Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | NN NN AAAA MM MM VV VV EEEEEEE TTTTTTTT | | NNN NN AA AA MMM MMM VV VV EE TT | | NN N NN AA AA MM M M MM VV VV EE TT | | NN N NN AA AA MM M MM VV VV EE TT | | NN N NN AAAAAAAA MM MM VV VV EEEEE TT | | NN N NN AA AA MM MM VV VV EE TT | | NN NNN AA AA MM MM V V EE TT | | NN NN AA AA MM MM VVV EEEEEEE TT | | | | The International Newsletter for Vietnam Veterans | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ Editor in Chief: Todd Looney Assistant Editor: G. Joseph Peck NAM VET is a special )| electronic newsletter dedicated to _+|__|_ * VIETNAM |--- --| VETERANS * around the ------------------------=========================== world and \_______________________________________________) provided as a ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ service to participants in the International Vietnam Veterans Echo Con- ference (IVVEC) available on many FidoNet (tm) bulletin boards throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Canada. _ Not all of the articles appearing in here | are written by participants in the IVVEC, but NAM VET | is very much an electronic newsletter by, -----/_\----- of, and for Vietnam veterans, their -O==============< : >==============O- friends, wives, and lovers. ( ) (...) ( ) If you are a veteran or anyone else wishing to express yourself concerning our Nation's Vietnam or other related experience, you are invited to submit material for publication to the Vietnam Veterans Valhalla (143/27), VETLink #1 (321/203), or to any BBS carrying IVVEC whose sysop can forward your work from there. NAM VET is published | monthly by Vietnam Veterans Valhalla. The views expressed | are not necessarily those of the NAM VET its staff or any of |____====________ its volunteers. The newsletter is ||__________}____)==================|) made up of =============---------------------===_____ articles and items /| | | | |\\from other newsletters \________|__________|_________|_________|/ and a variety of \\(O)___(O)___(O)___(O)___(O)___(O)// other sources We are not responsible for the content of this information nor are any of the above-mentioned parties. ____________ ======= _________________/|_____... | | " === |_______________| |-----::: |._ - " ) |_|___| / / |___| Duplication and/or distribution is /_/ permitted for noncommercial purposes only For other use, please contact Todd Looney at (408) 947-7668. ================================================================= T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S 1. EDITORIALS Song of the Valhalla .................................... 1 Don't Know Where I'm Going .............................. 3 2. VETERANS' SERVICES The Job Connection ...................................... 7 Agent Orange Measure A Priority ......................... 12 Just Don't Fit .......................................... 13 3. MEMORIES Vietnam era service, A personal view .................... 27 An American ............................................. 37 A Place for Me .......................................... 38 Stranger In Your Bed .................................... 39 Let Me Tell You Where I've Been ......................... 41 4. "MINI" WALL SCHEDULE 1989 "Mini" Wall Schedule .................................... 47 5. CALENDAR NAM VET Calendar of Events .............................. 49 6. IVVEC VETNet NODELIST IVVEC Nodelist .......................................... 50 NAM VET NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIPTION FORM .................... 57 NAM VET Newsletter Page i Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 ================================================================= E D I T O R I A L S ================================================================= Song of the Valhalla By: Todd Looney Vietnam Veterans Valhalla Well gang, I'm more sorry than all the rest of you that the Valhalla has got to go down for a few months, but it was unavoidable. What with all the legal expenses trying to keep my son out of jail, and having to sell all of our personal belongings (wedding rings, jewelry, car, computer equipment, etc.) to try to get up the $10,000.00 required by our lawyer, I could not justify the $350+ monthly expenses including the phone bill to keep it up in the interim. When this mess is all over and done with we will be back and you'll see the announcement both in this newsletter as well as in the FidoNews and AlterNews. We predict the Vietnam Veterans' Valhalla BBS system will be back online stronger than ever sometime in June of 1989. And the temporarily suspended Vietnam Veteran Community OutReach Service projects will pick up where they left off. In addition, Nancy and I plan to polish up our existing Organizational Charter and By-Laws within the next month with our ultimate goal to file the Valhalla's official California State Incorporation and Non-Profit Tax Status applications. Hopefully both will have been approved by the time we bring the Valhalla back online so we can open our membership doors to anyone with aspirations of playing an active role in our continued growth. Several of you were getting the VIETNAM_VETS, VETS_FRIENDS, MILITARY_ISSUE, VETREACH, and MIA-POW echo's from 1:143/27. Don't worry, you're not being cut off. Either look through the IVVEC Nodelist at the end of this newsletter for a participating VETNet BBS system in your area so that you can continue participating in one or more of the above veteran-related echo conferences, or contact Jim Deputy at "Sir Dep's Dungeon" in San Jose, California, FidoNet node number 1:204/40. My good friend and Vietnam veteran, Jim, has unselfishly volunteered to temporarily assume the West Coast distribution responsibilities while the Valhalla is down. Also, the NAM VET will continue to be published by Joe Peck and me as if nothing had changed. If you have articles which you would like to see published in future electronic editions of the NAM VET Newsletter (and we *desperately* need fresh material for the May and June issues), you can send them to Joe Peck by E-Mail at FidoNet node number 1:321/203, or to me at FidoNet node number 1:143/28. We'll get them in the next available issue for you if at all possible. Lastly, I'd like to extend my most sincere gratitude to Joe Peck, Bob Richards, and Kathleen Kelly; the three of whom established a Legal Defense Fund Drive and are actively soliciting monetary contributions from all of our friends within the VETNet community. Their dedicated and selfless endeavors are genuinely appreciated by Nancy and myself, and we both want to assure all of you that each and every dollar you donate toward our Legal Defense Fund will significantly chip away, bit by prescious bit, at the near unbearable pressures placed on us in our turmoil. Each dollar you can contribute will help us to meet the financial obligations committed to our child's legal defense. NAM VET Newsletter Page 1 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 We're still a LONG way off from reaching our goal, so *please*, we beg you, look into your hearts and souls (and pocketbooks), and if the Vietnam Veterans' Valhalla and/or the NAM VET Newsletter has meant *anything* at all to you in the last three years, *please* send something to our fund. The addresses are: Todd Looney Vietnam Veterans Valhalla Legal Defense Fund 28 Cecil Avenue, Ste. 179 San Jose, CA. 95128 and Bob Richards/Kathleen Kelly Valhalla Fund Blythe Systems 235 E. 87th Street # 12J New York, NY 10128 We wish we could tell you your donations were tax- deductible, but they aren't. Please find it in your hearts to help us anyway. We are *depending* on your charity in this, our time of need. Please don't let us down. Until next month, God bless each and every one of you, and... Show a vet *YOU* care! Todd NAM VET Newsletter Page 2 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 DON'T KNOW WHERE I'M GOING... JUST DOIN' MY BEST TO GET THERE Editorial by: G. Joseph Peck Assistant Editor Sysop: VETLink #1 FidoNet 1:321/203 AlterNet 7:46/203 (413) 443-6313 It's like goin' through the house of my childhood years. As most of ya know, we had somewhat of a catastrophe here at VETLink #1 very recently. First our computer began acting up. Not quickly repairable, we decided to transfer the HardDisk over to our other machine until we managed to get it fixed. Something went awry and, to our severe dismay, we discovered we were suddenly getting a "Cannot Access Boot Sector" error when we fired everything up. VETLink #1 is now in the process of being rebuilt - piece-by- piece, file-by-file. I just happened to be looking at the August '88 edition (NVET208) of NAM VET as we were putting things back together. Some things have happened up here that I just gotta share with you all... JOE > I'm caught in like a "limbo", Todd... all the applications JOE > I've filled out haven't as yet borne fruit... TODD: "It takes time sometimes bro. That same thing has happened to me more than once and I always discovered that in the end, the wait was worth it. Just don't give up. Don't look back, that's behind you now and can only help if you apply what you learned for the future. Look ahead, there's a light at the end of that tunnel. Maybe you can't see it yet, and maybe it's another train coming your way, but all you need to do is step off the track and let it go by, the train you're looking for is heading the same direction you are and you just have to run a little before you can jump on." JOE > What did you do, how did you balance-the-scales with JOE > yourself when raised hopes were dashed against the rocks? TODD: "That was the hardest time in all my life. I look back on it often, not to curse that I was put through that, or that GOD did that to me, but to reason out the WHY's and WHAT's that I learned. I know who I am. I know *exactly* what I am capable of and I know above all that when I let my guard down or feel sorry for myself that I will lose. When I was in camp I daydreamed a lot. I built a motorcycle in my head... from spokes to handlebars. When I came home I did it in real life. You are building that bike by working on the family and the VETLink etc. These things keep you going. What you cannot do is shut everything else out. You need to keep in touch with reality or you are a dead man. And when you die your family dies. Look ahead Joe. Dream about the things you want. Dreams are life. Through striving for our dreams we build life. Look ahead, there's something there waiting for you, you just haven't found it yet. It eludes you.. tests your mettle. What good would having it be if it came too easily. Only hard work and pain brings the best my little brother. Stay on the tracks, be looking for those lights. The right one is coming your way... in the direction you are travelling. It's *your* train, Joe... can NAM VET Newsletter Page 3 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 you hear it? "Wooooo Woooooo"" WHY am I reproducing part of an old NAM VET editorial here when there's so MUCH goin' on now that NEEDS direct attention? A veterans' son has run into some legal difficulties and the veteran finds himself a little short when it comes time to pay the Attorney for legal defense... A school teacher in Texas unknowingly teaches today's youth that 'Nam Vets weren't winners and is challenged by one of our Vietnam_Vet echo participants... A computer and hard-drive bit-the-bullet and is now only wingin' along on faith and a prayer... WHY??? ...'cause there's a *>-MESSAGE-<* in what Todd has been tellin' me, in what I've gone through and in what has recently happened to me that will direct us to WHERE the answer for each of us lies... in ourselves, in our faith, and in our inner direction... a -MESSAGE-that will keep alive that spark of HOPE within the many of us who feel there is no answer to present problems... JOE > "I don't know WHERE I'm goin', Todd-san, I just know I'm JOE > doin' the very best I can to get there. Who am *I* to JOE > question what God has planned for me? I just do the best I JOE > can and KNOW that things WILL work out... it gets kinda JOE > tough at times, but I'm not lettin' go... I've got FAITH JOE > that I'm in good hands..." "Operation Vets-Haven is located in Saranac Lake, New York, high in the Adirondack Mountains. By car, it is about six hours north of New York City, and two hours south of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Saranac Lake was at one time very famous for its tuberculosis sanitoriums, and to this day the famous research center, The Trudeau Institute, continues to do research in the medical field. The Village is located in Franklin County at an approximate elevation of 1600 feet. Saranac Lake today is a fine resort community that boasts many good accommodations and restaurants. Operation Vets-Haven was founded in the summer of 1987 by Douglas J. Lawrence, Clarence V. Russell, and Hallstein Arve