by

Robert H. Dirr Jr.

Damn, that was a close one! I wish they'd stop firing those fucking rockets for just a minute, so I could get this guy medevacked. Jesus, I hope I can stop the blood before the poor bastard bleeds to death. I need, I need some kind of thread or string or twine or anything to wrap around this goddamn femoral artery. I can't hold on to it. It's too slippery. I know. A piece of my boot string ought to do the job. Hang on, Wildman. We'll get you out of here in a minute. Now, if I can just tie this thing in a knot, everything will be cool. Here, Jones. Put your finger on this while I tie it off. Bullshit, man, it's only blood. Hurry. There. I think that's got it. Better put an extra knot in it. I hope this guy is the last one for a while. I'm beat. Wait a minute. Who kicked me in the shoulder? What? Oh shit, it's an NVA and he's got me staring into the barrel of his AK-47. I'm dead. But�where's the sound? I can't hear anything. It's all in slow motion. I see Mom and Dad waving at the airport. I see myself at three years old and bitten by the neighbor's dog. I see my ninth grade math teacher. I see. I see. My God, his head exploded and flowered like a red and white and gray aerial burst at the 4th of July fireworks show. There he goes. He's falling backwards. Watch out for the rifle. He dropped it. There's a long, pointed bayonet on the end. Look out. Look out!

I bolted upright, held my face with shaky palms, and a thin film of cold sweat covered my body. I swung my legs over the wet crumpled sheets, sat on the edge of the bed and slowly entered reality. Another nightmare. If not this dream, the one where I accidentally killed four babies. The Lieutenant ordered us to burn a village, and when I checked inside the hut and found no evidence of life, I torched it. Running away from the flames, I heard the children's' screams. I tried to re-enter the hut, but the fiery straw roof and walls prevented me. Within minutes, only the earthen floor remained undamaged. Beneath the smoldering rubble of the fallen roof lay a trap door, slightly ajar. When I opened it, I saw a mama-san with her arms wrapped around four children. All dead.

Or the time I patrolled with a squad and we came upon a VC woman, decked out with bandoleers and grenades. They shot her in the left knee so she could not run away, stripped her, inserted a pop-up flare into her vagina and set it off. Though it happened twenty years ago, I can still see the expression on her face and hear those shrilling, high-pitched screams.

Many dreams interrupted my sleep. Perhaps that is why I never wanted to go to bed at night. I sat in the living room and watched MTV or played Solitaire or read Stephen King, while I sipped at a bottle of Jack Daniels and toked on a bowl filled with the good stuff. They helped me get to sleep but they never helped me to forget. Nothing could, so I agreed to go on this Veterans Day weekend trip to see the Wall and say goodbye to a lot of people I previously never had the chance to.

They decided, by unanimous vote during the last Vet Center meeting, to take the government van and six people for a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. I has serious reservations about going, because I had already seen the "Moving Wall" on its travel through Cincinnati, stretched over the length of a football field, at Elder High School. The one-third-sized replica proved too much for me to handle, and I could not imagine staring at over 58,000 names, some of which I knew I'd recognize, etched into black granite on a wall three hundred yards long.

But, the doctors said it was part of the healing process, and that it would do more good than harm. So, I figured what the hell? Nothing else worked. I had major social problems and difficulty in dealing with authority figures. Besides, the impending divorce from my second wife didn't make life any easier. I wrote out a check for the motel reservation and reluctantly agreed to go.

That night I told my wife about the trip.

"It's a good idea, but don't you think you have tormented yourself enough?" she asked. "You live and breathe Vietnam, twenty-four hours a day, and never do anything about it. A lot of you veterans wallow in self pity and blame the whole world for your problems."

I tried to explain but was cut off in mid-sentence.

"Just look at all those poems and stories you've been writing. Every one of them is about Vietnam," she said. "Aren't you a bit obsessed with the war? Don't you think you should give it a rest?"

