Within a relatively short time they took me into the prep room and started cutting my clothes off. The last [thing I] remember, basically, was one of the doctors saying to me, “Did you get wounded in the leg, too?” And I said no. And he said okay, and then the next thing I remember it was the next day.
I woke up in a hospital bed, and I had my arm in a sling and my right leg in a splint. My left hand was wrapped up from my thumb injury. But the thing that I think is the most striking to me: We had been out in the field for almost a month, and I’m sure [you know] from speaking to other people you get filthy. And when I woke up the next day and I got to look at my body, they had washed and shaved, I’d say, from here over, and the rest of the other side was all still black. [Laughs.] And I’m wondering, couldn’t they wash all of it? But I was not in pain; I was very fortunate, because of the nerve damage.
Looking back, he calls it a “million-dollar wound,” serious enough to get him out of the war. In fact, it seemed not to hurt at all, though he remembers that the doctors were blunt, telling him that if he recovered the use of his arm, it would take a long time. Apparently, they believed that a primary nerve had been cut. In the end, it had only been bruised, and Ptachik recovered the use of his arm more quickly than anticipated.
After a foul-up with his personnel records, he was sent from Japan to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and then to St. Albans Naval Hospital just southeast of Jamaica, Queens, where he stayed until November, when he was discharged from the Army with a permanent 40 percent disability rating.
As a wounded but ambulatory soldier assigned to St. Albans Naval Hospital for medical care, he had duty obligations at the hospital but was able to spend the night at his own home, in his own bed, on Avenue P and East Fourteenth Street in Brooklyn. Although he had to take a train and a bus to and from St. Albans every day, a two-hour round-trip, it was worth it. It was good to be home.
In retrospect, he believes his reentry into civilian life was made easier by the buffer of the duty he did at St. Albans. It gave him time to adjust, functioning somewhere between the status of a soldier and a civilian.
Today, Ptachik is senior university dean for the executive office and enrollment at the City University of New York (CUNY). Brooklyn College, where I teach, is part of this university. Meeting him was a bit like meeting the executive vice president at your corporation. I was somewhat nervous about the impression I would make. I am more comfortable now. I have interviewed him three times in his office, and we’ve met on a number of other occasions. He has also been a guest in my course on the history of the American war in Vietnam.
Still, he remains a formidable presence as he sits behind his rather large desk facing the door of his office. He is a pleasant-looking man, in his mid-sixties now, with thinning short gray hair. During our interviews he wore a business suit, usually with his jacket off and tie on, ready to attend the next meeting, often with the CUNY chancellor. While he understood the objective of the research interview and cooperated willingly, he resisted the quasi-therapeutic dynamic that can often emerge during oral history interviews. Despite this, Ptachik reminisced easily, peppering our conversation with references to some of the literature we have both enjoyed, such as Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
Ptachik was born in 1946 in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. His father was a World War II veteran, and after the war he ran an Army-Navy store in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, on Third Avenue between Eighty-Seventh and Eighty-Eighth Streets. He operated the store with one of his brothers. Ptachik’s father did not see combat, and spoke infrequently about his service to his children, so Ptachik had learned relatively little about the Army from him.
He jokes that his background sounds as though it might come out of a Philip Roth novel, and in some ways that is so. When he was a middle-class Jewish kid growing up in postwar Brooklyn, his family valued patriotism, fitting in, and social and economic success. One measure of success was academic, and at first Ptachik seemed primed to go to college and succeed. When he was in the sixth grade, the family moved to the Midwood section of Brooklyn, and he attended James Madison High School, where, by his own admission, he started out doing well and then did progressively worse each year. By the time he was in his senior year, he spent more time in the poolroom than with the books.
Lest the mention of a poolroom conjure up images of teenage delinquency, Ptachik’s memories of street life in 1960s Brooklyn contrast sharply with those of veterans who grew up in tougher neighborhoods.
We were basically pretty well-behaved Jewish kids, and some Italian kids. The terrorists of the time were the Fanelli gang; there was Charlie Fanelli and his cousins, who were from Avenue U. You’d be playing in the park and they’d come and they’d push you off the basketball court or take your ball and there would be a couple of fights—in retrospect, nothing terrible. But these were the gangsters of the time. Well, I get to basic training, and not in my platoon but in my company there is Charlie Fanelli and his cousins, okay, and now everyone’s head is shaved and they’re all wearing the same stuff. These are the guys who are just like us; they’re not any tougher; they’re not any worse.
But Ptachik was smart. He did so well in elementary school that he skipped eighth grade, and despite his waning interest in his schoolbooks he graduated from high school at the age of sixteen. He gained admission to Brooklyn College, a prestigious school within the CUNY system, enrolling in 1963. He didn’t like it, though, and in the fall semester of his junior year, he dropped out. He wasn’t thinking about the possibility of being drafted: I just thought, well, I would drop out and nothing would happen to me—everything would be okay.
