’t join the Army because he was color blind.  So, he walked to the next door.  The Marine Corps door.  My dad joined the Marine Corps in 1967.  After he left RCMD in San Diego, he hugged his mommy, and boarded the first flight to Honolulu.  From Honolulu, he took his sea bag, and tugged it up the ramp of a C-130, headed to Nagasaki.  From Nagasaki, he humped every possession he had to some place in the Vietnamese jungle.  Where he lived for many, many months. 

When I was little, and my dad would try to explain to me what he did in Vietnam, he would get really angry.  He would say things like ‘I had to shove the bayonet at the end of my riffle into bales of hay.  Bales of hay that honest people were trying to make a living off of.”  He would also say things like “I knew people like you in Vietnam.  I knew little girls who didn’t know the difference between war and peace.” When I was eight, that meant nothing to me.  When I was eight, Vietnam may have been a different planet.  When I was eight, the idea of a bayonet in a rice paddy was more foreign than Farsi on the menu at a Persian restaurant.  I had no idea what Vietnam meant. 

As I got older, I tried to relate to my dad’s experiences by reading books.  After I got out of the Coast Guard, I went to college, and I took classes, and I read books.  I read a lot of books about Vietnam.  One time, my dad came to visit me.  And, as an offering of peace, I said “I’ve been reading this book.  Wanna see it?”  I don’t’ remember the name of the book now.  But it was very popular and it was very poignant.  It was a compilation of essays by Vietnam vets.  And it was the only thing I had to relate to my dad’s experiences.  I was 23, and getting educated, and I wanted my dad to know that I finally understood what happened to him in South East Asia. 

I sat there and watched him read.  I waited for him to look at me and say “thank you daughter, for finally understanding.”  But he didn’t say that.  Instead, he pretended to read until I broke the silence when I asked him if he wanted to go to dinner.  He was ready.

We didn’t talk for Vietnam for many years after that.  I can understand why.  I thought I was trying to relate to his experiences, but really, what I was doing was trivializing them.  I read a book.  Maybe two.  And I wanted my dad to know that I got it.  But I could never get it.  I have never been to war.  So I DO NOT get it.  I don’t understand the idea of losing your two best friends to a senseless argument.  I don’t’ understand shrapnel in your knee.  I don’t understand a purple heart.  I don’t understand any of it. 

Since then, my dad has said a lot of things about what happened after he returned from Vietnam.  He has talked about the lonely welcoming.  He has about the hostile encounters with people who hated the war.  He talked about how he almost lost a leg, while he lay bleeding, near death, on a hospital gurney, after a motorcycle accident, because his hair cut told the story of his service.  My dad lived in a different time.  His parents were veterans, and they were revered for their service.  His daughter is a veteran, and she is, too.  I live in a time where the media demand that I am revered for my sacrifice.   But the media, conveniently, has forgotten my father’s generation.

More Vietnam veterans have died on the streets than any veterans that came before or after them.  More Vietnam veterans have suffered from addiction.  More Vietnam veterans have lived , and untreated for post traumatic stress disorder.  More than veterans from any other war, conflict, military intervention.  What does that say about that say about how we view our military men and women? 

My dad is a Vietnam veteran.  He suffers for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. After 40 years, he still can’t sleep at night.  He give sto charities.  All of them in Vietnam.  He has done humanitarian work in Southeast Asia.  He had done everything within his means to make right his indiscretions, and  make right the indiscretions of his country.  And he still can’t sleep at night. 

Thank you, Dad.  Thank you for your service.  Thank you for bearing the weight of the world’s poor decisions.  Thank you for being so wonderfully optimistic, despite the way society views you and your counterparts.  Thank you for coming home and fighting like hell to make the wrongs right.  Happy Veterans’ Day, Daddy.  

-Inner Peas