Kjollesdal. The Organization is a non-profit foundation, that is privately and independently held. Its chief source of revenue is from private donations and endowments. Mr. Kjollesdal, a native of Norway, is a chief contributor and sponsor of the Organization. Messrs. Lawrence, Russell, and Kjollesdal came together in the summer of 1987 after realizing that existing organizations for the Vietnam Veterans were in many cases unable to do all in their ability for the veteran because of lack of funding, bureaucratic encumbrances, or political involvements. Operation Vets-Haven is concerned primarily with the health and welfare of the Vietnam Veteran and his [/her] family. However, unlike other veteran organizations, Operation Vets-Haven is also open to the public and encourages the communication, education, and sharing between the veteran and the non-veteran. There are many non-veterans who genuinely care and contribute to the welfare, health and honor of the Vietnam Veteran. As such this organization fosters that community concept. Therefore, there are no membership requirements to become involved in the work of this Foundation. Operation Vets-Haven shall accept no federal, state, or local government help unless it is given freely and without any covenants or encumbrances attached. This policy is instituted in NAM VET Newsletter Page 4 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 order to serve the veteran more freely. As a humanistic organization, we also do not subscribe nor support any political cause or lobby, excepting those involving the civil rights of Vietnam Veterans, the health and welfare thereof, and the Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Issue. For further information you may contact us at: Operation Vets-Haven, Inc. P.O. Box 247 Saranac Lake, NY 12983 (518) 891-1191" Douglas Lawrence, President of Operation Vets-Haven, has been a VETLink #1 user for a little while. On Monday, March 13, 1989 (the 24th anniversary of the jeep accident in which I was involved that ended - yet, in a roundabout way, BEGAN - my military career), I took a drive up to Saranac Lake, NY ... and things began to unfold! I discovered, among many things, that Operation Vets-Haven, Inc. conducts rap groups for incarcerated veterans at their local correctional facilities (Maximum and Medium Security); conducts rap support groups; has been instrumental in the erection and dedication of a memorial to Vietnam veterans in their town; provides crisis intervention; cares for vets and their families; is in the process of constructing - on its own initiative and without Federal/State funding - its own headquarters/Vietnam Veterans Learning Resource facility/Memorial Hall/Museum / and public monument to the Vietnam Veteran. Operation Vets-Haven also conducts a unique service which many of you may have heard of: In an Operation Vets-Haven hearse, a casket (which is a replica of the casket in which John F. Kennedy was buried) is driven to The National Memorial (The Wall) in Washington, D.C. At The Wall, a service is conducted, veterans place 'Nam-related items into the casket, and they are finally allowed to release many of the pent-up feelings kept so tightly bottled up since 'Nam. On Tuesday, March 14, 1989, I telephoned Operation Vets-Haven and spoke with its president, Doug Lawrence. "Ya know, Doug, I'd sure be interested in adding my efforts to your team..." And last night, via VETLink #1, I received from Operation Vets- Haven, Inc. a text-file letter which reads, in part: "This is to advise that this organization is considering the application of G. Joseph Peck for permanent employment. If retained, he shall be appointed to the position of Assistant to the President. His duties shall include but not be limited to administration, publications, veteran outreach programs, research, and other such duties as the president may proscribe." TODD: "It takes time sometimes bro. That same thing has happened to me more than once and I always discovered that in the end, the wait was worth it. Just don't give up. Don't look back, that's behind you now and can only help if you apply what you learned for the future. Look ahead, there's a light at the end of that tunnel. TODD: Through striving for our dreams we build life. Look ahead, there's something there waiting for you, you just haven't found it yet. It eludes you.. tests your mettle. What good would having it be if it came too easily. Only hard work and NAM VET Newsletter Page 5 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 pain brings the best my little brother. Stay on the tracks, be looking for those lights. The right one is coming your way... in the direction you are travelling. It's *your* train, Joe... can you hear it? "Wooooo Woooooo"" The "train" that Todd was talking about, my 'Nam Vet brothers and sisters, belongs to each and every one of us... the train that takes Vietnam Veterans - the toughest, most persistent and determined veterans in all of American history - out of a land of despair and disappointment into a REAL world where promises are kept and we work together to put UNITY in our veteran commUNITY. 'til next month Show a brother/sister veteran that YOU really care!! Ci'ao for Ni'ao -Joe- NAM VET Newsletter Page 6 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 ================================================================= V E T E R A N S ' S E R V I C E S ================================================================= The Job Connection - Veterans Employment and Training Service Department of Labor - United States of America Input by: VETLink #1 Pittsfield, MA FidoNet 1:321/203 7:46/203 (413) 443-6313 FEDERAL SERVICE VETERANS' PREFERENCE IN FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT HOW IT WORKS: Since the time of the Civil War, veterans of the armed forces traditionally have been given some degree of preference in appointments to government jobs. Recognizing that an economic loss is suffered by those who serve their country in the armed forces, Congress enacted laws to prevent veterans seeking Federal employment from being penalized because of the time they spent in service. Preference does not have as its goal the placement of a veteran in every Federal job in which a vacancy occurs; this would be incompatible with the merit principle of public employment. It does provide a uniform method by which special consideration is given to qualified veterans seeking Federal employment. WHO IS ELIGIBLE: Five-point preference is given to honorably separated veterans who served on active duty in the armed forces of the United States: + during any war (the official dates for war service are April 6, 1917-July 2, 1921 and December 7, 1941-April 28, 1952; + during the period April 28, 1952 through July 1, 1955; + in any campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge or service medal has been authorized; + for more than 180 consecutive days, any part of which occurred after January 31, 1955 and before October 15, 1976. PREFERENCE IN EXAMINATIONS: Persons who establish veteran preference and make passing grades on civil service examinations have 5 or 10 points added to the scores they make in open, competitive examinations for appointment to jobs in the Federal civil service. The extra points cause the names of veteran- preference eligibles to stand higher on lists of persons eligible for appointment. FOR MORE INFORMATION: The office of Personnel Management offers Federal employment information through a network of Federal Job Information Centers (FJICs) in several major metropolitan areas across the country. The FJICs are listed under "U.S. Government" in the white pages of local telephone directories. The information specialists at our FJICs can mail you appropriate job announcements, application forms, and pamphlets. In addition, Federal job opportunities are posted in State Job Service (State Employment Security) offices. APPRENTICESHIP / OJT THE VETERANS ADMINISTRATION MAY SUPPLEMENT A TRAINEE'S STARTING WAGE, ENABLING THE EMPLOYER TO PROVIDE A JOB WHERE NONE EXISTED BEFORE. HOW IT WORKS: Eligible veterans may pursue, on a full-time basis only, an approved Apprenticeship On-The-Job Training with qualified employers. As with the Emergency Veterans Jobs NAM VET Newsletter Page 7 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 Training Act, this may result in remarkable savings for the employer during the training period. Under APPRENTICESHIP, the Veterans Administration will supplement the veteran's starting salary, paid by the employer. The amount of money paid to the veteran by the VA decreases every six months, according to a prescribed salary schedule. Under the ON-THE-JOB TRAINING, the entrance wages, paid by the employer, must be at least one-half the salary paid for the specific job. The employer will be expected to increase the salary on a regular schedule until the veteran is receiving 86 percent of the wages for that job by at least the last full month of the training period, which may not exceed two years. The VA will approve Apprenticeship programs. For OJT, the VA will begin payments upon certification. WHO IS ELIGIBLE: Any veteran who served 181 days active duty, any part of which occurred prior to Jan. 1, 1977, is entitled to subsistence for Apprenticeship/OJT training at the rate of one and a half months of training for each month of active duty, not to exceed 45 months total. Applicants must have been discharged from active duty under conditions other than dishonorable. The VA defines an apprenticeship as a skilled trade learned in a practical way through a structured, systematic program of on- the-job training. It must be clearly identified and commonly recognized throughout an industry. TIME LIMIT: Benefits will expire 10 years from the date of release from active duty, or on Dec. 31, 1989, whichever date comes first. TAX CREDIT PROGRAM VETERANS MAY EARN FOR THEIR NEW EMPLOYERS AS MUCH AS $4,500 IN TAX CREDITS FOR TWO YEARS. HOW IT WORKS: Hundreds of employers have already realized significant breaks in their taxes through participation in the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit program, another strong incentive to hire eligible veterans. Through a simple formula, the maximum allowable tax credit if $3,000 the first year, and $1,500 the second. The precise amount of an employer's savings depends on his/her tax bracket and wages paid. The tax credit cannot exceed 90 percent of the employer's total tax liability in one year; however, excess tax credits may be used to claim a refund on taxes paid in the last three years, or may be carried forward to reduce future taxes for the next 15 years. WHO IS ELIGIBLE: Low income Vietnam Era veterans (8/5/64 to 5/7/75) who have at least 181 days of service. Employment Security's TJTC Unit will verify the veteran's family income for the six month period immediately preceding application. HOW TO APPLY: Qualified veterans may apply with the Local Veterans Employment Representative (LVER) at any State Job Service Center or any other TJTC agency such as the Department of Veterans Affairs' Field and Contract offices, Private Industry Councils or the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Project. Employers who believe a prospective applicant is TJTC eligible are encouraged to call the nearest Job Service Center. WORK STUDY HOW IT WORKS: The Veteran-Student Work Study program provides supplemental funds for veterans enrolled in full-time schooling. At a rate of $3.35 per hour (or an amount equal to the minimum daily hour wage, whichever is higher), veteran-students may work NAM VET Newsletter Page 8 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 a maximum of 250 hours a semester/quarter. WHO IS ELIGIBLE: You must be a veteran enrolled full-time under G.I. Bill (Chapter 34) or vocational rehabilitation program (Chapter 31). Preference will be given to those veterans having a 30 percent or more service-connected disability. HOW TO APPLY: Veterans may apply through the veterans advisor on campus, DVA Headquarters or Field Offices, with the Local Veterans Employment Representative (LVER) at any State Job Service Center or directly through any VA Regional Office. TIME LIMIT: Veterans may utilize the Work-Study Program until expiration of Chapter 34 or 31 educational benefits. VEAP HOW IT WORKS: Veterans and service-persons entering the active duty armed forces on or after Jan. 1, 1977, may participate in the Veterans Education Assistance Program, the successor to the G.I. Bill which expired Dec. 31, 1976. Participants contribute to the program through monthly deductions from their military pay, until a total $2,700 is reached. Placed in a training fund, the United States will match the contribution at the rate of $2 to every $1 IF the participant elects to use the funds for training. VOC-REHAB HOW IT WORKS: Vocational rehabilitation is a program