Fifty years of reflection, study and thought have gone into the writing of this novel. I’m still learning how the Vietnam War impacted not only my life, but the lives of countless others—even many who were born after the war ended for the United States in 1975.
Psychology, history, geo-politics and the very nature of war have collided in attempting to make sense of how it all happened—and why? I have noticed a change in the questions of younger generations puzzled by U.S. involvement and how such a powerful country could have lost. The conversation between an American general and his Vietnamese counterpart after the war is instructive.
“You know, we won most of the battles,” the American is reported to have said.
“That may be true,” the Vietnamese answered, “but it is also irrelevant.”
In writing Poisoned Jungle, I have attempted to express through the characters the incredible complexity of going to war. Conflicts don’t end with the last shots fired; they send tentacles in numerous directions to twist and fester and entangle themselves into lives beyond the combatants.
What I know now, in my seventies, would have been useful at twenty-one. Life doesn’t work that way. Too much pain gets buried beneath the conscious mind and is left there. Even during the writing process, moments of further understanding occurred, surfacing as epiphanies while I continued to explore the Vietnam War and all the repercussions of having been there. War has consequences. My intent was for Poisoned Jungle to explore some of them for an unknown reader. Awareness of how Vietnam shaped my own life continued.
What I did learn relatively early was that the experience had altered the course of my life. Only later did I become consciously aware of how deeply. Denial is also a human coping mechanism and activated when trauma turns the world upside down for the participant.
Parts of Poisoned Jungle are semi-autobiographical. Andy’s stint in the Presidio of San Francisco’s stockade is a good example of how understanding one’s life is only gradually pieced together, even after years of trying. Just as Andy thought he must be going crazy for going AWOL after returning from Vietnam, he finally figures it out. For all the trouble it caused, it was not the result of being crazy, but of his subconscious acting as the savior of his sanity.
Like the important people in Andy’s life being perplexed and incapable of making sense of his actions, those closest to me also had differing interpretations and explanations for what they didn’t understand. Healing becomes a process and not an arrival point. I don’t think there ever is a “normal” to return to. Trauma is simply too transformational. In her rape memoir, Lucky, Alice Sebold expressed it well and succinctly: “I had begun to notice that I was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn’t understand it myself.”
When I returned from Vietnam, there was no such thing as post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I know it was called something else in previous wars, but you would not have known that from how the Army and a lot of U.S. citizens reacted to their returning soldiers. The response guaranteed additional adjustment problems. I followed the resulting psychological research with morbid fascination. Within a couple of decades psychology went from denial of the phenomenon to overboard acceptance. Even witnessing an accident was cause for PTSD. I am not a psychologist so will not try and argue a point of view as if I am. The following anecdote may be of interest in this context.
I finally did get out of the stockade and then got my discharge a few months after. During that time, I met another army medic also just back from a tour in Vietnam. John and I set out from California on a cross-country hitchhiking tour. I don’t remember who first proposed the idea. Our first destination, Denver, was to look up another medic who I had trained with, then sat next to on the plane to Vietnam. My friend, Michael, had enrolled at the University of Colorado. I found him subdued and depressed. John’s family, who I had met before the trip, thought me depressed. Maybe John was too. I can’t really remember.
What sticks out is Michael’s neighbor, a psychiatric nurse working with troubled veterans just back from the war. I always wondered if she recognized how troubled Michael really was. I even worried he might be suicidal. I knew him before the war and could compare the two Michaels, which she wouldn’t have been able to do.
Michael came out of the closet as gay a few years later. I got back in touch with him around 1990. Our initial conversations were positive, old friends reuniting, but he seemed to lose interest in maintaining contact. I didn’t push it. People get busy with their lives. John and I parted amicably in Montreal a few weeks later. He had an uncle in Milwaukee he wanted to visit, and I had yet another army medic I knew in the war to visit on the coast of New Jersey. We had much in common, four medics all made somber by our experiences in the war. I never saw any of them again. Further into her memoir, Alice Sebold wrote, “no one—females included—knew what to do with a rape victim.” I’ve often felt that way about American society and its veterans of the Vietnam War.
In the category of insights continuing to come years after an experience, I asked myself: “Did I hitchhike across the country, from California to New Jersey, to have a conversation with someone who had been through the same experience because I was trying to make sense of it? Or was it simply the great adventure my conscious mind told everybody it was—myself included?” I have never thought to ask the question until now. I don’t know how to answer it.
When asked why I wrote the novel, I usually give a simple reply. “After fifty years, I get to say what I want about the war.” It’s a lot more complex than that because everything I’ve ever experienced about war and its aftermath is complicated. I will never figure it all out. Never arrive at the finish line. Writing Poisoned Jungle is more in the vein of “still trying to understand what happened.”