Status Updates From Nam

Can only read before 6pm…. but seriously stirring

“I had no expectations of being a hero when I came back. I did expect to get a job. I thought the government would take care of us. But we were Kennedy’s children and when we got back, Kennedy wasn’t around, so we got fucked.”

“Containing communism was only worth 5 percent of the war. Generator capital for corporations was 41 percent. I was pledging allegiance to Dow and Monsanto and all the large corporations. That shattered my whole image of the US, of freedom and democracy, of the world we live in, all the ideals I had gone to Vietnam with. The sacrifice was a lie. The war was a fraud.”

“”No one interview, no particular story made me cry. None of the veterans had spilled his guts on me. It was just the accumulation of too much vicarious, second-hand pain, broken voices and broken spirits. What a waste.”

“The war in Vietnam left a wound on my generation that hasn’t healed.”

“Americans were wasted in an amazing variety of ways in Vietnam’s when they returned home, they were wasted again, like greasy paper plates after the picnic.”

“On their own again, they’re making the best of a bad situation.”

“Now a lot of vets back here in the World just picked up rifles and started shooting people. I can understand that. They could not adjust. They just threw us back into a place that we were untrained to live in. They should have had to train us to come back into the World. It took me years to understand I’m part of the United States.”

“Somebody stabbed us in the back. The average person in the peace struggle didn’t understand. We got stabbed in the back by the Army, while we were in the Army. We got stabbed in the back when we got back to the US by the Peace people. We got stabbed in the back by President Nixon. He’s talking nonsense. Kissinger is talking about peace and ending the war. All this is garbage.”

“I’m back but I don’t belong. I wanted to go back to the Nam. … This world was alienating, what people was talking, what people was liking.”

“You did your duty, you didn’t run off to Canada. You didn’t fake some head case to go 4-F. We all know that you’ve been a killer. You’re a little strange. We don’t trust you, not all the way, because you’ve been through this terrible, harrowing experiences you did what you were told to do and you did it very well. You’ve just been fucked.”

“Later when we got home, my brother said ‘Don’t wear your uniform.’ What kind of shit was that? I wanted to wear the fucking thing. I had my ribbons. I was proud of what I’d done. I’m a king. That didn’t hurt me then, but it hurts me now.”

“Walking down the streets of Berkeley, I felt like the man from Mars visiting the Earth. Everybody was looking at me. All kinds of comments. People spit at me. I was more scared walking down that street than I had been at Vietnam. … These people looked like they wanted to kill me more than the Viet Cong did.”

“Some guys they had to lock up because they wouldn’t leave Vietnam. A lot of guys wanted to die there. I mean, I wanted to die there. All my fucking friends died there.”

“I never saw so many guys cry as I did while I was in Vietnam.”

“You can’t tell who’s your enemy. You got to shoot kids, you got to shoot women. You don’t want to. You may be sorry that you did. But you might be sorrier if you didn’t. That’s the damn truth.”

“Too many of us forgot that Vietnamese were people. We didn’t treat them like people after a while. It was hard to separate. I really didn’t like to mistreat people over there. I tried as hard as I could… not that I didn’t from time to time.”

“The only way to take out your frustrations over there (Nam) was to shack up or go out and shoot somebody. A lot of guys were afraid of shackling up, because they were afraid of VD and everything. So they would go and shoot somebody.”