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Started By
Message
A Veteran Writes. Very powerful writing.
Posted on 5/28/18 at 10:06 am
Posted on 5/28/18 at 10:06 am
I came across this essay, yes, essay, in college and it's one of those that has always stuck with me. Let's just say it shows a veteran's view from a different perspective.
A Veteran Writes A Bad Mood, A Six-Pack, And A Typewriter
I begin to weary of the stories about veterans that are now in vogue with the newspapers, the stories that dissect the veteran's psyche as if prying apart a laboratory frog-patronizing stories written by style-section reporters who know all there is to know about chocolate mousse, ladies' fashions, and the wonderful desserts that can be made with simple jello. I weary of seeing veterans analyzed and diagnosed and explained by people who share nothing with veterans, by people who, one feels intuitively, would regard it as a harrowing experience to be alone in a backyard.
Week after week the mousse authorities tell us what is wrong with the veteran. The veteran is badly in need of adjustment, they say-lacks balance, needs fine tuning to whatever it is in society that one should be attuned to. What we have here, all agree, with omniscience and veiled condescension, is a victim: The press loves a victim. The veteran has bad dreams, say the jello writers, is alienated, may be hostile, doesn't socialize well-isn't, to be frank, quite right in the head.
But perhaps it is the veteran's head to be right or wrong in, and maybe it makes a difference what memories are in the head. For the jello writers the war was a moral fable on Channel Four, a struggle hinging on Nixon and Joan Baez and the inequities of this or that. I can't be sure. The veterans seem to have missed the war by having been away in Vietnam at the time and do not understand the combat as it raged in the internecine cocktail parties of Georgetown.
Still, to me Vietnam was not what it was to the jello writers, not a ventilation of pious simplisms, not the latest literary interpretation of the domino theory. It left me memories the fashion writers can't imagine. It was the slums of Truong Minh Ky, where dogs' heads floated in pools of green water and three-inch roaches droned in sweltering back-alley rooms and I was happy. Washington knows nothing of hot, whore-rich, beery Truong Minh Ky. I remember riding the bomb boats up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, with the devilish brown river closing in like a vise and rockets shrieking from the dim jungle to burst against the sandbagged wheelhouse, and crouching below the waterline between the diesel tanks. The mousse authorities do not remember this. I remember the villa on Monivong in Phnom Penh, with Sedlacek, the balding Australian hippie, and Naoki, the crazy freelance combat photographer, and Zoco, the Frenchman, when the night jumped and flickered with the boom of artillery and we listened to Mancini on shortwave and watched Nara dance. Washington's elite do not know Nara. They know much of politicians and of furniture.
If I try to explain what Vietnam meant to me-I haven't for years, and never will again-they grow uneasy at my intensity. "My God," their eyes say, "he sounds as though he liked it over there. Something in the experience clearly snapped an anchoring ligament in his mind and left him with odd cravings, a perverse view of life-nothing dangerous, of course, but...The war did that to them," they say. "War is hell."....
Rest of Essay
A Veteran Writes A Bad Mood, A Six-Pack, And A Typewriter
I begin to weary of the stories about veterans that are now in vogue with the newspapers, the stories that dissect the veteran's psyche as if prying apart a laboratory frog-patronizing stories written by style-section reporters who know all there is to know about chocolate mousse, ladies' fashions, and the wonderful desserts that can be made with simple jello. I weary of seeing veterans analyzed and diagnosed and explained by people who share nothing with veterans, by people who, one feels intuitively, would regard it as a harrowing experience to be alone in a backyard.
Week after week the mousse authorities tell us what is wrong with the veteran. The veteran is badly in need of adjustment, they say-lacks balance, needs fine tuning to whatever it is in society that one should be attuned to. What we have here, all agree, with omniscience and veiled condescension, is a victim: The press loves a victim. The veteran has bad dreams, say the jello writers, is alienated, may be hostile, doesn't socialize well-isn't, to be frank, quite right in the head.
But perhaps it is the veteran's head to be right or wrong in, and maybe it makes a difference what memories are in the head. For the jello writers the war was a moral fable on Channel Four, a struggle hinging on Nixon and Joan Baez and the inequities of this or that. I can't be sure. The veterans seem to have missed the war by having been away in Vietnam at the time and do not understand the combat as it raged in the internecine cocktail parties of Georgetown.
Still, to me Vietnam was not what it was to the jello writers, not a ventilation of pious simplisms, not the latest literary interpretation of the domino theory. It left me memories the fashion writers can't imagine. It was the slums of Truong Minh Ky, where dogs' heads floated in pools of green water and three-inch roaches droned in sweltering back-alley rooms and I was happy. Washington knows nothing of hot, whore-rich, beery Truong Minh Ky. I remember riding the bomb boats up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, with the devilish brown river closing in like a vise and rockets shrieking from the dim jungle to burst against the sandbagged wheelhouse, and crouching below the waterline between the diesel tanks. The mousse authorities do not remember this. I remember the villa on Monivong in Phnom Penh, with Sedlacek, the balding Australian hippie, and Naoki, the crazy freelance combat photographer, and Zoco, the Frenchman, when the night jumped and flickered with the boom of artillery and we listened to Mancini on shortwave and watched Nara dance. Washington's elite do not know Nara. They know much of politicians and of furniture.
If I try to explain what Vietnam meant to me-I haven't for years, and never will again-they grow uneasy at my intensity. "My God," their eyes say, "he sounds as though he liked it over there. Something in the experience clearly snapped an anchoring ligament in his mind and left him with odd cravings, a perverse view of life-nothing dangerous, of course, but...The war did that to them," they say. "War is hell."....
Rest of Essay
This post was edited on 5/28/18 at 10:51 am
3
Posted on 5/28/18 at 10:40 am to prplhze2000
That link is AWOL.
Posted on 5/28/18 at 10:50 am to Coeur du Tigre
fixed.
Posted on 5/28/18 at 11:07 am to prplhze2000
quote:
I drifted across Asia, Mexico, Wyoming, hitchhiking and sleeping in ditches until I learned that aberrant behavior, when written about, is literature.
An Eleven Bravo Hunter Thompson... Thanks, nice site.
Posted on 5/28/18 at 12:53 pm to Coeur du Tigre
He paid the price to do whatever the hell he wants to do
Posted on 5/28/18 at 1:02 pm to prplhze2000
OAF on Facebook has some great, short pieces as well. Tim Kinnedy’s podcast with JR the other day was really good when he said “it’s harder to get into the military these days than to get into college” and that’s absolutely true.
Posted on 5/28/18 at 1:06 pm to prplhze2000
quote:
The veterans seem to have missed the war by having been away in Vietnam at the time and do not understand the combat as it raged in the internecine cocktail parties of Georgetown.
That’s a great line.
Posted on 5/28/18 at 4:54 pm to OysterPoBoy
One of my favorites in anything I've ever read.
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