Here I am—sixty-two years old and left the war when I was nineteen years old, taken care of by Uncle Sam for eleven, almost twelve, years. So from that time that goes to show you that for all the other years, I was out here suffering; that’s what I’m trying to do now—to slow the suffering down of other veterans, and move right on.
Sweat was elected chair of the board of directors at BVSJ in 2010. In that capacity he pushes forward the organization’s aim of aiding people like himself. And he struggles every day with the impact of Vietnam on his life. In his mind, life since then has been a kind of cosmic payback for what he did as a “boonie rat,” a soldier in the bush, for twelve months nearly forty-five years ago.
Once you commit the murder of war, you can never forget that. War is that, murder. Someone will die. I was so young that I did not understand what I was doing. I didn’t only destroy human life and destroy villages, but I also destroyed myself. I suffer now from post-traumatic stress disorder and the situations, the missions, the air assaults, just the killing fields itself, remain vivid and in me forever. It’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of or have a flashback or a thought about Vietnam, about the incidences, about the missions, or about just the simple smell.
It’s the truth that I want to explain. It’s what holds me back from being a whole man. It’s—it’s the guilt—it’s the killing, it’s the not caring about human beings at that one little time, that year, that just keeps coming back and back.
13
LONG ROAD HOME: NEIL KENNY
It’s long been recognized that combat can have profound psychological consequences for soldiers. The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has argued that the problem can be traced as far back as the Iliad, where the wrath of Achilles follows the death of his beloved Patroclus. In the nineteenth century, soldiers affected by combat were said to have “soldier’s heart.” In the aftermath of World War I, their condition was identified as “shell shock,” and during World War II as “combat fatigue.” Until fairly recently, these conditions were considered to be short-term; the assumption was that symptoms showed up immediately and faded relatively quickly.
In 1988 the journal Science reported that fifteen to twenty years after the end of their service in Vietnam, veterans of that war were more than twice as likely to suffer “serious psychological problems”—alcohol abuse, major depression, and anxiety—as soldiers who did not serve in Vietnam.1 The recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder by the American Psychological Association in 1980 was, by the mid-1980s, provoking what the writer Leslie Roberts called a “seemingly intractable debate on how to prevent it,” as well as a discussion of “which veterans should be compensated.”
The Centers for Disease Control spent four years and $23 million conducting analytic interviews with some fifteen thousand veterans. In all, the health of about seven thousand Army veterans who served in Vietnam between 1965 and 1971 was compared with that of about seven thousand Vietnam-era noncombat veterans. The study concluded that about 14 percent of Vietnam veterans were having problems with alcohol abuse or dependence, as opposed to 9 percent of noncombat Vietnam-era veterans.
The New York City resident and Vietnam veteran Neil Kenny was eventually diagnosed with PTSD in 1995, twenty-six years after he left the Marine Corps.
Kenny speaks with what New Yorkers would recognize as a Lower East Side accent. A commanding presence, he is only about five feet eight inches tall and by his own admission sixty pounds heavier than he would like to be. His rigid bearing still contains traces of his military background. At sixty-three years old, his hair remains full and dark, and his face has retained a boyish appearance.
A self-described survivor, Kenny lived through a difficult childhood, thirteen months of service in Vietnam, and years of alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression. He was eventually diagnosed with disabling post-traumatic stress disorder, and his story is one example of how the symptoms of the syndrome can shape a life without destroying it.
He remains vigorously active and is ebullient, witty, and engaged as he communicates. While his symptoms have alienated some, including other veterans, he works hard to maintain his equilibrium. Some days, he says, he wakes up in a homicidal mood and it is best not to cross him. Overall, it’s best to become a member of his squad, or as Alice, whom he calls his bride of twenty-five years, puts it, to be “inside the wire.” If Kenny considers you a “friendly,” you will be all right.
Not that there isn’t plenty of venom to go around. In recent years, Kenny has begun to joke, I don’t have PTSD. I just have an anger problem.
