Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  Statistics consistently reported elevated mortality rates for Vietnam veterans in the years between the end of the war in 1975 and 1983. While Vietnam veterans’ death rates have stabilized in the years that followed, the stories of loss live on.3 The widow of one Vietnam veteran told me a story about her husband, Ray, about his struggle with PTSD and cancer after the war, and what it all eventually cost her and her family.

  I don’t think things went too well for him over there. I heard stories, a lot of stories, that were very gory. These guys who went over were very young; Ray was about seventeen when he went over, and it was very hard for them.

  Ray drank. At first she didn’t think much of it, because, she said, at the time everybody was drinking. Ray didn’t sleep much either, averaging three or four hours a night. He liked to work night shifts and had a very bad temper. On one occasion when he had their children with him, someone said something to Ray that provoked him and a fight began. It took seven New York City Transit Police officers to subdue him. Another time, at the VA hospital in Brooklyn, he lost control, and it took another half a dozen police officers to subdue him.

  It was hard on me because you didn’t know when he was going to explode. But I loved him, you know, so I was trying to help him. [I] tried to get him into therapy quite a few times. He went a few times. It was just very hard for him.

  Sometimes, Ray would disappear for days on end. She heard that he would dress in his fatigues, put paint on his face, and walk—on the Belt Parkway from Brooklyn all the way out to Long Island. He could get violent, but never with their children. Eventually, she had to leave. Ray died in 1997. She believes that he too was a casualty of the war.

  He developed asthma about five years before he died. They said it was cancer. We don’t know if it was directly caused by Agent Orange. That we never found out. But because of the cancer, I think maybe Agent Orange did have something to do with it.

  In speculating about the cause of Ray’s cancer and its connection to his Vietnam service, she is on solid ground. The Veterans Administration presumes that certain “diseases can be related to a Veteran’s qualifying military service.” There are fourteen categories of disease on the current list. Lung cancer is among them.4

  Almost a half century after the war in Vietnam, the bodies are still coming home; the costs are still being calculated. In 2009, the New York Daily News reported the story of Jose Sanchez. Born at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, Sanchez was killed fighting in Vietnam, and his body had only just been recovered—he was coming home. Sanchez had been killed in Quang Tri province, South Vietnam, in 1968, along with three other Marines. The news reported that Sanchez’s mother, Virginia, died five weeks after learning that her son’s remains had been identified. The Daily News reported: “Her mind at ease, Virginia Sanchez died five weeks later.

  “‘Finally,’ says son Peter, ‘she could rest.’”5

  8

  WELCOME HOME, JIMMY: THE BACOLO TWINS

  Jimmy and Mauro Bacolo are twins who were born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 1947. Their father, Mike, was a decorated World War II veteran, and they grew up wanting to be like him. Jimmy says: We knew about my father. I mean, everybody knew about it. He didn’t talk about it. Him and his whole generation didn’t talk much about what they did.

  But Jimmy has studied his father’s past. Mike Bacolo served in the Forty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, part of the Seventh U.S. Army that invaded North Africa. From there he went into Sicily with General George Patton and then landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944. He was wounded three weeks into the battle. Jimmy’s uncle fought through the Battle of the Bulge and into the Rhineland with General Patton’s Third Army. He says with pride, Between the two of them they got five Purple Hearts.

  In part to carry on the strong family military tradition, Jimmy wanted to enlist in the Navy at age eighteen, but a petty juvenile crime record prevented it. Instead, he found himself swept up in the draft and sent to Vietnam as an Army artilleryman in 1966. His brother Mauro enlisted in the Navy, where he took part in the recovery of an H-bomb that had been lost at sea off Palomares, Spain, in 1966. He went to Vietnam later that year.

  Today, both twins are retired—Jimmy from his job as a Staten Island Ferry repairman and Mauro from his work as a landscaper for the New York City Parks Department. Both men also suffer from cancer. Jimmy believes he may have been exposed to Agent Orange.

