The Lingering Legacy of Vietnam: The War That Changed Us

This post explores the lingering impact of the Vietnam War through personal memory, cultural reflection, and historical context. From Bruce Springsteen’s protest anthem to Ron Kovic’s memoir and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Jean revisits the emotional terrain of a generation shaped by conflict. With fresh reflections sparked by recent books and films, she connects past and present—reminding us that war doesn’t end when the fighting stops. AI...

“Records are often auditory Rorschach tests,” Bruce Springsteen wrote in his memoir. “We hear what we want to hear.” His song Born in the U.S.A.—often mistaken for a patriotic anthem—was actually written as a Vietnam protest song. Springsteen’s interest in veterans affairs and this song were inspired by Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July, the story of a paralyzed veteran turned anti-war activist. That autobiography was published in 1976 and it became a best-seller. Fate brought these two men together shortly after and they became life long friends.

The 1989 film adaptation of the book, starring Tom Cruise, took some creative liberties—adding a high school girlfriend, placing Kovic at a protest he only watched on TV, and dramatizing a visit to the family of a fellow soldier he accidentally killed (in real life, he wrote them a letter). But overall, the movie stayed true to the spirit of Kovic’s account.

According to Wikipedia, Ron wrote the book in three weeks and two days. He described the process like this:

“I wrote all night long, seven days a week, single space, no paragraphs, front and back of the pages, pounding the keys so hard the tips of my fingers would hurt. I couldn't stop writing, and I remember feeling more alive than I had ever felt. Convinced that I was destined to die young, I struggled to leave something of meaning behind, to rise above the darkness and despair. I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war — to be shot and wounded, to be fighting for my life on the intensive care ward — not the myth we had grown up believing. I wanted people to know about the hospitals and the enema room, about why I had become opposed to the war, why I had grown more and more committed to peace and nonviolence.”

Netflix was showing Born on the Fourth of July recently, and knowing it was a classic Vietnam film, I decided to watch. I couldn’t remember seeing it before, but I had read the book. Back in the late ’70s I read around twenty books about the war—memoirs and fiction by recent veterans like Ron. I was obsessed, trying to understand how we, as a nation—and I, personally—could go from naive supporter of the “conflict” to understanding why so many of us turned against it.

I thought I’d long ago made peace with that terrible chapter of American history. But seeing that movie on the heels of reading Kristin Hannah’s book The Women (about the U.S. Army Nurse Corp during the Vietnam War) a bunch of memories surfaced. Like the night Don and I tried to talk a friend of his nephew out of running off to Canada because his draft number was close to being called. Right or wrong, we didn’t succeed and he became a draft dodger. No matter what choice those teen boys made it was life altering. It wasn’t until 1977 when drafter dodgers were pardoned by Jimmy Carter, in an attempt to heal the nation, that those who fled could come back to The States.

We visited the Vietnam Wall Memorial twice—once in Washington, D.C., shortly after it was built in 1982 and again a decade later when its traveling replica came to town. Our local newspaper called the replica ‘The Wall That Heals.’ It was 250 foot long, ½ scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall on the National Mall and its 24 panels contain more than 58,000 names of those who didn’t make it home. When we saw the actual Wall in Washington D.C. it was an emotional experience for me. I had penpal relationships with over fifty servicemen over in ‘Nam spread out over four-five years and I planned to look them all up in the index book by the Wall, but after finding a few listed I just couldn’t continue.

When we saw the traveling replica it was my husband who was left haunted by the experience. As I pushed Don’s wheelchair past the 24th panel there was a homemade sign on a stake that contained the name of a work friend of Don's. It said he’d died of Agent Orange. This was in the ‘90s, just after our government finally got around to acknowledging the connection between Agent Orange and all the medical problems the guys who were exposed to those chemicals suffered. My husband’s friend had taken his own life just weeks before his wife placed that hand-painted sign at the replica Wall. The war hadn’t ended for him. It just changed shape. 

During my caregiving years (2000–2012), war played in our living room every night in the form of VHS tapes of M*A*S*H. When the series originally aired (1972–1983), Don was working nights and never saw it. But he had the entire series on tape and watched the episodes repeatedly. The whoop-whoop of helicopter blades and Alan Alda’s voice gave him the comfort of ritual while I was in the kitchen becoming a blogger.

I don’t entirely understand why we humans find comfort in watching the same shows over and over again, but I do it now with Sex and the City. Watching an episode after a movie each night acts like a palate cleanser for my brain. I’ve probably seen the entire series a dozen times.

