by Matt Kritzer
I can't understand why these experiences are coming up now. Why
now, more than 30 years later? The ghosts have been there all along, true,
but lately they have wormed their way up, through my sub
conscience and reached a level just under the thin skin of my
daily thoughts or consciousness. It gives life more of a
dimension, yet it's unnerving knowing that the violence and rage
associated with those ghosts can be triggered and burst through
at any moment.
Honestly, at times, it almost feels good expressing that anger in
an "inappropriate social behavior". It's a mini high, almost
like going back to the Nam. The wonderful horror of killing
again. The ultimate power over life and death. A gift given to
us when we were nineteen, then, suddenly yanked away. Well somebody
forgot to turn off my power switch, the one that I never seem to
be able to reach.
Now I am taught that the power no longer exists in the old manner
but must be expressed in appropriate socially acceptable ways,
ie., getting to the "top" and deciding who to lay off along the way. The
trouble is that the expression of these primordial instincts never got totally
erased from my circuit boards. Somewhere in that damp jungle, walking point or pinned down, laying next to a corpse during a human wave attack, something must have shorted out in 1967. Somehow their software got hard wired into my system. At times, the feeling of cutting through the "bullshit" and blowing somebody's brains out still reigns supreme. Sometimes that surge of raging feelings comes through so close to the surface that I must suppress it by sitting down and writing a few lines. Writing a few words looking in vain for an explanation but only getting a small release.
Years of suppressing ideas and feelings and then, all of a
sudden, its OK to talk about them. We're no longer viewed as
cowards, so its OK to cry at a Vietnam Memorial and the World War II vets don’t treat us like dirt any more. Yet, how can I as a combat veteran, forgive the American people, who, out of their own frustrations, turned on us and burnt us in effigy when we came home? How can I forget the greed of the large corporations; dictating the pace of the war, prolonging it, not letting us win it and then reaping its profits from their own son’s blood. Not literally their own sons, of course, but the real America’s sons and the Government went right along with the program.
Why wasn't it stopped or won? When the finger gets pointed, its
always someone else who was responsible. And now it’s all being
glazed over. Forgive and forget. Vietnam is now just a glossy
photograph in the American Journal.
Well my photographs cannot be touched up, the memories don't erase that easily.
When I stumble across a photograph of my best friend and I look into his eyes, I
know that forgetting is totally out of the question. I must tell his story, and
then mine.
Now, just a fading yellowing photograph, shuffled among a myriad
of others, he lays somewhere in a drawer; doomed not to be found
on purpose or often. It's playful facade of struttfull posing
could never fit in a gilded frame or live on a prominent shelf.
As a trophy it would belie the scourge of his ripping flesh; his
smile would twist into the maddening pain of the ordeal of his
slow death. No, I don't think that I'll ever put up his picture.
Regardless, I'll always remember that he must have been brave in those last
hours.
Brave but not a hero. Heroes are too hard to define, if they
exist at all. None of us were heroes. We just did it, whatever
it was, whatever it took. To accomplish the mission, to live through it and to
help others do the same to get back home. Home the way it was, to be boys again
in the reassuring warmth and safety of the past. We all missed home
and, yet, we had no clue that it no longer existed. In the
stupor of our ignorance, we could still numb the horror of the
war by daydreaming of home.
Bruce Howard Bumgardener was a non stop daydream of home to me. Being
with him was just like being home. We shared our inner most thoughts like
brothers. Combat was merely a disturbance that had to be tolerated. Bum and I
had more than a mere friendship, we were each others life line back to the
world.
So when I left country, three weeks before him, he died.
Just two weeks after I left country, Bum spent the better part of
a night bleeding to death in some shit hole corner of the Boi Loi
Woods. As it started to get dark, a sniper took him down
blowing off part of his left shoulder. Bum screamed for
a medic, but when the medic tried to reach him, the sniper shot
the medic between the eyes. For the rest of the night they could hear him, but
no one tried to reach him.
Where was his mind as he cried and bled in the darkness? What
were his thoughts before he finally fell silent as dawn approached
and all of his blood laid on the thirsty jungle floor, our guys pinned down
around him?
Was he thinking of home? Was he holding on to the thought of meeting me at
Christmas in San Francisco or was he imagining me calling his house, asking to
speak to him, and his father sobbing on the phone? What was he thinking in
those long hours of torturous pain? Of me back in the world he used to know?
Thinking of him, I can smell the rotting jungle vegetation in my
nostrils. I can feel that cold, damp dew all over me. I can
just barely make out the limp, useless arm still attached, laying
next to him in the moon lit clearing. I can feel from the essence of my soul, deep in the truth of my heart that had I been
there; he would have lived or I, also, would have died.
For the rest of my life, I'll be crawling through that thicket, trying to reach him...