My Facebook page will be concerned with dispelling myths
about the Vietnam War.
Some personae of the target audience:
Jack D. just retired after turning sixty-five. Now that he
has more free time he is plagued by the thoughts he used to be able to shove
aside. The pressing events of the work a day world that allowed him to ignore
those thoughts are now gone. He ponders the reasons why his generation was the
only generation ever to loose a war. He considers that even though his outfit
got hurt a few times in a battle and some firefights, he does not remember a
time when he really thought his unit was loosing. He has been told a thousand
times that he lost the War, but that is not the way he remembers it. Jack D. is
seeking answers to resolve this dissonance.
Wyle T., 63, wondered at the news reports when he got back
to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1971. While over there, he remembers everything was
pretty much going our way. He doesn’t understand how it all went downhill after
he left.
Tom C., pushing 70, is homeless and depressed. Ever since he
returned from Vietnam life has not been what expected while growing up. Since
his return he hasn’t held a job for more than three weeks. Well, there was that
one job that lasted almost three months. He fought his way through three wives
before he gave up on love and eventually life as well. He spends his days
rooting for food and begging for spare change. Occasionally he visits the
library and gets news from the Internet or reads a book. He lies awake nights
thinking of the friends he lost and the people he killed in Vietnam. The War
left him feeling like a looser and he never was able to shake that feeling.
Johnny W., 46, never met his Dad. All he has is a letter his
Dad wrote to him when he was still a baby. His Mother gave the letter to Johnny
before she died. She said he left it with her for him before going back to
Vietnam. The letter didn’t say much, “Sorry I can’t be there for you son. I
just can’t make it in the world”. Johnny W. is still trying to figure out what
that means.
Shirley T. was ten when she went with her mother and
grandfather to pick up her father’s coffin. He was lost in Vietnam during
Operation Junction City in 1967. She spent her entire life grieving because
during the next seven years of the War she was bombarded by media rhetoric that
portrayed her father’s sacrifice as useless, a waste, sometimes even as an
abomination.
Virginia C. went with her Mom to pick up her father when he
arrived home in 1970 from Vietnam. Her seven-year-old mind could not understand
why those longhaired people on the other side of the fence were yelling foul
things at her father and the other soldiers as they walked off the tarmac to
meet their families. She watched her mother and father argue and fight a lot as
she grew up. She watched her father do strange things that caused her mother to
get angry with him. She watched him suffer torment for ten years before anyone
even defined Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Since her Father’s recent death,
Virginia has unanswered questions about the War and why it affected her father
the way it did.
Tammy T., 27, is still teaching myths about the Vietnam War in
her history class because those are the things that are written in the textbook
she uses.