designed to assist the service-disabled veteran obtain and maintain suitable employment, or for certain veterans, to achieve maximum independence in daily living. Benefits are available for use in on-the-job or Apprenticeship training, or for full-time schooling. The VA pays the trainee a monthly allowance in addition to the wage paid by the employer, and in addition to regular disability compensation. WHO IS ELIGIBLE: Any veteran who served in the armed forces during World War II or thereafter if: they suffered a service- connected disability in active service which entitles them to compensation; they were discharged under other than dishonorable conditions; the VA determines they need vocational rehabilitation to overcome a handicap to employment caused by their disabilities. HOW TO APPLY: If you are a veteran with a service-connected disability, visit any Department of Veterans Affairs Field or Contract Office, your local service organization, or any VA Regional Office. If you are a hospitalized service person awaiting disability discharge, send your application, VA Form 28-1900 (with copies of available medical records) to any VARO. TIME LIMIT: Veterans generally have 12 years from date of discharge to complete a rehabilitation program. Those who have been out of the service for more than 12 years may still be eligible if certain conditions prevented them from pursuing a rehabilitation program. NO-PAY PROGRAM HOW IT WORKS: The Chapter 31 "No Pay" Program (P.L. 94-502), provides eligible veterans the opportunity to receive unpaid training at the facilities of any agency of the United States. On completion of training, the veteran may be appointed noncompetitively to a position for which the training has qualified him. WHO IS ELIGIBLE: Veterans eligible for this program are those NAM VET Newsletter Page 9 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 who cannot develop a suitable on-the-job training opportunity with a private employer; those who require transitional training following schooling; or those for whom training in a Federal agency is in the interest of his or her career with the Federal government. HOW TO APPLY: Visit any VA Regional Office, Local Veterans Employment Representative (LVER) at any State Job Service Center, or any DVA Field or Contract Office. There is no time limit on this program. VETERANS READJUSTMENT HOW IT WORKS: The Veterans Readjustment Act provides eligible veterans with an opportunity to work at entry-level positions within the Federal civil service system, through direct appointment. Applicants need not pursue the normal application procedures. Applications are available through the Local Veterans Employment Representative (LVER) at any State Job Service Center, any VA Regional Office, or civilian personnel offices in Federal agencies and military reservations. WHO IS ELIGIBLE: Vietnam Era veterans (8/5/64 to 5/7/75) with 181 days or more active duty are basically eligible to apply. The program is limited to veterans with less than a two-year college degree (Associate Degree or equivalent) unless in receipt of service-connected disability. OTHER PROGRAMS TRADE ADJUSTMENT ACT: Eligible veterans among the general public may receive adjustment assistance under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program. This program is reserved for workers whose unemployment is linked to imports of foreign-made products. The Labor Department makes its determination in response to petitions from workers who have been laid off or threatened with layoffs from their plant. Copies of the petition form are available from state Employment Security agencies, and any of the 10 regional offices of the Employment and Training Administration, or the Office of Trade Adjustment Assistance (write to the address below, or telephone (202) 376-6944). To determine eligibility, submit petitions to U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, Office of Trade Adjustment Assistance, Room 10400, 601 D Street, Washington, D.C. 20213. VETERANS JOB COUNSELING: The Division of Employment Security provides vocational counseling to veterans through the Local Veterans Employment Representative and/or Disabled Veterans Outreach Person at all local Job Service Centers. The counseling is available on a walk-in basis, or by appointment. The representative provides assistance through job referrals, resume writing instruction, as well as job availability research. "DVOPS" and "LVERS" are veterans themselves and remain in close touch with other veterans service delivery organizations. Therefore, they have a wide variety of resources at their disposal. There is no time limit for these services. Check local telephone numbers listed for the nearest Job Matching Center. MASSACHUSETTS JOB MATCHING CENTERS Attleboro 67 Mechanic St. 222-1950 Boston C.F. Hurley Bldg. NAM VET Newsletter Page 10 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 Gov't Ctr. 727-6322 Boston 610 Columbia Rd. 282-5790 Brockton 25 White Avenue 586-8100 Cambridge 806 Massachusetts Ave. 864-1950 Chicopee 355 Front St. 598-8371 Fall River 162 Pleasant St. 678-8311 Fitchburg 120 Main St. 343-6461 Framingham 46 Park St. 875-5237 Gardner 86-88 Parker St. 632-5050 Gloucester 18 Washington St. 283-4772 Greenfield 31 Federal St. 774-4361 Haverhill City Hall, 4 Summer St. 374-4753 Holyoke 320 Beech St. 538-8271 Hyannis 77 High School Rd. Ext. 775-5800 Lawrence 444 Canal St. 682-5217 Lowell 291 Summer St. 458-4641 Lynn 52-62 Market St. 593-5504 Malden 200 Pleasant St. 322-8890 Marlboro 11 Florence St. 485-8711 Milford 65 Congress St. 478-4300 New Bedford 874 Purchase St. 999-2361 Newburyport 15 Green St. 462-4494 North Adams 85 Main St. 663-3748 Northampton 34 Bridge St. 586-3116 Norwood 17 Central St. 762-9450 Pittsfield 46 Summer St. 499-1793 Plymouth 19 Court St. 746-5910 Quincy 1433 Hancock St. 471-2750 Salem 118 Washington St. 745-1860 Springfield 1592 Main St. 785-1231 Taunton 21 Spring St. 824-5835 Waltham 738 Main St. 899-9340 Wareham 3086 Cranberry Hwy. 295-6170 Webster 562 Main St. 943-1240 Woburn 10 Park St. 935-4654 Worcester 51 Myrtle St. 791-8551 NAM VET Newsletter Page 11 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 AGENT ORANGE MEASURE A PRIORITY . Washington--(AF TIMES) Enactment of legislation treating Agent Orange- related disabilities the same as other service-connected injuries and illnesses is the top priority of the Vietnam-era Veterans in Congres Caucus. . The group of aabout 40 lawmakers, who served in the military from 1964 through 1975, came close last year to getting Agent Orange dis- ability legislation approved. . In October, the Senate passed a measure, supported by three power- ful veterans groups, that would have presumed a service connection for three AGent Orange-realated ailments: non-Hodgkins's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic glands; soft-tissue sarcoma, a broad category of tumors in tissues, muscles and bones; and chloracne, a sever skin disease that is rarely fatal. . Some scientists think these ailments are caused by dioxin, the active ingredient in Agent Orange, although evidence is not conclusive. . Veterans with AGent Orange-realted health complaints are eligible for medical care at Veterans Administration hospitals, even though the agency does not formally recognize a connection between exposure to the defoliant and any ailments. . Input by Friends BBS from the March 13, 1989 issue of Air Force Times. NAM VET Newsletter Page 12 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 JUST DON'T FIT - Stalking the elusive 'tripwire' veteran by: Larry Heinemann (in Harper's Magazine 4/85 p.55-63) Input by: VETLink #1 - G. Joseph Peck, Sysop FidoNet 1:321/203 AlterNet 7:46/203 (413) 443-6313 JUST DON'T FIT - Stalking the elusive 'tripwire' veteran By Larry Heinemann LARRY HEINEMANN served in Vietnam as a combat infantryman. He is the author of Close Quarters, a novel; his short stories have appeared in Harper's and other magazines. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches writing at Columbia College. Washington's Olympic Peninsula lies between the open water of the North Pacific and Puget Sound. It is countryside of stunning color and contradiction - sandy beaches and mile-high, snow- covered mountains. Almost everywhere you look are bright yellow Iceland poppies, purple lupines, whole pastures covered with white daisies, hedgerows of evergreen (called Scotch broom) clustered with yellow flowers that remind you of wisteria. From one end of the peninsula to the other are thick evergreen forests - the Olympic National Park, the Olympic National Forest, and commercial timberlands. On the northern shore of the peninsula, you can stand on the broad tidal flat of a gray-sand beach (or on a noisy pebble beach or a smooth, swirling lava beach) and look northward across the Strait of Juan De Fuca to the timberlands of Vancouver Island not twenty miles distant. In the water between, you may see container ships heaped high, Trident submarines, which are not small, and flotillas of Navy ships-of-the-line, as well as gray whales spouting along, making their leisurely way. The water is as blue as a crayon, and the sky is filled with clouds drifting steadily eastward, fleece-white and billowing. Or the overcast hangs so dismally low, pouring rain, that you can reach up and touch it. There is "weather" almost every day. At the beach you can hop in your car and drive south, as I did, into the sharply rising woodland hills of the Olympic Mountains, and soon find yourself among thick, second-growth "working" timber - the knee-high stumps still fresh, the smell of cut lumber in the air. If you keep driving for another fifteen minutes or so, up into the fringes of Olympic National Park, you'll be in a rich, verdant, mossy rain forest, dripping with humidity. The slopes are a veritable cascade of ferns, and the woods a thick mixture of cedar, Douglas fir, and yew. The humus is so rich and spongy you can feel it ooze underfoot. These green and auburn woods are as thick as any jungle I've been in, yet the air is a crisp and solid sixty degrees. Then you hop into the car once more and drive another twenty minutes straight south, past the Olympic National Park ranger station and up into the weather to the summit of Hurricane Ridge, where there's a ski lodge and an overlook. If it's clear - you'll never know until you drive up there and see for yourself - you'll see a panorama of snow-capped mountains spread out around you from one end of the park to the other. The air is so clear you can't judge distances, and deer graze the grounds of the lodge as calm as sheep and mooch sweets from the tourists. Chief Seattle, the Suquamish Indian for whom the city is named, once said: NAM VET Newsletter Page 13 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 ... the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to footsteps [of my people] than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. More than once on the peninsula did I have a sense of this "sympathetic touch." I was driving the peninsula to learn about, and perhaps meet with, the men who had searched out this place and its special sense, this heartfelt SOMETHING - men who had come to be called, over their objection, tripwire veterans. A tripwire is a piece of blackened wire about as thick as fish line. Rigged from a booby trap across a footpath, say, and tied to a stake or tree, it is VERY difficult to see. In Vietnam, a tripwire was sometimes attached to noisemakers a good distance from an encampment - an early warning device. Compare it to that little hawk's bell a shopkeeper might attach to the front door of his place to announce customers, or to that pneumatic rubber tube rigged around the perimeter of a service station to alert the mechanic when he's working under the hood of a car. If you think "early warning device," the tripwire metaphor clicks. Think of the tripwire as the distance that many Vietnam veterans seem to maintain. The first time I saw the term "tripwire" used to describe Vietnam veterans was in a series of articles by Marlowe Churchill published in TACOMA NEWS TRIBUNE in December 1983 and January 1984. Churchill had talked with Mike McWatters, an ex-Navy corpsman who had served two tours in Vietnam with Marine Main Force Reconnaissance and who now is on the staff of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington. The department had learned that between 70,000 and 100,000 Vietnam combat veterans live in the state, a number that is out of all proportion to the total population and could not readily be explained. It also discovered that the veteran population of Washington's cities is shrinking, while the number of veterans in rural areas is increasing. On the Olympic Peninsula, around Port Angeles and Forks, areas with fewer than nineteen people per square mile, there were 1,700 combat veterans