  Recalling his service in an Army artillery unit, Jimmy emphasizes that his job was relatively easy. He was not a “ground-pounder,” “trigger-puller,” or “grunt.” We got lifted with the guns and placed down, but it was usually secure … what they would call an LZ [landing zone] or a firebase. They were already secured by the airborne troops that went in there, you know? They would go in and secure it, and then the artillery would be brought in.

  Nevertheless, his time there wasn’t without danger.

  I was scared enough just being over there, knowing that you had 5 million people and 4.5 million hated your guts and you couldn’t tell them apart, because nobody had uniforms. You know, they all wore pajamas, whether it was different colors or not. There was no battle lines; there was no secured areas. You could walk into a village one day, and the next day they’re dropping rockets and mortars on you. Or at night, you know, there’s a guy … he’s cutting your hair in a village in the daytime, at nighttime he’s lobbing mortars into your position.

  By 1968, the Pentagon estimated that eighty thousand Vietnam-era veterans were being returned to civilian life each month.1 These men and women were, as the journalist William Barry Furlong put it at the time, “peculiar.” They were unlike returning World War II veterans. Furlong wrote, “The feeling of total anonymity strikes the Vietnam veteran right down to the neighborhood level.”2 Even after forty years, my interviewees reported feeling both isolated and anonymous when they came home.

  Anonymity led to the effacing of a veteran’s military identity. Sandy Goodman, writing in The Nation in 1968 about service members returning from Vietnam, described them as “invisible veterans.” Goodman asserted that, “as a group, the Vietnam veterans resemble neither the noisy, assertive veterans of World War II, who clomped around as if they owned the country, nor the quiet, apathetic young men who shuffled aimlessly about after Korea, ‘staring nowhere,’ as one observer described them. Like the men of Korea, the Vietvets are relatively few in number … but unlike the Korean veteran, the Vietvet has no glassy, faraway look in his eyes. He knows exactly what he wants: to throw off his identity as an ex-GI and become a civilian again as fast as possible.” Some hoped that shedding the identity of soldier might lead to an easy transition to civilian life. Goodman even quoted a Veterans Administration official who said—with what sounds now like painfully ironic optimism—that the Vietnam veteran’s readjustment to civilian life is “the smoothest in recent history.”3

  In some ways, the return was smooth. In 1971, a Louis Harris & Associates poll conducted for the Veterans Administration indicated that both the general public and employers overwhelmingly respected returning veterans. Ninety-four percent of respondents indicated that Vietnam veterans deserved “the same warm reception” as veterans of earlier wars. Veterans—95 percent of them—believed that their family and friends greeted them warmly upon return, and 79 percent believed that “most people respect you.”4 And despite the impression that veterans were not welcomed home from Vietnam, there were parades and brass bands for the returning soldiers, Marines, and airmen. On March 31, 1973, New York City played host to one of the largest parades in its history, the Home with Honor parade.5 Charles Wiley, at that time a writer for The American Legion Magazine and one of the parade organizers, many years later said about the parade:

  On this day, unknown to the overwhelming majority of our people, one thousand servicemen, all of whom had volunteered and fought in Vietnam, all of whom had volunteered to give up a weekend to represent their service, marched a two-mile parade route through cheering, flag-waving Americans. The Ar
my, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard were there to be saluted on a day that was officially called Home With Honor Day. However, what happened after they completed the route-of-march made it one of the greatest homecoming parades in the history of the world. At the end of the route, the thousand servicemen sat in the grandstand while 150,000 people welcomed our men back from Vietnam by marching the two-mile parade route behind them. They tell you that there were no brass bands to welcome our men home. How about 120 brass bands to welcome them home? Probably the biggest massing of bands in history!6

  It took only about seventy-two hours for Jimmy Bacolo to move from the depths of the jungle in Southeast Asia to the cement jungle of Red Hook, Brooklyn. He felt as if he had to prepare himself for the emotional intensity of the moment.