By dropping out, however, he lost his deferment from the Coney Island draft board. When his draft notice arrived, he had enrolled at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, for the spring semester. He went to the draft board and applied for reinstatement of his draft deferment, but the board refused. He was drafted in August 1966.
I was inducted into the Army on August 16, 1966; January 6, 1967, I arrived in Vietnam. So it was eight weeks of basic training, eight weeks of Advanced Infantry Training, about ten days’ leave at home, and then over to Vietnam.
Ptachik had tried to avoid being assigned to an infantry MOS. He was offered a slot in Officer Candidate School but turned it down because he thought it might increase his chances of landing in Vietnam. He applied instead for quartermaster training.
I still have this memory. On the day, I guess, that we were all supposed to go to our next assignments after basic training, we were all standing out in front of the barracks, and they were calling names and saying, all right, you go here and you go here. At the end of the run through the platoon, there were three of us left standing there, and it turned out there was two other guys who either had graduated from college or had some college like I did, and the sergeant says, “All three of your orders have been changed. You’re going to infantry training.” So I have no idea whether that was just random or punishment or, you know, just my luck ran out, but I stayed at Fort Jackson and got my infantry training there and then from there [went] to Vietnam.
Even though few of his peers did military service, Ptachik does not recall even a moment when he thought that avoiding service was an option once he was drafted. Like many others, he looked at it as a rite of passage.
I just assumed that if you’re asked, you go. Maybe it was my upbringing; I was too sheltered, or it was just not something that I—I even considered. You know, I would just as likely [have] said “Well, I’ll go to the moon” than go to Canada. I didn’t see any other options.
At the time, large-scale efforts to resist the draft were only just getting under way. In any case, Ptachik had no personal experience with the antiwar movement and gave himself up to his fate.
Up to this point, Ptachik’s life seems to parallel that of many Vietnam veterans. Swept up in the draft, he went to Vietnam simply to do hi
s duty, and no more.
When he got out of the Army in November 1967, Ptachik tried to put Vietnam behind him.
I sort of blocked the war out when I came back. I would never watch the news on TV. I was aware of the protests, but, you know, I neither participated in them nor objected to them.
It was quite common for wounded soldiers like Ptachik to experience periods of depression. He remembers focusing on himself, simply trying to keep himself functional. He went back to college, attending classes at night while working. He told no one about his Vietnam experience.
At Stony Brook, there was one professor who I had who I did tell that I was in Vietnam, and he really encouraged me to do things with it and to talk to people and so on, and I just refused. I think I probably dropped his class to avoid having to do that. This is something that will prevail right through when the Iranian hostages came home, which was a tipping point for me in how I dealt with Vietnam.
After finishing college, Ptachik got a job working for CUNY in the University Application Processing Center, which handled document processing for the entire university system. His mother had worked there, and the head of the department was a World War II veteran, sympathetic to Ptachik’s war experience. Ptachik wound up staying at the processing center for twenty years, eventually rising to become its deputy director.
After the election of Ronald Reagan and the return of the Iranian hostages, Ptachik and many other Vietnam veterans found themselves feeling a deep resentment. This was directed not at the hostages themselves but at the way the American public embraced them so easily. How could the hostages be treated so well, many wondered, when the men who had fought, been wounded, and died in Vietnam were seemingly forgotten? The return of the hostages turned out to be a trigger.
In late 1981 or early 1982, Ptachik became aware of the existence of the Vietnam Veterans of America and went to a chapter meeting in Queens. Recognizing that there was no VVA chapter in Brooklyn, he decided to establish one. He reached out to other CUNY veterans, particularly to Mike Gold of Brooklyn, who was at that time working in the Office of Admissions Services at CUNY. Other activists included Ed Daniels, who currently runs the Incarcerated Veterans Consortium; Joe Reiter; and Tom Coughlin, for whom the Brooklyn chapter of the VVA is named. Ptachik was elected the first chapter president.
After the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., in November 1982, Ptachik began to meet other veterans who had been to college or who had successful careers. This connection with other veterans helped him to realize his own capabilities and interests. He became ambitious. Fitting in was no longer limited to working a comfortable job and raising a family. Maybe he could do more, he thought. Soon, others would recognize his capabilities as well.
In late 1984, he became involved with the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission. The commission was charged with the responsibility of raising half a million dollars: $250,000 to build the physical memorial in New York City and $250,000 for the jobs program. The group wound up raising over $5 million, exceeding its goal tenfold. Looking back, Ptachik recalls:
We just did much more than anyone thought was possible. I was not an isolate in the sense that there were people who had been to Vietnam who weren’t crazed vets. There were other people like me; I wasn’t doing the greatest of anyone in my generation, but I was certainly doing okay. I had a college degree, I had a job, I had a reasonably good life, and then I saw other people who were like this and people who were even much more successful.