in 1982 and 2,700 by the end of 1983. McWatters figured that many of the Vietnam veterans on the peninsula might be suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder" - undeniable self-destructive impulses, unresolved grief, and unrelieved survivor's guilt (virtually a collective sense of guilt). These symptoms may appear separately or together, beginning as a malaise, then blossoming into withering cycles of crushing, debilitating depression; psychic numbing (the "crust" many veterans seem to have); spontaneous flashbacks - momentary or prolonged - brought about by everyday occurrences; supravigilant suspicion; bouts of self-medication with alcohol and drugs; and a craving for isolation. McWatters, a big, burly guy, had himself spent two years in the Adirondacks of New York State. Randy Fisher, the director of Washington's Department of Veterans Affairs, convinced the state in 1982 to fund an outreach program for rural veterans suffering from "delayed stress." The state contracted with clinics and family counseling centers in rural areas. (As of this writing there are eleven such centers sprinkled around the state, and three more will be opened soon.) Word went out through the veterans' grapevine that anyone who wanted to come in to talk would find someone to listen. In just NAM VET Newsletter Page 14 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 over two years the various rural centers have made contact with about 300 men. Among them are what McWatters calls rural veterans, those living in small towns, and bush veterans, those living more or less conventionally in the woods. But some of the veterans literally walked out of the deep isolation of the woods - tripwire veterans. When Churchill talked with McWatters, McWatters described tripwire veterans simply as "combat veterans who have forsaken the comfort of society to disappear into the backwoods." But read the spate of newspaper articles about tripwire veterans and the unmistakable image springs to your mind of a mossbacked old hard-ass (thirty-five or forty years old), just as squirrelly as hell and literally shivering with paranoia, who hops and whoops around those evergreen forests like some mangy, half-mad freak (dressed head to toe in homemade leathers, as they are called). He minds a string of illegal traps and poaches game aplenty. He eats his kill - a dear or some big-ass elk or whatever trots by the cabin - hardly bothering to skin the damn thing, though if asked, he'd skin it with his thumbnail the way some folks skin a grapefruit. He lives in a virtually impenetrable woods hard by a dense wilderness area in a jerry-built cabin made of cedar logs and barn timbers, tar paper and sheet tin - the whole affair as solid and impregnable as a castle keep. His place is a good day's walk down to the footpath leading to the firebreak that takes him out to the blacktop highway where he can thumb a ride to town. But in the woods he keeps the rest of humanity at arm's length with booby traps made of monster deadfalls, homemade Claymore mines as big as manhole covers, and other such things he learned to manufacture in the Special Forces or the Navy SEALs or the Army LRRPs. He rigs these contraptions with tripwires (hence, the newspaper nickname) as thin as spider's silk. The wires crisscross the perimeter of his territory like a long trellis, laid flat. He squats in his dirt- floor cabin and stares out a gun slit the size of a mail slot. He's big and ugly, with a wooly beard and a head of hair that hangs down in squiggly dreadlocks. And he lives in a permanent fantasy of nightmare flashbacks, screaming rages, and stomping- mad fits. He sits there day and night, in the dim glow of lamps made from beer bottles and bear fat, with a loaded lever-action Winchester in his lap - as high as a coon on kitchen-garden marijuana. And when he gets hungry he'll whittle long slivers of jerky from the side of a smoked venison that hangs down from the rafters. He'll sprinkle the meat with plenty of NUOC MAU (Vietnamese fish sauce) and wash it down with gulps of "swipe" (backyard booze made from canned fruit). And may God pity the poor fool who comes looking for him, calling, HELLO THE HOUSE as he dawdles up the way and trips a wire, or comes within easy sniper range of the cabin. On the Olympic Peninsula I talked with two men who knew of veterans who lived like the tripwire vets of popular myth. One man said he knew of five places around the state of Washington where groups of veterans and their families lived in "hard camps" tricked out with bunkers, tunnels, barbed-wire perimeters that had been booby-trapped, and cleared fields of fire. When I asked to be taken to one, I was told, FLATLY, no. Steve, as I will call him, knew of a hard camp "not thirty miles from where we're sitting." We were sitting on the deck of the cabin where he lives with his wife, Julie, in a thick cedar woods outside of Port Townsend, a ferry port that connects the NAM VET Newsletter Page 15 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 peninsula with the mainland. Steve is a big man (McWatters and others call him "Steve the bear") who served three tours in Vietnam as a SEAL. The cabin, all cedar shingles and plenty of windows, is airy and aromatic. The deck of the cabin goes right to the edge of a cliff that drops about ninety feet to a narrow, rocky beach. We sat near the edge of the deck and talked. All morning, we could hear the surf bubble among the rocks below. The boughs of cedar and yew and princess pine bobbed in and out of the conversation, and the fresh odor of saltwater and milled cedar pervaded the air. Once we spotted a gray whale plowing its way east toward Puget Sound. Another time we stopped to watch a bald eagle soar along the edge of the cliff, not twenty feet out, cruising the updraft. Steve talked about his years in the Navy. "Navy SEAL training spins your head around," he said. He went through mock POW camps, with Japanese- and Chinese-American drill-instructor cadres wearing plain utilities (fatigues) and red stars. Each camp indoctrination included interrogation and torture. Steve explained his training this way: "They're doing a brainwashing job on you that says, 'You cannot trust, you cannot trust, you cannot trust...' After this I go over to Vietnam. Hell, I didn't trust NOTHING. I killed EVERYTHING. "We'd do sweeps," Steve continued. "We brought in people who didn't have IDs. I personally know that 363 got to see the bottom of a big ditch. I decided that rather than watch the atrocities - I mean, I wouldn't let anyone torture a dog that way - I went: CLICK! ANYTHING GOES! From then on, it was no prisoners. When Calley got busted, I got shook. "I got out of the Navy in April 1969. I dealt drugs. I worked in a sawmill for a while. I went back to college. I had twenty- three car wrecks; I wrecked three cycles. I did drugs; I was drinking heavily. I made a conscious decision to stay f*cked up. I wouldn't be held responsible if I hurt someone. "Anyway, I wrecked a car. I almost got cut in half - four inches of flesh and my backbone were holding me together, my insides were in the street. I didn't lose consciousness through the whole thing. I said, 'There are two things I can do. One, I can freak out and pump all my blood into the street. Or I can bring everything down.' I made a conscious effort to slow my heart down, to do everything possible to hold together until somebody came by." Steve endured four operations. The physical therapist said he didn't know how to help him. He told Steve to rehabilitate himself: "He gave me the key to the room," Steve said. He continued the physical therapy in a Veterans Administration hospital and still sometimes uses a cane. "I decided - discovered - that I couldn't operate around humanity," Steve said. "I felt my government sh*t on me. My family sh*t on me. The only true, clean thing left was the woods. So I went back to the woods and slowly, slowly mended." For two years on and off he lived along the upper part of the Bogachiel River, about miles from Forks. His 125-year-old cabin stood in a mountain meadow near a small old orchard within a hundred feet of the river. For pocket money he scrounged odd jobs, but mostly he stayed close to home. A herd of elk came down out of the Olympic National Park to graze, and stayed the summer. "So every morning," Steve said, "I'd get up, and I'd have these elk at my front door, and deer. And I'd damn near have to shoo them out of the way so I could go to the john. I made forays out to survive. I knew certain plants to eat; this NAM VET Newsletter Page 16 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 was my turf. I set traps and ate small animals, and deer and elk." "I've always studied animals," Steve continued, "their characteristics - what makes them tick. Six o'clock in the morning I'd slip out the door, naked, doing a low crawl on my elbows and hips, and go down my porch and out through this fence and into this old orchard. The elk herd liked to bed down there. The morning fog would be about two feet thick, so thick that sometimes you didn't think you had legs. It was strange, but it was a new feeling, a good feeling. I'd crawl through this stuff and come up by this apple tree, and just slowly bring myself up and watch the elk with my eyes just above the fog to see what they did - how they cared for each other, the love that they showed, how they cared for their young. What made the bulls special. The females bed down, and INSIDE the females you find the young. And on the outside you find these ranging herd bulls - they just keep moving. And outside THAT is the main herd bull - it doesn't seem he ever rests. There was a tenderness, no matter how much they beat heads, and there was a pecking order. I knew there was a gentleness and a peacefulness with the animals that you never saw with humans. And that was what I needed to see. It was part of my healing. I desperately needed to know that there was still gentleness - that my whole world wasn't caving in completely." After two years of living in the cabin on the Bogachiel, Steve left to drift around. He married, and he and his wife moved to Indiana - "Which taught me a lesson about what I have here," he said frankly. "In Indiana, I dropped back twenty years into KKK and corn on the cob. I tried to talk to people, but there were veterans there who were heavier into denial than I was. They were saying, 'Hey, the war was JUST FINE. What we did was JUST GREAT, and we out to DO IT SOME MORE.' One of the things they'd talk about was, 'Yeah, had a little trouble with the old lady last night. I had a couple of drinks, and she got right in my face, and I had to beat the hell out of her.' For or five guys'd start laughing, and I'd go, JESUS CHRIST, what am I doing here?" After Steve and his first wife divorced, he went back to the Olympic Peninsula. "For me it's the cleanness of the place," he said. "If you've ever been to sea when it gets really bad, you get real humble, real quick. And that's what's here. There is a power, a feeling, truly a humbleness. A lot of people think it's comical; a lot of people think it's sad. There's areas here where people see and feel and get into contact with the most humble part of themselves." Nowadays Steve doesn't go to Seattle much. Other people smell popcorn and pavement and bus fumes. "I smell those, too," Steve said, "but they spring loose other things for me. There's just too many people and too much energy." During World War I, the Allied military, and the British especially, weren't interested in attributing the soldiers' responses to battle and butchery to any unmanly newfangled psychological or emotional causes. Rather, it was believed that the very shock, the concussion, from an artillery round had an irresistible effect upon the body itself. "Shell shock" seemed a perfectly reasonable explanation for what happened to men in the trenches. During World War II, the troops suffered "combat fatigue" - the boys were just tired. World War II veterans did not escape the effects associated with delayed stress. The psychiatric NAM VET Newsletter Page 17 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 casualties were 300 percent higher in the early years of World War II than in World War I. But the way soldiers found in World War II, and the way they stopped fighting after it, were different from what happened in Vietnam - and this difference would prove crucial. During World War II, a unit trained together and shipped overseas together. You humped North Africa, Italy and Sicily, then France and Germany, or you island-hopped from Tarawa and Guadalcanal and Peleliu to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. You were in for the duration, as the saying went. After the war, waiting to be shipped home, you had time to share the sympathetic support of men with whom you had a particular