(This essay first appeared in Southern Indiana Review in 1998 and subsequently was published by the Indiana Historical Society Press as the first chapter of the book “A Temporary Sort of Peace” in 2007. I’m sharing it here in honor of National Vietnam Veterans Day which is March 29.)
Back in Evansville, Indiana, I’m locking my car. My conscious mind says there is no need for locks in this neighborhood in broad daylight. During my high school years, I never took the keys out of the ignition, and my mother never locked the front door of our house. But that was thirty years ago, a whole other lifetime. Fear resides deep inside me now. I turn and walk across the asphalt parking lot of the Veteran’s Administration Outpatient Clinic on Walnut Street. Three old warriors of some past conflict pick up litter with similar tentative motions, as if thinking that in each stoop and each lift a collective and unbearable burden lies hidden. They are six arms and six legs linked to one common incubus of monotony. They nod at me in unison, as if each can read my thoughts.
The electric door opens with a footstep, pushing the overcast sky away and replacing it with the fluorescent smile of a file clerk. As the door closes behind me with a hydraulic hiss, I flinch. It has the exact same sound as a tab top popping on a Pepsi can or a bolt going home on an M-16.
“Can I help you?”
“I have an appointment in mental health.”
“Mr. McGarrah, service-connected disability. I have your paperwork.
Go on in and have a nice day. They’re waiting for you.”
I appreciate this man’s hospitality. It’s an attempt to make the VA user friendly, and it reminds me of an article in my morning newspaper about the current effort by the Missouri Ku Klux Klan to join the Adopt-A-Highway program. Image is everything, isn’t it? Still, I can’t reconcile the file clerk’s Southern Indiana friendliness with the idea that someone behind closed doors will soon be dissecting my brain for broken parts with the same attitude, or even with sincerity.
For the first twenty-five years after the Vietnam War ended the VA dealt with us as if we were illegal aliens who had slipped across the border to the United States. If we kept hiding, we could receive the leftover benefits of the legitimate veterans who fought in the good wars. If we were silent and didn’t remind the nation how much a mistake costs, we could be treated with a semi-benevolent condescension that expended no great sacrifice.
Now, Vietnam era vets are showing up in universities, practicing law and medicine, being elected to Congress, even running for president. Our scars are visible outside the walls of our homes. Frustration and confusion have replaced our guilt. Our questions are being articulated loudly and with intelligence. Consequently, the Veterans Administration health service has been forced to reinvent itself as a caring, nurturing, all-encompassing HMO. I like the idea, but, if you believe Plato, only the idea can be true.
Even with the visible changes like bright pastoral reproductions on the walls, buffed floors, and free coffee making me suspicious, I take a seat in the waiting room and rummage through a wrinkled Reader’s Digest. No matter how much fresh paint alters the surface appearance of this place, the smell of dying men still clings to the air.
What powerful sensations the olfactory system provides. It can excite you—the scent of a lonely woman in a crowded bar or the fragrance of an untried exotic dish in a new restaurant. It can soothe you—the hint of alfalfa after a spring rain or the aroma of French Market coffee in the early morning. The nose will also terrify—the stench of diesel fuel as you hurry to beat a train or the hint of someone else’s aftershave on your wife’s pillowcase.
As I sit on a vinyl couch next to an old man with yellow skin and watch him pick lint from a dirty sweater, the sense of smell opens a pathway from the present to the past. It acts as a conduit carrying the stench from where it is back to its origin. I’m smelling unwashed clothes and rotting flesh in 1998, and then instantly, the Southern Indiana autumn outside the doors is just a multi-colored dream of maple trees, baseball tournaments, and freckled girls tied like helium balloons to the arms of future farmers.
Someone is gurgling on my right. I rip the cellophane from a pack of Marlboros and slap it across a hole in a chest. The chest and the hole belong to a man named Tri. We’re in a dry ditch. A wall of tracers from several AK-47’s traps us there. The cellophane sucks into the hole, creates a vacuum and stops his lung from collapsing, but blood still seeps around the edges. Where’s my damn pressure bandage?
“Jim. Jim…. Mr. McGarrah, sir. Excuse me. My name is Tom. Follow me, please. What made you come visit us after thirty years?”
“Well Tom, I got a Xeroxed letter from your regional director. She said the VA really cares about me now. I think I might be a little depressed too. A man I trust says I have those symptoms.”
“Why do you trust him? Is he a doctor?”
“No. He’s a Vietnam veteran.”
Tom begins to write my history, speaking rapidly as he writes. His head is bowed and the words from his lips seem to roll down his arm and off the pen. He has a huge caseload and needs me to stick with the facts because time is a valuable commodity in a world filled with case numbers and stereotypes. There is no more time in life for substance, just time for forms. Do I have nightmares? Only when I sleep. Do I drink? Only before dinner and sometimes after. Have I ever used drugs? I went to college, the first time, in the ’60’s. Why’d he even bother to ask that question?
It was then I realized what kind of picture Tom was drawing of my life. To me it seemed more like a caricature, a hyperbolic picture of a person I knew but wasn’t close to. This person was a polydrug abuser and an alcoholic with a sleep disorder who feared intimacy. Surely it wasn’t fear that pushed me out of three marriages like an electric spark shoots through a hot wire? Why did he ask me if I was uncomfortable being intimate with people? I had been intimate with a lot of people.
I hear the click and static of a PRC 25 radio. “Foxfire one…foxfire one…this is one Charlie niner. I have one Whiskey India Alpha and one Kilo India Alpha. Request immediate medivac…over.” “One Charlie niner…this is foxfire one. LZ too hot….cannot respond. Do you copy…over?” The wall of lead has moved forward at least a hundred meters. The squad leader rushes up to my point position, stands over me and packs white gauze into the cavity under my knee. I see splintered bone. My left shoulder tingles. Warm liquid runs down my arm, dripping off numb fingers. The blood soaks into the dirt and irrigates the elephant grass. I’m looking at the arm and leg, but there is no pain. These strange appendages belong to another creature. Pain is a thief in the night. It never comes while you’re watching.