Neil Joseph Kenny was born on March 13, 1949, and grew up in the Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses, a New York City public housing project built in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Proposed by Mayor La Guardia in 1943, the project housed 1,780 apartments with room for 6,850 persons.2 Designed by the architectural firm Eggers & Higgins, which, coincidentally, was owned by the father of his fellow veteran Richard Eggers,3 it was a remarkably safe place to grow up, Kenny recalls.
I had Chinatown. I grew up with blacks, grew up with Hispanics; it was a mixed neighborhood, which I didn’t think was really a bad thing. It really wasn’t. I grew up in a time when people could leave their doors open, when you lived in a project and things really weren’t happening. We all got along; we all got along on the Lower East Side. I’m a kid from the Lower East Side. I have fond memories of living in the projects.
Even as a child, Kenny dreamed of being a soldier.
One of the things that I’ve always had memories of, and sometimes it comes out to me in dreams, is I always had—I always played soldiers, always. I was always—it was an always thing.
While he remembers the Lower East Side projects as being safe, there are also memories of deprivation, violence, and even death. The family was poor, and Kenny can recall times when there was nothing to eat. Sometimes the family couldn’t pay the rent because of his father’s drinking. There was a lot of alcoholism in Kenny’s family, and drinking would become part of his story, too.
I always felt in many ways that my childhood was training for Vietnam. I did very well in Vietnam because I was trained for that and having a sixth sense about things. I think [it gave me] street knowledge; I think deprivation … that there’s a sense of survival about it.
He was sickly as a child, and until fifth grade he was very, very small for his age, but as he remembers, My mouth was never very small. Fights were common between the kids from the Smith projects and another nearby project, Knickerbocker Village. Despite his small stature, he could afford to be cheeky. For one thing, he had a big brother he could rely on. Also, kids in the neighborhood knew his uncle Frank, the toughest police officer in the Fifth Precinct. Kenny had the power to walk down the street, approach the meanest kids on the street, and tell them to move. Kids would be quick to admonish Kenny’s victim, “Don’t hit him. His uncle will beat you up.”
Violence seemed part of the natural order of things. He says, When I was about five or six, I was very young, and I remember seeing a dead guy right in front of my building. Someone had slashed this big black man, cutting him from his neck to his stomach in the parking lot.
By the seventh grade Kenny was getting into trouble in school for not doing his homework and mouthing off. His poor academic performance may have been due, in part, to circumstances at home. One night his father came home in a rage and began a physical confrontation with Kenny’s mother, breaking her leg in two places.
I can remember the sound when her leg broke. I said, “Holy shit.”
It was a turning point in the Kennys’ lives. Their mother and father never really lived together again. After his father left, his mother was in bed for two and a half days, and Kenny stayed home to help. When he emerged after a few days, he ran into Uncle Frank, the police officer, who asked where he had been. Kenny told him about his mother. When his uncle came to Kenny’s apartment, he took one look at his sister and called for an ambulance. She was in danger of l
osing her leg because gangrene was starting to set in. At the hospital, doctors wanted to amputate her leg, but Kenny recalls her protesting, telling them to let her die instead. She kept the leg.
The Kenny family moved out of the Smith Houses into a small apartment in Bay Ridge to live with Kenny’s mother’s family. There were already a lot of people living there. Now, with five additional bodies, including four kids, it was stressful. Nevertheless, Kenny, his brother, and his sister would get up every morning and take the train into Manhattan to go to St. James School. The train rides were educational in and of themselves. Kenny recalls sitting on the train one morning and seeing a man in a business suit leaning against the door, grabbing his chest and making noises of distress. He slid down onto the floor. At the Canal Street stop people dragged him off, propped him up against the wall along with his bag, and got back on the subway. No one stayed with him. No one made an effort to contact the police or bring him any kind of aid.
I realize today he was having a heart attack. But as a kid what I thought was really weird was to observe the guy slide against the door and he was lying there with people stepping over him to get on and off the train.
