Killing Me Softly: Reflections of a Vietnam Combat Veteran
Killing Me Softly: Reflections of a Vietnam Combat Veteran
Killing Me Softly: Reflections of a Vietnam Combat Veteran
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
people who can't assume safety. So is the world suffering from PTSD, and if it is, what is<br />
its meaning? Who is responsible?<br />
Even those who purport to heal us don't understand. It don't mean nuthin', we used to<br />
say. What? Nuthin.'<br />
People think we're all damaged. A lot <strong>of</strong> that's hype. A lot <strong>of</strong> it is veterans who never saw<br />
combat cashing in on the tragic pose they can cop with the credulous war-worshipping<br />
public. But those <strong>of</strong> us who did see combat, we are really just the healthiest people in the<br />
whole society, at least by some standards. No patience for hypocrisy. We understand why<br />
the guy in All Quiet on the Western Front goes back to the front. Shit is real there;<br />
honest. Some <strong>of</strong> us can be what you wanted us to be, men, but not like you wanted us to<br />
be, liars.<br />
The military boosters would hesitate to tell you how homoerotic the whole thing is,<br />
because they are still bent on the instrumental project <strong>of</strong> de-feminizing their boys so<br />
they'll be good workers, good husbands, good fathers. Good soldiers. <strong>Me</strong>n, good men.<br />
Get with your significant other sometime and do something that cheats death. Jump out<br />
<strong>of</strong> an airplane. Get into a fight with firearms. That luminous feeling lasts for hours. It's<br />
like an orgy, like entering a haunted house, like murder, like giving up your religion.<br />
Transgression.<br />
Then it's just a question <strong>of</strong> whether you refuse to see or not. I started to see something.<br />
I saw people who were supposed to be my enemies who practiced transgression. But they<br />
didn't do it out <strong>of</strong> fear, like me. They did it because there were no options left open to<br />
them. They did it because their families had been burned out or murdered or had<br />
sharpened stakes driven into their vaginas. They did it so a next generation might not<br />
have to live under someone's heel. They did it out <strong>of</strong> hate, because they did it out <strong>of</strong> love.<br />
Some were older than soldiers, and some were younger than soldiers, and some were<br />
women.<br />
They fought not to dominate but to defend and liberate. We rotated back to the States,<br />
where we could nurse out post-trauma syndrome disorders, but they were there for the<br />
duration.<br />
I don't know how to explain this because the voices in me, after 50 years, two marriages,<br />
five continents, and more than two decades in a uniform are as numerous as they are<br />
contradictory. And I was so slow to learn, lost in the fog <strong>of</strong> my phallicentric, shattered<br />
little world. The veterans.<br />
Former US Senator Bob Kerrey <strong>of</strong> Nebraska ordered the execution <strong>of</strong> 15 <strong>Vietnam</strong>ese<br />
children, women and old men in 1969. Do we remember how fast that story popped up<br />
last year, then disappeared?