remembering Mike's war:
SOMETIMES, IN ODD PLACES,...
IT STILL CAME BACK TO HIM. I have seen Mike walking on a summer beach, stepping around oiled bodies, hearing the steady growl of the sea. Suddenly, from over the horizon, he believes that he hears the phwuk-phwuk-phwuk of the rotor blades and for an instant he prepares to fall in the sand. The imaginary chopper moves by, he still remains looking upward, his mind stained with old images. Or he is walking down a city street, heading toward the theater, or a parking lot or an appointment. A door opens, an odor drifts from a restaurant; it's ngoc nam sauce, surely, and yes, the sign tells him that its a Vietnamese restaurant, and he hurries on, pursued by a ghost.
The ghost of Vietnam.
Twenty-nine years have passed since North Vietnamese T - 54 tanks rolled down Thong Nhut Boulevard in Saigon to breach the gates of the presidential palace and the war came to an end. Across those twenty-nine years, a sort of institutionalized amnesia became the order of the day, as if by tribal consent we had decided as Americans to deal with Vietnam by forgetting about it. Vietnam belonged parents, wives, lovers, and children of the 58,022 dead, to maimed men hidden away in veterans hospitals, to the bearded young men you could see from time to time in any American town, with a leg gone as permanently as his youth. Vietnam? we seemed to be saying, that was another country, man.
But not for Mike.
His ghosts were always with him.
One afternoon about twenty-years after Mike's war had come to an end, he and I were sitting on a park bench, looking at the beauty of the trees and the grass and the lake. He said that he missed the beauty of Vietnam, that there were bottle-green hills there with blackbirds flying over them, moving slowly beneath the clouds. They looked like doves, he said, and he laughed at the obvious symbolism and moved on. He told me how difficult it was to explain to those who had not been in a war how beautiful napalm can look, scudding in orange flames across a dark hillside. Seen from a helicopter, the natural green beauty of Vietnam was forever underlined by man-made damage; those blue an brown rain-filled pools had been made by B52s; about the ghastly dead forests made skeletal by Agent Orange. In the night, he said, you could hear a wind with its own language, its own sound; that was Vietnam too.
I was surprised when he said he wanted to go back. For a day, a month, an hour. He wanted to see Vietnam when its beauty did not hold potential death. He wanted to know what had ever happened to a whore named Li, whose husband died fighting for the VC, the woman who had lived in a blue room and never smiled. What do women like her remember about all those clumsy young Americans who arrived to throw seed into flesh before rising to hurl metal at hills and butcher people? He wonders what has become of the old French cemetery in Da Nang, where he said that you could see the stones sinking into the dark earth?
The last time I saw Mike, I asked how he was doing. He replied, "The ghosts still whisper. Vietnam, they say. Vietnam, Vietnam."
The ghost of Vietnam.
Twenty-nine years have passed since North Vietnamese T - 54 tanks rolled down Thong Nhut Boulevard in Saigon to breach the gates of the presidential palace and the war came to an end. Across those twenty-nine years, a sort of institutionalized amnesia became the order of the day, as if by tribal consent we had decided as Americans to deal with Vietnam by forgetting about it. Vietnam belonged parents, wives, lovers, and children of the 58,022 dead, to maimed men hidden away in veterans hospitals, to the bearded young men you could see from time to time in any American town, with a leg gone as permanently as his youth. Vietnam? we seemed to be saying, that was another country, man.
But not for Mike.
His ghosts were always with him.
One afternoon about twenty-years after Mike's war had come to an end, he and I were sitting on a park bench, looking at the beauty of the trees and the grass and the lake. He said that he missed the beauty of Vietnam, that there were bottle-green hills there with blackbirds flying over them, moving slowly beneath the clouds. They looked like doves, he said, and he laughed at the obvious symbolism and moved on. He told me how difficult it was to explain to those who had not been in a war how beautiful napalm can look, scudding in orange flames across a dark hillside. Seen from a helicopter, the natural green beauty of Vietnam was forever underlined by man-made damage; those blue an brown rain-filled pools had been made by B52s; about the ghastly dead forests made skeletal by Agent Orange. In the night, he said, you could hear a wind with its own language, its own sound; that was Vietnam too.
I was surprised when he said he wanted to go back. For a day, a month, an hour. He wanted to see Vietnam when its beauty did not hold potential death. He wanted to know what had ever happened to a whore named Li, whose husband died fighting for the VC, the woman who had lived in a blue room and never smiled. What do women like her remember about all those clumsy young Americans who arrived to throw seed into flesh before rising to hurl metal at hills and butcher people? He wonders what has become of the old French cemetery in Da Nang, where he said that you could see the stones sinking into the dark earth?
The last time I saw Mike, I asked how he was doing. He replied, "The ghosts still whisper. Vietnam, they say. Vietnam, Vietnam."
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