A young American soldier sits in his M1 tank in Saudi Arabia, looking up at Dan Rather, waiting an instant before answering the question. He lowers his eyes and finally says, “I’m not a warmonger, but let’s go in now and get it over with so we don’t have to come back in a few years.”
No single veteran can speak for all, but few of them are more knowing than Carl Burrell, a Vietnam vet who’s a counselor at the Oak Park Vet Center. The Vet Center is one of many created by Congress in 1985 to deal with veterans of the Vietnam era. The Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) estimated that of the three million GIs who served in Vietnam, some 700,000 suffer various readjustment problems. Burrell has been in constant touch with veterans who couldn’t leave the war behind. He describes them as “one day here, one day there, and still in the mold.”
Like many Vietnam vets, Burrell views his time in the military as somehow more than a personal experience; he connects significant service dates to events in the larger world. The date he remembers most clearly is December 14, 1969, the day he returned home from boot camp.
“At the same time your commitment was that you know this person was trying to kill you and you were going to kill this person because you don’t want to die here, you want to go back to the real world. You have this conflict of what you know and what you feel. Oftentimes you have to hide behind something, whether it’s alcohol or marijuana or whatever. Alcohol was the biggest problem in Vietnam because it was pushed–pushed all the time.”
The GI didn’t understand this until he came home. Then the shock of discovering that people he knew had gotten married, had babies, grown older made him feel as if there was no common ground on which he could reestablish himself in the world. Many vets drifted to the fringes of society, possessed by devils inside them.
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I found him in an old man’s bar on Cermak Road accompanied by a middle-aged hooker named Monica. I brought them back to my apartment. “Danny, your brother Steve’s a pimp,” he said. “You ever seen a white pimp before? Well your brother Steve’s the only white pimp in the country.” This pimping business had to do with a trip he’d taken to Tucson. He’d been living with Monica (“One thing Danny, I ain’t never been Monica’s trick. I may be a pimp, but I ain’t never been anyone’s trick”) and he’d decided to visit my father. They had enough money to make it to Tucson but not enough to make it back, and he’d hoped to tap my father for the return fare. He gave them 40 bucks and dropped them off at the local strip in Tucson. Halfway back to Michigan they ran out of money, and Monica started turning tricks at rest areas with truckers for food and gas money.
