Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  It had been three weeks since we had a hot meal. I mean, generally when we were out in the field, they would fly us in a meal at least once a day. It was either lunch or dinner. They’d come out with containers and stuff, but it had been three weeks since that had happened. It had been three weeks since we had clean clothes, and it had been close to that since I had even washed, you know. [We had] fatigues that were white with dried sweat. Actually, we wore T-shirts more than anything.

  So we decided to set up right there, and they flew us in food and clothes, they paid us, they brought us mail, you know, and we had been under, you know, an awful lot of stress. And we set up for the night, some people dug foxholes and set up claymore [mines] and trip wires and flares and the whole bit around the perimeter and stuff, but it was, I don’t know—we let down our guard, let’s put it that way.

  I’d set up my little tent, and in the middle of the night all hell broke loose. I mean, there was firebombs from everywhere, trip wires were going off, explosions everywhere, and I remember crawling around on the ground trying to find my weapon, which I don’t think I ever did. It’s dark and then one of the guys from my squad off to my right was screaming he was hit or was blind or something. Actually, what had happened was he had opened fire and they fired back, and what happened was that sand got kicked up in his face, and it ended up he was all right, but at the time he couldn’t see.

  Somehow somebody pulled me over or somebody called me or something, and so I slipped down into this hole, and as I’m going down the hole, I’m going feetfirst, I’m going down this hole, there’s this big flash of light in front of my face. I think probably this guy that’s got sand in his eyes was there before me and after me came this gunner who was rather nervous. [Laughs.]

  And so this guy goes, “I can’t see, I can’t see.” Well, I’m looking around and it’s black and stuff and I’m feeling my chest and I’m feeling this dripping down my chest, you know, and I can’t see a thing and this guy won’t keep his mouth shut. All they had to do was throw a bomb or grenade down the hole and we all would have been dead, you know, so I’m trying to get him to shut up so they don’t know where the hell we are. And anyway, all hell’s breaking loose; you hear people screaming and explosions.

  [The enemy] knew where everything was, they undoubtedly, you know, just sat around and watched us all day; knew where all the trip wires was; knew where all the defenses were and came up with a good plan to get around everything. We had three killed and thirty-nine wounded. Oh yeah, it was a bad night.

  Louis freely admits that his antiwar position today has to do with what he saw in Vietnam.

  A lot of guys come back with survivor’s guilt. Friend of mine got wounded in an ambush, and his two best buddies lay on top of him to keep him from harm and they both were killed, so that’s what he lives with. [I have] another friend who stepped on a mine and lost his leg and wonders how many people he took with him and stuff. I kind of figured out that mine is participatory guilt. I knew better; I shouldn’t have been there, and somewhere along the line I should have just said no, I ain’t doing this shit anymore. As I say, little My Lais happened every day.

  As a student at Cornell University, he had gone down south to work for voters’ rights. He learned a lot about the war and had participated in an antiwar demonstration in March 1967, where protesters marched from Central Park down to the United Nations. One year later, he was on the ground, fighting in Vietnam. He blames himself for not doing more to stop the war.

  His return home was a classic New York story.

  I landed at Kennedy. It’s probably late evening, ten or eleven o’clock, something like that. Full-dress uniform, all the bells and whistles, all the ribbons, you know, everything, full-dress greens. Get my stuff, go out to the cab line, throw my stuff in the back, get in the cab, tell the cabdriver where I want to go. He says, “I ain’t going.”

  My parents lived in Flatbush in the middle of Brooklyn. East Thirteenth Street between J and K. He ain’t going there at eleven o’clock at night, because he ain’t picking up no fare there, you know; he wants to go to mid-Manhattan, you know, or at least somewhere where he’s going to get a fare. So I’m a little more alert than I usually am. [Laughs.] I say, “I know the law; I’m sitting in your cab; you’re going to take me.” He says, “I can sit here as long as you can.” I said, “I’ll give you $10 over the meter.” He said, “Okay.” That’s my hero’s welcome.

