Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  Aggression chases fear. Anger chases sadness. So when you get that whack on the back, and you’re stiff, and you’re sad, and you say, “What do we do now?” and someone says, “We get payback,” that’s anger chasing depression. So anger and aggression become important tools. They are cultivated.

  We didn’t have enough food. We literally didn’t have enough food when we were paratroopers in Nam. That’s not true now. We really were always hungry. And they’d say, “Keep you lean and mean.” Lean and mean. You’re hungry, you’re angry.

  The next time I hear an explosion and a cry, I’m going to run to that as quickly as I can. And I revisit that. And I revisit that. And I revisit that. Why? Because if there’s an explosion and a cry, I don’t want to be the last one there. It’s a pride thing.

  That’s the aspect of PTSD and the Vietnam experience that is of significance now. Vietnam is gone in one way but remains profoundly present in another.

  As New York City’s Vietnam veterans evaluate the long-term significance of Vietnam in their lives, the experience becomes something like a kaleidoscope—a single event understood in a vast number of often contradictory ways.

  Louis Marcello, who grew up in Brooklyn and served with the Fourth Infantry Division, 1967–68, loved his time in the service and the men with whom he fought, despite his wounds. He felt then and feels now a deep bond with the people in his unit.

  I loved Vietnam. That’s the only thing that put a damper on it—seeing so many of my, my friends getting wounded. It was the people I was with. I loved the people I was with.

  Some veterans, like John Di Sanza, value their experiences in the military highly. Di Sanza, who grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Florida, is an artist and author. He says:

  I tell you, you know, it turned out, as strange as it may seem, it turned out to be the best thing I ever did for myself, because I’m at this point right now, with all the suffering and things I’ve gone through in my life, I would not be where I am. You know, I’ve got a wonderful family; I’ve got wonderful children. I’ve got a wonderful wife. I’m an artist; I’m a writer. I mean, if I didn’t go, who only knows what would have happened to me? You know, I might have been dead.

  John Flanagan, who served as a combat helicopter pilot in Vietnam with the First Cavalry Division and went on to participate in the development of military training devices, thinks military service was a key element in his life. It, and Vietnam, gave him the opportunity to mature.

  I told you about growing up in Brooklyn and didn’t think I was ever going to see anything more than New Jersey probably. I wasn’t going to be anything more than probably a civil servant someplace just making it through. It’s changed me; it’s given me confidence; it’s given me something to be. Nobody can take away from me the time that I was an Army helicopter pilot … not only an Army helicopter pilot: in combat, and in the best damn unit going, bar none.

  I know everybody has got fears and stuff like that, but it’s how you cope with it, you know, and I’m probably a calmer person because I don’t have to show people what I’m doing. I’ve thought things out. Also, I got pretty good situation awareness. It’s about knowing what I’m going to do in any situation. I mean, it gave me confidence; it gave me an education; it gave me a sense of an environment where I could stand up and speak my mind and say this is right and this is wrong. The Army has given me an awful lot.

  Others are forced to measure the costs of their service. Speaking of a friend, Frank Arce, a Marine from the Bronx, recalls:

  Johnny failed out of school, and the next thing you know, he was driving trucks in the Nam and he ran over a land mine. Whoever it was that was with him got blown up and got killed. When I came back from the Nam, I went to visit Johnny, and Johnny was a vegetable—realistically, he was a vegetable. His kids had been born vegetables—Agent Orange—and we didn’t even know what the hell that was back then, you know, in ’69 and ’70 coming home. We had no idea what the hell is Agent Orange. I mean, I’m sure we had seen it sprayed or whatever, but who knew your kid was going to be born, you know, with one eye or whatever the case might be or mentally unstable, you know. I guess that was the hardest part to swallow of the war—we lost not only so many guys over there but so many guys over here who came and were able to make it back, and most of them, I bet you if you asked them, they probably will tell you, “I wish I had died back then.”

  Peter Meloro echoes the feeling of many when he articulates the value of military service.

