Arizona, USA (2015)
My last two American friends from the war passed away within a month of each other in 2017. While both were hugely impacted by their experiences in the war, their lives defied the stereotypical troubled paths that many have come to associate with veterans of Vietnam.
There is a scene in Poisoned Jungle where Andy is with two other vets and they are discussing the public’s perception of them. One of them says: “To some, we’re all a bunch of ticking time bombs about to go off at any moment.” I don’t sense that reaction very often anymore, but it used to happen with some regularity. Assumptions are powerful motivations for how people perceive and respond to others. Writing a novel is a good way to depict the varied ways in which powerful events shape the lives of ordinary people. If well-written, the characters will have depth and give the reader a deeper insight into what the author wants to say than a pedantic narrative.
Both friends also wrote about the war. In Gene’s case, I have an unpublished manuscript that I find brilliant. Broader in scope than the Vietnam War, through a series of thematically related short stories, he connects the diversity of the lives in his pieces to the broader consequences of war. Interspersed with biographical details of his own life, a broad number of voices, diverse on the surface, flow together as a woven tapestry.
Part of Gene’s writing encapsulates a normal kid growing up with an Irish Catholic background taught by nuns competing with Elvis Presley for the soul of American youth. He takes his Elvis-styled-hair to summer camp and is not sure whether to be pleased or not when the girl he has a crush on starts calling him “Elvis.”
Slightly younger than Gene, my boyhood memories of Elvis Presley hitting the scene were of never being near a radio when his smash hit “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” was playing. Everybody was talking about that song, but I never did hear it on the radio. It didn’t help that I was spending part of my summer with older cousins who tormented me over it. “Where were you? You just missed it. It was just on.” Of course, these were the same older cousins who took me to a local cherry orchard to steal fruit. Clutching my bag of illicit cherries, they had me running all the way back to their place after telling me the farmer was after us. I never did see him, certainly not from under the bed where they had me hiding still holding all the evidence from the crime. They even knocked on the door and yelled, “he’s here, he’s here. Don’t come out!”
Some of that Catholic education must have won out over the popular culture in Gene. I was in awe of his intellectual capacity. His linguistic accomplishments alone were impressive. Fluent in Spanish and French, he picked up Italian rather easily while teaching in Italy. Japanese took longer, made possible by teaching English literature in a private school in Japan.
Not just a linguist, Gene spent his summer breaks from teaching pursuing a doctorate in English literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I lost contact with him for a while as we aged into our fifties and sixties. An email arrived unexpectedly after his diagnosis of brain cancer a few months before his death, a horrible irony that such a disciplined and brilliant mind would deteriorate from within after accomplishing so much.
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Ben, captivated by film, became a sound technician for one of the major studios in Hollywood. Not bad for a former grunt whose Vietnam experiences turned him into a lifelong peace activist. I’m not sure there was ever an antiwar demonstration in Southern California that he missed. He originally wanted to make films but told me he’d never completed his master’s degree. “I wanted to make the great American movie and present it as my thesis. It never got finished.”
His Facebook posts were often photoshopped compilations from movie scenes with a satirical humor. Henry Kissinger often starred in them. I remember a post where Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and Henry Kissinger sat beside one another in the Oval office, each in an unflattering pose. Their ample stomachs protruding, Ben’s caption read something like: WHITE MEN EXHIBITING THEIR SUPERIORITY.
It was one of Ben’s last creations before his diagnosis of cancer. He also went quickly. He loved telling a story about reporting to his local draft board just before they snagged him. On the third floor in an old building without an elevator, a sign outside the door read: IF YOU HAVE MADE IT THIS FAR, YOU HAVE JUST PASSED YOUR PHYSICAL.
Retired in his home state of Arizona, I visited in the summer of 2015. He’d always wanted to return. An avid baseball fan, he enjoyed attending some of the spring training games in Phoenix. The Dodgers had become his team. Years before, knowing I’d been in Canada since 1975, and assuming I must be an Expos fan, he sent me the ticket stubs from the game he attended at Chavez Ravine. Dennis Martinez of the Expos had pitched a perfect game against the Dodgers. Along with the ticket stubs, which I still have, was an accompanying article quoting Tommy Lasorda. Never one to take a Dodger loss lightly, their manager grudgingly admitted that Martinez had “pitched a pretty good game.” He then told the newspaper that “our guy pitched a good one, too.”
While Gene and I spent our adult lives in other countries, Ben never kept trying to steer the U.S. in directions away from its foreign wars. He remained connected with many veterans active in the peace movement.
After Gene and Ben’s passing, a Vietnamese friend surfaced fifty years after I returned from the war. I’d always wondered what had happened to her. The friendship never had a romantic component. She was a nice person and, having worked for the Americans in a medical capacity, I worried she might have got caught up in the postwar purges in Vietnam. The so-called “re-education” camps were euphemisms for what amounted to Vietnamese gulags. It is one of the reasons I sometimes preface my remarks with stating I don’t act as an apologist for the Vietnamese government. Ideologues prevailed for several years in the immediate aftermath of the war. My friend was and is okay. Some of her story in next week’s blog.