by Doug Stanton
• • •
When I meet Stan in Afghanistan, he tells me that he wants to understand what happened to him in Vietnam. I encourage him to organize a reunion of the platoon, and my wife and I decamp for the first of two trips to Huntington Beach, California, where some of his platoon-mates gather and a shared story begins to coalesce out of disparate, and often terrifying and darkly humorous, narratives.
When Stan returns home from the reunion, he continues writing. More memories spool out, many of them about the challenge he feels years later of living in a world, a civilian one, a world void of war’s dangers.
“I guess for me and thousands like me, that’s part of the problem,” Stan writes, explaining the self-confusion wrought by having been “asked to kill a bad guy at work on Monday of one week and then try[ing] to go out on a civilized date the Monday of the following week with a beautiful young woman, who has no idea what her date, a combat veteran, is all about.”
Time can telescope years; a single moment can be so dense that it contains a universe. For the beholder of these perceptions, the effect can be terrifying. Memories strobe back and forth on one’s consciousness, whipsawing emotions and thought processes. What Stan decided he needed was to return to Vietnam. By this journey, he hoped to untangle a year of his life so dense that its every minute seemed to have lasted a century. He hoped to come home, finally.
Think of it this way: perhaps the first step he took off the first helicopter in Vietnam, the first push of his boot into its soil, was the first step he took toward home.
En route to Vietnam in April 2014, when we are in the airport lounge in Tokyo, he tells me that he’s afraid how he’ll react when he meets a Vietnamese person. Will he be scared? Will he want to punch the person? He doesn’t think so. But still, he believes that these feelings can come up, and his awareness of them within himself seems brave.
He admits to harboring anger, fear, resentment, even hatred for the Vietnamese people, and his acknowledgment of this also strikes me as an act of bravery. At the same time, he explains he doesn’t feel any need to confront an enemy, or, specifically, the former enemy, the soldiers of the NVA and VC.
He wants to see the young man he was, and better know the man he’s become.
* * *
I. Reports of the March 16, 1968, massacre of some five hundred civilians at My Lai by the 23rd Infantry Division soldiers wouldn’t come to light until November 1969, with the publication of news reporter Seymour Hersh’s stories.
PART III
HOMECOMING
2014
Colorado to Vietnam
Find him now, back in Vietnam.
We are a group of four: Stan Parker; Tom Soals, his former platoon-mate; Anne Stanton, my wife; and me. We’ve spent the day walking Saigon’s streets.
Tom and Stan haven’t seen each other in forty-six years. They’ve come together now because I called them separately and asked them to show me where they had fought, and where parts of them had died, in Vietnam. Both of them possess an abiding love for the men in the platoon and are eager to get reacquainted.
Stan has spent the years disliking the Vietnamese and parts of himself—or, rather, he’s been ashamed of himself for a long time about a lot of things (that day he and the platoon started to burn the family’s rice outside their hooch, for instance). After surviving Vietnam, he felt in some deep part of himself that there was not another place for him but in the military, in the middle of conflict.
Tom, I think, has spent some of these years wondering how to understand the meaning of his fighting in Vietnam. Often it feels as if it occurred in another lifetime, to another person. Tom’s father was a Navy captain and there’d not been much question that his son wouldn’t serve, but neither was Tom eager to die and fight in a war many of his peers wanted to avoid. His forfeiture of his college draft deferment, which his father had not opposed, was a brave, considered act and affirmation of his family’s legacy, especially, as Tom saw it, while so many others without his advantages were being drafted. He will tell me that this return to Vietnam is overwhelming at times, as it is for Stan too. Stan, however, spent his remaining professional life in military service. Tom worked as a surveyor in Portland, Oregon; a building contractor; an outdoor camping supply employee; and an avid mountaineer, this last providing him with the adrenaline thrills he missed after leaving the Army. If Tom has lived further outside of, or away from, his experiences in Vietnam, Stan has been revisiting them during his long military career. The transformative experiences are potent for both men and never far from their minds. I think that each would still die for the other, though they may not agree on issues that pundits and cable news use to divide and atomize American society.
