Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  “Joan, I just want to tell you one thing. When I came home from World War II, I thought I was going to lose my mind. But I didn’t. And neither will you. You’ll be okay.” That’s all she said, and she walked out.

  Furey quit that job and never saw Mrs. Florczek again. She returned to school, to get her master’s so she could teach. She didn’t realize until years later how much Mrs. Florczek’s words helped her find her way.

  She was not alone. Elizabeth Norman’s study of fifty nurses who served in Vietnam found that forty-three of them changed their area of specialty after returning home. A number of veteran nurses elected to leave nursing, for a range of reasons, including the fact that some found “they could no longer deal with patients and their problems.”9

  By 1975, Furey was teaching nursing as South Vietnam fell to the Communists. She remembers getting drunk as she watched Pleiku surrender. At that moment in time, it appeared to Furey—and to many, many other Vietnam veterans—that everything that had happened, everything she had struggled for, every effort she had made to save someone, had been for nothing. Furey abandoned the premise that her work and sacrifice had been of value, that the war itself had meant anything.

  She didn’t know about post-traumatic stress disorder. She felt terrible, out of control, and in crisis. Furey stopped drinking, and she has been sober for more than thirty years. She dealt with her alcoholism but did not begin to deal with the realities of Vietnam until 1982.

  When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., in November 1982, as badly as she wanted to be there, she felt attending would lead to a relapse and that she might begin drinking again. She did not go.

  But a number of developments would prompt her to acknowledge her status as a Vietnam veteran. The first was the development of the Veterans Administration Vet Centers in the early 1980s. These were storefront counseling centers for Vietnam veterans who were looking for help but unwilling to deal with the Veterans Administration bureaucracy. Veterans’ advocates believed, probably rightly, that Vietnam veterans were put off by institutions of the size and scope of the VA. These supporters felt the veterans might seek care more readily in casual environments that invited open conversation and facilitated access to treatment. This storefront method mattered, and it helped many people. But Furey remained angry: I got livid because I thought it was too little too late.

  The second stimulus for change was the publication in 1983 of Lynda Van Devanter’s memoir, Home Before Morning: The True Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam. In it Van Devanter described her drug and alcohol use and provided accounts of her romantic relationships with doctors. The book provoked outrage among a number of other Vietnam nurses, who felt compelled to protest against the image of Army nurses it painted. Furey too was angered.

  She just totally told secrets and presented all this stuff. It violated confidentiality—this thing that what happens in Vietnam stays in Vietnam—and presented women in a bad light. Initially, my response was “How dare she?”

  Furey was especially unhappy with Van Devanter’s open acknowledgment of her struggles with PTSD when she came home.

  I thought that, you know, you’re not supposed to talk about that because then people are going to ask me, us, the other people who served. And I didn’t want to talk about it. None of us wanted to talk about it. It was almost like somebody was exposing you to the world, even though they were talking about their own experience.

  The consequence, though, was that Furey was increasingly driven to speak up about the Vietnam War she had experienced and to acknowledge her own struggles with PTSD.

  On Memorial Day 1983, with six years of sobriety behind her, Furey made the trip to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. While there, she began to recognize that she had some of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. She had kept busy, working at a VA hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, but at the same time she knew that she was hiding something from herself. She didn’t trust her own feelings.

  Furey admits that her first five years back from Vietnam were the most difficult years of her life. She struggled to create an emotional balance and find a community that supported her. There were far fewer female veterans, which made it even more difficult for them to locate each other. Furey had not stayed in touch with anyone from her Army days. To her it seemed as though she had experienced Vietnam all by herself.

  Asked to become almost superhuman, caring for badly wounded soldiers and civilians day after day, seeing the war from the perspective of the triage and surgical units, Furey developed whatever coping mechanisms she could. She is still proud of what she did in Vietnam, even if she was disillusioned by the war.

  Today, she understands the act of relating her life story as part of a larger effort to find comfort with her own life. Vietnam is central to that effort.

  I [am] struck by the fact that the stories of Vietnam don’t really end. You know, everything you approached in life, everything that you responded to in life, was always interpreted through this lens of Vietnam. The effect of the experiences literally carried on for years. I think the reason I spent so much of my professional life working in this field of PTSD and veterans’ health care was to … figure out a way to get people to understand what this experience is about so the next generation of people don’t have to go through that.

  It’s been like this probably lifelong journey to really understand what it was about that experience that was so powerful. That one year in your life—I mean, that’s really all it was—this one year in your life could have that kind of impact on you or on any other person.

  It’s kind of mind-boggling.

  7

  WAR AND LOSS: MIANO, NOWICKI, AND GONZALEZ

  The cost of war cannot be calculated in dollars and cents alone. Losses have to be reckoned in personal terms, too. The sons, husbands, brothers, uncles, and friends who died in Vietnam are one natural part of this calculus, but we must think too about the families they left behind. They are also casualties of the Vietnam War, even if they are not commonly recognized as such.