I met people like Robert Santos and Jim Noonan or Frank Havlicek and others, [and] it did a couple of things to me. One, it showed me here are guys who did the same thing I did, went through Vietnam, and look how successful they are, look how polished they are, look how comfortable they are in this other world, and, you know, through them I think I started to realize there are other things I could do. I also saw that other people, World War II vets, respected us and [we] respected them, which was different because you didn’t have that respect from the older vets right [before]. So that was a real turning point for me.
One of the other veterans working on the memorial commission persuaded Ptachik that he might benefit enormously by getting a doctorate. He did so, completing his degree in public administration at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. Getting his PhD was something that would never have occurred to him before his involvement with the memorial commission.
While working on the commission, Ptachik also began to think more deeply about the meaning of service and the impact it can have on veterans.
One thing I realized—and I realized this for myself in some way, too—for almost everyone the time in Vietnam was the most exciting and the most alive time of your life … I mean, if you’re a cop or a fireman or you know … you can re-create it, but for a lot of guys it’s a peak, and for an unfortunate proportion of people who were in Vietnam, it’s a peak they never got back to, and the rest of their lives could never be as interesting or as important.
He did not want to look back on his life and be forced to remember Vietnam as the most important thing he ever did. The commission allowed him to acknowledge his ambition to achieve more. Meanwhile, by embedding himself within a wider network of Vietnam veterans during the 1980s, he came to see that his views and experiences, singular though they were, were not entirely unique.
Vietnam remains a touchstone in his life.
I still have this little trick that I would say. I [don’t] do it every night, but when I lie down and go to sleep, if there’s something bothering me, I say, “You’re warm, you’re dry, and there is no one shooting at you.”
12
TWONESS: HERBERT SWEAT
In his book The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”1 Herbert Sweat is the intellectual child of W.E.B. Du Bois; his world is a working out of “twoness.” He is a black man in a white man’s world, a soldier in a world of civilians, a child of the ghetto in a world of riches out of his reach.
Most of my meetings with Sweat took place at Black Veterans for Social Justice (BVSJ), a private social service agency where he serves on the board of directors. I was asked to meet with several members of the staff before I could talk to him. Sweat and others at BVSJ were wary. Finally, Sweat agreed to come visit me at my office in Washington Heights, in northern Manhattan. He was early, arriving a good hour before our appointment. He reported that he spent the time walking around the neighborhood, preparing himself for our conversation.
Herbert Sweat grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in central Brooklyn. The area was originally populated with Canarsie Indians and “bought” from them by the Dutch West India Company in the seventeenth century. The Dutch settled there and renamed it Bedford. Improvements in transportation and infrastructure made the area accessible to both downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan; therefore, the wealthier classes were lured to Bedford-Stuyvesant in the middle and late nineteenth century. At the same time, the region remained one of the only places in New York where free blacks could buy homes and land.
By the 1950s, Bedford-Stuyvesant was one of the largest black settlements in New York City. However, the housing stock deteriorated with time as landlords failed to invest in repair and upkeep, and by the 1960s the neighborhood was identified as a slum district. This is the Bed-Stuy where Sweat grew up.
He describes his background as essentially working-class. The family lived in a brownstone with a backyard, a birdbath, and a rose garden. His father was a veteran of the Korean War and lost a leg in the service. His father and his uncles belonged to the Masonic Lodge, and lodge meetings were held in the basement of the brownstone. Sweat remembers it as a mixed neighborhood—Italians, Germans, and African Americans living side by side. He acknowledges that the neighborhood was at the time
considered a ghetto. But as a child he did not see it that way.
We understood and was raised by almost each and every neighbor and it—it was a beautiful thing to observe or to be part of [a place] that was pictured to be the worst, but yet there is the beauty. Why? Over my years I’ve understood that was the tree that grew in Brooklyn; that was the life … And one would never believe the unity of that block …
Everything was in place; it was a mother and a father, and they were providing for the children and themselves, and the relatives would come on all the holidays, and we would go downtown to Robert Hall on Flatbush Avenue and get our Easter suits and coats, and we would find Easter eggs in the backyard and throughout the cellar and all over the house. The holidays were celebrated like in any other home on the block.
Like so many others from his generation, Sweat fondly remembers life on the streets as a kid, playing stickball and stoopball and all of the street games with a diverse population of kids. There was order in his life, even if just a few blocks away things could be profoundly different. He is not blind to the realities of Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1950s and 1960s. He knows that there were gangs and drugs and gambling and prostitution. But in his recollection, that kind of activity was happening on the main thoroughfares. The side streets were different: islands of respect, mutual care, and order.
Once he was forced to leave his block, life got harder and he changed. By the time he was in fourth grade, he was being bused from his neighborhood school to P.S. 221, a mostly white school on Empire Boulevard in East Flatbush.
Going to school on the bus was a beautiful ride, but getting off the bus was traumatizing, now that I look at it.
Bringing It All Back Home Page 18
