The Fight to Write

Text copy of my 2015 Chapbook: What the Vietnam War Taught Me About Truth and Writing

Originially published as a chapbook. Now available on Kindle.

Fear and Truth in Vietnam | Chapter One

Why

"Why" is often a good question, but it doesn't always have a good answer.

My mom, my six siblings, and myself were in Vietnam from July 1974 to April 1975 because my father was assigned to the Saigon CIA Station.

My father was assigned there because the Nixon administration wanted him to help win the Vietnam War. My father worked in psychological warfare.

Why did America—and my father—get involved in Vietnam? Back then, we—that is Americans—thought that by fighting the North Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh, we would halt the spread of communism.

And communism was scary. Russian dictator Joseph Stalin had killed 20 million of his own citizens between 1929 and 1953, and Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party of China, had killed about 45 million of his own people between 1958 and 1962.

We had good reason to be scared.

We had good reason to fight.

My father had good reason to believe in his cause.

We—the family—had good reason to be with our dad.

These are all good reasons. However, that doesn't mean they were good answers.

Fear and Truth in Vietnam

Chapter Two

Different

Every war leaves its scars. The Vietnam War was different, however.

While there is no such thing as a good war, there are many things that make Vietnam remarkably tragic. Here, I will touch on the one thing that has stopped me dead in my tracks many times.

The soldiers who served in the Vietnam War were subject to the greatest injury of all: the psychological severing from their country and communities.

At an average age of 19, they were sent to Vietnam alone—not in platoons like in other wars—to a foreign land to fight. They were sent into a new kind of war, one with battlefields that had no front lines. The North Vietnamese guerrilla warfare tactics meant that the enemy that was literally everywhere. That meant they were indistinguishable from the residents of every village that American soldiers passed through and from every civilian walking toward them on a lonely road.

These young American soldiers, many of whom had not yet had a chance to vote, were given an unthinkable responsibility: save the world from communism. Or else. Take this gun and find the unidentifiable enemy that is hiding everywhere. Or else.

The Vietnam War was the first televised war. Americans watching the evening news while eating their fried chicken and mashed potatoes were treated to a nightly helping of carnage and slaughter. They were appalled.

When public opinion turned against the war and the urge to defeat communism paled in light of those imported images, many people demonstrated for peace.

Ironically, many also blamed the soldiers for the war and when the men returned home—weary to the core and broken—they found that they were not welcomed and comforted but were shunned, spat upon, called baby-killers and disowned.

Injuries to a body can be seen. They can be attended to. They can form scars and heal.

But injuries to the heart and spirit? Not so easy to see, not so easy to attend to.

And sometimes they do not scar over, but bleed on invisibly for always.

Fear and Truth in Vietnam | Chapter Three

Scared

I was scared.

Scared to my core.

Saigon in 1974-1975 was the focal point of the world's attention, America's desperate hope, peacemakers' yearning, soldiers' sorrow, and the North Vietnamese army’s relentless drive.

However, when you are a child and you are scared to death and you have no one to talk to about it, you learn to live with it, to make it normal. This is not the truth, but it is the best you can do.

Then you grow up and people say:

"You lived in Vietnam? What a great subject, you should write about that!"

You think of the veterans who lost limbs, soul, life, spirit and you think:

"Who am I to write about such things?"

I am still scared.

The Truth and Power of Vietnam | Chapter One

Damn It

America lost a war.

This still seems to be a hidden truth, a sleeping lie. We still think we are the smartest, fastest, strongest, fiercest power on the world stage.

But the Vietnamese, a tiny people in a tiny country, had the power, the grit, the sheer gut-wrenching strength to eject us from their country.

America lost.

And people got hurt.

And we still don't know how to deal with this.

Is it my fault?

No.

Is it my responsibility to try and fix it?

No.

Is it my responsibility to figure out what all this means to me?

Damn it.

It is.

Truth and Power of Vietnam | Chapter Two

Hero

And here's the weirdest thing.

My dad was a hero.

He was not a Navy SEAL or a swashbuckling general. He was a thin, balding man who spent most of his time at a desk or with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His work in psychological warfare was running an "ultra-secret" radio station (dubbed "House 7" since it was located at 7 Hong Thup Tu Street) that said nice things to the enemy so that they would tire of fighting and defect to our side.

And he loved his people.

That's what he called his staff: "my people." When he saw, in the beginning of April 1975, that it was going down and going down bad, he wasted no time making a plan to get out. He wrote to my mom that he might "get shot by the bureaucracy" but that he was not going to just sit around and see what happened.

So he moved his radio station to a remote island from which, he said to his superiors, he could safely continue his psywar broadcasts. It also happened to be near shipping lanes and away from the crowded, panicking city of Saigon.

He took his 250 employees and their families—over 1000 people.

Those people did not face the wrath of the communists.

They all got out of Vietnam safely.

They got out safely because of my dad.

My dad was a hero.

Truth and Power of Vietnam | Chapter Three

Who Cares

No one cared.

Not about my dad being a hero.