The truth is, the Vietnam veteran’s journey home is entwined with a military and political “event” that tore America in half, the war itself, while the act of homecoming is neither political nor military, but emotional. Ironically, a war that split a country often deepened the bonds between the young men and women fighting its battles.
• • •
Our guide for the two-week trip is Bill Ervin, a former Marine who married a Vietnamese woman he met after the war, named Anh Kan. Bill Ervin fought near Khe Sanh, and Anh survived the war but not without witnessing the violence inflicted by American and North Vietnamese Army troops. They are a perfect partnership. Bill Ervin understands what American veterans of Vietnam expect to find when they return to the country. And Anh, a former news anchor on a large Vietnamese network, is affable and diplomatic as Stan and Tom’s liaison with the Vietnamese people we meet.
We first visit the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, walking among dozens of wall-sized photographs graphically depicting battlefields covered with the mangled dead, which is to say these photos are bald depictions of what Americans did to the Vietnamese people. Landscapes burned by rolling waves of napalm. Bodies draped across the spindly shards of trees in bombed-out areas. The images smack you as you stand in the smartly lit gallery.
The museum depicts the blood and guts of combat in a way you never see in an American museum about the Vietnam War. It’s also true that it’d be possible to mount the same graphic exhibition about combat during World War II. People are killed in all kinds of ways, but it tends to look the same, with blood and limbs everywhere.
During the war, millions of gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed on miles of jungle and countryside in order to deny the enemy sanctuary or cover. The resultant birth defects caused by Agent Orange range from children born missing limbs, to blindness, to severe spinal deformation. . . . In room after room, Stan and Tom stand before enormous photos of children damaged by Agent Orange. Two women, both with deeply bowed spines, sit at a nearby table soliciting donations for Agent Orange victims.The rooms go on and on. There is a related war museum in Hanoi, in the country’s north, which is milder in its depiction of war’s horrors. Our tour guide informs us that the Saigon museum is designed intentionally to be a more intense experience, as a way to punish the South for fighting the North in the first place. It’s as if to say, “See what happens when we fight?” Most of the museum’s patrons are Europeans, judging by the accents, and German and French at that. After several hours of wandering the exhibits, past other photos of NVA soldiers celebrating victory in battle, Stan and Tom are ashen faced and exhausted.
Our next stop is Cu Chi, where Stan and the platoon had first rolled up after landing in-country in mid-December 1967. Cu Chi was where they saw Raquel Welch dance onstage and where Stan had come face-to-face with his first NVA soldier, the man with the red star on his pith helmet, whom he was supposed to kill but did not.
We’re relieved to be escaping the museum and Saigon’s intense traffic of motorbikes. Bill Ervin pilots our van, Anh riding shotgun, through the city’s sprawling industrial parks and into greener countryside. The area of Cu Chi has long been a vacation spot for Saigon residents; it’s about thirty miles from the city center’s opera house, yet heavily wooded. Today,
the Vietnamese government has made this former Viet Cong sanctuary into a tourist park.
We pull up in our van and pay an admission fee to walk beyond a fence and enter into what was once part of a battlefield. The Cu Chi bunkers of the enemy army, the underground meeting rooms, and kitchens, as well as the tunnels, are available as a historical amusement and curiosity for paying customers to crawl and walk through. At nearly every corner of a groomed path, mannequins dressed as 1960s North Vietnamese soldiers appear to rear up, having been posed by park personnel in various combat stances. It’s spooky and weird, even for me. Stan and Tom shy away from the mannequins whenever they see them up ahead. I can’t tell if the Vietnamese government has placed the mannequins around the place to antagonize visiting Americans, but then I think, no. That’s just my Americanness speaking.
