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. ©

The Daughter, the Millennial and the Ladies in Red

The last half of my week was busy with three things penciled on my day planner: 1) The geek-on-wheels to fix my printer that a Windows 10 update dumped off both my laptop and desk top computers; 2) An appointment with the car dealership to fix a recall on my air bag; and 3) A Red Hat Society tea. All these gave me plenty opportunities to interact with people but apparently it wasn’t enough because one afternoon I called someone I hadn’t talked with since mid-summer. Touching bases by phone seems to be a lost art in this age of social media but sometimes we just have to sit down and do it. My timing was perfect because the recipient started crying---heart-wrenching sobs. She said was “losing it” and needed to “unload.” She’s dealing with the repercussions of moving a loved one from a nursing home into a memory care unit with all the stresses that goes along with situations like that---siblings, spouses and the facility itself. We talked an hour and I think I helped. Sometimes just being a trusted sounding board is all someone needs to turn down the heat on a pot full of emotions ready to boil over. For me, it felt good to have someone place a value on my words and listening skills again. That doesn’t happen much anymore in my widow’s world of superficial conversation and causal acquaintances. 

It isn’t often, for example, that I go to a Red Hat Society tea when the conversation is something of substance. Usually it’s the normal chic-chat exchanged about family and who’s been doing what with grandchildren. Not this week. As we all took a place on an assembly line to fill up cellophane bags with Halloween candy to give out to the residents of our adopted nursing home, we got into a discussion of PTSD and veterans in general. All of us had stories to tell about vets we knew/know from WWI to the present day. Shell shocked, flashbacks, battle fatigue, PTSD---different names after different wars for coming back with varying degrees of emotional trauma. One woman told about her relative who during WWII was skilled at sneaking up on Germans soldiers and silently killing them with piano wire. After the war he got drunk and stayed that way for the rest of his life. We had a neighbor at our cottage who was in the Korean War and anytime he’d hear fireworks he’d end up in an ambulance on his way to a mental ward for a few weeks. If nothing else, at least Trump’s poorly worded comment about veterans with PTSD being weak got people around the nation talking about the topic.

It was a good week for conversation. While my millennial geek-on-wheels was here we talked about the election…tipsy-toeing around the subject without either one of us saying who we plan to vote for. Although it sounds like he’s not going to vote at all because---and this is an exact quote---“I’m a white male and will be alright no matter who wins, so I don’t care.” He said he works with two people who are on the opposite ends of the political spectrum and they both get mad at him when he says he doesn’t care. I had to agree with him on one level; he recognizes his white privilege and lack of a uterus subject to new governmental regulations. But on a deeper level I don’t understand not caring about policies and changes that could affect women, people of color and the LGBT community. Eventually, discontentment from any sector of society that’s getting marginalized trickles down to affect us all.

I brought up the nuclear codes and not wanting a loose cannon to have 24/7 access to them. The geek answered that it won’t happen because he thinks Obama will get a third term due to something massive happening on Election Day---major electrical grids hacked that will invalidate the election. Okaaaaay, I’ve heard that conspiracy theory a few times online and all I can say about that is if it actually happens---and I give it a 5% chance---I hope it’s confined to the southern states because it gets cold up here in November without our furnaces. And the moral of that story is we are all capable of having selfish thoughts, so I guess I need to ease up on my self-righteous, higher-horse-than-thou opinion of my geek for his seemingly callous disregard for others outside of his white male peer group. 

Conversations with the daughter, the millennial and the ladies in red this week made me feel good at the time but with a sad chaser. On one hand it was stimulating to be able to have in-depth conversations without having to type them on a keyboard. Real people with meaty words, none of that superficial stuff that often drives me to Boredom Village. On the other hand, when the conversations were over and I was tucked back into my quiet life on Widowhood Lane a mild sense of melancholy set in when I couldn’t regurgitate those conversations up for my husband to enjoy. Without someone to share the highlights of my days---well, get out the violin and play along. You've heard this song before. ©