The End of the Beginning

". . .When I look back on the marines with whom I served in Vietnam, the men I was about to leave behind, I find a tremendous gap between what was true then and what is celebrated now in so many movies. It is hard to know how much of what is written and shown for entertainment is simply the fiction that someone believes will sell. The truth that I saw did not include drug use and rape of the local women. There were no massacres of rounded-up innocents. There were no bunkers filled with wild men and clouds of marijuana smoke.

The men I worked with were professional marines who had trained together and lived together. Some had been in the Marine Corps for ten or fifteen years; they had seen the terror of other wars and had helped train the younger marines like me and Mauerman so that they could have the best possible chance of living through their own battles. My memories are filled with dedicated men who exhibited strength and bravery in carrying out their mission. Men who fought and led the fight in close combat; men who stayed by their comrades, who wouldn't run; men who risked and sometimes lost their own lives saving or trying to save their fellow marines. And men who worked closely with the local Vietnamese to help them rebuild their homes and their roads.

We had all been taught the value of working together to do our respective jobs with excellence and in the most professional manner possible. The work we had been asked to perform was distasteful to all of us, it placed us in tremendous fear at times, and it took our friends and fellow marines from us in horrible ways. It made it necessary for us perform acts that were equally horrible on a people that most of us hardly knew at all. And oddly enough perhaps, given the cynicism of later years, we did the work we did with the belief that we had a responsibility to help the South Vietnamese people participate in the human freedoms that we enjoyed at home back in the world."

". . .Vietnam was a dreamscape. It was a group fantasy played out in some exotic otherland. Those things couldn't happen, they couldn't be real. Real humans could not behave like that; they could not create the mayhem, the carnage, the mutilation, the dismemberment, the obscenity. Real humans would not permit such things to happen. That kind of shit fills books and films that tell some tales of times that never could have been, of events that never could have happened. Imaginings from some bedeviled minds.

How do you fit a bloated, rotted, disembodied hand or arm or leg or head into your notions of reality, of order? How do you explain human beings -- talking, thinking, eating, farting, laughing -- suddenly turned into useless, lifeless, ragged meat? What do you do after you rip someone's life from him? How are you supposed to feel after turning a hundred people into worm food?

To accept what you saw and felt and heard and smelled as rational was acceptance of your own insanity. So it was fantasy; it was an out-of-reality experience that would cease for us when we escaped back to what was.

What was, what used to be, was the real world. The world that we presumed still existed outside the domain of the hallucination we called Vietnam. So we didn't yearn to return to San Diego or Wilmington or New York. We sought return to 'the world.'"

". . .The flight from Okinawa landed at Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, California. It was late evening and quite dark as the wheels touched down in the world. And we all cheered our return from the netherworld.

For those of us scheduled out on commercial aircraft, transportation had been arranged to take us to Los Angeles International. No fanfare; we just got on the bus and were soon deposited by the passenger counters. Suddenly, it was no different from traveling home on leave. The portal had closed, and Vietnam no longer existed. Perhaps never existed. We were back from nowhere.

No one seemed to notice. Nobody said a word. Nobody asked, 'How was it there?' Nobody said thanks and welcome back. Nobody said fuck you, you baby-killing, village-burning, peasant-raping, bastard jarhead. Nobody said shit. What the hell."