Anderson - Keep your head down: a memoir

EVERY OTHER MONDAY I drive down to the Veterans Affairs Hospital at West Haven, Connecticut, for my appointment. In the waiting area, two World War II vets are shouting at one another over failed hearing aids. I find myself a seat and nod at another Vietnam vet in a leather biker vest, his long black hair woven with gray.

Some days there are Korean War vets, Gulf War vets, and even somebody from forgotten little police actions like the invasions of Panama and Grenada. Today there are three men Im sure are Iraq War vets. There is something besides their youth that identifies them. They have that stunned look. One of them paces as if he were trying to climb out of himself and run. One confides in me that his wife kicked him out of the house and changed the locks. They take me back to my own war, and what happened after.

Since Vietnam, Ive acquired a second self that lies dormant until hes needed. I call him Snakebrain. Since the beginning of the Iraq War, hes come alive. Hes an early warning system for some seriously bad behavior. Snakebrain is good at sniffing out sham but not so good at affirming things. Sometimes he takes over the whole mind and I need someone to point this out.

After a few minutes in the waiting area, I am called in for my session with my therapist. I havent much to say today. Im feeling good. I havent had any incidents of incapacitating rage, even while watching politicians on television. She is aware that I have constricted affect, an ability to be glib about things I should really stammer and weep about. It is my way of getting along in the worldmuch preferable to the kind of crisis-craving life I had been leading more than twenty years ago. After my appointment, I drive back to Hartford, a little lighter.

AS A KID , I hung out with men who worked hard, fought hard, and spat tobacco. They believed that putting your life on the line for your country made you a man. My imagination was colonized by war stories, the Victory at Sea installments that ran for years on the TV long after World War II, and the patriotic newsreels that preceded the black-and-white movies in the theater. I wanted to be a cowboy, then I wanted to be a soldier. By way of further preparation I went duck hunting with uncles and fishing with my father. In my teens, I bought a .308 Winchester and hunted javelina in Arizona.

I ALWAYS SEEM to arrive in the middle of things. As I child, I grew up in the apartheid South that was giving birth to the civil rights movement. I remember separate black and white restrooms, drinking fountains, store entrances. I remember black men stepping off the sidewalk to let whites pass. I grew up thinking this was normal.

I was in high school after the Korean War, and people went into the service right after high school to get it out of the way, never thinking there would be another war. No one really knew that the CIA was already in Graham Greenes Vietnam attempting to destabilize the country to such an extent that the United States would have a pretext to fight a war there. We just thought that the service was something that you naturally did if you were a man because your father had done it and his father before him. Even Elvis went into the army. I watched others go into the service and come out telling stories about the girls in Malaysia or the Mediterranean. But I was already playing drums in a rock band by then, and would enroll the next year at the University of Arizonas music department.

My first year at the university was miserable. ROTC was compulsory in those days, which meant maintaining a clean uniform with shined shoes and buckles and showing up for drill at seven AM. I hated it. Most of us hated it. Punks from the overachiever class who were headed to West Point after graduation would harass and threaten us during morning drill. We couldnt kick the shit out of them because wed be expelled. I flunked two semesters of ROTC because I couldnt bring myself to go to class. I didnt know that within a few years I would be on my way to Vietnam.

About that time I met some people who would try to change me. I hung out with these guys who were reading Marx and complaining constantly about racism and capitalism in the United States. They lectured me on the unfair distribution of wealth and the lynchings in the South. There was a coffee shop downtownthere were still downtowns thenwhere folksingers sang in the tradition of Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, or the more homogenized Kingston Trio. This was where the young reds hung out. Id go there and listen to music and try to get interested in communism. Their outsider style appealed to my sense of social alienation. The McCarthy witch hunts had ended not so long ago and there was a certain heroic stance taken by younger reds that was borrowed from that time. I liked the people I met there. I began to practice their way of speaking and thinking. Fighting for the underdog seemed right to me, as it had been for my grandfather Wiseman in his union days. I was also on my way to becoming a jazz musician, and I liked wearing black turtlenecks and lurking in the shadows of respectable society. The ideas inculcated by my new friends would slip into my unconscious and lie there until I went into combat against the tough and committed Communist Vietcong and NVA in Vietnam.

In the middle of my youth and my ignorance I served in Vietnam as a corpsman with a marine infantry battalion. In 1968, just home from the war, I found my friends stoned and newly political, running around naked with their hair grown down to their butts. The things they were saying made sense to me.

Vietnam was the beginning of my real education, but in a way that my family had never imagined. When I turned against the war Id served in, they thought Id I turned against them. My mother said one day, How can you say what youre saying? Youve been there. I told her I could say what I said because Id been there. Because of this transformation of my beliefs and values I would later affiliate myself with the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences in Boston.

When we lost the Vietnam War and the country swung to the left, traditional patriots suffered a serious blow to their self-image. The black flags with the grim silhouetted face that to this day fly over police stations and post offices throughout the country are more about this than any fictional abandoned POWs. There are no such men, still held captive by the Communist Vietnamese, but I think the left in this country underestimated the rage these black flags represented, a rage that would fuel the Reagan revolution, as the right began to reclaim their role as patriots.