Due to the intensity of the agriculture practiced throughout the region, the Mekong Delta is both rural and densely populated. This led to a great tragedy of the Vietnam War—the number of civilian war casualties. The mix of American firepower in the highly populated Delta caused the wounds and deaths of many Vietnamese civilians, children and aged among them. Nothing impacted my own tour more than the numbers of civilian war casualties I saw and treated. Nothing has stayed with me like the scenes of our firepower landing on innocents caught in situations beyond their control. None of the excuses and euphemisms used to explain the numbers of civilian casualties ring true to me. Three-year-old children did not harbor grenades waiting to blow us up. Five-year-old girls were not waiting with rifles to ambush us.
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.
Returning
Instead of being welcomed home, the first Americans I interacted with after deboarding my plane at Travis Air Force Base were screaming obscenities at me and 180 other veterans. Still in our jungle fatigues, we had to walk within a few feet of a chain link fence which separated us from hundreds of angry and jeering protestors. The message was clear; we were not welcome in our homeland.