  The one thing the Army taught me … you learn … in basic training when, you know, they take you as an individual and shave your head and, you know, put everyone in the same clothes so that everyone looks like a twin, you know, for the most part and then started beating you down individually. Not physically, but mentally beating you down in an effort to reduce the individual and create the team. It’s an extreme example, [but because of it] I think I’ve understood the team concept in business. Normally, if you get everybody on the same page, [you are] much more successful … I don’t think I understood [that] in basic training. These people are nuts, I thought, who were in basic training.

  But after a while, you know, afterward as you grow and you move on, you say, “That’s the reason.” Just to lose the individuality and create the team so that everyone’s got everybody’s back and everyone is working together for a common goal. That’s good in areas of business, so from that perspective …

  But it is a view that has relevance well beyond the business sphere. In November 2003, Al Singerman, a Brooklyn native and past president of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 49 in Westchester County, New York, described to me some of the volunteer work he had been doing since his retirement.

  I’m going to tell you something. If you talk to a large enough group of veterans, you will find that … they carry this tremendous burden from going to war, whether it’s physical suffering [or] mental suffering. You won’t hear how they won [the war], or complain about it, or … say, “I wouldn’t do it again.” And, in fact, most of the guys that I know who are members of veterans’ organizations like DAV [Disabled American Veterans] or VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars], because of their service, I mean, in going to war or serving their country, have learned the lesson that there’s a responsibility of doing good. That’s what their service taught them.

  Some men and women seem to have put Vietnam in its place: behind them. Frank DeSantis, who passed away in 2009, told me in 2005 that Vietnam had ceased being part of his everyday life. The war, he thought, was in the past, and he had moved on. In this respect, I suspect DeSantis spoke for many Vietnam veterans when he said:

  I don’t bother to read books about Vietnam; I don’t want to know the history of it. When I’m at a meeting with guys and they know too much, you know, they just know every little bit of information about everything that happened, and it’s like, you didn’t know that then. You researched it; you went online; you’re trying to do every bit of research about the Battle for Hill 227 … I don’t remember what hill it was, sometimes I remember the name, sometimes I don’t, and I kind of remember what was going on, and sometimes I may be a little out of sequence, but I don’t want to go on the Internet and look up and know every little thing.

  For others, Vietnam is part of every waking moment. Rudy Dent, a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam and a retired New York City firefighter, says:

  Someone had asked me about flashbacks, and it’s not about a flashback; how about a flash-present? It’s there every moment of every day. I don’t know how to explain it; it’s a feeling that’s always there. I’m at a loss for words for it.

  It’s always there.

  It doesn’t go away.

  16

  LIVING MEMORIALS

  There are tangible reminders of the Vietnam dead all over the country as well as in the city of New York. The New York City Parks Department maintains twenty-seven parks, playgrounds, and memorials dedicated to New Yorkers who died fighting in Vietnam. Queens has eight;
Brooklyn nine. Manhattan and the Bronx have three each, and Staten Island has four.

  Although the definitions are slippery, there is a distinction between a memorial and a monument. A monument honors a landmark or physical structure. A memorial, by contrast, is defined by the National Park Service as having “primarily commemorative” purposes.1 Therefore, a memorial reflects on history in some way. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at 55 Water Street follows in this tradition, commemorating and honoring those who fought in Vietnam. There are, however, many ways to honor a soldier’s service. The idea of a living memorial has been around since at least World War I, and the purpose behind such memorials is to do or produce something useful.2

  Many veterans do exactly this. Among my interviewees, Danny Friedman, Fred Louis, Neil Kenny, Sue O’Neill, Joan Furey, and many others work to advance public understanding about veterans and their lives. Kenny works with Marines recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Furey has recorded oral histories with other scholars and given interviews. Friedman visits high school classrooms to share his experience. O’Neill continues to write about what Vietnam taught her. Anthony Wallace in his quiet way has adopted this role as my personal tutor.

