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Five Simple Words

By Marc Levy

In Vietnam I had a few run ins with authority. The battalion surgeon was drunk the night we took rockets and mortars on a small LZ. He had a hard time with the wounded, including two friends badly hit. Someone put a frag beneath his bunk. But he found the coke can filled with diesel, the grenade wrapped in elastic bands, the spoon with nowhere to fly.

A remf lieutenant tried to send me out after I'd done eight months in the bush and rotated to burning shit on an LZ. I refused, was given direct orders, told three days they'd bring me back. I gathered my gear, filled my pack with C's, ammo, water, strapped on three bandoleers, frags, loaded and locked my M16. Waiting for the chopper, I melted down, waved off the bird, caught a second going back to battalion. From fifty yards I spotted the lieutenant. Walking forward, my M16 leveled itself to his chest. "Are you sending me out? You m***f***! Are you sending me out?" He froze. Lifted both arms over his head. "You don't have to go. I'll send someone else. It was a mistake." I walked right past that prick, found an empty bunk, threw down my gear, and wept.

After an ambush, the machine gun team blew a man's head off. My LT asked me to look in his mouth. "Doc, you gonna put me in for a Purple Heart?" he asked. His tooth was chipped. "No way, sir. It's just skull fragments from the dead dink." A good man, he held no grudge.

I'd seen my share of combat and couldn't adjust to stateside duty. "Sorry," I said to sergeants and lieutenants, captains and colonels, "I don't pull guard duty. I don't pull KP. I don't get hair cuts. I don't salute officers." I joined an anti-war GI coffee house. Spoke to reporters. Shook hands with Dan Ellsburg on TV. With other GIs spoke on weekly anti-war segment on commercial radio. Got court-martialed twice. The Special Court Martial netted three months hard labor/dishonorable discharge. My civilian lawyer struck a deal: admit guilt, get five days jail, a general discharge. But I lost all rank. It was 1971. No one knew about PTSD.

In college I kept a loaded pistol near the bed. I had many women but little love. I had intellectual friends. I had friends who should have been locked up. Someone tried to kill me — I got fifty stitches to the head and face. The dean took me under his wing. No one knew about PTSD.

I became a social worker, an extension of medic, did my best work with crime victims. Jobs lasted a year or two, three at most. I quit or was let go.

In 1992, I lived in a mountain village in Guatemala, backpacked Central America eight months. I climbed a lot, often alone, living simple, five bucks a day. Even with flashbacks, depression, anxiety, much of the time I felt reborn.

I drifted. Spent '93 abroad, saved money, for eight months backpacked Asia, Indonesia, Europe. There were bad days, good days. One afternoon in Amsterdam I completely melted down. Once home, I spent seven weeks on a VA PTSD ward in upstate New York. Afterward, I lived three months in a nature conservancy, met a renowned poet. He rejected all my war poems, save one. "This is your voice," he said. "The rest is crap."

Between 1995 and 2001 I moved twelve times. Once settled, I saw a VA counselor for war stress. I tried meds. Refused them.

In 1986, Manhattan, NY held a Nam vets parade. In Brooklyn, we marched from Grand Army Plaza to Wall Street — renamed the Canyon of Heroes. At a small park jammed with noisy patriots, confetti knee deep, a lone demonstrator held a placard: US OUT OF NICARAGUA. I had tears. I saluted. I'm surrounded by war vets, I salute the protester.

I don't like hearing, "Thank you for your service." It makes me uneasy. Puts blood in my face. I want to say, Do you know what I did? Do you know what I've seen?

I want to say, Are you thanking me for that first ambush, when GIs picked off three NVA like paper targets, and I cried like a kid? Are you thanking me for toughening up, glad when we killed them before they killed us?

Are you thanking me for saying "Bill, it's Doc. Everyone loves you," after Bill got shot in the head and later died? For telling his brothers what really happened, the Army stonewalling the family thirty years?

Are you thanking me for spotting Lieutenant Noble, struck down by mortars in Phuc Vinh after a panicked remf stampeded fifty GIs straight into the barrage? Are you thanking me for telling his grown daughter, an infant when he died, what I could of the dad she never knew?

Are you thanking me for shaking off the wounded grunts after the second Chicom blast? Are you thanking me for tossing lime on the dead sappers who over ran our base?

Pardon my French but I hate with all my heart the spoon fed dupes, the received wisdom gobblers, the twice yearly mobs of Sunday patriots who wouldn't know a gun barrel from a beer barrel filled with Mideast oil.

When I hear, "Thank you for your service," it makes me mad and sad and weary. The facts are well known: the US has long spied on, destabilized and toppled elected foreign governments for our own self-interest. We conquer, occupy, exploit. In the event of stalemate, as in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, we leave our mess, lick our wounds, fete our wounded, forget them. In time its off to the next war, conflict, invasion. For democracy's sake, we're told. But Marine General Smedley Butler knew otherwise. "War is a racket" he famously declared. Corporate profits. That's what it's all about.

I forgive the civic legions who've not read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est", or the poetry of Michael Casey, Yusef Kumanyakaa, or Bruce Weigl. But still, I shun the willful ignorance, the unschooled emotions, the media fueled piety of that oft said awful phrase "Thank you for your service." Much better, the two words Vietnam vets invoke when greeting each other, "Welcome home."

Marc Levy was a medic with Delta 1/7 First Cavalry Division in 1970. Email: silverspartan@gmail.com. Website: MedicintheGreenTime.com, where this article first appeared.