because I didn’t have a problem.

I flew reconnaissance in Vietnam at 16,000 feet, lost no close friends, had a rewarding military career, witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism.  We won the ‘Long War.’  If anyone doubt that our cause was just, read The Black Book of Communism, then we’ll talk.

I had it all worked out.

  It was a cold spring day in 1983 or 84. My youngest son, Christopher, was perhaps in first grade, Michelle had just begun to walk.  Sue and I were taking a Sunday morning walk on the Washington Mall and came unawares upon the Vietnam Wall. There were few people around, one, perhaps two, of those veterans who camped there in those days to deal with ‘shit.’ For some reason that Sunday I was in uniform.  Hmm, I thought, ‘Vietnam Wall.’ Then things jumbled. The gravel hurt my knees. A bearded veteran with big hands held my shoulder. I heard Michelle say ‘why is Daddy crying?’

 I stuffed it, got hold of myself, and walked on.  The Soviet Union was deploying T-72 tanks and SS-20 missiles like tinker toys. I had five kids to raise, and a war to win.

 Still…

 I had read Lynda Van Devanter’s Home Before Morning, a memoir of a small town Catholic girl-2nd lieutenant nurse assigned to an in-country forward field hospital. Her day-to-day was as gruesome as one would expect, yet she only felt the first shock of the war that first day returning to CONUS. Stranded at San Francisco airport without transport to Alameda, she did what we did in Vietnam.  She hitchhiked. A cursing motorist gave her the finger, and her world collapsed around her.

 I’ve heard mention of  similar abuse when guys/gals returned stateside. I didn’t see it. From SEA, I went straight to Berlin with a stopover in Gleason, Wisconsin. My troops in Berlin––gals and guys––bitched about beer, Germans, and the unfairness of shift work. I listened to a lot of it.  It is what you did on long mid-shifts. Sorting fact from narrative is the time-suck task of the 1st lieutenant, first sergeant and county judge.

  In those days, anti-war rage was virulent on campus and city, but McNamara, Nixon, and Kissinger were inaccessible. Thus, a dazed Sp-5 making his way back to the farm in Iowa was as good a target as any. Nowadays, the ubiquitous cell-phone documents this crap; then, not so much. 

I come from a long line of cannon fodder.  My redneck great-grandfather, Lott Townsend, captain, 50th Georgia Infantry, fought from the Civil War’s first to last battle and dozens between. My grandfather’s troopship landed at L’Havre, France, in 1918, the war ending before he got to the front. My father, a WWII US Army infantry 1st sergeant, was in constant combat from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. Their front-line infantry unit stories are sketched out in unit histories. Some who have the words can do war in scorching detail. See E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn,  and especially his What it’s like to go to War. Corpsman Desmond Dou, the subject of Mel Gibson’s movie Hacksaw Ridge was in the medical battalion of Dad’s division, my father, 1st Sergeant Ernest L Townsend, awarded his Bronze Star (V) on Kakazu Ridge, one over from Hacksaw Ridge. My dad rarely spoke.

Three moments…

Mosinee, Wisconsin, 0430 September 1, 2019

Reagan Airport, Washington, D.C. same day 10AM:

War is hard.   Always has been.  Alway will be.

Soldiers suck it up. Some got the shit end of the stick. Some got cushy posting in Berlin. Some Viet vets had not been well treated––Agent Orange, underfunded Veteran’s Administration hospitals, an insult here and there. Most lacks the words to articulate the experience — an AK-47 wound…a bitter word…wife dumping you for the tennis coach — it hurts, but you don’t have the words.

I have lived many places for long periods. Thanks to the American taxpayer, I speak Russian, German and French pretty well. I’ve drunk with Soviet Army (vodka) and Wehrmacht (beer and schnapps) WWII veterans, heard to their stories, and read their memoirs and war novels. Bryan Doerries, The Theater of War: What Ancient Tragedies Can Teach Us I can’t recommend enough his YouTube presentations. Sophocles speaks for we who don’t have the words.