Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
I have no real rights in this matter. I’m neither soldier nor loved one of a victim or survivor. Still, nearly five decades later, the Vietnam War haunts me.
Kristin Hannah’s most recent novel, The Women, is Frankie McGrath’s coming-of-age story, a searing tale of a young woman gone to war as an Army Corps nurse in Vietnam. Frankie’s story brought it all back to me: the nightly news stories of the early 70s, the images that assaulted the covers of news magazines and television screens, the impending draft that threatened to take my high school classmates. Mostly, it brought back the nights when I lay awake imagining what I would do if I were male: Would I enlist? Would I wait, in hopes that I wouldn’t be drafted? Would I find refuge in college deferment? Would I flee to Canada? Would I conscientiously object?
My mother once joked that I excelled at living vicariously through others’ experiences, recalling how I’d begin to cry during the opening theme song of Lassie. Even before little Timmy got into trouble, you cried, she said, anticipating tragedy as you lived through Timmy’s pain and fear. It has been this gift (or curse) that has marked my Vietnam War experience. For reasons I couldn’t explain as a 17-year-old, I felt compelled to watch Vietnam movies and television series, to read Vietnam accounts and to listen to survivors. I agonized through Platoon, my knees drawn to my chest in my theater seat, my hands gripping the arm rests. I suffered through Apocalype Now–several times–and to this day, can’t hear Wagner’s The Ride of Valkrie without seeing images of helicopters vanquishing a Vietnamese village. I watched the television series, China Beach, and marveled at the persistent trauma that beleagured nurses, medics, and doctors encountered each day. I read veteran Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, and wept. And with each film, each television episode, each written or spoken word, I found myself mired in the same moral quandary: What would I have done? How would I have survived?
In 2017, filmmaker Ken Burns produced an 18-hour documentary series, The Vietnam War. Burns understands the impact that this war continues to have on Americans:
The Vietnam War was a decade of agony that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans. Not since the Civil War have we as a country been so torn apart. There wasn’t an American alive who wasn’t affected in some way. More than 40 years after it ended, we can’t forget Vietnam, and we are still arguing about why it went wrong, who was to blame and whether it was all worth it. (“Ken Burns to preview Vietnam War documentary at free San Diego event”, San Diego Union-Tribune, April 22, 2017)
As a high school and college student, I was keenly aware of the political and social aspects of this war. But my Vietnam experience remained grounded in the most personal, philosophical, and ethical bedrock. I anguished over “what-ifs” and tried myself in the court of morality. I recall one moment during college when I came face-to-face with my biggest fear. As I imagined myself working through the jungle with my platoon, I saw a shadow–or maybe just a movement–shouldered my gun and fired. I remember thinking, I don’t fear being shot; I fear shooting–instinctively and unthinkingly pulling the trigger and killing someone. I sat up in bed, my heart racing and my hands trembling. I could kill, I thought, and this awareness slayed me.
Years later as an English teacher, I taught Tim O’Brien’s short story, “Ambush.” He opens this story with a scene in which his 9-year-old daughter asks him if he’d ever killed anyone. She knew that he’d been a soldier in Vietnam and that he wrote stories about the war. The story that follows is a grown-up answer to her question, an account that he hoped she might read and understand years later. He writes of being on a two-man watch, the heat oppressive and the fog thick. He describes seeing a man dressed in black with a gray ammunition belt emerging from the mist. Gun at his side, he was making his way down the trail. In this passage, O’Brien recounts the next moments:
I had already pulled the pin on a grenade. I had come up to a crouch. It was entirely automatic. I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty. I crouched and kept my head low. I tried to swallow whatever was rising from my stomach, which tasted like lemonade, something fruity and sour. I was terrified. There were no thoughts about killing. The grenade was to make him go away—just evaporate—and I leaned back and felt my mind go empty and then felt it fill up again. I had already thrown the grenade before telling myself to throw it. (“Ambush”)
After killing the man, O’Brien realizes that [i]t was not a matter of live or die. There was no real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed by. And it will always be that way. He concludes the story by confessing that he hasn’t finished sorting it out, that sometimes he can forgive himself, and sometimes he can’t. O’Brien’s account here is one that I’d imagined so many times through the decades. This is why I can’t forget the Vietnam War. It stripped away the veneer of the person I thought I was and uncovered someone who could be–who probably would be in the right circumstances–a killer.