I knew she was right. She usually was. The war had ended for me, and I needed to get on with my life. But how could I ever forget this part of me? How could I not think about lost friends and the blood I shed, or the fact that I was barely nineteen when it all happened? I went upstairs to the bedroom, put the headphones on and made myself feel better with the restful notes seeping from the guitars of Pink Floyd. Music medicated me and, in my wife's words became "the other woman."

There I was, in my mid-forties, in college, attempting to learn how to put words on paper, so I could write about the incidents that haunted me. I watched the letters appear magically onto the monitor of my computer, transferred from brain to fingertips to the keyboard, and saw right through them. Instead of words, I envisioned faces of lost friends, trails I walked on and sand, turned red with blood.

I heard explosions and gunfire and screams of civilians. I smelled napalm and rice paddies and burnt diesel fuel mixed with human shit. I tasted the salt on my upper lip, the salt in the C-rations and the rusted iron taste of blood. At times, I even felt guilt. Guilt, because I survived while so many of my peers did not.

Even as I listened to the music, I thought about my experiences in Vietnam. Gruesome spectacles of severed legs and dribbled guts and chunks of flesh stuck in branches of trees were not my only memories. Horror overshadowed the good times, and they came in small fragments, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Friends became friends when they filled countless sandbags together. I discovered closeness, when I read the letter of a guy's girlfriend to him, because he could not read or write. I found trust, when I had to depend on another to stay alive. I developed sensitivity, when a friend received a Dear John letter, and I consoled him by saying I got one too, and all women were bitches and that he shouldn't take it so hard. I had crossed racial barriers, because in combat there is no color. Yes, there were some good memories.

Like the time Billy Bob pissed his pants, because he laughed so hard at the Gunny, who lost his balance and fell into the shitter. Or the time we walked through a village and gave the kids chocolate bars from our C-rations that were remnants of the Korean War. And the time Woody Jamison got shot in the gut. Not too serious, but he repeatedly asked if his family jewels and pecker were still there.

Oh, and when we got high on pot in the middle of a mortar attack, and laughed while each puff of black smoke seemed to get closer and closer to our hootch. And when Elmer Jackson's M-16 accidentally discharged, and Sgt. Kemper, who was at one of the piss tubes, dove into the nearest bunker and got a splinter in his penis.

Yes, there were good times, but I had to think hard to get them to surface. In two weeks, I had an appointment. I had to visit a monument, that thing some referred to as a black gash in the ground, and it threatened to be the most difficult task of my life. I didn't even know the names I would search for, because in Vietnam everyone had nicknames: Chief, Wildman, Snake, Cherry, Dogshit, Trapper, Mother, Sarge, El Tee, Gunny, Slim, Hairless, Fat Boy, Nose, Rat and even Doc. The only name I could remember was Robert A. Engels, my best friend.

The trip by van took thirteen hours and we passed the time telling war stories. It is difficult not to tell tales like that, when in the company of those who experienced similar incidents. All the passengers in the van had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a fancy name for shell shock or delayed stress syndrome. Some appeared worse than others. I sat in the front seat, because my six-foot-five-inch body was cursed with long legs. I turned around to reflect on my small group of peers.

Danny talked about how he put his hand over an injured guy's mouth to keep him quiet, so the nearby column of North Vietnamese soldiers would not hear him. When they passed and Danny removed his hand, he found the guy dead.

George told us about some dude who made tobacco pouches out of human breasts.

"Female titties work the best," he said, "but if you know how to do it right, you can make one out of a man's, too."

We all had our own stories, and I had heard them numerous times before. I looked at Larry, recently separated from his wife; John, who slept every night under his bed; Bruce, who was just released from prison because he stabbed somebody in a bar; Jerry, who was an inpatient on the VA psychiatric ward. We all had our problems.

The Veterans Administration rates disability compensation in percentages, in accordance with employability. My friends were 100% disabled, due to PTSD and I was only 10%. So why was I there? I enjoyed the company of that band of veterans. I felt lucky that I was not as crazy as I might have been. The only problems I suffered were the nightmares and a few spells of instant rage. Nothing that couldn't be fixed. Besides, I liked them. I was one of them. The bonds of combat are permanent and those men would do anything for each other.