And now I need that palate cleanser after watching the nightly news. With two wars raging and a president I don’t trust holding the reins, I’m angry again—angry that humanity remains so divided that we risk blowing up the whole kit and caboodle. Did Vietnam not teach us anything? I know what 45/47 wants out of one of those wars. He wants to develop the Gaza Strip into a high-rollers resort. And with Netanyahu’s latest plan to take over the area and relocate its people, it sounds suspiciously like an off-the-books deal is brewing. If so, it better not involve our tax dollars! If we can’t fund USAID to support the poorest people in the world then we sure as hell can’t fund billionaires on vacation!

My mother used to say, “Don’t borrow trouble from the future.” How she could say that so often—when she was the longest-range planner I’ve ever known—is beyond me. Maybe that’s the answer. She didn’t borrow trouble. She saw its potential and planned contingencies.

Anyone want to help me dig an underground fallout shelter? ©

Until Next Wednesday. 

Veterans in Hats and Bare-Headed Widows

I take myself out to lunch quite often in good driving months and this week was no exception. Often I’m struck by how many older guys I run across who are wearing baseball hats proclaiming that they are veterans and if you could hear the jumble of thoughts going through my head when I see them, you’d probably be shocked. I get the whole proud to have served thing and how the hat elicits strangers to say, “thank you for your service” and how veterans often stop one another to compare service stats but it also makes me sad and stirs up thoughts I’d rather not have. And I wonder how many of these guys are letting their hats proclaim that their few years in the service were the most significant thing that happened in their entire lives. Do you think I’m being unpatriotic or anti-military or disrespectful to question the message a person’s head gear is expressing?

The sad truth is for many veterans of the Vietnam War it was the most significant and life changing thing they went through in their roughly 60+ years of living. The controversies surrounding the war and the dismissive way our servicemen were treated for many years was different than after previous wars. At least in this country. After WWII the French had collective amnesia about their own dark history. Exhibit A of many: The Vél d'Hiv Roundup when the French police did Hitler’s bidding and rounded up their own countrymen---thousands of Jewish people living in Paris including nearly 4,000 children and shipped them off to Auschwitz. The children were separated from their parents before they got on the trains and when the children got to Auschwitz they were marched directly to the ovens. It happened in July of 1942 and it took until 1995 for the country to officially acknowledge the part France played in delivering so many of their own citizens to their deaths.

I suppose the reason the veteran hats bother me is because they remind me that I can’t live in a bubble where everything is a Disney movie. Letting it go when we should never forget might work for many things but not when it comes to the atrocities that follow on the heels of unfettered hate. In our current political climate it's easy to see how intolerance can creep into public policies that, in turn, could lead to unspeakable acts. I guess that’s one of the good things about old men wearing veteran hats, they remind us not forget those who fought for---hopefully----noble causes. Admittedly, the line between noble causes and self-serving lust for power were clearer during the Civil War, WWI and WWII. Not so much with the Vietnam War. We were lied to. We trusted our leaders and our returning servicemen paid a price for those lies. 

I’ve never thanked a veteran for his service. Why can’t I bring myself to do that? I see others do it and it seems so easy-peasy for them---like a greeting and a handshake. Hello, nice to meet you. Have a nice day. I can’t presume to know what that hat represents to the person wearing it or to the person doing the thanking. Maybe I’d presume too much, maybe not enough. A military hat is not a like college t-shirt on a forty year old, balding guy where you can safely guess the shirt presents a carefree time in his life when he had time to play sports and flirt with the campus cutie pies. It’s not like a hat from a concert or a souvenir hat from a place where you left your heart and half the money in your wallet. 

My husband had a large collection of hats with logos and t-shirts with sayings on the front. It was a big deal every morning to decide what mood he was in when he picked out his fashion choices, especially after his stroke when he couldn’t communicate in other ways. But reading a person’s mood by the messages on his clothing never worked with a friend of ours who, when asked about the logo on his shirt replied, “I don’t know what it is. I buy cheap shirts at the Salvation Army so I can throw them out when they get too grubby to wear.” 