Although Hannah confronts a host of political and social issues regarding the Vietnam War in The Women, she does an exceptional job of profiling in-country field hospitals. She writes of the relentless trauma of 18-hour shifts, the crude facilities, the incessant heat, the constant threat of attack, the dying and the dead piling up in mind-numbing numbers, and the tragic inexperience of many doctors and nurses. In their article “In Country: U.S. Nurses During the Vietnam War,” Aaron Severson and Lorilea Johnson report that although the average age of a Vietnam nurse was 23, many were as young as 20, and only 35% of these nurses had two or more years of nursing experience when they enlisted. Most were recruited directly out of nursing school. Such is the case with Hannah’s protagonist, Frankie, who is thrust into trauma surgery after several weeks of stateside nursing duties which amounted to emptying bedpans and filling water pitchers. Severson and Johnson explain that [a] nurse who had been in Vietnam for six months had more credibility than a doctor who had just arrived, even if that doctor was very experienced in the States. These nurses had to learn quickly; this was trial by fire.
I’m haunted by Hannah’s Frankie as she is thrust into trauma surgery. I’m haunted by her experiences with devastating mortar wounds and napalm burns. And I’m haunted by her relentless terror, a terror that soldiers, helicopter pilots, doctors, medics, and nurses often tried to drink and laugh away, finding refuge in whatever might bring them temporary relief. I know that watching a film or reading a book is not active service. As I said, I have no real rights in this matter. But to the extent that I could, I’ve imagined this. In a sense of duty–perhaps misguided but nonetheless sincere–I’ve forced myself to imagine all this.
I can’t forget the times when Vietnam vets shared some of their experiences in college courses I taught. One vet admitted that he’d volunteered for a second tour, as my 18-year-old freshmen looked on in sore amazement. When one student finally asked why he’d gone back, the vet looked him directly in the eyes and said, Because I liked it. Because I was good at it. You could’ve heard a pin drop in that classroom. The look on his face still haunts me. He knew that they didn’t understand. How could they begin to know what it was like to serve in a unit of men who depended on one another, who’d give their lives for one another, to live on adrenaline and the hope that you’d see another day, to stay alive? And to return to a country in which many would rather you didn’t talk about your war experiences, and others condemned you for your service? He knew that they couldn’t understand, and his painful awareness haunts me.
Until I read Hannah’s novel, I wasn’t aware of the reception that most Vietnam nurses received upon coming home. Again and again, her protagonist, Frankie, tries to convince people that there were, indeed, women in Vietnam, that she was truly a veteran. They don’t believe her, insisting that there were no women in Vietnam. And to confound matters, after two years of experience in combat trauma surgery, she’s relegated to changing bed pans and filling water pitchers again, for hospital administrators argue she doesn’t have the proper raining or experience to be a surgical nurse. Hannah’s portrayal of Frankie’s struggle is tragically accurate.
In a profile of Army nurse Edie Meeks (The Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2013), Ruth Tam recounts an incident in 1992 when Meek’s daughter told her that her Mount Holyoke College professor proclaimed that you women will never know what it’s like to be in war. Aghast, her daughter approached the professor and asked if her mother could address the class. To her professor and classmates, she introduced her mother by saying, This is my mother, Edie Meeks. She was an Army nurse in Vietnam. I’m so proud of her. Meeks confessed that this was the first time that anyone had truly acknowledged her service. Twenty-three years later, she finally felt as though she’d been welcomed home. Like many combat soldiers, these nurses suffered from PTSD. It wasn’t until 1978–three years after the war ended– however, that the VFW accepted female veterans. I can’t begin to imagine what this must have felt like, and I can’t begin to forget these women’s pain and disappointment in reentering a country that didn’t appear to know–or care–that they’d even served.
I’m quite certain that I’ll never be able to forget what I’ve learned and what I’ve imagined about Vietnam. I don’t want to forget. It’s important that I don’t forget. Living vicariously through real and fictional characters has helped me experience the moral complexity, the indelible trauma, the exceptional comraderie, and the inconceivable costs of war. For me, the Vietnam War continues to be a moral testing ground, one on which I’ve discovered who I am–and who I’d like to be.
