Reflections on the War
Q: Do you feel like the war still affects you today, personally?
Yes. It makes me very sad that that happened, and that I didn’t know how to respond to it. I didn’t have the maturity. Today, I could respond differently. I would be compassionate, I would say talk to me. You have to talk it to death. Talk to me, tell me what happened, I won’t judge you, it won’t go anywhere, I can be your person. Because they didn’t have a person. Here now in our day, we all have a person. We got to our person and go “Oh my God” and we can tell that person stuff and they love us no matter what. If I could’ve done that for them, that would’ve been life changing for me. But I was nowhere, I was not available to talk to people in that much pain.
Q: Just going off of what you just said and how you didn’t really know it [the Vietnam war] still affected you but it does, when do you think you went through that reflection and looked back on your life and realized, ‘this is how it’s affected me?’ Was it much later, or just after the fact?
It was just now. Because now I know. I mean, I’m an addiction treatment specialist, I do counseling, and therapeutic interventions, and I know how to help people. I didn’t know how to help people. I needed help. I was an addict, a practicing addict, now a recovering addict. But who knew? But if I could go back with what I know now, I could’ve formed support groups. I could’ve gotten everybody together because for them to talk to each other is the healing. Like when one alcoholic talks to another alcoholic, nobody else can talk to us. Like a normie, doesn’t know what I went through. A normie doesn’t understand. Well, “Just have a beer,” pft, I tried to “have a beer” for 27 years. You can’t have a beer. You can’t. You’re trying to just have a cocktail. People have cocktails and it blows my mind. They have a cocktail and they just stop drinking. I’m like, “what?!” And my sister always jokes with me, she says “You’re staring at my wine” and I go, “you need to drink that.” Don’t be leaving this much in the glass with me around because I don’t get that.
But a normie doesn’t get what I mean by that, so alcoholics talk to other alcoholics, that’s why we have our meetings, like MS patients can talk to other MS patients. Veterans can talk to veterans; they get each other. They don’t have to say “why don’t you just have one,” they don’t say “oh get over it.” You don’t get over it. Because it scars you. Those men are scarred for life. And the worst part for me is the way they were treated when they came home. And to add insult to injury, they really were and continue to be ignored.
I wasn’t even for it [the war] then. Most wars are fought over what people think might happen – well that’s insane. We think it might happen so we better kill people, go over and screw things up – well nothing happened! We thought it might, but that’s not a good reason. I think a lot of things might happen but I’m going outside anyway. It’s hard to know what we need to stop and what we don’t need to stop. Who do we think we are anyway? In a way we’re sort of bullies – “you all aren’t behaving the way we need you to, so we’re coming over.” Nobody asked us to come. We screw things up for the people and then we leave. Gee thanks! My daughter, when she was little and the Gulf War was going on, she said, “We have to go over, we’re in a war.” And I said, “Well, what if you and I were just sitting around and living our lives, and then some guys from another country came up our street and they were really mad and they were invading us?” She didn’t even know what that meant, because you don’t hear that part. You hear only this, not that.