But there was another reason I was there. I endured the nightly dreams for close to a year and I became obsessed with the war. I read every book on Vietnam I could get my hands on, and I resolved to find the words that justified the carnage I relived nightly. Impossible.

One morning, while I retrieved the garbage cans from the curb, my neighbor asked if everything was all right, because he had watched me crawl around my house the night before.

I shook when he described what I faintly remembered as a dream, and I knew my mental problems were too severe to ignore any longer. My knees and elbows still ached from that nocturnal episode; I had checked the perimeter of my home, a kitchen knife clutched tightly between my teeth. I wasted several hours at the VA Hospital that day, on uncomfortable chairs in anticipation of a session with a doctor who might help me. The psychiatrist seemed concerned and genuinely honest, and tried to comfort me. But in the end, Dr. Sousa merely issued prescriptions for powerful antidepressants and referred me to the Vet Center.

So there I was, surrounded by others with similar symptoms and thinking about our destination. I wondered what it would be like. How would I take it? Would I find solace?

The van pulled into a parking lot beside the Lincoln Memorial, and everybody climbed out to stretch, after such a long trip. A short path wove through a grove of pine trees and brought us to a small clearing where several thick books were housed under glass to protect them from the elements. One of the books contained an alphabetical list of every name that was etched upon the Wall, and indicated on which panel each was located. Another book listed the dates of those killed in action. That way, if you could not remember the name, but knew the date, you could still find the person you sought. I used the chronological list, for I knew the date by heart: May 2nd, 1968. I scanned the list until I found Robert's name.

I wrote the required information on a small slip of paper and continued down the path until I came upon another clearing. I froze and stared in awe at the famous statue by Frederick Hart that depicted the three servicemen. I marveled at the realism and minute detail, down to the bullets inside the magazines of the M-16 rifles. The early morning sun that reflected off the dew covered figures made them appear to sweat. When I looked at their faces, I followed that old familiar "thousand-yard-stare" and realized their eyes faced the direction of the Wall. My knees buckled and I felt myself begin to fall. The panoramic view of the black monolith before me was more than I was prepared for.

I stumbled along a brick path to a tree line and sad down to try to clear the growing lump in my throat that would not go away. I lingered on the grass for two hours before I felt composed enough to walk down the knoll and search for the panel number that was scribbled on the crumpled piece of paper in my hand. I approached the Wall and became more aware of the uncontrolled emotions displayed by those around me. Some openly wept, some cried in anger and some prayed.

Most just stood before the Wall, eyes fixed on a particular name while silent tears trickled down cheeks. Veterans embraced other veterans, young adults embraced their mothers and older parents held on to one another. All of the visitors presented the feelings that erupt when one visits a cemetery. But this was no graveyard. It was a monument.

Just a monument? No. To some of those people it was a cemetery. Their sons never came home in an aluminum casket. Their husbands were never buried. Friends were still listed as missing in action. They had nowhere else to go, to pay their respects. At the Wall they could at least see the names of their loved ones, inscribed into the granite, and to them, it signified a final resting place.

I glanced once again at the panel number written on the paper, and began to search for it. As I walked past them, I stopped from time to time to read some of the hundreds of letters and notes that were left at the base of the structure. Some were taped to the Wall itself, and others were neatly folded and inserted into the creases between the panels. I saw packs of cigarettes, bottles of whiskey, medals, decks of cards, candy bars, cigars, dog tags, wreaths, homemade crosses and an assortment of clothing and personal items.

My heartbeat climbed to my Adams apple and my stomach dropped to my feet as I came closer to the panel. 55�54�53-East. There it was. 53-East. I began at the top line and read left to right, then went down one line at a time. Line 30. There he was. Robert Allen Engels. No longer able to contain emotions, my tears turned into sobs. I reached an arm out and gently caressed the stone letters with my fingertips. I eventually became aware of my own reflection, but only for a moment. My image had transformed into that of my friend's. Engels' left hand seemed to press the surface of the Wall from within, at the same spot where my right hand rested. When I increased the pressure, both hands touched and everything was suddenly alright. We were, in a metaphysical way, communicating with each other. There and then we said our farewells.