The squad leader is smiling like a high school quarterback after scoring with the homecoming queen. He says that Tri and I did a fine job uncovering the enemy ambush. Judging from a few bodies they were forced to leave behind, these men were NVA regulars moving toward Hue for the Tet offensive. If we hadn’t engaged them, their automatic weapons would have cut apart the next truck convoy coming down Highway 1. At least that’s what he believed. He removes the cellophane covering the hole in Tri’s chest. The gurgling has stopped. Can his wife grow rice alone?
Tom’s hypnotic baritone makes me wonder why I want to go back. Isn’t that really what this meeting is all about? If I want to go forward, I must start the trip back. Ion Eremia, a Romanian political prisoner, once wrote “You must not silence that voice within you that is crying to be heard, or, as you yourself sense, there will always be a part of you that will remain unfulfilled.” I need to hear my own voice again, the one that tells me who I am and who I might become. I have to go back to where it was lost in order to find it.
“Jim, you seem to be exhibiting some symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD as it’s sometimes called. Have you ever considered the possibility that you have this? It’s very common with men who’ve seen as much combat as you have. Do you ever have intrusive thoughts about the war?”
Triage is crowded. It is late in the afternoon when I arrive at the Phu Bai M.A.S.H. for emergency surgery and the wounded pile up quickly in war. Eighteen days into the 1968 Tet Offensive and here I lie with tubes running in and out of several jagged holes in my flesh. I watch the doctor scrub his hands quickly over a stainless-steel sink and move down the assembly line of operating tables to the one next to mine. The water dripping from the hands is pink with someone’s blood. A masked nurse tells me to close my eyes and travel back home, back home again to Indiana. I close my eyes and look for corn fields and John Deere tractors, ’57 Chevys and blond cheerleaders wearing angora wrapped class rings, 4-H livestock shows and watermelon festivals, strip pits and deer, county courthouses and A&W root beer. I try. I really try. But in the dark behind my eyes, colors explode, vague shapes surround me, slowing down my travel. I only get as far as a few miles and a few minutes ago. I’m bouncing in the back of a truck loaded with still warm bodies from the 2nd battalion 5th Marine Division in a fierce firefight south of the Perfume River in Hue. The CH-46D chopper was too big a target. It wasn’t worth the risk losing a whole helicopter and crew just to medivac one live Marine. The corpsman throws me on the first passing vehicle headed south, and this is it. If I die in route, I’m already moving toward the morgue with my companions. Semper Fidelis.
“Tom, is it possible to be nineteen years old and fight in a war, any war ten thousand miles from home, and not end up with intrusive thoughts every day thereafter? You’re the expert Tom. What’s the answer? Is it possible to fight in a war and not have PTSD?”
My voice raises and my new therapist smiles an all-knowing smile. He doesn’t seem to be condescending. I feel his struggle for empathy. Nevertheless, I also feel a real urge for a shot of Jim Beam and maybe just two or three beers. More than that, I want to leave this smell behind. This odor of old, tired men started these memories today. This aroma of unfulfilled dreams and unrequited conscience and unresolved conflict keeps nauseating me because I’m not sure it’s on the outside coming in. What if it’s inside and rising up?
Am I simply another addition to the caseload? I look around the waiting room as I rush from Tom’s office on my way out. These men I see are struggling just to catch a breath. Some are homeless. Some are helpless. How did I wake up inside their nightmares? I’ve been where they’ve been. Must I go where they’re going as an act of contrition?
It’s cooler now, in the parking lot. A light drizzle sifts through the thick air like wet sand and sticks to my skin. The three old warriors laugh and light cigarettes in unison. The trash is retrieved.
“Where ya goin’ on this fine day,” the youngest one asks?
“I’m goin’ to a school to teach poetry. I just started my second lifetime.”
“Well, I hope it turns out better than the first.” His eyes seem to glaze over slightly as he picks up his trash bag and limps toward the dumpster.
In the car, Bob Edwards is on the radio. NPR’s Morning Edition is doing a feature on the tourist industry in Vietnam, “the emerald jewel of Southeast Asia” and America’s new partner in commerce. It seems that the Marriott and Sheraton hotel chains are concerned about profit and overhead. The monsoons have slowed construction on their new resorts, creating cost overruns. Even the Hilton in Hanoi can’t keep its rooms full during the monsoons.
I knew of another Hilton in Hanoi as a young man. But, as a young man, I also learned that monsoons were rainstorms. For three decades, my one sane point of mental convergence focused on the assurance that these hard rains would fall every year in absolution and eventually cleanse the blood from the canvas of my dreams. Today, Bob Edwards sets me straight. Monsoons were never what I thought they were. I always equated them with the Southern Indiana thunderstorms the old farmers from Gibson County call “toad stranglers” because my home was my only frame of reference. I got it wrong. Monsoons are without substance, just seasonal shifts in upper air direction. They are simply forms of air that carry the vicious storms inland from the Gulf of Tonkin.
Calm settles over me as I turn west on the Expressway. My first class at the University begins in fifteen minutes. Listening to the raindrops dodge the wipers, I think I might really keep this teaching job for a while. Maybe I can finish at least one thing I’ve started and started and started. After all, I’m fifty years old and have become a semi-responsible family man. More importantly, I’m beginning to see my life as more than an illusion. It is a pastiche of imagination, substance, and passionate ideas that my memory has allowed me to step in and out of at random, but not without context and meaning. Today is the day I realize that a monsoon is just wind.
Jim McGarrah, Author 