No Protection

No Protection

He stands in front of the shiny black wall, polished high and long and filled with over 50,000 etched names. He stands and stares and I pray that somehow I will know what he knows and see what he sees. That somehow I can make sense of this.

But I know that is barely possible.  Not now. Not at this age.

*

My father served our country in Vietnam. He was a poor white boy, working as a mechanic, no college deferment, and in good health.

In other words, dispensable.

He was in Vietnam from early 1966 until mid-summer 1967.  Some would say he didn’t see the worst of it.  But what is the worst? He wrote letters to his mother assuring her that he was working the radio in the office, far away from the fighting, not one of the guys on foot stumbling through the jungles, huge packs on their weary backs, entering villages to terrorize, all in the name of some elusive freedom. He was protected.  Or so he said.

My father’s name was Daniel. He grew up in a small town in Ohio, in a converted barn made into a house. Outdoor plumbing for much of his life. Chickens in a coop. A mother who doted on him and his brother David and father, a sister Karen who was like an additional arm to his mother.  My grandparents were simple people, my grandmother and Aunt Karen religious beyond reason. My grandfather a beer lover.  My Uncle David clearly in love with every hot rod in town.  He was a mechanic, too, and never got drafted.

Late in life, my parents would purchase a beautiful old farm house in the country. It had a wide front porch and was painted white with green shutters. Every room had floorboards that creaked. Part of the character, my mother would say. My father would die there with us by his side, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in June, long shadows growing on the lawn, the brain cancer finishing its job.

Caused by Agent Orange? Probably. No protection when you’re there when the planes drop the deadly gel on all the vegetation in order to flush out the enemy. The enemy that is so hard to find. The one my father Daniel searched for far from the protection of some radio office.

He was always one to try to protect us from the truth of his war – the one he fought until the day he died.  He had no use for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  He said he had already seen enough, and he’d prefer to forget.

Although he couldn’t.

My father was always so contained.  Unlike his cousin Ted who also served. Ted was a sniper during the war, and spent a good part of his adult life drinking himself into oblivion in his small apartment. My dad would state things simply when I asked the hard questions, like Why is war so hard to get over? Why was Uncle Ted so sad?

The response that stuck with me: “Renee, Vietnam took part of my soul. It took all of your Uncle Ted’s.” 

Where do the soul’s go?

When I was in college, I heard this statement from Jean-Paul Sartre: “When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.”

I thought of my dad. My uncle. The names of the men who were on a wall in Washington D.C.  Were they the poor pawns in a rich man’s game?

A wall with names of men my dad knew.  Names he never mentioned.

*

It took my dad nearly ten years after his return to get his act together and marry my mother. They met at the Veteran’s Administration where she worked the front desk. She saw Vets all day long.  But she said there was something in my dad’s eyes that caught her attention.

Maybe that piece of his soul that was still left?  The only lucky one?

They married in 1976, and I came along in 1977.

In 1980, my beloved Uncle Dave died from testicular cancer. He was just 33. I was too young to really know him, but the reaction of the family for years afterward was a testament to the love they felt. They never forgot. They brought him up constantly – how caring and beautiful and funny he was.  And it wasn’t hyperbole, from what I can tell.

My brother David, born in 1982, was named for him.

And so it goes.

My mother often said that she didn’t know which was harder on my dad: Vietnam or the loss of Dave.

It would make me cry.  And I only knew both from the stories of others.

*

My parents were good at shielding us as much as they could from the realities of what my dad suffered.  He was a victim of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as many Vets are. He saw it as a badge of shame – that he couldn’t be man enough some how. No amount of assistance or therapy seemed to take that away.

But even with their so-called protection, we knew.  We knew when to lie silently in our rooms because dad needed the house quiet.  We knew that sometimes he heard things we didn’t hear.  We knew that even if he was “well” for a long time, anything could change at any time.

We were on high alert.

When I got to go away to college, it was a major relief.  I was also the first one in the family to attend.

A lot was riding on me.

*

It was good to get a degree, but I left college ready for marriage to a wonderful man I met there, and we started a family.  Ryan is a joy to our family, as is Emilia who followed.  My parents embraced being grandparents wholeheartedly.  Family always meant the most to them.

My father in particular seemed….better.  Maybe it was just time as a healer.

But maybe it was the growing tumor in his brain that helped balance him out some way. The headaches had been there for a long time, so he didn’t get much warning.

*

And now, three years after my father’s farewell to us, I stand with my son Ryan at the Vietnam Wall. He is a junior in high school who has set his sights on joining the military – a life choice I am not happy about.  He tells me, This isn’t the time of Vietnam and War is different now.

How? Just how his war “different”?

We stand at the wall together, and I can see him reflected in the black marble. I can see the shape of his face is exactly like my dad’s, and for a moment he is wearing the same fatigues my father wore, reflected there like a mirror.  I feel a stream of tears trickle unexpectedly down my cheek.  Will one day I look into Ryan’s eyes and see a piece missing?  Will his future children be affected by the grinding pain that never goes away, the pain of putting your life on the line, killing in order to not be killed?  Or even worse – killing from a distance, like some exotic video game? ‘

What does this do to a person, the “war that isn’t war”?

Ryan turns to me, and there is no missing piece.  Instead he, too, has tears in his eyes.  As we walk away he calmly says, “I get it, mom.”