I Was Just There Last Night
By Bill Sayers 9th Infantry
Division 3rd/60th
This story came to me from a
cousin via e-mail, the author, a fellow Vietnam Veteran.
After reading his
story, I felt compelled to share this with you. If you
didn't participate in
the Vietnam War, this will give you some insight into how
their minds work.
He writes: A couple of years ago
someone asked me if I still
thought about Vietnam. I nearly laughed in their face. How
do you stop thinking
about it?
Every day for the past forty years,
I wake up with it- I go
to bed with it. This was my response:
"Yeah, I think about it. I can't
stop thinking about
it. I never will. But, I've also learned to live with it.
I'm comfortable with
the memories. I've learned to stop trying to forget and
learned to embrace it.
It just doesn't scare me anymore." A lot of my "brothers"
haven't been so lucky. For them the memories are too
painful, their sense of
loss too great. My sister told me of a friend she has whose
husband was in “the
Nam.” She asks this guy when he was there. Here's what he
said, "Just last
night." It took my sister a while to figure out what he was
talking about.
Just Last Night? Yeah, I was in the
Nam. When? Just last
night, before I went to sleep, on my way to work this
morning, and over my
lunch hour. Yeah, I was there;
My sister says I'm not the same
brother who went to Vietnam.
My wife says I won't let people get close to me, not even
her. They are
probably both right. Ask a vet about making friends in Nam.
It was risky. Why?
Because we were in the business of death, and death was with
us all the time.
It wasn't the death of, "If I die before I wake." This was
the real
thing. The kind boys scream for their mothers. The kind that
lingers in your
mind and becomes more real each time you cheat it. You don't
want to make a lot
of friends when the possibility of dying is that real, that
close. When you do,
friends become a liability.
A guy named Bob Flannigan was my
friend. Bob Flannigan is
dead. I put him in a body bag one sunny day, April 29, 1969.
We'd been talking,
only a few minutes before he was shot, about what we were
going to do when we
got back to the world. Now, this was a guy who had come in
country the same
time as me. A guy who was lovable and generous. He had blue
eyes and sandy
blond hair. When he talked, it was with a soft drawl. I
loved this guy like the
brother I never had. But, I screwed up. I got too close to
him. I broke one of
the unwritten rules of war. DON"T GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE WHO
ARE GOING TO
DIE. You hear vets use the term "buddy" when they refer to a
guy they
spent the war with. "Me and this buddy of mine." Friend
sounds too
intimate, doesn't it? "Friend" calls up images of being
close. If
he's a friend, then you are going to be hurt if he dies, and
war hurts enough
without adding to the pain. Get close; get hurt. It's as
simple as that. In war
you learn to keep people at that distance my wife talks
about. You become good
at it, that forty years after the war, you still do it
without thinking. You
won't allow yourself to be vulnerable again. My wife knows
two people who can
get into the soft spots inside me; my daughters. I know it
bothers her that
they can do this. It's not that I don't love my wife. I do.
She's put up with a
lot from me. She'll tell you that when she signed for better
or worse, she had
no idea there was going to be so much of the latter. But
with my daughters it's
different. My girls are mine. They'll always be my kids. Not
marriage, not
distance, not even death can change that. They are something
on this earth that
can never be taken away from me. I belong to them. Nothing
can change that. I
can have an ex-wife; but my girls can never have an
ex-father. There's the
difference. I can still see the faces, though they all seem
to have the same
eyes. When I think of us, I always see a line of "dirty
grunts" sitting
on a paddy dike. We're caught in the first gray silver
between darkness and
light. That first moment when we know we've survived another
night, and the
business of staying alive for one more day is about to
begin. There was so much
hope in that brief space of time. It's what we used to pray
for. "One more
day, God. One more day." And I can hear our conversations as
if they'd
only just been spoken I still hear the way we sounded. The
hard cynical jokes,
our morbid senses of humor. We were scared to death of
dying, and tried our
best not to show it.
I recall the smells, too. Like the
way cordite hangs on the
air after a fire-fight. Or the pungent odor of rice paddy
mud. So different
from the black dirt of Iowa. The mud of Nam smells ancient,
somehow. Like it's
always been there. And I'll never forget the way blood
smells, sticky and
drying on my hands. I spent a long night that way once. The
memory isn't going
anywhere.
I remember how the night jungle
appears almost dreamlike as
pilot of a Cessna buzzes overhead, dropping parachute flares
until morning.
That artificial sun would flicker and make shadows run
through the jungle. It
was worse than not being able to see what was out there
sometimes. I remember
once looking at the man next to me as a flare floated
overhead. The shadows
around his eyes were so deep that it looked like his eyes
were gone. I reached
over and touched him on the arm; without looking at me he
touched my hand.
"I know man. I know." That's what he said. It was a human
moment. Two
guys a long way from home and scared to death.
God, I loved those guys. I hurt
every time one of them died.
We all did. Despite our posturing. Despite our desire to
stay disconnected, we
couldn't help ourselves. I know why Tim O' Brien writes his
stories. I know
what gives Bruce Weigle the words to create poems so honest
I cry at their
horrible beauty. It's love. Love for those guys we shared
the experience with.
We did our jobs like good soldiers,
and we tried our best
not to become as hard as our surroundings. You want to know
what is
frightening. It's a nineteen-year-old-boy who's had a sip of
that power over
life and death that war gives you. It's a boy who, despite
all the things he's
been taught, knows that he likes it. It's a
nineteen-year-old who's just lost a
friend, and is angry and scared and, determined that,
"Some*@#*s gonna pay!"
To this day, the thought of that boy can wake me from a
sound sleep and leave
me staring at the ceiling.
As I write this, I have a picture
in front of me. It's of
two young men. On their laps are tablets. One is smoking a
cigarette. Both
stare without expression at the camera. They're writing
letters. Staying in
touch with places they rather be. Places and people they
hope to see again. The
picture shares space in a frame with one of my wife. She
doesn't mind. She
knows she's been included in special company. She knows I'll
always love those
guys who shared that part of my life, a part she never can.
And she understands
how I feel about the ones I know are out there yet.
The ones who still ask
the question, "When were you in Vietnam?"
"Hey, man. I was there just last night."