  Such an undertaking is not new for him. Raised in the Cornerstone Baptist Church as a leader, made a noncommissioned officer in the Army, and ordained a church deacon at age twenty-two, Wallace has always been a teacher. He took on this role from virtually the moment he returned to the United States. After being released from the hospital, he recalls:

  I sat down and wrote a letter. This is in the summer of 1970. I wrote to President Nixon and told him who I was. I gave him my name, my rank, and I said that I was in Vietnam at such and such a time, point A to point B, and wounded on this day. In other words, trying to give them enough credence to know that, hey, you know, I’m no phony. This is the truth … that there were three other people who were in the bunker [and were killed]. And I was able to give two names. Pepe’s name—I didn’t know his full name. They could not find anything on Pepe. President Nixon, the White House, wrote a letter back and said, “Your request has been referred to the Department of the Army.”

  I wanted the name and address of the next of kin. I get Thurman Wolfe, and I get William Di Santis; I get their next of kin. I sat down and wrote a letter to the families and told them who I was and that I was with their sons. Wolfe’s parents or mother—they were from Robeline, Louisiana. I had pictures of Wolfe, a couple of pictures just like this, and I sent them. And the neighbors advised her don’t write [back] to him, he’s probably looking at trying to get your insurance money. So she wrote me and said please don’t write back.

  One day, I get a letter from Aurora, Illinois, and I open the letter and it said, “I prayed to God for somebody like you. You did not put your telephone number in your letter. When you get this letter, you call me, even if you have to call collect.” That was Bill Di Santis’s mother. And I called her as soon as I finished reading the letter, and she said to me again, “I prayed to God for somebody like you.”

  She says, “I have to ask you; did my son suffer when he died?” I asked her, “Well, what did the Army tell you?” She replied, “They indicated he was in a bunker that took a direct hit.” And I said to her, “That’s exactly what happened, and there is no way Bill suffered; it was too fast.” And she said, “Thank you.” I then said, “Well, I want to come to see you,” and she said, “When?” So we set up a time.

  I flew out to Chicago, rented a car, and drove to Aurora, based on the directions they had given me. They lived on a semi-farm, and I remember driving up like off this long road and then into their property and the house was like off in a distance. I drove up, stopped the car, and got out, and there was a man on the lawn mower, and he stopped and he looked at me, and I looked at him. He said, “You must be Mr. Wallace.” I said, “You must be Mr. Di Santis.” We shook hands and we went up on the porch and we talked awhile and we talked about his son. I told him about when you guys were sending the care packages and we would—you’d send the pepperoni and how Bill shared that with us and we got—we talked about those few things, and he then took me inside and I met Bill’s mother and his sister, and we talked. And we—they fixed dinner and we talked more and more, and I went to stay two days. I ended up staying four days.

  He was an engineer for Burlington Northern, and that next morning he took me to his job, the train yards, and every place we would go, he’d say, “This is Tony Wallace. He’s from New York. He was with Bill in Vietnam. He was with Bill in Vietnam.” He took me to relatives. He took me to Bill’s grandmother. He took me to so many folks, and they all greeted me with warmth; they treated me like a king. Then I have to say that there was no question about me being a brother, Bill being [white] … there was no question—no feeling of anything where you’d be afraid or apprehensive of going into this setting. No way.

  He took me to the college he [Bill] went to. He even took me to the cemetery to see where he was buried. He took me fishing, and I had really never been fishing, but he took me fishing. And the thing was, we were able to talk, and I was able to share certain experiences that we had over in Vietnam. He thanked me for making this effort to come and see them. He said, “You’ll never realize what it meant to the family to do what you did by coming out here.”

  When I got back home, those guilt feelings began to dissipate.

