Still on the road

I'm in New Mexico headed for Santa Fe and Taos. Rich told me to correct my last post. I appologize to who follow my blog. I implied that Rich was to only one. I'm on my way to Santa Fe, Taos, and Angel Fire. At Angel Fire I will visit the Victor Westphall Vietnam Veteran Memorial. This is the first US memorial for those who died in Vietnam. I have spent time at the Wall and visiting this memorial will follow one of the themes of my trip. The last memorial that I plan to go to will be Joe Martin's grave in San Luis Obispo, CA. The aniversary of Joe's death is tomorrow. He died in a battle near Long An Province, south of Saigon in 1967. That day was a tragic one for all of us in the 4/47th.

To Rick

This is to my good friend Rick who faithfully checks this blog; almost the only one who checks my blog. I'm in Nashville where I went to see a great bluegrass group last night. I'll see some blues performers tonight. I'm feeling good, although I pushed myself too hard while traveling and got the old burning, stinging anxiety feeling in my chest. Ptsd stuff and it almost cripples me. I've had to slow down for about a month, but I will stay on the road till mid June. Hope that you and Marcia are doing well.

Traveling

It's been a while since I posted anything here. Traveling has been keeping me busy. I began my travels on December 20 with the idea that I would visit a friend in Wyoming whom I served with in Vietnam. On the way there, I realized that I had nothing pressing that necessitated returning home. So I kept going, first to Denver and Kansas City to visit cousins then to Madison, Wisconsin to visit a young woman whom I trained as a boxer. I enjoyed visiting Kerstin and her husband Kevin and bonded with her toddler, Meriam. After that I visited two more friend with whom I served in Vietnam. My plan was to go south and visit another vet friend in Texas; however, my plan changed and as I went south I turned east through Arkansas, Georgia, Virginia and eventually to Washington, DC. What kept pulling me was the Vietnan Veterans Memorial. I had never visited the Wall. In DC, I went there once alone and then a second time with three young people. Standing a distance from the Wall I told them stories of experiences that I had in war. It was good for them to hear these stories as the stories gave more meaning to the name on the wall. I'm sure telling those stories there helped me. I'm not sure how; however, I have a feeling that as I process that experience I will learn more.

I did not remain in the saddness that the Wall represents. I stayed in DC luxuriating in art going to the National Art Gallery and the National Portrait and American Art Gallery. I spent three days there soaking in as much great art as I could. I experienced art from the late middle ages to the modernists. Vemeer and Pollack still remain some of my favorites. However, on my last day in DC I wanted to visit something especially meaningful and prayed for that gift. In the National Portrait Gallery I went to a certain gallery looking for one particular work in one photograph section. There I happened on the pictures of four individual womem--three younger women and a woman just a little older. They were pictures of women who had served in Iraq and all had post-traumatic stress disorder. I could feel the depression, anxiety that the pictures expressed. I could also relate to their feelings because I have two pictures that of myself that captured the same feelings. While I stood there in the small gallery I wanted to yell and direct people to look at those pictures. I wanted to say, "experience what these pictures say. This is important." I suppose that that is one of the goals of my life--to educate people about what war does to people.

A Poem From My Friend Rick

I have been visiting my friend Rick for the past few days. We both served in the same company while in Vietnam during 1967. This evening Rick brought out his "Vietnam Box," a box with a few memento's of his year in war. This poem was in the box, which he had not opened for more than ten years. He wrote it sometime before June 19, 1967, the day of our battalion's most disastrous battle. He knows that he wrote this poem before that day because after the battle he could not write and remembers little of the rest of his year at war.

For Love of God and Nation?

Why me? What did I do?
I gave no one cause to
even feel blue.

Yet now I must go,
thru the muck and the mire
and lord help my soul,
if I ever should tire
for this is a war
such as never before
where no man can rest
lest the enemy come out best
for tho they're farmers by day
come night they're away
to bring havoc on men
that could be my kin

Why me? What did I say?
Why did my neighbors give me away?
To sweat and to toil
on the enemy soil
To fight for my life
For the love of my wife.

They say for the love of God and my nation
I must go through hell and damnation
And try tho I may
I can't get away

Why Me?

From A Walk in the Garden of Heaven

I have been re-reading Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Something in this passage resonates with me.

"Whatever it is holds us in a spell of wonder when we are children, abandoned me when the war began. I don't mean just me or just youth, I mean something about this country. But I don't mean just this country, I mean the world. I've spent my time searching for what it is, like a suicide who refuses to die, an optimist who is empty, a buoy on th sea."