  Bacolo had gone over to Vietnam aboard a ship, a journey that took about twenty days. Coming home, he traveled on a commercial airliner. From his artillery unit he was sent first to Cam Ranh Bay for out-processing. He turned in his combat equipment and jungle fatigues and was given a new set of clothing, including a garrison cap, which is generally worn only in the United States. After his papers were in order, he flew to Japan for a short stopover, then to Alaska for a refueling stop, and finally to Fort Lewis, Washington, in the Seattle-Tacoma area. At Fort Lewis, Bacolo was processed out of the service. After a short stay in San Francisco, he headed for New York.

  It was 1968. As he flew over New York City, he looked down at the skyscrapers, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Manhattan skyline. You know, you were looking at America right then after being in Asia. It felt great.

  Several Brooklyn-reared soldiers from his unit were on the same flight. Together they flew to John F. Kennedy International Airport and then shared a taxicab home. Jimmy was the last to get dropped off because he lived on the waterfront, at Red Hook.

  Coming home was rather emotional, being away for twelve months, going through Vietnam, just to get out of a cab and walk in the door without a few minutes of sort of downtime. I didn’t want to just step out and step into the house, so I asked the cabbie to drop me off at Smith and Ninth Street, and he said, “Why? This is not where you live.” And I explained to him that I used to always walk that Z shape to school and to work, so I needed that block and a half of zigzag just so I could sort of compose myself, you know? After being away for twelve months and most of the time walking on grass and weeds and bush and mud, I needed to find me back on asphalt and concrete.

  Jimmy described what it was like to finally walk in the door:

  And [long pause, taps with fingers] it was a school day, so my brothers and sisters, the younger ones, were in school. But my mom was home, as usual, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee because she always had a pot of coffee on, and I think she was eating toast or zwieback biscuits, which she loved with butter. It was emotional. We used to call her Tiny Tears because she would cry at the drop of a hat for anything; I mean, if a baby was born, she would cry. If somebody died, she would cry. If something was this, she would cry. She, my mother, was very emotional that way. She would always cry.

  So I walked in the second door—we had a vestibule—and I still had a key because I always had a key to the house, and no matter when we moved away or where we went, we always had a key to get back to the house. And I just opened the door and walked in the first door, then I walked into the second door, and she heard the doors opening and she started to get up and I could just catch her from the corner of my eye at the table with the coffee and the zwiebacks and she turned and she got a little—I would say hysterical, more than emotional. I mean, she couldn’t believe that I was home.

  Jimmy’s mother called his father’s best friend. About ten minutes later three carloads of longshoremen showed up, including his father, his uncles, and his best friends.

  My father was beside himself. He wasn’t one for showing too much emotion at certain things, but he was taken aback, and it was good to see him. We had a couple of beers, and then he said, “Come on. We’ll take you down to the neighborhood.” We went back down to my uncle’s bar, where all the rest of the longshoremen were because the longshoremen were strictly 100 percent behind the war or behind the troops, and we went down there and I met my cousins and other friends and all my father’s longshoremen friends, and none of them went back to the ship that day. We stayed in my uncle’s bar, and we all got smashed. We had a good time.

  They had a sign out, which I still have. They took a piece of wood, painted it red, white, and blue, and they put Christmas lights on it, and they hung it up for Christmas out in the window. And it was still there when I got home in May: WELCOME HOME JIMMY FROM VIETNAM. When my mother passed away in 1989, I went down in the basement. I found the wood sign dry-rotted but still painted with the words, and I brought it to my house, and I have it down in the basement covered up. That was the only welcome home I got—was the family and that sign.