I’ve often wondered what message I’d want to wear on a hat, if I could design one that sums up the most significant thing that happened in my entire life. Sexual abused as a toddler, rape survivor later on? No, those things happened to me but they never defined me. Same goes for surviving the death of my parents and husband. Those things helped make me stronger, but they don’t define me either. Caregiver to a stroke survivor? Now, if I could figure out how to put that on a hat that might work. I stepped up to the plate to care for my severely disabled husband in a way that gave him the best quality of life anyone could have under the circumstances and I am proud of those twelve and a half years. If all that would fit on a hat, I’d no longer be a bare-headed widow. ©

When the Past Connects to the Present

 

He was in his mid twenties with long, Braveheart-style hair only clean and looking like a photographer's fan should be blowing it back away from his perfect face. He was tall, muscles in all the right places, flat mid-section and his eyes---heck, I’d be lying if I said I noticed what color they were but I’m assuming they were like pools of dark chocolate. Let’s cut to the chase; he was tall, dark and handsome and I picked his checkout lane at Lowe’s because...well, his was the only one open but if I were inclined to embellish this story I’d say I picked it because he made my heart go pitter-patter. 

He took my check and stared at it for the longest time. I thought maybe I’d made a mistake and put the year 1967 down instead of 2017. I’ve been living in that year every day since I started re-reading the letters from the fifty penpals I had back during the Vietnam War. Finally he said, “You have beautiful handwriting.” Oh. My. God! That’s exactly what made so many G.I.s I had sent Christmas cards to want to write me back. That and the Avon Unforgettable perfume I sprayed on the envelopes. But I digress. “It’s nearly perfect,” he added. It wasn’t and I had an urge to say, “That’s my in-a-hurry writing. I can do better. Let me write you another check.” I didn’t. I kept that thought in my head.

“Did you know that Steve Jobs studied calligraphy with a monk before he started Apple?” he asked. “I do,” I replied and then he said, “Isn’t it ironic that a guy who credited his love of calligraphy for the fact that computers now come with lots of typefaces would become the very guy who is making cursive writing obsolete.” Wow, that’s mind blowing! I thought but I replied something about how they don’t even teach cursive in schools anymore and how someday there will be scholars who will do nothing but translate cursive. The guy was clearly in love with my handwriting and he seemed reluctant to put the check in his drawer. If I had been his age, I would have written my name and phone number on a piece of paper and slipped it into his shirt pocket. We made that kind of connection. Well, not exactly. I was in lust with his mind and body and he was fascinated with the mathematical precision of my penmanship and how Jobs could write coding for that, but it’s my story so if I want to suggest our connection could'a run deeper in a boy/girl kind of way if only that age thing hadn’t been an issue, I can. 

I came right home and googled Steve Jobs and I found an article about a speech he made at Stanford’s 2005 graduation ceremony. He talked about his time spent learning calligraphy and how it influenced how Apples were built to include different fonts and typefaces and how that in turn influenced Microsoft to follow suit. "You can’t connect the dots looking forward," he told the grads. "You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something---your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." 

Being the age I am, I saw the truth in Steve’s words. When we’re young we try a little of this and a little of that, haphazardly tasting what life has to offer. It’s only through the passing of time that we can see the trajectory our lives took, how all the parts fit together. I see that in the letters I’ve been re-reading. I was so young and innocent back in 1967 and not afraid to take on the world. In 1967 and 1968 I saw both the highest and lowest points in my entire life and who would have thought that 50 years later I would go to a lecture about war letters that would cause me to revisit that pivotal era in my life and in such a close-up and detailed way.

I’m three quarters of the way through the letter reading project and it finally dawned on me to get out the journals I kept during that time frame and compare them to the copies I kept of the letters I wrote to my G.I. penpals. Two sentences jumped out at me and they changed the watercolor memory of a serviceman I dated for a year after he came home and who broke my heart and spirit in ways I’ve never written or talked about. It went something like: “He scares me sometimes. When we’re horsing around he’s not quick to let me go when I tell him to stop.” Those sentences sent chills down my spine. There's no way of knowing where that aggressiveness would have led if we had stayed together but I do know I'm on a cathartic journey that is connecting all the dots in my life.

Steve Jobs said you have to believe in something and I pick destiny. Destiny put me in a checkout lane for a brief liaison with a young guy who loved my penmanship. He might have loved it for an entirely different reason than my G.I. penpals did, but his expression as he studied my check could have been the same mesmerized look that stared at my envelopes at Mail Call back in 1967. Having beautiful penmanship changed my life.  ©

1967, a Year of Lost Innocence

Re-reading copies of letters I wrote back in 1967 I hardly recognized that starry-eyed, flag-waving girl I was back then when 'she' was on a mission to write to as many guys stationed in Vietnam as she could. Troops over there, that year, increased to a total of 475,000 and peace rallies turned into war protests erupted around the world, becoming more and more intense and frequent. I was clearly on the side of Uncle Sam and by the end of the year the country and many of us in it had lost our innocence---me in more ways than one.

