This article originally appeared on the website “War Stories” on Memorial Day 2019. The author hits a home run with this analogy of the Vietnam War. He places readers into the heads of our Warriors, offering them a glimpse of what we endured after the war. And then, he reminds us all of what Memorial Day should be. Take a few minutes to read what he had to say.

By Spencer Matteson

“After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and the images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories, you’d hear them out of a remote but accessible space where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information. However many times it happened, whether I’d known them or not, no matter what I’d felt about them or the way they’d died, their story was always there and it was always the same: it went, “Put yourself in my place.”

― Michael Herr, Dispatches

Death is something we hide from. In our society, we pay people to do the job most of us would never do. We pay handsomely for others to tend to our dead. We only look at them after they’ve been cleaned up, dressed up, made presentable – in other words, made to look as if they’re still alive and sleeping peacefully. And if that’s not possible, we simply close the lid on them.

In war, soldiers don’t have that luxury. We who have been to war and are combat veterans were subjected to the extreme violence of the modern-day battlefield. We saw firsthand what M16s, hand grenades, artillery shells, bombs, napalm, and other means of killing we’ve invented can do to a healthy, young body. In addition to creating the mess in a firefight, we had to clean it up as well – all while dealing with the grief of losing good friends and fellow soldiers – men killed in unspeakable and grotesque ways. It was hard – physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

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Many of us were unable to cope with it, were not able to get through it, and return to anything like a normal life. Thousands of Vietnam veterans ended their own lives rather than live with the memory of it. Others tried whatever they could to forget – alcohol and drugs usually, but in the long run that only messed them up worse. Still, others simply went insane and parted ways with reality. War in many ways is the “gift” that keeps on giving. It continues to claim victims years after the bullets have stopped flying and the bombs have stopped dropping. Many men die in war but don’t drop until years later. They are not remembered or honored on monuments, not mentioned in Memorial Day speeches, but they are war casualties nonetheless – the same as if they’d gotten a bullet through the head.

The hell that was served to the youth of my generation was that we were brought up in the era shortly after World War II. Our country was basking in the glory of a war well fought and won. A war fought with rectitude, for righteous reasons. We were weaned on John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies, given a glossed-over history of our country in school (and on television), and were totally convinced that we Americans were always the good guys and our government leaders were patriots and therefore would never lie to us. Vietnam made us question all that. We began to rethink everything we learned when we were growing up and in my case anyway, it was bitterly heartbreaking. I, like the majority of Vietnam Vets, was a volunteer. There were other reasons why I joined the army, but one of the main ones was to serve my country. Then I discovered my country wasn’t what I thought it was.

That our leaders would send us into an unwinnable war without a viable exit strategy and without any (or damn little) indoctrination as to why we were being sent I feel was part of the reason we lost. We weren’t motivated. We were simply told that communism was bad and we had to draw the line in Vietnam, domino theory, all of Asia would fall, etc., etc. Turns out the domino theory was dead wrong – after the war, Vietnam went into Cambodia, overthrew Pol Pot’s murderous, communist regime, and reinstalled the monarchy, which is to this day still in power – the exact opposite of the domino theory doctrine.

Regardless of what you thought about the Vietnam War, the fact is that 2,709,918 Americans served in Vietnam, representing almost 10% of their (very large) generation. 40% to 60% of those were either in combat, provided close support, or were regularly exposed to enemy attack. 58,318 names of American men and women who died in the war are etched on the black granite slabs of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. 11,465 of those on the wall were not yet 20 years old, still teenagers – 5 of them were just 16 years old. Kids.

It is fitting and important on this Memorial Day, that we take time out from our burgers and beer to remember the people who gave their lives for this country. To remember their deaths in all its raw ugliness. Remember that for every name on the wall, there was a family back home – wives, girlfriends, children, and friends affected by their death. Remember that it could have been you or someone in your family. Remember that our leaders sent tens of thousands of young men and women to their deaths in the prime of their lives. To remember that it can and will happen again – indeed, still is happening.  Remember that unless we put an end to war, it will surely put an end to us all.

Put yourself in their place.

From the author:

I spent a year and a day in Vietnam with the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division. I was in Charlie Company, 1st Batallion, 12th Cavalry Regiment (Airborne), from May 1966 to May 1967. Our base camp, Camp Radcliff was in the central highlands of Vietnam outside the small farming village of An Khe (now a town of over 50,000). We were on field operations almost continuously during the year I was there, with only a few short breaks. Our operations were in the provinces of the central coast and the central highlands. Of all the firefights and skirmishes I was in, this night a LZ Bird was the most intense and the most horrifying. I was 19 years old at the time and it has colored my entire adult life since. When I saw the inhumanity, brutality and ugliness of war up close, it turned me into a lifelong pacifist. I realized that though there are things worth fighting for, most of our wars are based on lies and started for reasons and ideas that are just plain wrong. If the human race is to survive, we need to find a way to get along together, or we’re all going to die together.

Here is the direct link to the article: https://warstoriesweb.wordpress.com/

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