Breaking the Silence

I know it's been a few weeks. I finished up my final paper for the Jane Austen class and began the Vietnam War class. It wasn't an easy transition. And, since I knew so very little about the war in general, I've hit a real learning curve. The only thing is, I don't want to learn this.

We're reading a novel, three memoirs, and two books of poetry, all by people who served the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. We're also watching film clips from documentaries (a Walter Cronkite one first, then tonight in class it was Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam) to Hollywood productions like We Were Soldiers. I also had to read one more book on which to give a "book talk" to the whole class, meaning they won't read it, but will learn about it from my 5-minute presentation. That book was a memoir by an Amerasian boy, born out of this war, trying to survive the Communist regime that took over after the fall of Saigon, and his efforts to escape, hoping to make his way to freedom and America.

Now, I realize that I have a super sensitive empathetic nature. I realize things affect me, my heart, my sensibilities, my mind a lot more than some, perhaps most. But, what I'm learning about this war is horrific. For all sides. I have dreams about what I'm reading in these books; I'm haunted by images described and feelings experienced. Today I learned that the average age of the soldiers in Vietnam was 19. Average?! That those men (and women) who fought for their lives and managed to survive came back changed would be a given as well as an understatement. They were children, barely able to drive, not able to drink, did they even know who they were? I certainly didn't at 19. I thought I owned the world, yet I'd been nowhere and done nothing on my own. Sometimes I imagine what such a harrowing experience would have had on my 19 year old self. It's terrifying.

The psychological trauma of a war with no visible enemy, a war fought in a surreal environment for most of the kids (and I will call them kids because they were): a jungle, a beautiful land that became the enemy as it hid those attacking them and brought disease and sickness.

I've never known much about this war, and I assume this is because those who went never wanted to talk about it. History books give the cold, hard facts. What happened where. How many died, were injured, the end results. They don't give the personal accounts, the pieces that could humanize this totally dehumanizing war.

I hope you don't think I'm ranting. I'm processing as aloud as you'll ever hear me process. I'm trying to wrap my mind around (I hate that phrase, but what else to tell you how much I'm grappling with this?) the chaos, fear, and courage that was the U.S. involvement in SE Asia.

This is why I don't like the class. Because every time I finish a book, or even as I'm reading it, and after every class, I just want to weep. For the innocence lost in the soldiers who stared death and destruction in the face; for the soldiers who had no one to write letters home to, and thus no one to express their fear and uncertainty to; for the kids on the other side, with the VC, who were fighting just a desperately (I don't even know their stories); for the civilians of Vietnam who suffered terribly, who were scared and abused. I want to weep for those who suffered after all the "war" part was over, the tens of thousands of children who were by-products of the American soldiers being in Vietnam, for their suffering at the hands of the Communist Party thereafter.

How do you learn about this stuff, historical events that I could not have changed even if I had lived then; how do you hear this, see it through documentaries and the eyes of those who walked and fought it, how do you take this information and process it...into what? What can I do with it? Wars will always occur, and I will never like them. People die every day from abuse and disease--war related or not, and I can't ever stop that from happening. This course may be opening my eyes, but to what? My own helplessness in a world of hurt and destruction?

Now you know the source of my quietness and my depression. These are the thoughts I fight against every day.

Sometimes it blows up even bigger:

Who am I, in this big, broken world?

But that is a discussion for another day.