It is probably dangerous for self-preservation to philosophize too much while in a war, but every once-in-a-while, through the fog of my fatigue the question arose: What are we doing here?
A shared experience
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 In Gene’s case, I have an unpublished manuscript that I find brilliant.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.
Civilian war casualties
The five-year-old boy in the photograph is Tran Van Hay. I did not know his name until a friend still in Vietnam sent me the newspaper clipping after I’d returned from the war. When I first saw Tran, his abdomen was ripped open and his intestines were exposed and dangling outside of his abdominal cavity. I didn’t think he would live.
Post Traumatic Growth
In retrospect, I returned from the war searching for remnants of my former life. I wasn’t the only one who had changed. The Vietnam War had the country polarized. My mind soon took a philosophical turn. The meaning I could no longer find in the structures of society I looked for in the wisdom of great thinkers. I sought the core of existence.
Empathy and Trauma
It is not surprising that medics would experience a deep sense of survivor’s guilt. People who have not witnessed what explosives and automatic weapons do to the human body can only imagine. Serious wounds are horrible—for the casualty, and the medics, nurses and doctors at every level from the field through the evacuation system. It is not just about saving a life. It is about amputations and blindness, paralysis, burns, infections, and pain. Not every wounded body can be put back together. And at the core of every one of them is a human being.