George Evans. "A Walk in the Garden of Heaven," Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. Kiheri, Hawai'i: Koa Books, 2005. pg. 88

A Church Service

I remember attending church services in Vietnam only a few times. For the most part, we were in the field on small combat operations and away from such religious opportunities. However, one service has set an indelible mark on my memory. It was during the mid part of my tour. Our unit had been in the field for some time and it had been a mouth and a half or two months since I had attended mass. After this period, our company arrived at Doug Tam near the city of My Tho; the 9th Infantry Division southern most major base camp in the Mekong Delta. It was Sunday when we arrived at this camp and after we had unloaded our gear and set up in barracks, I felt a compelling need to find a chapel and the celebration of Catholic mass. I asked around and someone pointed me in the direction across the camp. He said that the chapel was quite a distance away. I set off in late mid afternoon for what I would find was a trek through the dusty base roads. It was a walk in the Delta humidity and hot sun. I was tired when I started and as I walked, I became more tired. On my trek I lost my way a couple of times and had to ask for directions.

When I arrived at the chapel, I walked in to this round wooden building. It had a low rising dome and windows set in around the exterior wall of the structure. Glass windows were unusual in this war zone as explosions from incoming mortar rounds could blow them inward. Although it was not large, it was an impressive structure in the midst of long barracks and other rectangular military buildings most of which were covered with canvas roofs. I was hot, dusty, and tired and felt frustrated after the long walk. Inside the chapel, the altar was set in front of the wall near the door through which I entered. The floor was laid in long planks and the ceiling was open with its beams exposed. A semi-circle of wooden pews, maybe ten rows deep, surrounded the altar on three sides. I quietly took a seat near the door at the right of the altar. In my distraction, I hadn’t taken the misselette from the table next to the door. The misselette is a book with the mass prayers and bible reading for the mass of the day. One man kindly walked to me and gave me a misselette. I must have looked uncomfortable and unfamiliar with the proceedings so this man, a young guy like me, opened the book to the proper page. I reacted in a frustrated way. Some of my religions pride poked out and I said to myself “what’s this guy doing, I’m know what’s going on.” In a few minutes, I began to relax and I settled in for the service. It was early in the mass, the time just after the opening prayers. A soldier got up, walked to the altar, and read the first two readings for the day, one from the Old Testament and the other from the New. I don’t remember the message of those scripture readings nor that of the Gospel passage that the priest read; however, I do remember a few words from the priest’s sermon. They are engraved in my mind.

The priest, a taller man with short graying hair who looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, stood squarely at the ambo at the left of the alter. He spoke about love to the soldiers present. However, his words in no way reflect the Christian message in I Corinthians 13: “Love is patient; love is kind; . . . it does not rejoice in wrongdoing . . . Love never fails . . .” This priest’s words sent another message as he boldly proclaimed a moral stance, “It’s alright to kill as many Vietnamese as you can and you can have sex with as many women as you want. But just make sure that love your buddies!” At first his words sounded appealing. They gave me permission to do things that my teachers and ministers taught were wrong. Then the full impact of what he said set in and I thought, “this man is nuts!” “How could he say such thing and from the alter.” His words shocked me. I was in a daze for the rest of the mass, almost reeling from his words that had little to do with the Christian love instilled in me as I grew up. After the mass, I left the chapel and as I walked back to my barracks anger permeated me as this priest’s words that condoned violence, even unnecessary and indiscriminate violence, and the sexual use of women swirled in my head. I knew that acting on what he said would profoundly inhibit the experience of love for which I longed.

A Thanksgiving Poem

Anne Porter's poem, "A List of Praises," is a finely worked Thanksgiving poem especially if we consider that thanksgiving and praise are two sides of the same coin.



A List of Praises

Anne Porter

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,

Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,

Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,

Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,

Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,

A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry

living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away

With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle

As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,

Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh

Of the wind in the pinewoods,

At night give praise with starry silences.

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls

And the rattle and flap of sails

And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell

Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.

Give praise with the humpback whales,

Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.

Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas,

Give praise with hum of bees,

Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.

When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries

We know that the winter is over.

Give praise with mockingbirds, day's nightingales.

Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle

And glossy tulip trees

On quiet side streets in southern towns.

Give praise with the rippling speech

Of the eider-duck and her ducklings

As they paddle their way downstream

In the red-gold morning

On Restiguche, their cold river,

Salmon river,

Wilderness river.

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.

Far, far from the cities,

Far even from the towns,

With piercing innocence

He sings in the spruce-tree tops,

Always four notes

And four notes only.

Give praise with water,

With storms of rain and thunder

And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,

And the faint floating ocean roar

That fills the seaside villages,

And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,

And with the angels in that other country.