intimacy not often permitted in this culture. (It wasn't "buddies," the dead-flat, shopworn newspaper cliche that trivialized a complex and powerful relationship. "Buddy-up" was something you did at Boy Scout camp, when everyone would mosey down to the lake for a swim. Boy Scout camp may be many things, but it ain't the straight-leg, ground- pounding, grunt-f*cking infantry.) Waiting, you got to work some of the war out of your system; to release the grief for men long dead; to feel keenly, perhaps for the first time, your survivor's guilt; to feel as well the sharp personal guilt for murdering prisoners, say, or for shelling villages good and hard that you later discovered will filled with women and children, or for firebombing Dresden; to recognize the delight you took in destruction (what the Bible calls "lust of the eye") and the warm, grim satisfaction of your firm and bitter anger. Waiting, you had time for crying jags, public and private; you had time for fistfights to settle old scores once and for all. By the time your ship docked, you had worked much of the stress out of your system, though the annual depressions (usually coinciding with anniversaries), the periodic screaming, thrashing nightmares (vivid and colorful recollections of the worst times of your life), and the rest would linger for years - delayed stress (though no one yet called it by that name) a permanent fixture in your life. In the Vietnam War, everyone served a one-year tour - the assumption being that any dipstick could keep his buttons buttoned THAT long - though you could volunteer to stay as long as you liked. (United States Marine Corps esprit dictated that every Marine would serve one year and one month. SEMPER FI, Mac.) But the one-year tour created a reverberating and lingering turmoil of emotional problems unlike anything known after World War II. Vietnam was a war of individuals. You went through Basic Training with one group, Advanced Individual Training with another. You shipped overseas with a planeload of total strangers, and when you reached your outfit - a rifle company out in the middle of nowhere, say - the astonishment on your face and the bright sheen of your uniform pegged you as a 'cruit, the newbee, the f*cking new guy. You have never seen those people before in your life. Everyone avoids you (dumb guys never last, we used to say). At the very least, you have replaced a highly experienced and valuable man whose tour was up. He was as smooth as silk when he took the point, and no John Wayne. You, on the other hand, have hardly seen an M-16 and do not know your ass from a hole in the ground. The head and humidity are withering, and you're so exhausted by ten in the morning, pouring sweat, that when they call a break in place, you can't even stand up to piss. As you begin your tour, the short-timers finish theirs, mount NAM VET Newsletter Page 18 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 their choppers and leave, and are never heard from again; other f*cking new guys arrive. Your first firefight is a bloody, nasty mess, and it is a pure wonder you are not killed. Slowly you become accustomed to the weather and the work - the GRINDING, backbreaking humps, the going over the same ground day in and day out, aboard choppers and on foot. More short-timers leave; more f*cking new guys arrive. This is the ugliest, most grueling, and spiritless work you have ever done. But you soon discover you're a pretty good tunnel rat or booby-trap man, or especially canny and efficient on night ambush. You come to know the ground around your base camp and firebases like the back of your hand. In camp, on stand-down, you smoke dope in earnest; you drink like a fish; you party with a serious frenzy. More short-timers leave; more f*cking new guys arrive. With every firefight the men around you drop like flies. YOu endure jungle rot, heat exhaustion, crabs and head lice, and an endless diarrhea from the one-a-day malaria pills. You take your five- day R&R in Bangkok, a culinary and sexual rampage. When you get back to the field more short-timers have disappeared; more f*cking new guys have replaced them. You are sprayed with Agent Orange; the dust is in your hair, in your water, on your food. They send you to sharpshooter school; you return with an M-14 with scope and carrying case and a $500 pair of field glasses - the company sniper. You can draw a bead and drop a VC - man, woman, or child - in his tracks at 500 meters, and he never knows what hit him. You have many kills. More short-timers leave; more f*cking new guys arrive. You are promoted to sergeant and made a squad leader. Your platoon leader, an ROTC first lieutenant, admires and trusts you: you will go anywhere and do anything. Humping is a snap, and you live in the midst of an alien ease. The firefights and ambushes are bloody and nasty, businesslike massacres with meat all over everything. The one-year tour is the topic of endless conversation; you know exactly when your tour will end, and THAT is what keeps you going. You don't care about anything but finishing your tour - you just don't care. Then one morning you wake up and it is finally your turn - not a day too soon, you understand. You say your goodbyes, hop in your chopper, and leave. You will never see or hear of these men again. The next morning you hitch a ride to the airfield in time to catch the plane to Saigon. You have hacked it, but you are exhausted. Your body is as tight as a drum. The plane finally comes: a Boeing 707. The replacements file off and you and your fellow passengers walk across the tarmac, and load up - a ritual unbelievable ordinary and benign. On the plane you sit in a space both anonymous and claustrophobic, more glad and more guilty than tongue can tell. Sick, lame or lazy, blind, crippled or crazy - you give a sweet f*ck, you just want out. The plane ride is nineteen hours of canned music and beach-blanket movies. At Oakland Army Terminal you're mustered out - given a bum's rush of a physical and a new baggy, smelly uniform, and issued your outstanding pay in greenback cash. You are free to go. Your entire family meets you at the airport and takes you home to the house where you grew up. Yesterday or the day before you were surrounded by men who humped guns and grenades, up to their eyeballs in bloody murder (mean and evil sons-of-bitches, you bet): now you're dumped into a maelstrom - walk/don't walk lights, Levi's and daytime TV; mom and dad and the dog on the couch - that bears no relationship to anything you're accustomed NAM VET Newsletter Page 19 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 to. You're with people who love you, but they don't have the faintest inkling how to help you. You want to sit and tell them what happened - what you saw, what you did, what you became - but more often than not they don't want to hear about it. Your father, a World War II Marine, perhaps, shrugs his shoulders and, struggling with his own residual delayed stress, says, Everybody did those things, grow up, forget it (it's all right). But you sit in that clean kitchen, smelling the eggs and bacon, and warming your hands on a cup of coffee, and its not all right. And no "validating" ritual - no parade or Vietnam War memorial - will make it so. And make no mistake: if you have any healthy impulses left at all, you want to find a woman and take her to bed. Skip the date; skip the dinner; skip the movie. You want to feel good in your body and re-establish those powerful human feelings. Maybe you manage it, but just as likely you don't: some women refuse to date veterans, and then brag to them about it. You get your old job back (it's the law) stocking shelves at the A&P. The work is easy and dull, and the money's decent, but the petty harassment is galling. The boss doesn't want you around, the way you STARE when the customers ask their endlessly stupid questions. YOu drift from job to job. Sometimes, as soon as you mention you're a veteran, the clerk behind the counter tells you to beat it; they don't need junkies and they don't need freaks. You cannot concentrate. YOu begin having nightmares; you jerk out of sleep, pouring sweat. You drink to anesthetize yourself against the dreams and the daydream flashbacks (drunks don't dream very well). You try to stay up as long as you can. You know you will dream about the night you shivved that wounded VC who kept waving his hands in your face, shaking his head and whispering man to man, "No, no," while he squirmed against your knife with all his might. You cannot stand crowds or people walking close behind you. You discover an abrupt and furious temper; you startle into a crouch at the damnedest things. You become self-destructive, picking fights and driving your car crazily. There is the nagging thought that you didn't do enough, that you never should have left Vietnam. Everyone you came to trust has disappeared from your life, dead by now, for all you know. How does that make you feel? You withdraw into isolation. Why put up with the grief? Bruce Webster operates the Family Counseling Center in Port Angeles, where he conducts individual counseling and rap-group sessions. He also runs a state-funded rural outreach program in Forks, about an hour's drive west on Highway 101, and supervises counseling efforts at Neah Bay on the Makah Indian Reservation. A former high-school wrestling coach, Webster is a calm and patient man, warm and hospitable; many of the veterans who come to him with delayed-stress problems are former students. The center occupies a large loft space within sight of the car ferry to Victoria, on Vancouver Island. There are many cubby- hole office, painted white, with groups of large potted plants here and there. Many comfortable chairs are scattered around, and a pot of coffee is always on - almost like a social center. With veterans and others "checking in," the stream of traffic is steady, but for all the activity there is a feeling of welcome and ease, peace and quiet. When I first sat down with Webster he told me, "The veterans NAM VET Newsletter Page 20 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 come to me and often say they just don't fit. They can't find work. Maybe they drink, scrounge jobs. There isn't a lot to do around here, you notice. They don't think they fit. That's one reason they go to the woods. Out there everything 'fits,' everything works; maybe they can too. The other part of it is, 'Right now, I'm having a hard time containing my rage and my anger. And the way I can control that without hurting anyone - because I know how to hurt people, I've been trained very well, and I've never been given another way - the way I can control that is to go to the woods.'" According to Webster, delayed stress is not an illness but an emotional disorder, a "disorder of self-esteem." At one point he looked right at me and said, "I think of a lot of their delayed- stress problems would go away if they could find useful work - a real job." Webster wants to help the veterans, but he doesn't want them to hang on forever. He has said that he asks each veteran to take responsibility for what he does, what he says, and how he feels. The veterans' rap group meets weekly in a large room at the back of the center. The night I visited, Webster had set the topic: How do you let people back into your life? About ten men had gathered (some weeks it is twenty or twenty-five), together with some wives and girlfriends, who usually meet separately in another room. There were Doug, a Seabee, who worked thirty or forty jobs between 1972 and 1979; Pat, a crewman on a Navy river patrol boat; Bob, a Navy corpsman, who said, "I can piss off anybody"; Delmer, a chopper door-gunner, looking haggard and tired - a man permanently exhausted - who summed up his life since the war this way: "I lived in bars, had all kinds of jobs, didn't give a sh*t, would pick fights." He told me later, about his time in Vietnam, "I don't remember anybody's name. I can'[t even remember my pilots' names. They're both Harvard, both lawyers, both crazy as loony tunes. One smoked opium, the other drank all this good scotch. The Army did have a lot to do with the way I drank and stuff. I drank before, but the violence wasn't there like it is now." There was another Navy man, a strapping-big guy with a well- clipped Quaker's beard. Everyone called him Doc. In 1964 he was classified 1AO - Conscientious Objector, but willing to serve - so the Navy made him a hospital corpsman. He gave me a very stern lecture about the difference between Army MEDICS, who received skimpy training - "Wrap 'em up, shoot 'em up, and shove 'em on a chopper" - and NAVY HOSPITAL CORPSMEN, like himself, who got months of very thorough schooling. Mike, another Navy man, said, "I have a real bitter taste about what the United States did. My life style over the years has been to separate from the system. I