1967 was also the year when Twiggy was a fashion sensation that started women on a path of viewing our bodies in an unhealthy and unrealistic way and we are still dealing with her legacy all these years later. It was also the year when 7,000 National Guards were sent to Detroit to put down the race rioting and looting in the streets and those scenes were repeated across the nation, including right in my own back yard where one of my co-workers couldn’t go home for nearly a week because her whole neighborhood was blocked off by the police.  

In 1967 the Beatles came out with their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band album and I have two hats in my closet, bought in the ‘60s that I affectionately call my Sgt. Pepper hats. One hat is white fur and the other is red velvet and the latter one is what I wore when I got my picture taken so I’d have photos to send the servicemen I was penpals with. By the second or third letter I received from a G.I. a picture was usually requested. Also requested was the name of the perfume I sprayed on my envelopes. It was Avon’s Unforgettable and I could probably write an entire essay just quoting the various comments I received about that perfume. One guy said at Mail Call the guys would pass my letters around before he could even open them. Another guy said any girl who "smells like that and has such beautiful handwriting has to be pretty." Several guys said they carried my letters around in their helmets so they could smell the perfume---in one case, when the smell of jungle rot got too much and in another case, the guy wanted to “remember what girls smell like.” One guy said he was charging ten cents for a quick sniff---probably a joke since the guys don't use cash in the military.

Yes, I’ve been staying up way too late reading the letters I’ve decided to send off to the Center for American War Letters. The servicemen’s letters are in good condition, but unfortunately my letters will all have to be redone because they are carbon copies on cheap paper that did not fare well over time. But since the curator of the legacy project said they will welcome the back and forth of pen pals, and since they do accept copies, that’s what they’ll get from my side of the exchanges---if my fingers hold up with all the typing I’ll be doing over winter.

After I read a complete set of letters between me and a particular guy, I look him up on the index of names listed on the Vietnam War Memorial. What a heart-pounding task that’s turning out to be! With one guy out of the thirty I've read so far, I took it a step farther and found him on the internet living about fifty miles away. We had a brother/sister like exchange of eight to ten page letters about every subject on earth including Twiggy. He had a girlfriend back here in the States who was planning their wedding and he had his whole life plotted out. Near the end of our letter exchanges, he was giving me dating advice. (I wasn't give guys a fair chance. Who knew.) Re-reading his letters brought on an urge to send him a note with no return address on the envelope. I’m not sending it until Christmas---IF I do it at all, a full circle kind of thing since our penpalling started at Christmas 1966. I can’t decide if a note could cause trouble for the guy, or not. What do you think? I’ve never been the jealous type so it’s hard for me to predict how a wife would react. If I do it, this is what I'll say:

"If you’re not the ______ _______ who was stationed at Da Dang in 1967 please disregard this note. If you are, you may (or may not) remember a brother/sister type penpal friendship we had back then. Either way, recently I went to a lecture about war letters and it reminded me of our exchange and that I’ve owed you a letter for the past fifty years. That war was a defining era for so many people. I hope the plans you had for your post-military life came to pass. As for me, I found my soulmate a few years later and as they say, we lived “happily ever after.” I hope you find the intended humor and sentimentality in me sending this note all these years later. Sincerely, Jean _______ (the floral designer)"    ©

 

P.S. 8/2025 I decided against trying to connect with any of the guys I'd been pen pals with, this guy included. I look some of them up on the Vietnam War Memorial though to see if they made it home or not.

 

s

My Sgt. Pepper Hat, 1967

Fun and Fastinating Days Mixed in with the Rest

The “Leaf Peeping” half-day trip sponsored by the senior hall finally took place and it started out at a brewery with lunch off their traditional Bavarian menu and it ended with us having homemade ice cream at a place with 300 Giant Bull Elk, reindeer, whitetail deer and Tibetan Yaks, raised to sell their breeding rights and babies. When the owner first started his “alternate animals” farm, he spent a month living with Eskimos and a month in Tibet to learn how to care for reindeer and Yaks. The color tour was all but forgotten as we rode through the 100 acre farm in a “stagecoach” while we got an interested and laugh-filled education about DNA proven blood lines, breeding, breaking up fights, birthing babies and keeping the animals fat and happy. We stopped at several places so we could hand feed adolescent Bull Elk and adult reindeer. The reindeer had soft, gentle lips as they ate. The guy said you could put your whole hand inside their mouths and they won’t bite. If you go in the spring, you can book tours timed so you can help bottle feed 40-50 babies. One of his Giant Bull Elks has won so many prizes that all his off springs are sold and pre-paid through 2020. 

