VIETNAM NOTES Part Four continued. 'YOU were in Vietnam? I didn't know you'd been to Vietnam. You've never mentioned it before.' 'I guess it just never came up before.' 'It was pretty bad over there, huh?' 'It wasn't good, but it could have been a whole lot worse.' 'Were you at the front doing the actual fighting?' 'There really was no "front". I mostly drove a truck and filled sandbags.' 'Oh, so you weren't in actual combat. That's good! The guys who were really in combat came back pretty screwed-up: that kind of stuff can really screw up your mind. You're lucky you got to drive a truck. I've got a friend who was up at the DMZ most of the time. He's really messed up over all that shit. All of his friends got killed while he was there. He was the only one left, out of all the guys he went over there with. He still gets pretty bad dreams about it, his buddies dying in his arms and all, but he sure wasted a bunch of gooks to make up for it. Made 'em pay for it real good. Those gooks were really mean, cruel fuckers. You had to watch out for those sneaky bastards, they'd cut some guy's dicks off and stick them in their mouths while they were still alive. I've seen a lot of books and movies about it, and stuff like that happened all the time.' 'Yeah, a lot of bad things came out of the war. There was some pretty good exaggeration about some of that stuff though. A lot of cruelty and horrible things definitely went on on both sides, but some of the stories you hear, weren't very typical of everyday reality. Sometimes, exaggerated or not, that's all you do hear because of a vet's overwhelming desire to get things off his chest, combined with the knowledge that so many people don't really want to hear what's important to him. They just want to feed their fantasies. It's a hard realization when you find that the painful baring of your soul is really just cheap entertainment. One of the reasons people don't talk about it much is because unless you babble stuff full of blood and guts, nobody seems to listen. The important things, the things that tear you apart and really matter to you, just aren't very interesting to most people: it's too uncomfortable for them. As they say, the first casualty of war is truth and the truth fades as the "boring" things are left out.' 'Oh, I know some guys bullshit, but this guy I know doesn't lie. He really had it rough there.' 'I didn't mean your friend was a liar, I just meant that it's a good idea to have an open mind, but take everything with a grain of salt. Try to listen to the underlying messages: that war isn't romance, glamour, and excitement, with music in the background and tough guys saying tough and humorous things, at just the right time. That love and compassion for others is the true and final solution to every one of our problems. The sad fact is that unless you've been there yourself, it's sort of hard to imagine what "tough" can be. If a story isn't pure, distilled carnage, it sometimes doesn't make much of an impact on people who haven't had a similar experience, and who have been conditioned all their lives by books, television, and movies pushing different versions of "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out." 'I know what you mean. Did you see Platoon? Man, that showed some of the really gory action that happened to the guys over there! Most Nam movies are crap, but that one showed what it was really like. I've read a lot of stories about it, and Platoon really showed some truth. A lot of stuff you see is like the old John Wayne hero junk. John Wayne was a really good actor, but his movies were made a long time ago. Nowadays movies show a lot more real stuff: the good ones do, anyway.' 'Well, I'm just glad to be home and I'm glad your friend made it home too. Mostly I'm glad the war is pretty well over for most folks.' 'What? Oh yeah! Me too. Be glad you weren't in combat. You were lucky, alot of guys like my friend are still real screwed up! Well, take it easy.' 'Yeah, you too.' *** Postscript. This was written quite a while ago. Since then I have found that most of the time, the pain of Vietnam is, if not gone, at least tolerable. Life today is good! A great part of that is due to a profound spiritual change, but a considerable amount can be attributed to the writing of the above. I don't know how it works, but putting things down on paper has proven to be an amazingly therapeutic activity for me. If you, like many of us, have memories that seem to eat away at all the good things in your life, and keep you from enjoying the blessings that you may not even know you have, try writing about them. Then maybe you too will be able to finally seize your life back from the demons of the past and strive to walk in awareness of the grace of God. Robert Flynn All copyrights reserved

Robert Flynn can be contacted at: netcatalog2@aol.com