didn't go to the woods, even though that crossed my mind more than once. More and more I keep flashing back to Vietnam and the lies we were told." Bill Maier, a native of Port Angeles and an ex-Marine, lived as a tripwire veteran for a while, came back to town, and was now working as a construction laborer. "I stepped out of high school - my mother had cooked every meal I'd ever eaten - and I was in the Marine Corps. I got home in 1968. A Vietnam veteran was not a good thing to be - a questionable character. If you were an employer, it was doubtful you'd hire one. I look at pictures of me taken around that time, and I see this LOOK in my eyes. People were afraid of me; I was afraid of everything. Some guys were pissed off. Some were depressed. Some people isolated themselves right off the bat. Some people, like myself, were NAM VET Newsletter Page 21 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 very afraid. "In the woods, living out there, it was real quiet. You heard absolutely nothing: you heard your ears. Anything you heard - especially at night - it gets to be "What was that?" You HAD to identify it, just like in Vietnam. What is that sound? What is that odor? What is that light? Holding all those tripwires took a lot of energy." In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Veterans Administration didn't know much about delayed stress, and sometimes misdiagnosed it as paranoid schizophrenia. Veterans were treated with downers and antidepressants morning, noon, and night, and were given well-meant but useless counseling - Let's keep the guy quiet and busy until he comes to his senses. Many veterans shunned the VA altogether. Widely regarded with firm distrust, it was and still is generally perceived as an uncaring bureaucracy staffed with lifers more interested in pushing their pencils and shuffling their papers than in treating the Vietnam veterans trickling in through the door, looking for help. In addition, the thousands of GIs with "bad paper" discharges - more often than not shoved at them out of sheer spite for their "attitude" - are barred by law from obtaining treatment of any kind from the VA, even if they suffer service-connected health problems: wounds received in active combat, Agent Orange exposure, delayed stress, and the like. with few exceptions, the veterans I talked with in Washington state and elsewhere during the past twelve or fifteen years express resentment at having been repeatedly lied to and used by arrogant and selfish men, and at having been sent to Vietnam, wasted like pieces of meat on a slab, and then just plain dumped. The Vietnam War was a distortion and betrayal of every good impulse they felt toward their government. In Port Townsend a veteran I spoke with about Agent Orange threw back his head so that his ponytail swayed behind him; then he laughed and growled in a deep, sharp voice: "I'm a fully stamped, qualified slab animal - successful species - that made it out of the lab." Ten years ago a student of mine who had been a young sergeant in 1969-70 told me that thinking about how MUCH he hated Richard Nixon brought tears to his eyes. Indeed, a point often comes in a conversation among veterans when talk and remembrance and fact cease, and a powerful up-welling of simultaneously sweet and bitter feeling takes over. Harboring this feeling is probably not healthy. We could, no doubt, discover abundant and irrefutable medical evidence, supported by ample statistics and vivid personal examples, showing that this blunt and heartfelt bitterness will shorten lives. Tens of thousands of GIs got chewed up in the Vietnam War, and there are tens of thousands more upon whom the war still chews. In the early 1970s Robert Jay Lifton, Chaim Shatan, and other psychiatrists first began looking into delayed stress, doing individual counseling and setting up veterans' rap groups. Directly from his early studies Lifton wrote HOME FROM THE WAR, which popularized the buzzword "post-Vietnam syndrome," further scapegoating Vietnam GIs by making it quite clear what unique warriors we were. The reverberation of our experience was explained away, virtually as a glitch on the graph. Tom Williams, a two-tour Marine Corps company commander and now a clinical psychologist who works with Vietnam veterans, edited POST-TRAUMATIC DELAYED STRESS DISORDERS OF THE VIETNAM VETERAN; he refers to Lifton as "Dr. Guilt." To Lifton's post-Vietnam syndrome (which clearly identifies the guilty party so you can NAM VET Newsletter Page 22 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 stand back and admire him) let us add the look in Bruce Dern's eyes in COMING HOME and the overly sentimental and preposterously exaggerated images of Vietnam vets as played by John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone. What emerges is a cartoon cliche of sullen, brooding vets (snarling and pugnacious and vicious, twitching with rage and consumed RAW with survivor's guilt) who love nothing better than to wallow in the pleasant brutality of wartime Southeast Asia. There ARE stunning differences between the Vietnam War and previous wars, but Vietnam was hardly unique. When you talk with veterans of the Korean War or World War II or the Spanish Civil War, you discover a brutally consistent pattern of military experience. Despite ritual patriotics and something J. Glenn Gray, a World War II veteran, called "the enduring appeal of battle" in his very good book THE WARRIORS: REFLECTIONS ON MEN IN BATTLE, even these older veterans speak of residual feelings of combat stress. There is no symptomatic difference between what the Vietnam veteran feels and what veterans of other wars have felt. The difference is in how society has chosen to deal with the Vietnam veteran. There is no symptomatic difference between Lifton's post-Vietnam syndrome and delayed stress. The difference is in the stigma attached to post-Vietnam syndrome. In 1980 the Veterans Administration finally recognized post- traumatic stress disorder as a service-connected disability and set up outreach centers in urban storefronts and counseling programs around the country. Right now there are nearly 700 outreach facilities. It has been estimated that between 750,000 and 900,000 veterans - about one quarter of the 3.7 million men and women who served in the Southeast Asian theater - suffer delayed stress. Gene lives in a modest house trailer just off Highway 101 in Forks, which is mostly a loggers' and bikers' town - a pretty rough-and-tumble place. Gene had been a cook in the First Air Cavalry until his mess tent blew up. Then he was a grunt working the bush. Then he was a crewman on twin 40mm antiaircraft guns mounted on an old tank body - "dusters," we called them, because of the dust they kicked up. Dusters were loud and nasty, and they could tear a wood line to splinters so that it looked worse than shredded, ruined drapes. It got plenty hairy for Gene working convoys upcountry from Bien Hoa to Pleiku, and he often wondered how long he would last. But, he said, "it was good to be a good shot. Part of Vietnam was a nightmare, and you had to do the best you knew how. I learned to keep trying, to keep going." Of Forks and the peninsula, Gene says, "there's a limit to things to do here. I'm not depressed, but I don't feel the greatest. Maybe I'm just getting older and getting more serious. I ain't living on what's behind me, but I'm stopped - can't go forward or back." Gene stays in Forks, surrounded by rivers and woods: the stress is at a minimum here. He hurt his foot in a shooting accident, and he can't work. "Too sick to work, not sick enough for welfare," he said. But he and his wife, Joyce, spend about six hours each day in the woods, picking ferns, collecting fungi, fishing and hunting. Under the trailer where the dog was chained was a stack of beer cases, any many garbage bags of empties sat out back. "Oh, there's plenty drinking goes on in Forks," Joyce said and laughed. "Come the Fourth of July, everybody gets drunk and starts parading up and down the highway." NAM VET Newsletter Page 23 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 Gene had many photographs tacked to the woodwork of the trailer, pictures of him and Joyce holding up large catches of fish, pictures of deer kills - the animals are laid across the fenders of the car and the hood is smeared with blood. They took me fishing for the day. We were after steelhead, "ocean trout" - fish as big as a loaf of bread and as long as your arm. We parked the car as close to the river as we could, and as soon as we entered the woods, Gene's body changed, the same way a dancer's body changes sometimes. Something dropped off him, and he loped along the trail, at ease among the felled and rotted timbers, the nurse stumps (huge, head-high things so old that other trees grow up out of them), the spongy moss, and the many shades of green. He told me about picking fiddlehead ferns: find the ones that grow as high as your head and as big around at the base as a car tire. Take only the top thirty-six inches. A bunch about the size of a bouquet fetches anywhere from forty to sixty cents (the best price he ever got was seventy-five). I asked him about the fungi he collects. He said they're called polypores - crescent-shaped, very solid to the touch, and white in color. Folk artists use them to paint landscapes. You might see the finished product in tourist-trap gift shops. Polypores sell by the inch. There were kelp balls, conch shells, horns, beehives, and cedar boughs - all sold for decorations. The list goes on - little things that lie around the woods, waiting for Gene and Joyce to pick them up. A little farther into the woods we came upon a young sapling. Gene took out his pocketknife and stripped off a long sliver of bark. It was thin and pliable like birch, with a clear, gummy sap. "This is cascara," Gene said. "Don't rub it with your thumb; the sap is absorbed right through the skin. You dry it and sell it. this is what they make Ex-Lax from." The river we were about to fish moves about as fast as you can job. The gear we had brought along was first-rate, but the fishing was terrible. Gene and Joyce had not been fishing for a couple of days; the steelhead had moved on. I caught a few ordinary brook trout, but Gene made me throw them back. "We're after steelhead," he said, as if keeping the trout would jinx the steelhead. We wound up the day with nothing but muddy shoes and pants soaked to the knees. Gene and Joyce own a Rambler Rebel and keep another for parts. They eat their catch; smoke their own salmon; hunt elk, deer, duck, grouse, and rabbit; and pay someone in kind to dress their meat. Gene ties his own flies to sell and wants to start a guide business. He says it's an O.K. life. He struck me as superbly sensible, and typical of the sensitive and intelligent veterans who have skinned back the layers of their delayed stress to resume their lives. NAM VET Newsletter Page 24 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX \ \ \ \ \XXXX XXXXX XXXXX.::::::::::::::.XXXXX INCARCERATED XXXX XXXXX XXXXX --------- XXXXX \ \ \ \ \ \ \XXXX XXXXX .XXXXX W W I I XXXXX. VETERANS \ \XXXX XXXXX .::XXXXX --------- XXXXX::. \ \ \ \ XXXX XXXXX .:::XXXXX ------------- XXXXX:::. XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX K O R E A XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX ------------- XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX ------------- XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX V I E T N A M XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX ------------- XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX::::::::::::::::XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX::::::::::::::::XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX::' `::XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX:: ::XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX `..........''`XXXXX:::: XXXX XXXXX ::::XXXXX .:O . O:. XXXXX:::' XXXX XXXXX ::' XXXXX .. XXXXX:: XXXX XXXXX .:' XXXXX . .. XXXXX: XXXX XXXXX :: XXXXX . .. ` XXXXX XXXX XXXXX :: XXXXX ' '.. ` XXXXX. XXXX XXXXX :: XXXXX" ' ` XXXXX . XXXX XXXXX ``. XXXXX ' . . . ` XXXXX '. ........., XXXX XXXXX :: XXXXX'' ..''.'''. XXXXX .' '.XXXX XXXXX :: XXXXX" ':.:'' XXXXX .'' .:::'XXXX XXXXX :: XXXXX:.. .:XXXXX.'' .::::' .XXXX XXXXX :: XXXXX '.. ..:' XXXXX ..:' . .:::'XXXX XXXXX ....::'XXXXX ':::::;' XXXXX .:''. .:::' XXXX XXXXX .:::::' XXXXX .: XXXXX :'. ..:... XXXX XXXXX.::' :: XXXXX: PREPARED TO XXXXX .'' ''.. XXXX XXXXX::' :: XXXXX`: FIGHT XXXXX.' '.XXXX XXXXX' :: XXXXX ``. XXXXX XXXX XXXXX '' XXXXX PREPARED TO XXXXX XXXX XXXXX :: XXXXX DIE ...'XXXXX XXXX XXXXX :: XXXXX `...' XXXXX XXXX XXXXX `..' XXXXX .' XXXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX /\ .' .' XXXX XXXXX /\ \ . . XXXX XXXXX / \ \...' `. .' XXXX XXXXX / NOT PREPARED TO BE DESERTED XXXX XXXXX / .'.' . .