This week I also had go back to the hearing center and the inside of my ear was pronounced completely cured of its infection. But getting there in the rain was not fun. It was the kind of rain where the cars in front of you seem to disappear in a foggy mist and the windshield wipers had to go at a rate of speed that makes you feel its hypnotic pull. You’ve gotta be careful about what’s playing on the radio when the wipers are going with the beat of the music: “That old Wacky Tobaccy, kick back and let it do what it do.” No, Toby Keith! I won’t “puff it in a pipe, twist it in a stem” or bake it in some brownies. I’m changing the radio station.  

Yesterday I was supposed to go to a cardio drumming class at the senior hall but it got delayed by three fire department guys who were running over their allotted time to teach a class on using an AED defibrillator. It actually looks pretty easy to use but I hope I never have to do it. There’s been a push in our area to get these machines in all public and private buildings and considering they cost well over a thousand each the project has been going well in the community. One tip I learned is if you are in a place where you have a choice in using a landline or a cell phone to call 911, using the landline because they can find you easier. If you don’t have your GPS turned on in your cell phone, their switchboard will show the address of the cell tower that picked up the call.

By the time the firemen were through our time for the cardio drumming class was cut back---so much so that a Gathering Girls friend and I played hookie and we went out for breakfast instead of working up a sweat. Even then we couldn’t linger long because I had to be back to the senior hall for the long awaited lecture about the Million Letters Campaign. It was a fascinating lecture that brought laughter and tears and more than a few “WOWs!” One of the ‘wow letters’ the speaker/curator showed us had a bullet hole through it and another was from the Revolutionary War. He also shared a little known fact that all the Native American “code talkers” used during WWII were so important to the war that each one was assigned a bodyguard to protect them and to also kill them if they were captured. 

During the Q&A period I raised my hand and I explained that I was pen pals with over fifty guys stationed in Vietnam and I still have a big box of letters plus carbon copies of the letters I sent to them. “Is there any value in donating the entire collection,” I asked, “or should I go through them and sort out some I think are interesting?” The curator, Andrew Carroll, of the Million Letters Campaign got rather excited and said they’d love to have a collection like that. “Would I include the copies of my letters too?” “Absolutely! That’s a unique collection,” he said. “Would you feel comfortable donating them?” I told him I want to read them one last time but, “Yes, I feel comfortable donating them.” And I will. So now I have a wintertime project lined up. 

He gave me his personal address afterward as well as the address to the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University in Orange, California. I’m both enthusiastic and finally at peace about my decision and about what the university is doing with this legacy project---to archive a quickly disappearing piece history that both honors our soldiers and makes the letters available for research material for writers, film makers and historians. It’s too late in my life to write the “penpals” book I envisioned coming from my box of letters---and to do it justice---but someone else might do it someday if they are archived at the center.

I brought the box up from the basement today and one of the first letters I pulled out to re-read from Vietnam, went like this: “If you were here, I would recite your last letter out loud. Your words are pressed in my memory like the purple violets my mother kept in her Bible. I read the letter so many times because the serenity of the woods you described was so real that I felt as if I was there with you. The quietness of home is one of the things I desperately miss. The sounds of being in a war zone are sounds I don’t think I’ll ever be able to erase from my mind. Incoming and outgoing mortars, men dying, and the bullets as they hit metal, dirt and human flesh are sounds unlike anything I have heard before. Last year I thought death was something only people with gray hair had to think about. Now I’m over here, and I can’t seem to think about anything else. If it weren’t for your letters, I don’t think I could make it. They are like a rope that keeps pulling me back to the world. The world where I was once a carefree boy who spent Sunday afternoons playing in my grandpa’s woods.” Reading this sent a chill up my spine knowing that, oh yes, there is a "penpals" book waiting to be written from that box. ©

Center for American War Letters, Legacy Project

Andrew Carroll’s twelve books based on War Letters

 Toby Keith and Willie Nelson, Wacky Tobaccy