April 11, 2013 Writer's Diary

It’s not as if I can claim to be a Vietnam Vet. I wouldn’t even want to. Damn, I was only eight years old back then.

But sometimes I wish I could be considered a vet. Sometimes I wish I could go to support group and sit nakedly with my broken heart and my tormented mind. I wish there were somebody who could listen to my stories and say “I understand.”

But really who can understand? I was a little girl. I was in Saigon, one of a menagerie of seven children, I was lost in the shuffle even in my very own family. Small, frail, nearly voiceless.

Who could understand (I certainly can’t even after so many years of reflection) what that little pipsqueak went through being shipped kit and caboodle with everyone to a foreign land devoid of green grasses, walks in the park, and even, for God’s sake actual glass in our windows—all we had was limp swathes of opaque plastic, dimly letting in light, ____ keeping out the threat of Viet Cong.

Who could understand what it was like to come home from school to find your father excavating a hole through the concrete of the second floor, creating a tunnel from your brother’s room to yours so that he could escape the enemy should they rappel down through the central courtyard of the house.

As I said I was small, I was frail and I was one of the legion. I had my ways of striving for independence. In kindergarten—we were in Korea then—I struck out from school on my own to walk home in defiant solitude. I don’t recall my punishment but I’m sure it was great; I must have scared my mother to death.

Several years later we lived in Taiwan and, this time with permission, I made a pilgrimage to the compound pool on my own to test out my recently earned “Swimmer’s Badge.”

Tiny forays but they were my way of asserting my individuality in the maelstrom of four brothers and two sisters and a delirious amount of change.

Then there was Vietnam. There was no opportunity there for nurturing that bud of independence. Now there was not only the family order to contend with but the constrictions of a city, the implication of an enemy, the subtle insinuations of uncertainty and fear that surely lurked everywhere but I could give no name to.

There is one man whom I’ve found who understands, I think. Vietnam Vet Jim Brown befriended me at a book discussion about The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brian. I could tell by the look in his eyes and the demeanor of his contributions that here was a man who had integrated his Vietnam experiences. Ironically, he was more at peace with the passions the war ignited than those whose experiences were second hand.

When I told him about my experiences I could see that he did understand. It was of such a great relief that I almost visibly melted. I didn’t, however; the burden had been too long carried. I continued to talk as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

“I’m not sure what it means for us to have been there in Saigon. It seems to echo through our life experiences all of us seem affected. Our parents died young both at 68, of cancer and broken hearts. What did Vietnam do to us? We all seem stilted in our ability to approach success or satisfaction, beyond the normal American penchant for unhappiness. Did Vietnam impact us that much, did it? It’s a question? I really don’t know, it is a question.”

He listened and nodded. “It was a very dangerous time to be there, very dangerous.”

No one had ever said that explicitly before.

I was eight years old and plunged into a danger I could not name, I could not see, I could not remedy and—it seems—to this day, cannot resolve.

______

Like I said, I was only eight years old when I was in Vietnam. I had no idea what the hell was going on.

I remember one night we were driving the streets of Saigon when I asked, innocently, curiously what those lights in the sky were. When my father said they were artillery fire

When my father told me the lights in the sky were artillery fire, I had no idea what he meant. I only knew by his hesitation and embarrassment that it wasn’t really a good thing. I just stared through the dusty windshield at the popping lights, acting as if it didn’t make a difference to me whether they were fireworks or enemy gunfire.

But, apparently, it does make a difference. For here I sit still wondering at that girl, small and frail, a member of a small American community in Saigon in 1975.

I still wonder how it could be that I was there, that the hopes my father had for the South Vietnamese people were dashed so cavalierly by forces so much bigger than him, how he seemed to die slowly after that war, how his love for a Vietnamese woman also slowly killed my mother.

Again, don’t get me wrong. If I were a Vietnam Vet who saw his buddies die in the mud beside him, I would not want a relatively young white woman of moderate means talking about how she survived the war too.

But am I not suffering from PTSD? Does my life since that time seem to be one dark shadow after another, hidden cleverly by such things as being “most likely to succeed” in high school and having a seemingly indomitable spirit?

I’m told I’m talented, yes, outgoing, yes, seemingly a font of knowledge, wisdom and élan.

But still, I sit sometimes in the dark, or walk when I mean to be running and stare into the middle distance.

What was this thing called Vietnam? This place I lived where my playhouse was a guard’s tower, where I saw my mother arguing that we needed to be getting out, where I sat dazzled in the front seat of a station wagon next to my brilliant father, staring at the night sky full of mysterious and hypnotic lights.

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