  Take the number of Vietnam dead from New York City, 1,741, and multiply it by 20—the figure World War I historians have used to estimate the “entourage” or “circle of mourning” created by the death of a single soldier. By this calculation 34,820 New Yorkers were directly affected by combat losses in Vietnam between 1964 and 1975.1 Since the population of New York City in 1975 was 7,895,563, these figures suggest that one person out of every 226 individuals had an experience like that of Vicki Miano and her family.

  Death does not discriminate. Of the servicemen from New York who died in Vietnam, 496—just over 28 percent—were African American, 1,235 were “Caucasian,” and 10 were of Malaysian, Mongolian, or “other/not reported” background. The Department of Defense did not count people of Hispanic descent as a separate category at that time, meaning those figures were likely folded into the numbers for Caucasians. By religion, the largest single group represented from New York City was Roman Catholic, like Stephen Pickett, Vicki Miano’s brother. Five were Muslim, and three were “other.” Just over 68 percent had been in the military for less than two years. No women from New York City are listed as having been killed.

  Like a lot of New Yorkers, Vicki Miano’s family, the Picketts, had roots elsewhere. Her father was born in Ohio and grew up in Tennessee. Her mother was a Corona, Queens, native. When her parents married, they settled in Kew Gardens, Queens, later moving into their own house in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1959. It was there that Vicki and her brother Stephen would grow up.

  Born in 1947, Stephen entered the Army in 1966. As Vicki remembers the events, Stephen had an automatic student deferment because he attended Queens College full-time but made the choice to serve his country. Nevertheless, military records indicate that Stephen was actually drafted. People who knew the family said later that Stephen’s mother had pressured him to go into the service. These contradictions are indicative of the tricks memory can
play, and the ways we—all of us—can construct narratives that are in conflict with the documentary record. In any case, Vicki says: I know from his letters and stuff that this was something that he did want to do.

  An Internet posting on a Vietnam Veterans Memorial website, left by someone who knew Stephen in high school, says, “I knew Steve at Regis High School in NYC where he was three years ahead of me. He was a non-conformist, wore sunglasses at odd times, and was generally ‘cool.’ He was a role model to me.”2

  Vicki and Stephen were very close. She recalls him as being more of a caretaker than either of her parents. Their mother suffered from asthma and was frequently immobilized by it; their father was often working and not at home, and the relationship between them was distant. Vicki holds on to memories of her brother taking her for ice cream at the corner store, bringing her along when he and his friends went out together—never treating her as a burden, despite the eight-year age difference between them. She says Stephen was kind, smart, and funny, the type of young person who left an indelible imprint on everyone he met. He had a facility with languages and had spent some time at a seminary in Indiana and contemplated joining the priesthood before entering the service. Stephen was in Vietnam for only nine weeks when he was killed in 1967. How he died remained a mystery to the family for over thirty years. They did not hear the details of what happened from the Army; families generally didn’t get detailed information about such matters from the military itself.

  Instead, Vicki learned the details of Stephen’s death from a member of his unit. In 2001, she began to use the Internet to search for someone who might have known her brother on various websites that veterans use. One night she received an e-mail from someone who said he thought he might have known Stephen and been with him when he died. From him she learned that Stephen had volunteered to investigate an enemy bunker and been killed by a Vietcong booby trap. Pickett was one of the thirty-two American soldiers killed in Vietnam that week.

  The family did not find out that Stephen had been killed until several days after his death. Vicki recalls:

  It was probably midmorning. There was a soldier who came to the door, and my mother was sleeping and my [other] brother, Chris, and I were home. And he asked if our parents were home, and we both said no, because when my mother was sleeping and with her asthma, you just didn’t wake her up quickly. And so he said, “When are they going to be back?” And I said, “Sometime in the afternoon,” and he said, “Okay, I’ll return.” And there was a package at the door; someone had sent a Christmas present, and Chris and I were arguing about who was going to open it. And you know we were getting into this battle, and my mother said, “Who was at the door?” And we said, “Oh, it was some soldier.” And I remember looking at her face; she knew right away.

  I knew. When I told my mother that the soldier was at the door, I just saw her expression. She called my grandmother; my grandparents lived in Flushing. My father used to work in the neighborhood, and she said, “Go see if your father is in the luncheonette.” And sure enough, we found him in the luncheonette, reading his paperbacks.

  By the time the soldier came back, my grandparents were there, my father was home, my mother was there, and he came to the door. They let him in. [He] said, “I’m sorry; I regret to inform you but your son was killed on December 14.” My grandmother starts screaming; that was her birthday. My father stepped down into the basement, and the next thing I knew he put his fist through the wall. My mother was hysterical—just hysterical. And my grandfather was just sitting there, you know—he was also crying. I mean it was just—whew, like I said—thirty-seven years ago, but you can remember it as if it was yesterday.

  The following days and weeks were a blur of activity as Army personnel came and went and the family prepared for the funeral. It was a few days before Christmas. Vicki recalls the funeral ceremony at the church, Our Lady of Fatima, as a nightmare. The wake was packed with people from all over, including people who had never met Stephen. The family held the interment ceremony at the Long Island National Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York. She vividly remembers the twenty-one-gun salute and the soldiers folding up the flag and handing it to her parents on that very cold winter day.