`.' XXXX XXXXX / ~ | : : : . XXXX XXXXX / |`. : : . .__________ XXXX XXXXX / ~ ~ ||.` ` : || \ / XXXX XXXXX / WRITE OR VISIT AN INCARCERATED VETERAN SOON ! XXXX XXXXX / ~ || . .'. / / XXXX XXXXX/ ~ ~ ~|| ||/ / XXXX XXXXX ~ ~ ~ || || / XXXX XXXXX || || / XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX \_________XXXXX________|| XgjpX XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXX NAM VET Newsletter Page 25 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 PLEASE!!! Help Todd and Nancy Looney though their crisis! Show them that *YOU* care as much about them as *THEY* have always cared about you! Send your contributions to their Legal Defense Fund today to either of the following addresses: Kathleen Kelly and Bob Richards Valhalla Fund Blythe Systems 235 East 87th Street, #12J New York, NY 10128 or Todd and Nancy Looney Vietnam Veterans' Valhalla Legal Defense Fund 28 Cecil Avenue, Ste. 179 San Jose, CA 95128 Please make your checks payable to TODD LOONEY Thank You!!! NAM VET Newsletter Page 26 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 ================================================================= M E M O R I E S ================================================================= VIETNAM ERA SERVICE, A PERSONAL VIEW, #8 of a series - Chuck Sterling - Las Cruces, NM - NASW, Las Cruces, NM (Opus 305/101) This is the eighth of a series of essays documenting my experiences and recollections while in the U.S. Navy during the period from early 1967 until my release from active duty in mid 1969. This article continues the theme begun in the last article. These are letters written to my parents during my tour in Vietnam, which lasted from mid-December, 1968 into July, 1969. I was attached to MCB Forty, a Seabee construction battalion, and worked in communications nearly the entire tour. April 14, 1969 Dear Folks, Finally I get another of my literary moments. Sorry they happen so seldom. I bought a Petri camera for you, and have fallen in love with it, which means I'll probably wind up with two of them. Do you think Mom would like this cartridge type single lens reflex I have? It's quite versatile, but can be aimed and fired just like a box camera, plus it takes flash cubes. She could take some real nice pictures without using the gadgets. No blanket as yet. Gotta go. Love, Chuck April 22, 1969 Dear Folks, I now have an electric blanket on my rack! It came the fifteenth. That's nearly two months in the mail, but the box wasn't broken up or anything, so I guess it must have come by ship. I have very little to say that's worthwhile NAM VET Newsletter Page 27 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 this morning except that everything's going pretty well and I'm pretty darn tired. I've sold by Teac tape deck for $200, the same as I paid. $200 for one piece of equipment was too much for me. Sunday I leave for five days of R&R in Da Nang. I'm going to China Beach with Vince and Mac and soak up rays for the whole time. This place leaves you cold with the monotony after awhile. I *almost*, not quite, though, wish we'd get hit again so we could have a change of pace. Camp Eagle got the devil blown out of them tonight earlier, but everything's quiet now, at 0230. Love, Chuck May 3, 1969 Dear Folks, Well, I'm back from R&R, but not quite in the ol' groove, yet. With a little luck, I'll be a civilian before I *do* get in it. On R&R, I saw several shows, spent a day trying to start the engine on a surfboard, and two days recovering from the sunburn (which I still have pieces of, peeling off my back). I bought another camera, a Yashica with a 55mm f1.4 lens, and other features the same as the Petri. My piloting is getting better, but my planes keep falling apart. Guess I'll have to start using some glue. Mom, you wait a few months or so, and I'll be home to look at your flowers in person, so keep them watered. MCB 5 in Da Nang is homeless. An ammo dump went up and spread their camp out about a foot thick. Also, the Freedom Hill exchange is no more. This happened Saturday night. Hey, I was *there* Friday night and that's a lot of area to blow up. Only one man hurt , and not badly. Nobody killed. I'm only drawing enough money to send the packages home. I'll leave it on the books until the last payday, then I'll bring it home. Should be about $500, I think. Love, Chuck NAM VET Newsletter Page 28 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 May 7, 1969 Dear Folks, Well, it's your ol' buddy, the short-timer once again. I have the eve watch and before I get too busy, I'm going to write a quick note. Lately, we've been relaying traffic for the rock crusher about 15 miles south, as their large radios are all down. That sometimes takes a lot of time, as they usually have between 10 and 20 sepa- rate messages at from two minutes to fifteen minutes per message - twice, because I have to send it out after copying it. The price on the Cougar is too great to turn down. 'Nuff said. I'll buy a car when I get home, like you suggested. My flying is improving perceptibly. I usually get four or five flights out of a plane before I have to repair it. Well, I'm out of things to say, now, so I better close. I'll write again the next time I get a chance. Love, Chuck May 21, 1969 Dear Folks, Last Thursday night we took a couple of rockets in our camp. One of them hit a Chief Petty Officer hut about 200 yards away, but they were already almost clear when it hit. Two were hospitalized, but only one was serious. He lost a fair share of leg muscle, but he'll be O.K. That round was the third one, so those men were darn lucky to be clear so quickly, and also that the round hit the hut and not the mortar pit. The first rocket hit a warehouse in Bravo sector, but the man on duty was called outside by mother nature, so he merely got shook up somewhat. I heard that one, but all it did was wake me up. I thought it was thunder, so I'm standing by my rack trying to decide whether I should get outside and take a look or go back to bed. About that time number two hit on the other side of the club, in the open about two hundred feet from the hut. That was a subtle hint to get into the hole, which I did on hands and knees, bouncing off the side of the tunnel, etc, but I was only halfway there (to the hole) when number three hit CPO number six. About the time we all NAM VET Newsletter Page 29 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 made it into the pit, the rocks, etc., started falling from number two. There were several others, but nothing in our camp, just numbers two and three. About sixteen total were hurt by number three, so we were pretty lucky. If the first round had been a dud, a lot of people would have been killed because no warning would have been given. So many ifs. The next few nights, I'd wake up every time somebody'd slam the door. One thing I've noticed. The difference in sound between incoming and outgoing. We have "D" Battery, 33rd Artillery across the road, and when they fire the 175mm guns, the hut darn near blows away just from the sound - but I can sleep through it with no trouble. Let an incoming round hit even three or four miles (I'm not exaggerating) away, and I'm awake like somebody just threw water on me. Didn't take very many incoming rounds to learn the difference, either. My record changer will be in the mail tonight, and I'm going to box up the other things I'm bringing home (blanket, etc.) and I'll put them in the mail shortly. I've done some trading around with tape decks and I've wound up with a $330 deck for about $100. Love, Chuck June 13, 1969 Dear Folks, Another letter from your war-ravaged son: Hi! I sent a package with two cameras, several recorded tapes, and the electric blanket. I sent the box for my camera, but I'll carry it when I return. I still find something worth photographing occasionally. My model airplane flying is nearly finished. I was flying a 34" wide biplane upside down, and I got my controls crossed up. I clipped the rudder off against the ground, and started having trouble keeping the lines tight. The next flight, the lines went loose on the launch and the plane piled up sort of totally. I had another run-in with that same officer yesterday that was giving me a rough time when we first got here. He got pretty angry, started yelling at me, and finished by stomping out of the ET shop and slamming the door behind him like a NAM VET Newsletter Page 30 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 ten-year-old kid. The communications officer is in Okinawa, and it seems this other guy (who made LtJg yesterday) wanted me to forgo the rules set up by his superior. I told him he'd have to wait a few minutes until the radioman got here to issue the radios (standard procedure). When I told him it didn't matter that he wanted the radios fifteen minutes ago, he got a bit upset. Love, Chuck June 18, 1969 Dear Folks, Well, Friday morning finds me on the midwatch again. Evidently we're not going to get hit tonight. It's already after four, and we usually get hit around 1:00 - 2:00 a.m. We took a couple more rounds a couple days ago. One landed way out in the swamp, and the other one hit the generator shack and knocked out our 200 kilowatt generators (two of them). The guy on watch got clear, but not by much. By the morning of the next day, we had full power back. Emergency power was on within minutes, so it didn't affect the command post much. The generator shack is about 100 yards from the hut, but that's O.K! I'd been sitting in the mortar pit for several minutes when it hit. The guys in the hut have a new warning system: Me. Whenever we hear a loud blast, they just look at Chuck's rack, and if Chuck's in it and awake, it's outgoing - if he isn't, he's probably already in the hole waiting for the siren to start wailing. He doesn't make too many mistakes, so they *move*. Love, Chuck June 16, 1969 Dear Folks, The expediter that went to Okinawa on the buying trip came back with six tons of cargo, 45 pounds of which was the TEAC A-1500 tape deck. The lenses for the Petri, however, were too expensive for the amount I deposited, so I didn't get them. The 14th I put in my application for my red I.D. card. "Sadly" enough, I am the "victim" of an eight month seabee cut. I should be getting off active duty the 25th of July. That means, in short, that I am going on seventy years leave. In case you are interested, from the 16th NAM VET Newsletter Page 31 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 (today) that is ***39 DAYS*** and a wake up. Love, Chuck June 19, 1969 Dear Folks, 35 days and a wake up. I can't wait to get out of this place. It's getting too hot for me. Last night about 8:00 we got hit again, but luckily nothing was even close to us. Just the same, three times in two weeks is quite a bit. I was fortunate enough to be sitting in the mortar pit at the generator shack when the alarm went. I didn't have too far to go (about two feet) to get out from in front of the door. I picked up my TEAC A-1500-W yesterday and checked it out. It works beautifully, looks beautiful, and sounds great. I've put it back in the box, and if I get half a chance, I'll send it home today. We're a little short-handed in communications this weekend. Bob's going to Phu Loc to skate until he returns stateside, and Johnnie's on R&R until Monday morning. That leaves three guys for a 24- hour day, plus run the electronics shop. I just copied the spot report from the rock crusher about fifteen miles south. They took a total of ninety-six 82mm mortar rounds and got their camp busted up a bit. They had fifteen wounded, but no one was killed. For the record, that's the same place that Bob's going to tomorrow. Seems like good ol' Victor Charlie's harassing the troops a bit. Love, Chuck June 23, 1969 Dear Folks, Well, here it is 31 and a wake-up already. You should be getting the tape deck in the mail in a couple of weeks or so. ...I just went to chow, such as it is, and I'm back on watch. I'm looking forward to getting off watch, too. I guess I'll cut this short and read a book or something until I get into a better mood. Love, Chuck NAM VET Newsletter Page 32 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 July 1, 1969 Dear Folks, In the very near future the undersigned will once again be in your midst, dehydrated and demoralized, to take his place again as a human being with the well know forms of freedom and justice for all; engage in Life, Liberty and the somewhat delayed Pursuit of Happiness. In making your joyous preparations to welcome him back into organized society you might take certain steps to make allowances for the crude environment which has been his miserable lot for the past tour. In other words he might be a little Asiatic from Vietnamesitis and overseasitis, and should be handled with care. Do not be alarmed if he is infected with all forms of rare tropical diseases. A