"Thirty-Two Hours"
I am a bit of a records "freak." So when I thought about a person from my
Lakewood Community College years (1981 to 1983) who had a significant
influence on me, I went to the storage boxes in my basement, confident that I
would find something relevant. And there they were: the paycheck stubs from
my stint as a tutor in the 1982-83 school year from the income tax files I
hadn't gotten around to tossing.
Thirty-two hours.
That's how much paid time I spent with the Vietnam veteran I tutored that
year. I don't remember his name. I don't remember for certain what subject I
tutored him in, though I think it was economics. I do remember a wiry body,
longish hair, a smoker (but not during our tutoring sessions). The couple of
times that we met at Perkins or Denny's, he bought my pie and coffee, had a
coffee himself, and tipped the server extra when we ended up using the booth
for two or three hours. And at some point early in the relationship, he told
something that doubled my personal knowledge of the Vietnam War.
It had touched my consciousness only once in my childhood. I was born in St.
Paul but spent twelve of those first fourteen years growing up in Japan. No
one in my family or circle of acquaintances was serving in the military or
active in the protest movements at the time. So even if I had spent more time
in the U.S. during those years, I suppose I would have been only peripherally
aware of this war going on somewhere far away and the people in my
community who opposed it.
But since I was in Japan for most of that time, the only protests or
demonstrations I remember were by union federations or political radicals
demanding government action on domestic issues, like inflation. In fact, when
it comes to the Vietnam War, I have only one memory from my childhood.
IT'S OVER.
Thus screamed the headline in the Stars and Stripes that spring day in 1975
when it was delivered to the dorm at the Tokyo boarding school I was
attending. In an era when newspapers hardly ever used color, those big red
letters—probably the same size as those that proclaimed, "Pearl Harbor
Attacked" in 1941—told me that this was significant news. Below the
headline was that now-famous photo of the people on the rooftop of the U.S.
Embassy in Saigon seeking evacuation via helicopter. I must have read the
article, but the only detail I remember was how that day defined the end of the
Vietnam War, when the last of the Americans left.
Wrong.
My second personal experience of the Vietnam War began when I met that
veteran in the fall of 1982. I had been told by the tutoring coordinator that he
was a Vietnam veteran, but with my bicultural upbringing, it was easy for me
to take him at face value. No one of my father's generation who served in the
military had seen combat, and the only exposure we had to the impact of
military service on their lives was when we would joke about wanting to be
scintillated by my uncle's "Greenland slides" that mostly pictured people
standing on a bunch of ice taking meteorological measurements. So I had
hardly any preconceptions on which to base my view of the Vietnam veteran I
tutored. And even though I had not yet registered for Selective Service (I was
one of the age groups that was supposed to register in 1979), I had merely a
passive rebellion that I only later figured out was motivated by a distrust in
my government's ability to appropriately decide what constituted a threat to
national security that was worth risking my life, body, and emotional health.
Nobody had taught me to despise the warriors.
What made the deepest impression on me was when he told me, matter-offactly, that he had been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and
that a sudden loud noise might cause him to duck for cover under the table. He
warned me not to be surprised if he reacted that way. However, there were no
loud noises, and he never any ducked under the table during our tutoring
sessions.
He did not tell me much more than that about himself, but I could see that he
had difficulty concentrating on and absorbing the material for class. I helped
him by confirming when he correctly explained what he understood and
assisted him in finding the words or processing the concepts when he did not.
His textbook started looking a bit psychedelic from all the highlighting he did,
using three different colors. One color was for definitions, another for key
concepts, and a third for review questions to focus on. I would have been
distracted by all that highlighting, but now I can see how it was a strategy for
coping with his brain's tendency to "protect" him by not remembering things.
Since then, I have learned a lot more about PTSD and why it manifests itself
in such behaviors by paying attention to news and documentaries and finding
a few examples from people in my life. In 1999, the centennial of my late
grandmother's birth, my mother, sister, and I went through some of her papers
that one of my uncles had kept. We came across my grandfather's discharge
certificate from his service in World War I. This was the grandfather who had
died before I was born, but whose story I had known all my life. He was an
alcoholic who was in and out, but mostly out, of my mother's life since the
time she was about six years old. Upon seeing the certificate, my mother
recalled a letter that her mother had received after her father's death, providing
an explanation and asking for understanding for the man my grandmother had
divorced in the late 1950s, shortly before he died. I think we found that letter
in those papers, too. The relative said that he had come back from World War
I "disturbed," or something like that, and his wartime experience must have
only exacerbated the emotional pain he had suffered before the war and losing
his sister, after whom my mother was named, to disease. In other words, I
have a family history of PTSD.
Around the same time, a couple of men I knew had gone to see Saving Private
Ryan. The one man who was not a Vietnam vet told me that his friend who
was a vet came out of the movie stifling his sobs. I got it. The realistic
portrayal of combat had brought his memories—and his unarticulated feelings
about them—back to the surface. And during the 2004 elections, when public
commentary questioned why Vietnam War issues were being dredged up
again when it had ended so long ago, I remembered that Vietnam vet from
twenty year earlier and knew that for combat veterans like him, my friend, my
grandfather, John Kerry, and John McCain, it ain't over. It's never over.
I tend not to rush to judgment, so it was about September 13 th or 14th, 2001
when I came to understand that some people in the world would kill me just
because I am American; that I never was an ideological pacifist, just one by
temperament; and that there are bullies out there, and I need people who are
willing to fight them on my behalf, even when our society or government can't
or won't always objectively and accurately identify who the bullies are.
Whatever horrible violence they must commit or experience, those who go
and fight carry the effects for the rest of their lives. And supporting the troops
is about way, way, way more than slapping a yellow ribbon magnet on your
SUV. It's about being there a quarter century from now when that Iraq veteran
is still unable tell you about seeing people blow themselves up in a
neighborhood market—being there, and listening to the silence.
I hope the thirty-two hours of education I provided to that veteran was as
valuable as the thirty-two hours of education he provided me.
—Luke Walbert, Student 1981 to 1983
Real Estate Agent, Coldwell Banker