Separated by society from experience. Leaving as a boy, changing into a soldier, returning as a man, who has seen and experienced more than words can explain or understand. Some by force, others by choice, yet all who were there understand and relate to one another through a bond that not one else can begin to comprehend. The war in Vietnam is one of the most controversial wars in American history, because the morals and purpose for American intervention will always be questioned, left to interpretation or assumption.
Every person has the right to their own thoughts but the only ones who have the truth on hat happened in Vietnam were those who experienced it, fought in it, and served in it. People often forget how young and innocent the “men” who fought in Vietnam were because in reality, “They were all still teenagers” (Appy, 11). The large majority of soldiers who fought, were young men around the ages of eighteen to twenty, who at this point in their lives had merely just begun reaching the brink of adulthood. Most of them leaving from under their parent’s roof for the first time in their lives.
Therefore, “A young, innocent boy with fuzz on his face and patriotic fervor in his heart marches off to war, as excited and proud as a young He returns a hardened man – tough, troubled, disillusioned” (80). This idea and view of the soldiers who fought in the war is often lost in the complication of the basis of the physical war itself. Those who served enlisted for a variety of reasons, some drafted and pulled by force, others chose to fight because “John Kennedy’s famous call for service to the nation has lost much of its resonance through repetition and because the history that colt. ollowed demoralized so many of those once inspired by his words” (64), while others joined because they felt like it was an escape from the hardships of their own lives, accompanying heir friends so they “went right after him and tried to join” (79). Despite their reasoning for joining the military, the boys who were there were there together. Regardless of their background, their family history, their economic status, each was now a soldier were brothers to one another, for they would now share a bond that no one outside of the war can relate to.
Training was these boys first experience as soldiers. Basic training was meant to take these boys who enlisted and turn them into men who would fight on behalf of their country. It was said that, “They wore you down… Frist they made you drop own to a piece of grit on the floor. Then they build you back up to being a marine” (Holiday, 86). Training was more than just equipping these boys with the skills to fight in combat, but they “were designed to reduce recruits to a psychological condition equivalent to early childhood” (88).
They had to be conditioned to re-think, re-learn how to live. Switching their thought process from a basic civilian to that of a soldier, to be “compliant and violent” (97). That was the basic objective of this training. Of course training was not to make each soldier a violent human being but “basic training combined discipline and aggression, bedience and anger. The final foal was to instill in recruits a focused hostility aimed a prescribed enemy” (97).
This training period was the main stepping stones that these boys who entered the army encountered a change from boyhood to the life of a soldier, for “Having been broken down to nothing – their identities stripped, their compliance won, and their aggression heightened – recruits were gradually rebuild into soldiers” (104). No matter how much training one had, nothing can fully prepare one for combat. Entering Vietnam there was more for these now soldiers than just the “predictable fear” of “entering a ar zone”, because “there is [was] also a profound feeling of abandonment and isolate vulnerability. (127). In a foreign land, entering a war that has already begun, no soldier new what to expect, all that could be done was the chance to wait for what their assignment would come with. Killing for the first time, taking a life for the first time, murdering a human being for the first time changes not only your personality, but changes your psychological state. This is what these boys turned soldiers had to learn how to cope with. They were in Vietnam to exterminate the enemy, often times by whatever means necessary.
Death was all around, the death of the enemy, the death of their fellow brothers in combat and the fear of death from themselves. The constant threat of an attack from an enemy they could not see with the constant threat of a mime. “The moment-to-moment, step-by-step decision-making preys on your and the effect sometimes is paralysis.. ” (170). Other wars always had a visible enemy, yet in Vietnam, your enemy could be literally under your feet.
The sense of the unknown tormented the minds of these soldiers and nothing could soothe this longing and unsettling feeling because “not seeing the enemy was particularly nnerving to American soldiers since so much of the combat took place at close range” (172). It was not the physical fear that burdened these soldiers the most, but the psychological torment they could not fight and shoot their guns against. The psychological factor of Vietnam, is on the most distinguishing factors in the difference between this war and others. “It was like running a race without knowing its length” (178).
The soldiers in the lowest level of the military hierarchy dealt with the most anxieties for they never had clarity on what the objective or larger picture of their missions were. Because “even when American unites outkilled the enemy or drive him back into the jungle, there was no clear sense of triumph or completion” (187). The war then turned to a fight for survival. Each soldier simply wanted to stay alive to return home. “Some soldiers began to believe the only way to survive in Vietnam was simply to treat all Vietnamese as outright enemies and make no pretense of favoring some over others. (215).
The change in psychological view on the war can be attributed to the lack of seen progress during the war, since progress was never physically seen. Once the war ended, the men who served ent home, changed, different, and alienated from society. ““Faced with society’s indifference, uneasiness, and outright rejection and gripped by their own troubled memories of the war, thousands of veterans lapsed into the sort of silence. (307). Like any veteran, there is pain associated with the war they served in.
For just as they lost friends, fellow soldiers, and brothers, they often times lost parts of themselves on the battlefield. “Veterans, too wanted to bury the war, to put it behind them… Like most Americans they, too, were trying to forget the war” (308). These men who left America as boys came back changed and estranged. Understanding or not, for or against the war, there was a constant separation from the Veterans and the rest of America. While they were trained for combat, they were not prepared to deal with the aftermath that the war would cause, because no one knows how to train for trauma.
Thus, “as posttraumatic stress disorder entered the nation’s vocabulary, people began to associate it with a list of very real and disturbing symptoms” that the nations veterans were experiencing, “but the sources of that psychic turmoil, and its social, political and moral significance were little examined” (320). Therefore, those who fought are forced to deal ith the psychological torment that America brought into their lives by sending them as boys to fight in Vietnam.
Trying to recover is a process that the men who served struggle with on a daily basis. The soldiers who served in Vietnam are marked and tied to the consequences and repercussions of the war. But more importantly, they are scared with trauma that they experienced and their experience can neither be justified or taken away. Despite one’s personal preference, respect and understanding should be had for all who served for each man left Vietnam different and changed, unfortunately not always for the better.