I stepped away from the panel to burn the image into my memory. I focused on the name I had come to see, but my knees failed and I dropped to the ground. Initial shock had turned into astonishment when certain letters on the Wall emerged from their deeply etched positions and protruded from the face of the granite. The shadows created by the late afternoon sun made them appear three-dimensional and it was as though a relief map formed on the face of the Wall. When the movement stopped I became conscious of the letters transformed into names. Names of thirty-six members of my old platoon in Vietnam, all brothers, who had died on the battlefield within three days of one another.

It began to rain softly and the droplets of water cascading down the face of the Wall made it appear to cry, as I was. My tears may have sprung from joy, finally capable of remembering their names, or from sorrow, aware that those people had died. In all my years since Vietnam, I never really knew how many injured Marines I loaded on the medevack helicopters lived or died.

Relief swelled over my body and soul, and I released some of the guilt I had carried around for so long. Physically and emotionally, I let go of the burden of the inability o remember all the names of those I cared for. And, I let go of the anger and rage I felt, because my friends died uselessly and without significance, in a war they knew nothing about. I raised my face to the darkened, rain filled sky and whispered "Why?"

Why, indeed. Perhaps I would never know, but at least I had found some peace of mind at the Wall. I looked behind me and discovered the rest of my group huddled together on the grass. Some smiled, some shed tears and some just stared at their feet. I walked to them and we participated in a group hug. In unison, the others said "Welcome home."

I dried my eyes and returned to the Wall. I reached inside my front pocket and pulled out the Bronze Star medal I was awarded, for "bravery above and beyond the call of duty," and gently deposited on the green grass, just below Engles' name. "Here, good buddy," I whispered. This is for you. You deserve this thing more than I do. I was surprised to see you when they loaded me on that boat for the medical evacuation. The driver thought I was nuts when I started to beat on your chest. But you came back to life and opened your eyes. You said 'Bob, how the hell are you?' with that shit-eating grin you always wore. Then you died again. I gave you mouth to mouth and you came back once more. But that time, all you said was 'Mom.' You were gone. I tried and tried to get you back, but I couldn't. The last thing I remember was that somebody tried to pull me off you. They carried both of us off on the same stretcher. I miss you, my friend."

With that, I bowed my head and said a silent prayer. One last glance at the name and I turned around, joined my group and walked back to the van. It was all behind me: the nightmares, the guilt, the anguish and the rage.

The return trip to Cincinnati was quiet. Each man entertained himself with his own thoughts and meditations. For the first time in years, I felt good. I wanted to share the magnitude, the impact and emotional reflection the Wall had imparted. "Yes," I thought to myself, "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial should be renamed 'The Healing Wall.'"

When we arrived at the Vet Center, one of the newer veterans that could not make the trip was there to greet us. I put my bags down and said "Dennis, have you ever been to the Wall?"

"No, I haven't," he said. "I'd like to, but I don't think I could handle it right now."

"I think you should go, sometime," I said. "I didn't think I could handle it, either, but it works wonders. Hell, I'd like to go back next week. You wouldn't believe it, Dennis. I walked up to that Wall and felt like I was at home. Everybody should see it, just to feel what there is to be felt. If the whole world saw it, there wouldn't be any more wars."

We shook hands and I picked up my suitcases and turned to the car. I could not wait to get home and impart the newly found peace of mind with my wife.

"I think I'll start that story I've wanted to write," I said, after we talked until late into the evening. "I've got something to say about the war. Something the writers seem to leave out of the movies about Vietnam. Something the guys who experienced it to can relate to, along with those who haven't."

The next day, I sat at the computer, stared at the blank monitor and wondered where and when and how I might begin my account of the war.

"Well," I thought. How about 1966?"