At certain points, tourists like us—including Germans, French, Italians, Vietnamese—walk down a few hard-packed clay steps and, if they stoop over far enough, enter one of the famed tunnels of the Cu Chi complex. I am immediately claustrophobic, hunched over, essentially walking quickly ahead in a duck-like way, while Stan, at five feet nine, zips through the tunnel but says nothing. He doesn’t enjoy it. The air inside is humid and smells like a recently excavated riverbank—not an unpleasant smell, but in a place whose history is filled with so much bloodshed, it’s a bad smell.
We duck in and out of the tunnels and continue down the paths and occasionally confront the mannequins set around the park. Gunfire rings out, which makes the sight of the soldier mannequins even more ominous. Stan and Tom seem jumpy at the sound of the gunfire—the shooting grows incessant. Like a firefight. Bam bam bam, a metallic sound banging through the silver leaves of humid foliage. We follow the sound of the shooting and up ahead see some light in the tree canopy and come upon an open-air snack bar dotted with wooden tables. You can stand at the snack bar and order a Coke and sandwich and some ice cream and look ahead through a chain-link fence at a gun range.
Stan and Tom just stare at this. The shooting noise is muted by the canopy of woods, but still, it’s loud, and I realize that this is likely how the gunfire sounded in these very woods when they were here in December 1967 and January 1968. It had to sound exactly like this because the guns being shot here are the same weapons used by the NVA. And this sound seems to be soaking into Stan’s and Tom’s consciousness, for they are growing ever quieter. This is a grim place to be.
We can see people, tourists, standing in a dugout, shooting the guns. They’ve paid a dollar a bullet to fire off a thirty-round clip at a paper bull’s-eye target fifty feet away. That’s not cheap; it takes about three seconds to fire off a clip.
I think the gun range idea is kind of strange, like operating a guillotine at an exhibit about the French Revolution.
• • •
We wander into a large gazebo area, the roof made of high-overhead thatch, and take seats on wooden folding chairs. There’s a movie screen up front, and soon we’re watching a black-and-white documentary about the Cu Chi area during the war. The Vietnamese call this “the American War,” not “the Vietnam War.” The footage is grainy, and the subtitled narration has the packaged feel of propaganda, which it is: the movie’s narration makes fun of the American invaders who tend to flee from the enemy at the slightest hint of danger.
Suddenly from behind us, someone fires off a pistol—it’s actually at the gun range but it seems closer—and Stan, sitting in the front row in his folding chair and watching this movie, jumps up and stiffens and goes into a spasm and then comes back down in his chair all within a matter of a second.
He lands and sits quietly, frozen. I can see his neck turn a little this way and that, as if he’s scanning to see who’s noticed his flinching at the sound of the gunshot. Mostly he just sits and stares straight ahead as the movie endlessly plays on, telling us more about the history of the area, that “Cu Chi is a 123-square-kilometer park,” that the Vietnamese of the nineteenth century picnicked here, and so on, and about how cowardly the Americans were when they were here and how heroic the Vietnamese acted in the war. The movie ends, we all get up, and we’re tired. I ask Tom and Stan how they feel. They mumble something; they don’t want to answer the question directly. It would be to admit the terribleness of their experience here, that they had been hated by the North Vietnamese, which is an odd thing to state; of course, the Vietnamese had hated them. They’d been at war and killed each other by the thousands and thousands. But it was the hate they felt back home in the States, after the war, that haunts these guys. To realize they’ve also been hated, with perhaps as much vigor, by the Vietnamese is a shock. Or unpleasant. Or just plain sad to understand.
We walk quietly back to the van and drive back into Saigon, to the hustle and flow, where soon we are ensconced on the street with a friendly bar host who delivers a bucket packed with ice and bottles of Tiger beer sticking up in the ice like brown glass flowers.
Stan begins to cry in the dark humid night. He’s wondering, he says, if we will judge him for something that happened earlier that day at Cu Chi, jumping the way he did at the sound of gunfire, when no one else reacted to the sound, including Tom. Of course not, we say, we won’t judge you, and we mean it.