  Once he was back in New York, Louis contacted his childhood friend Bob Greene, who had returned from Vietnam just a few months before him.

  He was there, and we spent, as I remember it, three days straight with a meal here and there and a little bit of sleep here and there, just trading stories … That was one of the tragedies of Vietnam vets, you know, not having any decompression … These guys in the Second World War came back on troop carriers, you know, they were at sea for a month or more, you know. With us, you know, one day in the jungle; the next day in civilization and—bye. So, happily, that was my debriefing, and we literally spent three days just trading stories.

  Louis credits those days with Greene with allowing him to avoid some of the worst difficulties that many veterans experienced upon their return. It is tempting to speculate how other veterans would have fared if they had been fortunate enough to find that kind of relationship.

  Apart from his relationship with Greene, Louis says he essentially stayed “in the closet” as a Vietnam vet until the 1980s.

  In the early 1990s, Louis was participating in Buddhist meditation groups, and through one of them he met Claude AnShin Thomas, a Vietnam veteran and an ordained Buddhist. As part of his Buddhist practice, Thomas helps veterans understand the place that service in Vietnam should hold in their lives.

  Louis became actively involved, traveling with Pastors for Peace in a 1993 caravan carrying humanitarian aid to El Salvador. He and seventy-five others drove thirty-four vehicles across Mexico into Central America to deliver supplies to the poor. A year and a half later, Louis participated in another Pastors for Peace aid caravan, this time to Cuba to help break the U.S. blockade of that country. As the first Gulf War began, he was a founding member of a chapter of Veterans for Peace in the Hudson River Valley, officially chartered in March 1991.

  Retired now after a career as a union electrician, Louis has learned to speak out about his own experiences. He has put some distance between himself and the guilt he feels about what he saw and did in Vietnam. It has not been easy. Today, he speaks comfortably and effectively, often appearing as a spokesperson for Vets for Peace. The group has grown to more than 125 chapters nationwide and in Vietnam and continues its efforts to “abolish war as an instrument of national policy.”5

  In a 2006 interview with Louis about the global war on terror, posted on YouTube, he says, It was like, Oh, man, they are doing this crap again. We cannot keep our mouths shut anymore.

  He has this to say about the global war on terror and our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan:

  Like almost any war I can think of, with the exception of true wars of national liberation, our insanity is based on lies, no matter how you look at it. We are in there because a lot of corporations are making a lot of money and there are some crazy people way high up who believe that we should control the world.

  He tells the interviewer:

  These guys that are over there now … are losing their souls because of what they see and what they have to do. And it is criminal.6

  10

  BECOMING VETERANS: EDELMAN, GERMAN, AND PAS

  In May 2005, at a small ceremony on a cold, blustery day, the former New York City mayor Edward I. Koch recalled the dedication twenty years earlier of the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the parade of twenty-five thousand Vietnam veterans across the Brooklyn Bridge and down New York City’s famed Canyon of Heroes. Witnessed by an estimated one million people, the 1985 parade was led by the wheelchair-bound Long Island assemblyman John L. Behan; at the time, it was said to be
the largest ticker-tape parade in the city’s history. These events, Koch recalled, were a tipping point in the city’s relationship with its Vietnam veterans. Ten years after the war ended, the veterans were finally, really, welcomed home.

  The memorial at 55 Water Street in lower Manhattan is a wall of glass blocks inscribed with portions of eighty-three letters, poems, clips from The New York Times, and words from American presidents and other leading figures. The memorial and parade played an important part in the emergence of a community of Vietnam veterans in New York City. Vietnam veterans themselves kindled a new relationship with the city as they worked to change public perceptions and to help veterans in need.