Kenny’s father found a one-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge on Eighty-Fourth Street and Third Avenue. His mother took a place around the corner on Eighty-Third Street, the very street she had lived on as a three-year-old. As a poor kid from the Lower East Side, Kenny never felt that he fit in with the Bay Ridge “rich kids.” He just didn’t have the same breadth of cultural knowledge. They used to play football in front of Fort Hamilton High School, at the southern tip of Brooklyn. One day Kenny got into an argument with another kid. Kenny recalls saying, “Listen, there’s one thing I want to know before I kick your ass. Are you a nigger, or are you a spic?”
The boy told him he was Lebanese. Kenny vividly recalls feeling embarrassed. He had never heard the word “Lebanese” before and had no idea what the kid was talking about.
Sports became an arena where he could vent some of his frustration, although the release wasn’t always appropriate. Once, Kenny recalls, during a football game he noticed a “ringer” on the opposing team. He was sure he knew the kid, a fifteen-year-old, who was playing against twelve-year-olds. He insisted that his coach speak to the other coach, but his coach refused. So Kenny took matters into his own hands. Marching across the field, he got into the face of the opposing coach and remembers saying: “You’ve got to get that fucking Greek out of here. You’re cheating.”
The coach responded by threatening to slap Kenny in the face. Kenny made a derogatory remark, and when the coach began to swing at him, Kenny hit the coach in the side of the head with his helmet. Kenny’s family backed him up, but he was thrown out of the game anyway. He was told to leave the field, but he refused, standing on the sidelines to watch the rest of the game.
Eventually, Kenny decided to walk away from school. At the bright age of sixteen, I set out to go to Wall Street to make my millions.
He got a job making $60 a week at the Wall Street law firm of Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, imagining that he would become a great lawyer. He got a suit, a briefcase, a pipe, and special tobacco and made his way from Bay Ridge to work each morning. The job did not last long, though how or why it ended is lost to the mists of memory.
In 1966, Kenny’s brother George joined the Air Force. Meanwhile, Kenny recalls hanging out at the candy store across the street from his apartment, smoking cigarettes and reading the newspaper, while the other kids his age went to school. In the evening, he would hang out in front of the Hinsch ice cream parlor at Eighty-Sixth Street and Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn.
In the spring of 1967, the soldier in him emerged as he read in the New York Daily News about a battle at Hill 881 in the northern section of South Vietnam, where 155 Marines were killed. This was history in the making; this was real. Suddenly he realized that he wanted to be part of it, he wanted the experience that his father’s generation had. When Kenny’s brother came home on leave and told the family that he was headed to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to learn how to make maps for aerial reconnaissance, Kenny was worried that his older brother would be killed. At the same time, Kenny was eager to enlist and serve in Vietnam. As it turns out, he would become intimately familiar with Hill 881 as a part of the Khe Sanh battlefield. In fact, his life would be marked by it.
I had this great plan. I said, “Well, I’ll join the Marine Corps,” because I figured I was going to get drafted anyway. So I said, “Well, if I’m going to get drafted, I want to go with the best that I can,” and so I joined the Marine Corps. And lo and behold, as I’m going away to the Marine Corps, my brother is getting out of the Air Force.
When I enlisted in the Marine Corps and I went to Fort Hamilton for the physical, the guy did the physical and he said, “All right, you’re 4-F.” I said, “What?” He said, “Yeah, that elbow. I’m not taking a chance on that.” I said, “What do you mean, 4-F?” I said, “I want to go.” He said, “You want to go?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “One-A.” Because, apparently, I mean [my elbow] curves because I broke it. They weren’t going to take me. I actually could have avoided military service. [Laughs.]
Kenny graduated from boot camp on August 29, 1967, and from there went to infantry training at Camp Geiger, which was part of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Then he headed home for ten days on leave. While home, his beloved grandfather told him that when he came back from the war, “you and me are going down to [the] bar and have a beer and a steak together.” There was no “if”; no doubt. His grandfather was the only member of the family who expressed such confidence.