At least, not in Washington.

When he got back to CIA Headquarters, no one wanted to talk about Vietnam. It had been a disaster. His heroism just made others look bad.

The truth was embarrassing.

So he retired.

And my family learned not to talk about it either.

What do you do when your father is a hero and you love him and you cannot talk about it?

You learn to lie.

If I tried to tell people that we had lived in Vietnam or that my dad had worked for the CIA, they would a get a funny look on their faces. So instead I began to say that we had lived overseas and my dad had worked for the government and they would say, "Oh, a military brat, huh?"

"Yeah," I would reply.

But I would never meet their eyes.

The Truth and Power of Vietnam | Chapter Four

Truth

The truth cannot be killed.

It can be hidden, covered up, put to sleep—but it cannot be killed.

When I lied to people about what my dad did and who I was, it was a just a little white lie to help me cope with a truth that was too much for me to handle.

But truth will not submit to whitewashing forever.

And when it rises from beneath the spell you've cast upon it, you will know it.

In the summer of 2012, I lost my job. I was angry and tired and cranky and I called a friend.

"I'm going back to writing," I said, as if that was going to show the world who was really boss. "I just don't know what I am going to write about."

"I think you should write about Vietnam," she said.

I was not prepared for what happened. I felt an invisible force crash into me like a wave. I actually buckled over and gasped. She thought she had scraped open an old wound, but I didn't feel hurt or scared. However, I was paying attention, something was telling me that this was no passing fancy.

"It's okay," she said. "You don't have to, not if it's too painful."

"No," I said in a croak. "No, I'm not crying. I'm not."

I forced myself to pull it together. It wasn't about me, it was about something wanting to be said.

"You're right," I said, gulping a huge breath of air. "I need to write about Vietnam."

The truth was done sleeping.

Lessons in Writing | Chapter One

Practice

So here's the deal. I'm a writer. I've been a writer and a storyteller for ages—I told myself bedtime stories when I still had baby teeth. It's something that comes naturally to me. It's a bit of an addiction, really.

So I feel like a jerk telling other people that they should write. It's hard work, it's not always fun, and, in our human way of convoluting good things, it's often used to turn a spotlight on spelling and grammar errors.

Forget seplling.

Grammar forget.

And I'm going to forget that you probably don't want to sweat it through the writing process. (It really is a pain in the ass, I know.)

But here's the thing:

Writing is magic. Pure magic.

It is a powerful way to take the invisible slithering snakes of our thoughts and emotions and turn them into visible, almost tangible objects that you can wrestle with.

It takes practice. In her book Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg compares writing to running or to preparing for a football game. Even when you don't want to put on your shoes, you have to. And you certainly don't show up to a game without attending practice.

When I was "called up" to write about Vietnam, I had a lot of writing under my belt: diaries, letters, essays, articles, a self-published novel, an unpublished novel, years of blogging . . . Sometimes it seemed pointless, but it was all practice, practice, practice.

Write about anything: your first pet, the color blue, your best friend's pinky toe. Forget spelling, forget grammar, forget political correctness—just let go, let the words flow, don't judge, build stamina.

One day, you will be called to say something powerful. And you will be ready.

Lessons in Writing | Chapter Two

Practice More

You have a right to your own way of writing.

You have a right to find your way around a blank page. You never know what you will find.

Writer William Faulkner said "I never know what I think about something until I see what I write about it."

Open a notebook or pull up a blank screen. Set a timer for 10 minutes. Pick an object in front of you. An issue on your mind. A childhood memory. A yellow pencil. Whether or not you should apply for that job.

Write, write, write.

Do not censor.

Do not stop.

Do not edit.

Be free.

Lessons in Writing | Chapter Three

The Fight to Write

If you practice, practice, practice, writing will set you free. It will set you free because you'll learn your way around your mind and your own way of being a slithering-thought-snake handler—your own way around truth.

But first there might be a fight.

You will write things that you suspect are lies.

You will write things that you don't want to believe.

You will write things that you realize are shockingly true.

It's all part of the practice.

Millions of words have been written about the Vietnam War. I was scared to write my stories because they are such a small piece of something so big. In his 2017 film documentary, “The Vietnam War,” Ken Burns describes the war in Vietnam as " a tragedy of epic proportions that took the lives of 58,000 Americans, as many as three million Vietnamese, polarized American society as nothing has since the Civil War, fundamentally challenged Americans’ faith in our leaders, our government, and many of our most respected institutions, and called into question the belief in our own exceptionalism."

But as I keep writing, I am finding that my stories are meaningful and they do add to the conversation.

I am finding that my fears are real but that they are worth overcoming.

I am finding that I am glad I keep fighting to write.

Vietnam is a wound that is still bleeding. Our country, our world is bleeding, as it has throughout history. Is it your fault? No. Is it your responsibility to fix these things? I don't believe so.

Is it your responsibility to find out what all this means to you?

I believe it is.

I wish you power.

I wish you write.

Originially published as a chapbook. Now available on Kindle.