  The memorial and parade were also reactions to specific events. On January 30, 1981, New York City hosted a parade for the returning hostages who had been held in the American embassy in Iran. A reported 1,250 tons of confetti greeted them as they traveled the Canyon of Heroes. Amid all the hoopla, some Vietnam veterans became resentful. Bobby Muller, a Marine lieutenant who lost both legs in Vietnam in 1969, told The New York Times, “That’s what probably would have been for us, if we had won.” He went on, “A lot of guys paid a heavy price, and for many of them there is no sense of appreciation or recognition of what they went through.”1 The wish for a parade that would honor returned Vietnam veterans grew out of that experience.2

  The political needs of Mayor Koch mattered, too. A sergeant during World War II, he understood the significance of military service. He was also a divisive figure in New York City politics. Honoring New York City’s veterans, many of them working-class white ethnics and a critical component of his political base, was both politically savvy and a matter of personal conscience.

  In 1981, Mayor Koch appointed twenty-seven citizens to begin planning a memorial that would acknowledge the service of those New Yorkers who served in the Vietnam War. This group gravitated toward two ideas: a physical memorial to New York City’s Vietnam veterans and a “living memorial” to assist those veterans who had needs that were not being met by agencies of the government. In 1982, the twenty-seven were transformed into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which had a hundred members, the inner core of whom were Vietnam veterans. This group built the memorial, created the assistance program, and gave shape to a powerful restatement of the Vietnam experience.

  Bernard Edelman was among the veterans subsequently appointed by the mayor to the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission. He explains how he got involved:

  My ten-month tour of duty [in Vietnam] in 1970 shaped me, for better or for worse. I was a broadcast specialist/correspondent, assigned to the United States Army Vietnam–Information Office. While I was not caught up in combat, I saw my share of its aftermath. I lost friends; I made lifelong friends there, too. Vietnam became, and remains, an integral facet of my frame of reference, as it is, I believe, for most veterans who served in a combat zone.

  Four months after I was released from active duty, I went to Washington as a participant/chronicler of Operation Dewey Canyon III, the first major demonstration by veterans since the Bonus March some forty years before. Some of my photographs were part of the first art show, in St. Paul, Minnesota, of the works of Vietnam veterans. And one year after that, on Veterans Day 1981, we brought an expanded version of this show to New York City, to the old birdhouse in the Central Park Zoo. Some 1,500 people—veterans, their families, friends—came to opening night; some 650 people a day viewed the show during its monthlong run. Then Vietnam came back into my life full force. I was named by Mayor Koch as one of a hundred citizens who would comprise the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission.

  A central goal of the art show Edelman curated, and of the New York City memorial, was to allow men and women to develop pride in their status as veterans.

  There are a lot of people who—they just put their veteran-ness, their veteran’s identity, in their pocket someplace, or in a closet someplace, and there it stays. When we did the Vietnam art show, Jerry Balcom was a court officer; he’s in private business now. And I used something of his, and it was only later that he told me he’d been a Marine, very proud of it, but he said he only literally came out of the closet around like 1979, 1980, because this wasn’t something you necessarily put on your résumé. If you were a veteran, particularly if you were a combat veteran, there was this assumption that you were somehow fucked-up.

  As a member of the commission, he, like the others, worked to recast the meaning of service in Vietnam.

  As the commission defined its mission, it decided to create a monument that celebrated the lives of those who had died but also of those who had survived. The members wanted to “acknowledge the service and sacrifice of all veterans from New York City who did their individual and collective best under trying and unusual circumstances,” to “evoke reconciliation and an awareness of the enduring human values reflected in the conflicting experiences,” and finally to show “the contradictory yet universally shared experiences of war and peace, danger and relief, weakness and strength, isolation and comradeship.” The veterans on the commission demanded a “living memorial,” a project that would help needy Vietnam veterans make the transition to successful civilian careers.