  Wallace has also continued to make peace with his experiences by remaining engaged with them. He speaks to school groups in Brooklyn about his time in Vietnam. He takes part in events aimed at younger veterans at Brooklyn College. He’s created a database of the casualties sustained by the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam, his unit, so that he can better understand how the unit worked. In spring 2012 he will become a docent, or “Yellow Hat,” a National Park Service volunteer at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. In that role he will help people find names on the black granite wall and share his experiences.

  Folks often ask, why do Vietnam veterans say [to each other], “Welcome home”? They don’t realize where that came from. The fact is that when you came home, no one said “Welcome home” to you. So we have to do this for ourselves. When a man sees another Nam vet and they greet them and shake hands, they say, “Welcome home.” That’s the appreciation that they know and have an idea what that person went through and can appreciate who they are. Nobody else can have that. That’s their special time, and when they’re able to do that, nothing else has to be said. They can keep walking.

  Over the years that have elapsed since I began this project, Tony Wallace and I have grown close. We have made many trips together on Veterans Day. In 2008 we spent a cold, drizzly afternoon at the wall in Washington, listening to various speakers tell us of their experiences and about the meaning of the wall. The green of the National Mall lawn was covered with folding chairs and umbrellas as the afternoon wound down. As we were leaving, Tony sought out a homeless veteran he had met at the wall earlier in the year and gave the man a new coat and a new pair of shoes that he had brought from New York just for that purpose. We chatted with him for a while and took photographs as the night gathered.

  After we got back to the hotel room we shared and prepared for sleep, from the other side of the room Tony said, I think it is time for you to see this. Already in his pajamas, he knelt down and peeled back the pajama top, revealing the deep and ugly scars from the blast that had killed Wolfe, Pepe, and Di Santis. The blast had changed his life forever. There on his knees he exposed his back to me for several moments. It is very hard to describe what I saw. The skin had been torn; it was discolored. There were scars that had not healed properly, and you could see the effects of several skin grafts that had been done to try to close the wounds. Where the skin was not torn, it was peppered with scars where shrapnel had entered his body. Tony rose and rebuttoned his top.

  Now you know was all he said.

  After his return from Vietnam, John Hamill (at left) joined Vietnam Vetera
ns Against the War and was arrested on the steps of the United States Supreme Court. As he was hauled away, John remembers a woman shouting out, “I don’t think what you’re doing is good for the troops.” John replied, “Lady, we are the troops.” (Photograph by Bernie Edelman, courtesy of John Hamill and Bernie Edelman)

  John Hamill enlisted at the age of seventeen. Later on, he wrote his own caption for this picture: “IT WAS ALL OVER BUT THE FIGHTING—for John Hamill as he smiled for the camera, relieved to be done with the rigors of Airborne training in 1967. A month later he would join the hard-fighting paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade as a combat medic in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.” (Photograph courtesy of John Hamill)

  Nurse Susan Kramer met her future husband, Paul O’Neill, in Vietnam. Paul took this picture at the time. After the war, they became involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and later joined the Peace Corps. (Photograph courtesy of Susan and Paul O’Neill)

  Joseph Giannini commanded a Marine rifle platoon. He has practiced criminal law on Long Island for more than thirty years and hosts a local television show, East End Veterans. (Photograph courtesy of Joseph Giannini)

  Anthony Wallace in Tay Ninh Province, March 1970. After the war, Wallace earned a B.A. from Brooklyn College and returned to work at Con Edison, where he is still employed. (Photograph courtesy of Anthony Wallace)

  Joan Furey worked as a nurse at an evacuation hospital in Pleiku, in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, from January 1969 through January 1970, earning a Bronze Star. Much of the area was inhabited by indigenous tribal peoples known as Montagnards. Furey recalls: “This was a Montagnard’s baby whose father brought her to the hospital in critical condition due to severe dysentery. We treated her, actually saved her life, and he was so overjoyed, he showed up with some rice wine and Montagnard bracelets for us … If you look closely at the baby, you’ll note she has a bunch of them on her left arm. At the time, everyone said that meant she was a Montagnard princess, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.” (Photograph courtesy of Joan Furey)