little time in the "Land of the big PX" will cure his malady. Therefore, show no alarm if he insists on carrying his weapon to the dinner table, looks around for his steel pot when offered a chair, or wakes you in the middle of the night for guard duty. Keep cool when he pours gravy on his dessert at dinner or mixes peaches with Seagram's V.O. Pretend not to notice if he eats with his fingers instead of silverware and prefers C-rations to steak. Take it with a smile when he insists on digging up the garden to fill sandbags for the bunker he is building. Abstain from saying anything about powdered eggs, dehydrated potatoes, fried rice, fresh milk, and ice cream. Do not be alarmed if when he hears a siren he rushes outside looking for his mortar pit of if he should jump from the dinner table and yell, "INCOMING!" After all, this has been his standard. Also, if it should start raining, pay no attention to him if he pulls off his clothes, grabs a bar of soap and a towel and runs outside for a shower. When in his daily conversation he utters such things as "Xin Loi" and "Choi oi", just be patient, and simply leave quickly and calmly if by some chance he utters "Didi!" with an irritated look on his face. Do not let it shake you when he picks up the phone and yells, "OPERATOR, SIR" or says, "ROGER, OUT", for goodbye. Never ask why the Jones's son held a higher rank than he did, and by no means mention the word "extend". Pretend not to notice if at a restaurant he refers to the waitress as "number one girl" and uses his hat for an ashtray. He will probably be listening for "Homeward Bound" to sound off from NAM VET Newsletter Page 33 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 the Armed Forces Radio Service. If he does, comfort him, for he is still reminiscing. Be especially watchful when he is in the presence of a woman, especially a beautiful woman. Above all, keep in mind that beneath that tanned and rugged exterior there is a heart of gold, the only thing of value he has left. Treat him with kindness, tolerance and an occasional fifth of good liquor and you will be able to rehabilitate that which once was, and is now a hollow shell of, the happy-go-lucky guy you once knew and loved. Last, but by no means least, send no more mail to the Fleet Post Office, fill the icebox with beer and sodas, get the civvies out of mothballs, fill the car with gas and get the women and children off the streets... Because THE KID IS COMING HOME!! Love, Chuck July 2, 1969 Dear Folks, 23 and a wake-up. I signed my orders to the Reserve center this afternoon, and tomorrow I get a physical prior to separation. I'm getting SHORT! You'll be getting another package or two through REA express before too long. Those are the speakers, which complete the hi-fi. Folks, I'm dead and gotta go or I'll pass out before I can make it to my rack. Take care. Love, Chuck July 9, 1969 Dear Folks, Charlie lobbed a few at us the night before last, but didn't drop any on our camp. I have to give them credit, they played their cards right. They put a few in, but didn't hit anything, and we secured thirty minutes after we went tactical. Everybody was just calming down and going back to sleep. Five minutes after the all clear, he started hitting us again, and everybody, including myself, was a bit slow realizing what the siren meant. If there had been any close ones, they would have caught people out of the pits even though we had NAM VET Newsletter Page 34 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 nearly a minute's warning before the rounds hit (our tower spotted them being launched). I was on watch, and had seen the red siren light go on for the previous alert and all clear, and was halfway conditioned to it, so it took me probably five seconds to realize that we were taking hits again. After I grabbed my jaw and picked it up off the table, everything went smooth for me, but that initial burst of action really snowed me. MCB One sent an Electronics Technician, Second-class, to change over our comm to being One's comm. He was here two days and three nights and then was shipped out. He had a nervous breakdown - and we never even *heard* a round, let alone took any. I wonder what he'd have done if he'd gone through the rocket attack. Love, Chuck July 13, 1969 Dear Folks, As of today, I have twelve days left in the Navy, with probably less than a week left in Vietnam. I finished checking out of the battalion this morning, so I only have to pick up my orders when I get to Davisville and get moving. We were hit again about 10:30 last night, so Mike was busy until nearly 2:30 with the reports. I slept until then, so I guess I'll stand the watch until 10:00 or so and let Jim sleep it off a little better than usual. Our Executive Officer isn't too cool a guy. He won't let us play any short-timer music over the P.A. system in the morning. We finally talked him into California Dreamin' immediately after reveille and the weather report and immediately before our beloved chow call. Love, Chuck In sorting through these letters, I probably got one or two out of order, and ask you to understand and bear with me. I dated almost none of them and without postmarks, I wound up relying on my parent's usually having written the date they received the letter on the envelope. In the last letters, I counted "short-timer" days back from July 25th, 1969, the day I left active duty for home. I left Vietnam a few days earlier, but no longer recall the exact date. Some of the dates I simply guessed at. It would be a good bet that some letters have been lost NAM VET Newsletter Page 35 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 over the years, as well, leaving gaps in this small chronology. I didn't realize how *much* I had written in Vietnam until I got into typing this article. Actually, what you see here is less than half of what was in the stack. I edited out a lot about cameras and model airplanes, cars and my once- steady girlfriend, and still wound up with two articles instead of the one I had planned on. During the time I was in Vietnam, I was never in combat, other than jumping into the ground from time to time. I never fired a shot, nor did I have a shot fired at me. I really don't know if either the M-16 I was first issued or the later .45 would even fire. I never tested them, I just kept them oily to fend off rust. The .45 was wrapped in an oily sock, stuffed into its holster, and hung in my locker, where it stayed unless I left the camp. Service in Vietnam, from my standpoint, was mostly boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror when rockets started dropping in the camp. I always wondered if the next one had my name on it, but none ever did. I've never been so ready to leave a place as I was when I left Vietnam. NAM VET Newsletter Page 36 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 An American by Gary L. Ryther, December 23, 1969 From: Vietnam Shared - An anthology Produced by: Victory Hill Press Saranac Lake, New York Input by: VETLink #1 With Permission "An American" I have died in Vietnam. But I have walked the face of the moon. I have befouled the waters and tainted the air of a magnificent land. But I have made it safe from disease. I have flown through the sky faster than the sun. But I have idled in streets made ugly with traffic. I have littered the land with garbage. But I have built upon it a hundred million homes. I have divided schools with my prejudice. But I have sent armies to unite them. I have beaten down my enemies with clubs. But I have built courtrooms to keep them free. I have built a bomb to destroy the world. But I have used it to light a light. I have outraged my brothers in the ghettos. But I have transplanted a human heart. I have scribbled out filth and pornography. But I have elevated the philosophy of man. I have watched children starve from my golden towers. But I have fed half of the earth. I was raised in a grotesque slum. But I am surfeited by the silver spoon of opulence. I live in the greatest country in the world, in the greatest time in history. But I scorn the ground I walk upon. I am ashamed. But I am proud. I am an American. NAM VET Newsletter Page 37 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 A PLACE FOR ME --UAWV 9.27.87 From: Vietnam Shared - An anthology Produced by: Victory Hill Press Saranac Lake, New York Input by: VETLink #1 With Permission A PLACE FOR ME The War is over ! That's what people say, It was all dead and buried, On a long forgotten day. It's not good to remember, Or so I've been told, I must make a new life And bury the Old. But how do I bury the memories That still invade my dreams ? And how do I bury the searing grate of tortured human screams ? How do I lose the smell of death That was with us everyday ? Its embedded in my nostrils and can't ever go away. People say I'm a dead-beat Getting drunk, staying high. If they just understood I get drunk to get by. I once had a family !!! I filled them with fear, I drove off my loved ones When I needed them near. I've seen eyes that won't see me And ears that won't hear, As I've tried to explain why I can't shed one tear. I want to move on now, get rid of the guilt, Won't somebody listen While I share what I felt ? There must be an answer somewhere don't you see ? There must be a place In this world left for me !!! NAM VET Newsletter Page 38 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 THERE'S A STRANGER IN YOUR BED, AND YOU'RE NOT ALONE ! by Susan Pennington (c) 1987 - All Rights Reserved From: Vietnam Shared - An anthology Produced by: Victory Hill Press Saranac Lake, New York Input by: VETLink #1 With Permission THERE'S A STRANGER IN YOUR BED AND YOU'RE NOT ALONE ! [ODE TO WIVES OF VIETNAM VETS] There he stands Big Strong A splendid specimen At least to you; You're in Love ! He's deserving and proud. He hides behind a mask of smiles radiating out to you, Desiring to Love, Care and Adore you as much as you do him. But he cannot. For he is a Vietnam Vet. He's tough, mean, cruel, and impossible to please. As you exchange vows, promising to Love, Honor and Cherish, little do you know what lies ahead. With each passing day, each hour, he will change without warning, without even a hint. The man you fell in love with is suddenly gone. So it seems. Shame, for in his mind where once lived tenderness and compassion, there is now confusion, anger, fear, and weakness causing him to forget who he really is. But You must not ! Though for the time he is miserable and painful to live with, it isn't you, or him; it's " THEM " " THEM " - Noises in the dark. " THEM " - damp rainy nights " THEM " - silent moments, bringing even the strongest man to his knees. " THEM " old men and young women at home - they would not pose a threat. DON'T TAKE CHANCES, KILL - KILL What a terrible life for anyone, especially a young boy, fresh from his High School Prom. What would his life be now if he hadn't answered the call?, Perhaps, ran instead. But now he is yours - and he needs you. He needs your strength to override his weaknesses. He needs your courage to understand his own fears. He needs your stability of caring, to clear his confusion. NAM VET Newsletter Page 39 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 And more - He needs your Love, to still the anger so deep within. So stand by him in his madness, and try to understand, (Though he believes no one can) I believe you can ! Be there for him, when he cannot be there for himself. Be true to this volcano of a man, who erupts day or night for no apparent reason. He has reason ! He answered his nation's call. He performed his duty. He did things and saw things that no one should have to do or see Respect ? A Pat on the Back ? No ! A back turned ? Yes ! He has memories of times he wants to forget. His country has forgotten times it should remember ! So Give him the Time - He will come back Give him the Patience - He will come back Give him the Respect - He will come back Give him the Understanding - He will return unto himself. But more - Give him your Love, and he will come home. Remind him of the good times shared - and he'll return Remind him also to believe in the four things of which he always can depend: God His Family The Brotherhood of Veterans and most of all - Himself. For once he was a Man built of Iron and Steel A hell of a Man Who got a raw deal. NAM VET Newsletter Page 40 Volume 3, Number 4 April 1, 1989 LET ME TELL YOU WHERE I'VE BEEN An interview with Ernest E. Washington, Jr. by Janice Rogovin Input by: VETLink #1 Pittsfield, MA FidoNet 1:321/203 AlterNet 7:46/203 (413) 443-6313 ERNEST E. WASHINGTON, JR. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in Boston City Hospital, and grew up in Roxbury in a strong Christian family. There were only two children in the family, I have a twin sister. My father was a long distance truck driver and was very rarely