Traffic flows past in a momentous stream, just feet away from where we sit on the street’s curb. Sometimes I can feel the wind of passing vehicles on my toes in their sandals. It feels odd to have bare feet in Vietnam after hearing Stan tell stories for so long about how violent the place was.
Stan grows quiet. His admission of vulnerability seems to be conjuring something like a confession, for he tells us, breathing in suddenly, that his son has a bone condition that may be connected to Agent Orange. He himself brought a rash back from Vietnam. After seeing a doctor for more than a year, he could never get a diagnosis. He’s crying again. He says he “gave” this malady to his son by virtue of his having been exposed to the chemical (and which some studies have also concluded). It’s then that Tom Soals tells us that two of his grandchildren were born with birth defects, including blindness and gastrointestinal problems, and died before the age of six. He too thinks this was caused by his exposure to Agent Orange.
I try to grasp the wreckage that Tom, Stan, and the Vietnamese are accounting for and have been living with. Granddaughters blinded by something that happened to Tom more than forty-five years earlier? This seems a trick of time; it is a trick of time. How can disease jump like that? And why hasn’t Tom gotten sick? He may yet. Many thousands of Vietnam veterans suffer from disorders caused, it’s suspected, by exposure to the toxin. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has been reluctant to admit a causal relationship between Agent Orange and these maladies; no one has accepted responsibility for the dioxin’s use in Vietnam, which may have resulted in hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese children being born with birth defects.
We can practically reach out and touch the thousands of motorbikes bleating past us. The commotion is, counterintuitively, soothing. As we sit on this street corner in Saigon, Tom and Stan realize that the Vietnamese people, the people of today, couldn’t be more gracious. There’s a strange disconnect between this warmth on the street and the graphic horror of the war museum. Later in our trip, in Hanoi, we hire a tour guide—twenty-four years old and born well after the war was over. For him, the war is something his grandparents fought in, the French and the Americans. Even the older Vietnamese seem to have forgotten the animosities. The economy in Vietnam is robust; Facebook works fine, if nonetheless subject to censorship; and Bill Clinton is an excellent American, for he opened relations with Vietnam in 1995, which kick-started the Vietnamese economy.
But how are the Vietnamese so cheery on the street? Or how can we walk down the street, we corn-fed Americans, and feel not the slightest sense, hint, or frisson of danger? The truth is, the Vietnamese don’t seem to care if we’re here. They don’t seem to care that Stan and Tom are Vietnam War veterans, and probably came over here and killed somebody in their d
ay. They don’t seem to care that these Americans are back. Of course, to the victor go the spoils, and in this case, the spoils are this peace of mind, this sense that they, the Vietnamese, won the war. Nixon pulled out in 1975, the last chopper lifted off, and the North Vietnamese rolled in and the bloodbath began. We Americans turned away.
The Vietnamese have assimilated the pain of this violence—they’ve had a thousand years of fighting—better than we Americans. We go to a museum where the truth is hung in black-and-white and Kodachrome color on the walls, and we’re in total shock. We sit and drink beer on the street corner in Saigon and try to piece it together. But maybe there’s no piecing to be done; maybe, I think, there’s no sense to be made of this war. That the pain that many from the platoon have felt, still feel, is just their problem. It’s all in their heads. But what nightmare isn’t? And does this make the nightmare a fiction? What’s to be done?
Who’s watching?
Behind us on the street corner, something is watching. An aged woman nearby is selling goldfish. The bright fish sit swimming in water-filled plastic bags that she’s placed on a metal cart. The bags jostle and roll, and the suspended fish grow and shrink in size, depending on the movement of the cart. First, one coal-dark eye dilates, then both eyes expand. An entire fish snaps into focus, floating, mouth opening and closing, as if trying to speak. I look at it while it looks past Stan Parker as he sits near the street and cries.
Who let whatever happened to Stan Parker, Tom Soals, and the Recon Platoon happen? Who’s responsible? Who could’ve stopped it—whatever it is? Who could have?