 Afterword
From Of Rice and
Men
Published by Random House / Ballantine Books / Presidio Press
You can't portray Vietnam
without helicopters and cynicism. The powerful whap-whap-whap of
the rotors still shakes my bones 35 years after I left the country. And
I still harbor a baby-boomer's bitter disappointment because a
fabulously gallant generation stood by and watched its children waste
their lives living up to standards of duty and honor that their elders
had set.
It seems the gallant generation spent all of its
awesome strength and courage on the Depression and Adolf Hitler and the
Cold War, and there was no strength or courage left to spend in defense
of its own kids. Those who fought that brave fight in the 1940s had
sacrificed so much, and so many of them had died, to give their kids a
better world. But many of their kids got an Asian meat grinder instead.
And, lest we forget, so did the Asians.
My generation let it happen to us. We were
citizens of a great democracy, and when it veered in the wrong
direction, we went along. Sure, we smoked dope, grew our hair long,
talked loud, and did shocking, psychedelic things. But we kept faith
with the generations that came before us, and most of us surrendered our
personal interests when the country told us it was our turn to do so.
The memory of a young soldier dying on a Normandy
beach on D-Day — it appears in Chapter Two — is as real to me now as it
was when I was a GI-hero-worshipping ten year old boy, and later a young
remf on my way to Vietnam. But I lived through the Sixties, and like Guy
Lopaca, I was there too long to be naive. I can't help but wonder: if
that unlucky young D-Day soldier I think of so often had managed to
survive his war, would he too have turned his back on us?
You can taste the disappointment, can't you? So
much went so wrong during the Vietnam years. So much disappointment. So
much anger.
It took me 35 years to turn down the heat and
tell the story I really wanted to tell.
* * *
Vietnam was the Great Event of my generation. We
deserved a better Great Event. We did the best we could with the one
they gave us.
I found in Vietnam a group of young men and women
who were brave, honest, and decent. Some of them were also smart as
hell. And funny? You have no idea. Neither my memory nor my writing does
them justice.
I started to write this book in 1971, but quickly
put it aside. I was too frustrated back then. The war lingered on, the
living kept dying. I lost touch with my memories. Over the next three
decades, other authors wrote works that vivified the war's destruction
and despair. I didn't often challenge the conventional assessment that
nothing could be found in Vietnam but bad examples.
Eventually I grew weary of a memory with so much
rage in it. I spent less time brooding about self-obsessed apologists
such as McNaught and General Frostmire. I spent more time remembering my
brief but impressionable comradeship with people who became blended into
Paul Gianelli and Tyler DeMudge and even Danny Maniac. I remembered the
gleam in the eye and the constant laugh of a young Vietnamese woman who
served as our clerk, who never made it into the book because writing
about her and her abandoned kind proved too painful for me to bear.
When the first draft of the book was complete, I
began chopping out of it big chunks of harsh material, that represented
the darkest tides of my lingering pessimism. Writing some of those
sections was good therapy for me; but they belonged in someone else's
book, not this one.
I didn't want to take you where you've been
before. I wanted to take you to a quieter place, where despite all we
know about that misbegotten war, there is room — in my memory, and
perhaps now in yours as well — for a smile, a chuckle, even a laugh or
two. And yes, there ought to be room in our tortured memory of Vietnam
for love. It took me more than half my lifetime to recognize it. I
finally had to write the book, and then read it myself, to see it.
At its gentle heart, behind the clown's paint,
this book is about longing and a sense of duty. We gave in to the
terrible force of duty, which we owed to others because they felt the
same obligation to us. We longed desperately to believe that even in a
bad war we could find something — anything — to be proud of. And we
longed to be home, hoping we would be welcome when we got there.
The gallant generation that spawned us is waning
now, and my own generation is beginning to dribble away as well. After
so many years, I thought it was time to put my sorrow into temporary
storage, and try to recapture the feeling I had in Vietnam, when my
equilibrium was ruined but my sense of wonder took its place. It was so
sad, knowing it was all such a waste. But it was so wonderful, that we
kept each other's heads up and our faith alive while we soldiered
through it.
Three million Americans served in the Vietnam
War. You would have been proud to know most of us. Had it been a better
war, you would have loved us
|