When he reached Vietnam, he loved it. I was home, he says.
Arriving in Vietnam in January 1968, Kenny was assigned to Lima Company, Third Battalion, Twenty-Sixth Marine Regiment. Within a few days, the siege of Khe Sanh would begin. In the late autumn of 1967, the U.S. military, led by General William Westmoreland, had become convinced that the North Vietnamese were preparing a major assault, although they did not know its timing or objectives. Westmoreland believed that the NVA wanted to replicate its success against the French in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. North Vietnamese troops had surrounded and laid siege to the French outpost. Defeated, the French lost their hold on Vietnam as a colonial possession.
General Westmoreland and President Lyndon B. Johnson insisted that no such defeat be inflicted on U.S. Marines in Vietnam. As a result, in the days and weeks leading up to the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive, reinforcements were added to the key base at Khe Sanh. Kenny was one of those added during the buildup. He would serve in I Corps in the northern part of South Vietnam through the spring, summer, and into the fall of that year.
Despite the passage of so many years, Kenny can still recall his first artillery barrage.
I remember the first time they hit the place. I was sleeping in the bunk. By this time we were living underground, you know. We had dug in and we had this bunker and everything, and Skip comes in and he says, “Get up, get up, get up.” I said, “Fuck you; I did my watch. Get the fuck out of here. Let the fucking lieutenant get me.” He was like, “Get up.” I said, “I’m not getting up.” He said, “I’ll fucking shoot you; get up.” And then I said, “Then shoot me, motherfucker, because I’m not getting up.” And he’s like—he just said, “Oh, fuck you.” That’s all he said. He didn’t, he wasn’t yelling anymore and it’s like—one thing I learned, like—when somebody is yelling and screaming, you’re usually pretty safe. You can duck this. But when all the emotion is gone and they say, “You just want to sit down,” and you’ve got to really lean forward to listen, there’s no emotion, you know you’re cooked.
Something said to me, “You better get up,” you know, and I got up and I grabbed my weapon and I went out and we were running down the trench line and he was in front of me and I said, “Skip, Skip, Skip.” And he stopped and turned around and he said, “What the fuck is…?” I said, “What’s that fucking noise?” you know, and
I pointed up. And he looked at me and he said, “It’s incoming.” And I was like, “Oh.” But he was like—it was like shocking to him that I didn’t know what this was, but to me it was like, well, why would I? I had never heard that before. You know [a] 120 rocket [is] coming in; it’s kind of like a freight train and a fire engine and a siren, and it’s all screaming and like Mach 2, and you just hope it don’t hit you, you know. It’s not personal; it really isn’t—it’s not personal.
He had his “adventures,” as he calls them, at Khe Sanh, doing things to alleviate the boredom and fear. He recalls that he and his friends stole the place blind, with raids on the commissary for food and water. He played pranks on other Marines, and he made friends.
With the lifting of the siege of Khe Sanh, the Third Battalion, Twenty-Sixth Marines carried out a maneuver on April 14. Dubbed the “Great Easter Egg Hunt” by the grunts, it was an effort to take Hill 881 North. According to the historians John Prados and Ray Stubbe, “more than five thousand rockets had been fired during the course of the siege” from that hill. The troops assembled on Hill 881 South, having moved there during the night. Despite concerns about the condition of the Marines who had fought through the siege, they were raring to go. By midafternoon the operation was over, and they had retaken the hill. Six Marines had been killed, nineteen wounded. As for the NVA, 106 bodies were recovered from 881 North, with their total losses estimated to be three times that number.4
In some ways, Kenny’s war had not yet begun. He made his first confirmed kill, a North Vietnamese soldier, on July 4, 1968. He tells the story.
Killing is holding a thunder stick, as a novel would call the weapon, and having the power of God. I decide if you’re going to live or you’re going to die; I’m making that decision.
Bringing It All Back Home Page 20