  After Christmas break, Vicki returned to school feeling alone and devastated. Life got hard after Stephen died. Her parents separated six months later.

  I think that after Stephen died, everything just disintegrated and the whole world kind of, like, fell apart. I was thirteen, in junior high school at the time.

  The impact of Stephen’s death has been passed on to a second generation of the Pickett family. Vicki’s oldest daughter, Stephanie, keeps a photograph of Stephen in her datebook. Vicki’s nephew and a second cousin are also named Stephen and have learned much about the man after whom they were named.

  Vicki still feels Stephen’s absence. On Memorial Day 2011, at a gathering of Vietnam veterans at the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Water Street in Manhattan, she read the names of some of the 1,741 soldiers from New York who were killed in Vietnam. As she prepared to leave the podium, she looked up and said: “This is for you, Stephen. I think about you every day. I love you.”

  Vicki’s story is disturbingly common. Pickett was killed on Thursday, December 14, 1967. The next day, Sergeant Edward Michael Looney of Marine Park, Brooklyn, was killed in Binh Dinh province, South Vietnam. As the Pickett family was dealing with their loss, neighbors across the city were coping with theirs. Bridget Nowicki remembers how her family, the Looneys of Marine Park, learned about the death of her nineteen-year-old brother, Edward.

  My brother had just gotten married before he went overseas, and they notified his wife. And the phone call came from his wife on a Sunday morning to let us know what happened. We were notified on the seventeenth.

  I can remember before the phone call came, my mother—it was a Sunday morning—had asked me to go down [to] the store to get … The family joke was always bread, milk, and cigarettes, you know; so I’m sure it was one of those three things. And I can remember walking back home and hearing my mother screaming. And then when I went in, they were sitting in the living room, and I can’t remember if somebody told me directly to myself, like said the words to me, or if I heard them. I can remember telling my father, “That’s not true; don’t say that; don’t lie to me.” I kept saying, “It’s not true; it’s not true; I don’t believe it.”

  And I can remember my father getting upset; it was like, “It’s true.” Not getting mad at me, but being upset like, “It’s true; stop saying that,” you know. And I just remember saying, “I’m sorry.” And I told him, you know what … I don’t know if it was my Catholic background, but I said, “God must have loved him more than we did; that’s why he took him.” And it finally sank in.

  There were signs that they had up, like they do now, like WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. They had signs that everybody would have in their windows: WE SUPPORT OUR BOYS IN VIETNAM. And I can remember one neighbor coming in and ripping it down and my father got very annoyed. He said, “Now is the time we really have to support them more than ever. You know, now we’re there; now we’ve got to do what we have to do. I’m not going to have my son’s life [be] in vain.”

  We found out, and then it’s waiting for the body to be shipped home. He was buried the day after Christmas, which was tough. I can remember the neighborhood because my father and his family grew up there. There were always Christmas lights up, but I can remember that year that nobody put their lights on, because like the whole neighborhood felt it.

  In 2001, out of the blue, the company medic and another member of Looney’s unit contacted the family. The men had been trying to find the people they served with, and they flew in to meet and talk to Edward’s family. They explained to Bridget and her father that Edward had not been alone when he died. The medic had been the one to place Edward on the helicopter that took him out of the field. The family had received a few letters, but for the most part it had seemed as th
ough Edward had boarded a plane bound for Vietnam only to disappear off the face of the earth. With this one small act, two veterans helped to fill that void. Visiting more than thirty years after Edward’s death, they gave the family a sense of closure.

  When soldiers lost comrades in the field in Vietnam, they did not have time to grieve. Indeed, some commanders actively discouraged it, preferring that they focus on the tasks at hand rather than on the deaths of their peers—which inevitably brought to mind the risks of their service. Anyway, most did not have time. They literally had to soldier on. Many only felt the trauma of loss when they got home.

  Jose Gonzalez served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in 1967 through the terrible battles of that year. But for Gonzalez, coming home was even worse, because his unit continued to suffer casualties and he wasn’t there. He says: I got more devastated at home than I did over there, I think. Because everything over there was always, you had no time. You had no time, you know.

  While in Vietnam, he became close with another Puerto Rican soldier from Brooklyn named Geovel Lopez-Garcia. Lopez-Garcia had been sent home in November 1967 on emergency bereavement leave, missing the Battle of Dak To—one of the bloodiest battles of the war. When Lopez-Garcia returned in-country in December, Gonzalez was rotating home permanently.

  And we saw each other again, two young kids. And then he gives me his address: “Go see my mother.” I did.

  The Tet Offensive opened in the last days of January 1968, and Lopez-Garcia was killed two weeks later. Gonzalez continues:

  His mother, somebody called me, that he was missing in action, and the next day they confirmed it. [He was dead.] Then they brought him home at the funeral parlor, over there on Park Avenue and Tompkins. I went to junior high school right there when I was a kid. I walked in, I was in uniform, and his mother saw me. She lost it. I lost it. I walked out. I walked right out. I never saw them again. I never saw them again, and I didn’t go to his funeral. I went on a drunk. I don’t know how long it was. I was AWOL from my next duty station. I didn’t care.