  The monument’s design was selected in a juried competition, as had been the Vietnam wall in Washington, D.C. A panel composed of veterans and architectural experts judged approximately 572 entries from forty-six countries. The architects William Fellows and Peter Wormser, together with the Vietnam veteran Joseph Ferrandino, submitted the winning design, and their plans became the basis for the memorial.3 The memorial’s centerpiece, a wall, is set back from the street itself by approximately a hundred yards. It is sixteen feet high and sixty-six feet long, and there are two door-sized passages through it. At chest height, there are two silver shelves, on which people can leave photographs, flowers, and other mementos; the idea was derived from the practice of leaving items at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Ferrandino, who came up with the original conception of the memorial, described it as “a window through which to view the Vietnam experience. The experience must be provided by the people whose lives were touched by Vietnam … We are not looking for great literature, flowery prose or correct grammar. We are looking for the truth from many different points of view.”4 For that reason, many of the written texts inscribed into the wall were drawn from the more than three thousand pieces of correspondence sent to the commission in response to a call for letters. In 2001, the names of the 1,741 New York City dead were installed on a walkway leading from the street to the wall itself.

  The parade was important, too, and the commission understood it would be so. The veterans’ parade poster said: “If you are a Vietnam veteran, you’re invited to take part in a very special parade. It will mark the 10th anniversary of the end of the war … We urge you not to miss this special celebration. After all, it’s being held in your honor.”

  The multiday celebration of the new memorial began May 6 with the dedication of the wall at an event on the USS Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier anchored in the Hudson River, where Donald Trump handed the commission a check for $1 million. The celebration concluded with a ceremony at the wall attended by an estimated twelve thousand people and a display of fireworks over the East River.

  On May 7, 1975, President Ford had issued a proclamation declaring that day “the last day of the Vietnam era,” and so the seventh was chosen as the date of the “Welcome Home” Parade. John Hamill, the medic and Brooklyn-born brother of the New York Daily News columnist Denis Hamill, remarks:

  For me the most special part of that day … was when we passed Pace University. And from the windows appeared all these secretaries, and students, women 10 and 15 years younger than us, a generation removed, who waved and blew us kisses. That moved me. Unlike a lot of places around the country, in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn I never saw anyone spit on Vietnam vets when they came home. In our neighborhood there was a lot of individual
support. But this was the first time strangers had embraced us as a group. It meant a lot. Twenty years later, it still does.5

  The themes of reconnection and mutual acknowledgment echoed throughout the festivities. As one veteran quoted in The New York Times said, “Anybody who’s been in ’Nam is automatically accepted by anybody else who’s been in ’Nam.”6

  As the effort to build the Water Street structure gathered steam, the commission began to consider the other central component of its mission. In order to create a successful “living memorial,” the commission needed to understand the problems veterans faced.

  Professor Robert Laufer of Brooklyn College prepared a study for the commission that found that Vietnam veterans were more densely concentrated in low-paying jobs than Vietnam-era counterparts. He also found that Vietnam veterans appeared to experience more difficulty in holding on to prestigious, high-paying jobs than did other members of their age cohort; that 25 percent of heavy-combat veterans had some PTSD symptoms; that 43 percent of heavy-combat veterans reported drinking regularly, weekly, for at least four months in the last year; that heavy-combat veterans were significantly more likely to smoke marijuana; and that the proportion of veterans using hard drugs was very low.

  At this point, the commission’s efforts connected with the work of other entities operating veterans’ initiatives in the city and nationally. A number of Wall Street employees had joined together as the New York Vietnam Veterans Group in 1981, at least in part because of their view that the returning Iranian hostages received better treatment than Vietnam veterans had. According to one Wall Streeter, Eugene Gitelson, “Those of us who were successful hadn’t had anything to do with our vet identity for almost 15 years. We decided it was time we did something with our expertise to help those who weren’t as fortunate.”7 Gitelson himself had been a rifle platoon leader in Vietnam. After the war he worked in marketing research for the Seagram Company and directed a drug prevention program in the South Bronx. Later he earned an MBA from New York University, worked at Chase Manhattan Bank, and then became a corporate consultant.