Rick Miller has finally come home from the Vietnam War. Not on a "freedom bird" — the nickname soldiers bestowed on their homebound commercial flights — but via an essay on the point of Veterans Day commemorations. His thoughts on being a veteran have absolutely nothing to do with discount furniture, hardware bargains, or clothing sales.

"It feels good to talk about the real meaning of Veterans Day," he said. "For me, it’s private, and I don’t like how the nation reacts. I mean, they’re not saying veterans should come in for a 10 percent discount."

Miller left Vietnam in 1968. Back home in California, he refused to talk or think about the bloody horrors he left behind. He took up cello making, a solitary but profitable vocation. In 1978, he moved to Salt Lake City! No one knew he was a veteran because he told no one. But last week, that changed. He wrote his feelings down; radio station KUER broadcast them Friday and Monday.

Lt. Miller’s first major conflict as a platoon leader in the Army infantry was the Tet offensive, launched Jan. 31, 1968. It was the bloody turning point of the war as large contingents of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regular Army troops attacked and stunned U.S. and South Vietnamese strongholds throughout the embattled country. After the fight, Miller and his horrified comrades figured they killed about 50 Viet Cong, then stacked their dead bodies.

"It got worse from there," he said. Lifting off in a helicopter on his way to a bloody firefight three kilometers outside of Saigon, Miller saw American reporters drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and lounging atop the hotels. They stay here, we go die, he thought. Near the landing zone, the chopper was hit. Miller was one of two survivors.

Later, he served two months as a company commander and does not recollect a moment of it. He wanted to forget. He succeeded for 18 years.
Now, he has resurrected feelings he left for dead 27 years ago. Now, at last, he can speak of his experiences - but not to his children, not yet. "I’m trying to tell them, but how do you tell a 3- and 6-year-old about Vietnam?," Miller asked.

Maybe, when they are older, they can read the essay:

I slipped easily out of my military duds back into the late sixties of Southern California. I grew my hair as fast as I could, letting my sideburns hang low. I tried hard to melt back into the happy-go-lucky kid I used to be. Somehow, my finger had too much hard trigger time to make the fit back into the old me. Flashes of Vietnam and the lingering thoughts of the buddies I suffered and survived with drifted away. Actually I killed the Vietnam within me.

I murdered Vietnam in self defense so I could go on living with some sanity. It was a not-so-fast death, more like a suffocation. I buried the corpse in the basement of my soul and cemented it over with six feet of concrete so no one could find it. Not even me. I walked away from the burial as a non-veteran not once glancing back.The burial was a success and no one knew of the Vietnam in me. I was not a veteran: no shame or guilt, no intrusions or nightmares. There were no tags on me like "baby killer"; no questions like "What was it like to kill someone?" Just no Vietnam. The denial was complete and polygraph-proof. A perfect murder. Vietnam did not exist in me.

For so many years I felt alone and isolated in life and wrote things like "solitude is not loneliness. " I came to accept that I was different, a duck among chickens. I felt I really didn’t fit in anywhere. I existed, only existed, in a familiar world that was totally strange and no longer mine. I had walled off my emotions deep within me with a blank pleasant face. I sat for hours at the edge of society staring hard into the wilderness of life, chaining myself forcibly to reality knowing I could not run. Desperation swirled around me without the last act occurring. Alcohol and drugs coped me into social settings, with withdrawal and isolation in sobriety.

Then on a day some ten years past, working alone in a basement carving away at a cello, the tears began to trickle. Veterans Day, November the eleventh, Gene Pack announced on the radio; classical music to honor our veterans.

l am a veteran. Am I a veteran? I guess I am but I don’t know. A storm mushroomed within my head that day with the dim remembrance that I too, am a veteran. A Vietnam veteran. Eighteen years away from the battlefields of Southeast Asia and this, the very first slam that I really am a veteran. It’s not a title I had put on myself before – veteran. I couldn't put my feet down on that thought with my life’s history swirling all around me. Who am I really? Certainly not the combat platoon leader from 1968, nor the non-veteran.

Veterans Day had caught me like the mule’s two-by-four upside the head, smacking acid tears into my eyes. At long last Vietnam had come home to me. The concrete was cracked and the ugly ghost of Vietnam was on the rise and out of my control.

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