  He came home in 1968. The New York City Fifth Avenue parade was five years in the future. By the time it rolled around, it was irrelevant to him. He compared his own experience with his father’s return home from World War II, when everybody had time to sort of relax a little bit. By the time they got everything secured, they got to the ships and all, they spent twenty-something days coming home. Here in Vietnam you were always flown home, individual or in groups, and within forty-eight hours from the time that I left Hill 29, I went to Chu Lai overnight, and from Chu Lai I went to Cam Ranh Bay overnight. That’s two days. On the third morning I was flying home. Within seventy-two hours I was back in the States after being out in the field and in LZs and firebases. So in that seventy-two hours’ time you went from one extreme to the next. Meanwhile, the battle, the war, was still going on and guys were still dying, and you were leaving guys behind that you knew well.

  Jimmy’s sense that he had abandoned his fellow soldiers is a common refrain in Vietnam veterans’ stories. Jose Gonzalez said the same thing, as did Joan Furey and many others I interviewed. World War II and Korean War veterans had long journeys home together, mostly aboard ship. Jimmy and his generation were separated and atomized by the service’s procedures, which generated bitterness. Most often, people came home individually, not as part of a unit, as their tour of duty in Vietnam ended—at twelve months for people in the Army and thirteen months for Marines. The men and women returning from Vietnam never had the opportunity to effectively decompress before returning home. This lack of downtime led to resentment. Many returned home feeling like so much surplus baggage.

  Jimmy’s brother Mauro recalls a relatively safe time in the Navy.

  We put things in the war; we took things out of the war. We researched the rivers, tributaries, and canals to measure the depth and breadth of them. We did water samples; we made charts. We turned them over to the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Army Corps [of] Engineers, and a sundry of other organizations that needed the charts. We worked for the Oceanographic Institute in Washington, D.C. The minute we went under way, we were measuring the water clouds. That’s what the ship was, the Geodetic Survey ship AGS-15. That’s what we did. It wasn’t a horrid experience. I didn’t earn any great ribbons; I didn’t draw blood on my own.

  He also describes homecoming as “uneventful.” He was in the Philippines with his ship when his time was up.

  I remember coming in, landing, it was morning; got in a cab and came home; it was bitter cold and I was home. The neighborhood had changed tremendously. A lot of the guys were on drugs, in jail, some had died, some were in Vietnam, others were in the military, several had died and I hadn’t been aware of it. None of us went together as a group or unit; we all went our own individual ways, on our own.

  At the age of sixteen, Mauro had left school to work at Ohrbach’s department store on Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. He joined the military the next year, in 1964, and got his GED while in the Navy, along with some college credits. He was married June 3, 1966, and reported to his ship in Bayonne, New Jersey, a week later. He arrived in
Vietnam in September 1966, and his wife gave birth to their daughter in January 1967. Mauro saw her for the first time that May, on a two-week leave, and then headed back to Vietnam, finally returning to the United States for good in December.

  My daughter was one month short of one year old.

  When he returned from Vietnam, he had a drug problem.

  He worked a variety of jobs, went to Woodstock in 1969, and hung out in Greenwich Village. He remembers the 1969 New York Mets victory parade in lower Manhattan.

  I was on Broadway and Wall Street the day that the Mets won the World Series. I remember the windows opening and the roar and din, but I was on LSD. I wasn’t a sports fan, so I could care less about the Mets. [But] I was sort of caught up in it … and when the paper came down, I was standing in the middle of Broad and Wall up to my waist in paper and trying to figure out why they were throwing this paper out.

  Mauro went briefly to City College and then to the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture, from which he graduated in 1974. From 1979 to 1982 he worked for a young-adult landscape-training program, then bought a nursery in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which he ran until 1986. While he did okay, Mauro regrets the years he lost to drug and alcohol use.

  I say to myself, “Look what I missed.” I could have been a nerd like that. I could have gone to college and graduated because I would have been with a crowd that gravitated toward that.

  In late 1986 he started rehabilitation, as an outpatient, finally getting clean for good in February 1989. He celebrated his twenty-third anniversary of being sober in February 2012.

  While he doesn’t blame the war for his drug use, he does attribute the lack of purpose and direction he felt after the war to the combined effect of his experience in Vietnam and social unrest in America.