Wiest - The boys of 67: Charlie Companys war in Vietnam

Andrew Wiest

When I finished the book, a dog-eared copy of Ron Kovics Born on the Fourth of July, I rolled over and placed it on the nightstand and turned off the light. Lying there in the combined afterglow of a good read and the dreamy feeling of the onset of slumber I knew exactly what I was going to do, but I had no idea that I had just made one of those snap decisions that changes your life forever. For those who have never been there, war is so hard to understand. So foreign. Over my years of leading classes on the history of war, I had done what I could to teach students about the realities of violent conflict, ranging from having veterans speak in class to wandering the battlefields of Europe. While standing with 25 students among the nearly endless crosses in the silent cemetery above Omaha Beach was intensely moving, the experience of war still remained elusive, somehow hovering just beyond our collective grasp. Kovics eloquent prose, though, had forcefully reminded me that wars dont end at the cemetery. Veterans were out there, sometimes invisible in the crowd, still struggling with the painful remembrances of bygone days of battle and destruction. Before I drifted off to sleep I made up my mind to contact the local Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care Center to see if any of the veterans who remained under the care of the doctors there would mind sharing their experiences with the students from my class on the Vietnam War.

Once I got to work the next morning I called the main number for the VA and fumblingly tried to get my point across to a bemused operator. How can I direct your call? Well, Im not quite sure. I think I need to speak with a doctor. Oh, are you a veteran with a health problem? No maam. Im a history teacher, and I would like to speak with a doctor about having my class come and meet with some of the veterans there. A short pause followed as the operator tried to process the odd information. She finally responded, Ill put you through. Wait! Put me through to whom? But it was too late. The phone was already ringing. The person who answered the phone identified herself as Dr Leslie Root, who was head of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) clinic. Her announcement left me in a bit of a panic. Post-traumatic stress disorder? What was that? Sure I had heard of it. Heck, Id seen as many movies about Vietnam veterans as the next guy, but what was it really? What was I about to get myself into? At a loss regarding how to proceed, I told Dr Root about my plan. After a few minutes of conversation, during which she began my education into PTSD, Dr Root decided that some of her patients might benefit from, if not enjoy, talking about their experiences with a group of bright and interested college students. She would work to get the veterans ready; all I had to do was bring my class to the VA in two weeks time.

Nobody quite knew what to expect that late spring day in 1997. My class and I had no real idea what PTSD was beyond the frightening, bastardized Hollywood depictions of unhinged Vietnam veterans. For the veterans who met with us, though, the situation was infinitely worse. They were about to share their most feared memories, things that had haunted them for decades things they had not yet been able even to discuss with their closest loved ones. And they were going to share these closely guarded remembrances of horrors endured and friends lost with college students? College students had spat on them and jeered as they got off the freedom bird from Vietnam. Those college students? After everyone took their seats, there were a few tense moments before a shared realization descended upon the room. We began to understand: these guys werent crazy. They were just men who had seen things that were so terrible and heart-rending that they had never fully been able to forget. They began to understand: these college students werent protestors waiting at the airport in San Francisco. They were young people who wanted to know about what had happened in Vietnam all those years ago young people who really cared. After all these years, somebody cared about Vietnam.

The minute I walked into the room I noticed him sitting there at the table with three other veterans. He had long, graying hair that fell down beyond his shoulders, a craggy face the kind that is etched by years of working in the sun and wore an old military jacket bearing the roundel of the 9th Infantry Division. It was his eyes, though, that caught my attention. Gray, piercing eyes that betrayed his mistrust. The other veterans spoke movingly of their experiences in war, but this veteran held the group spellbound. The meeting was short, and the memories exchanged were by necessity fleeting snapshots of frozen moments from the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. Surges of death and destruction, moments of tenderness, nights of despair. As the river of memories eddied and swirled, something slowly dawned on me. He never spoke about himself, but instead about others, the boys of his unit who were boys no longer. Sometimes the verbal pictures were tragic; sometimes they were heroic but the pictures were always of others. My notion was still vague and unformed, but I had a feeling that he was the steward of something special. After the meeting, the students and veterans shook hands and we made ready to depart. As I stood in the parking lot, the long-haired veteran walked up, fixed those eyes on me, and said that this was the first that he had ever heard of a class on Vietnam being taught at the college level. Then he asked if he could sit in the next time I taught. To this day I dont quite know why I said it, but I told him that he couldnt sit in, but if he wanted he could come and help me teach the class.

I next taught my Vietnam class the following spring semester. To be honest I was reasonably sure that this was going to be one of those nice promises that both sides mutually forget. In the intervening eight months the veteran with the haunting eyes would move on to other things, I would get lost in grading and writing and let his kind offer slip my mind, and the class would proceed as normal. But neither of us forgot, and on a cold January morning in 1998, he made the hour-long drive to meet with a fresh batch of students eager to learn about Vietnam. In those days I began my class with a movie, one made up mainly of action clips and reports from the time. After introducing the veteran to the class, I dimmed the lights and began the film. Settling back I watched as the story progressed from scenes of the Gulf of Tonkin and decision-makers in Washington, D.C. to graphic visions of firefights in the Mekong Delta. As I looked on, I noticed that my veteran visitor was holding on to his desk so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. Before I could even think that I ought to get up and stop the film, he jumped to his feet, violently kicking his desk to the side, and started yelling screaming at the top of his lungs and gesticulating wildly. I sat there frozen, thinking that this could not be happening as events crawled forward in slow motion. The students sat transfixed and shocked, with the sounds and flicker of the movie as mere backdrop. The veteran, wild-eyed and lost in his world of memories come to life, continued screaming animalistic noises, unintelligible sounds. But then one phrase crystal in its clarity and meaning: Get Down! Get Down! He dove to the floor, gashing his forehead open on the hard concrete, and began to convulse uncontrollably.

Some students in the class, who were also Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) cadets, seized the moment and rushed to his side, elevating his feet, and making certain that he did not swallow his tongue. In the furor someone, perhaps me, called the ambulance and got in touch with Dr Root from the VA. Before the ambulance arrived, the students departed, each having to walk past the veteran still prone on the floor. His eyes, once so wild, were now still and open. Those eyes looked at each student as they walked past, but our veteran visitor was not there. He was not in those eyes. He was gone, lost in Vietnam. Outside the room, students gathered in their ones and twos, many weeping openly, as the paramedics loaded the veteran onto a gurney and took him away. I rode with him to the hospital but I was alone. He was alone. I could only wonder at how horribly wrong it had all gone. He just wanted to tell students about his war, about his friends, and now what was going to happen?