By Gustav Hasford
Sleep, America.
Silence is a warm bed.
Sleep your nightmares of small
cries cut open now
in the secret places of
Black Land, Bamboo City.
Sleep tight, America
dogtags eating sweatgrimaced
TV-people
Five O'clock news: My son the Meat.
Laughing scars, huh?
Novocained fist.
Squeeze every window empty
then hum.
Fear only the natural unreality
and kiss nostalgia goodbye.
Bayonet teddy bear and snore.
Bad dreams are something you ate.
So sleep, you mother.
From Winning Hearts and Minds, a collection of poetry by Vietnam vets, published in 1972.
"I joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War while I was still in Vietnam. About February, '68.
Also, I had a poem in Winning Hearts and Minds, published by the First Casualty Press, which was the
first anthology of writing about the war by the veterans themselves."
--Gus Hasford,
LA Times Magazine, June 28, 1987
Showing posts with label Vietnam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vietnam. Show all posts
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Editorial, L.A. Times, 1980
FIVE YEARS LATER, THE NIGHTMARE REMAINS POISON
Still Gagging on the Bitterness of Vietnam
By Gustav Hasford
LOS ANGELES TIMES, April 30, 1980
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. After millions of words have been written trying to determine the lessons of Vietnam, I can only share what I, as a Vietnam veteran, believe that I have learned. (I am not, and will never be, a spokesman for Vietnam veterans. I speak for myself alone.)
The very first thing that I have learned about Vietnam as a writer is that I am no longer talking to two-thirds of you. The word "Vietnam" in the first sentence of this article triggered a negative response somewhere, and most of you are about to turn the page. To those stalwart few who remain: Welcome to the world of the disenchanted.
The second thing that I have learned after 12 years as an unreconstructed Vietnam veteran is that, while I deeply respect, and would fight to preserve, the Constitution of the United States, I am now and must remain a devoted enemy of the federal government of the United States.
Talking about Vietnam, I have learned, is like talking about cancer at the dinner table. For more than a decade now, my friends have humored me in what they have called my "tiresome obsession" as I continue to work at understanding the roots and lessons of our involvement in Vietnam. It is difficult for them to understand what I mean when I attempt to explain that I cannot forget the war because there's gunpowder in my cereal bowl.
I write about the war in Vietnam in a more or less futile attempt to convince a dwindling handful of people that an important part of the American dream is dead and down there in the tomb with John F. Kennedy. When the battle is lost, the soldier attacks. When the cancer is malignant, the doctor operates. So do writers write. And I echo the words of Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July, who said: "They should be glad that I came home from Vietnam and wrote a book. I could have bought a gun."
I am not an expert on the Vietnam War. All I know is what I read in the newspapers and what I observed as a Marine Corps war correspondent in Vietnam.
During the five years since the fall of Saigon, I have learned almost nothing about the longest war in U.S. history from television, except that the world is full of violent Vietnam veterans who have inconvenient memories of combat experiences and who subsequently shoot at people they believe to be Viet Cong. After a satisfyingly dramatic climax, the crazed veterans are captured unharmed and turned over to sympathetic social workers by compassionate SWAT teams. Recently, the TV executives who during the war cut from body bags to beer commercials have given us a new sitcom called "Six O'Clock Follies," featuring two GI reporters and a "cute weather girl" in the Armed Forces radio station in Saigon.
The most important truth that I have learned about Vietnam came from the Academy Award-winning documentary, Hearts and Minds, when Daniel Ellsberg, with tears in his eyes, said that when he heard that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated he suddenly felt that there was no longer any hope of changing America.
From politicians the verdict on our Vietnam adventure has been more encouraging. Jimmy Carter, the first political faith-healer to win the presidency, has granted the American people a verbal presidential pardon for any and all sins that we might have committed in Vietnam, and has officially designated Vietnam to be over and done with, case closed, blood under the bridge. Henry A. Kissinger, for whom no American ever voted, has called Vietnam a "mere footnote" to the great achievement of the new relationship with China. And former President Richard M. Nixon, ignominiously forced to leave the White House after the Watergate scandal, has assured us that Vietnam was "America's finest hour."
From my fellow citizens I have learned that people fear change more than they fear oppression. We Americans are like cancer patients who prefer to die before accepting the fact that we have sickness that requires treatment.
From my fellow veterans I have learned the most meaningful lessons of all. Vietnam veterans in America are the children of Frankenstein; you know that you are a Vietnam veteran when your sister won't let you hold her baby. I have learned that for many Vietnam veterans life is a flower without color. Vietnam veterans are often unable to transcend Vietnam, to build on the experience, to go beyond the war to other stages of their lives. For many of us, the Vietnam experience damned the American way of life as a lie from top to bottom. The war shot away our roots.
I've seen the quiet vets who work organizing rap sessions, who publish newspapers for veterans, who have marched arm in arm into forests of police batons. But I have met the casualties as well. I've met the closet veterans who deny that they served in the war at all, cowed vets who are intimidated by their peers' demand that they repudiate their true experiences and perform as dishonest mimics of themselves, touting the exciting fabricated war stories that everybody wants to hear. I've met the bitter veterans with "bad-paper" discharges who hate themselves and everybody else, too. And the maimed and the lame, the blind and the speechless, the victims of Agent Orange who love their deformed children fiercely, the multiple amputees who needed assistance when they came to throw their Purple Hearts and Silver Stars onto the steps of the Capitol, the apprentices at suicide, the angry and violent veterans who vowed to turn the guns around, who swore that "If we fight again it will be to take these steps . . . the Capitol steps . . . ." And then there are the endless ranks of psychic burnouts, the zombie veterans who were killed in action for all intents and purposed but who don't know enough to lie down and die. And I have met dozens and dozens of Vietnam veterans who tell me that they have been completely unaffected by the war, while it is obvious that they have pushed it down deep, that they have swallowed a whole continent of pain and sadness that remains undigested and is choking them one day at a time.
Hawks hate the Vietnam veterans for being a candy-ass who couldn't get the job done; those World War II boys won their war and didn't whine about how tough it was, either. Doves hate the Vietnam veteran because, in their view, each and every one routinely slaughtered helpless civilians, especially babies.
America's breast is a milkless stone, and she demands heroes from her sons. A recent Harris poll shows that 63% of the American people feel that Vietnam veterans "were made suckers, having to risk their lives in the wrong place at the wrong time." Vietnam veterans probably will in fact go down in history as "suckers," but we fall from glory alongside the nation that bred us, because a country that degrades, stigmatizes and humiliates its young for committing the heinous crime of steadfast loyalty can no longer be trusted or taken seriously by anyone. Even animals protect their young.
What have I learned about Vietnam from the federal government? I have learned, for one thing, that politics is a ballet of devils, and that politicians, with paper roses falling out of their mouths, cannot conceal the blood from distant wounds that stains their neckties--but they do try, and millions do listen and believe, and choose not to see.
Vietnam, in my opinion, never ended. Peace is only a continuation of hypocrisy by other means, just as Watergate, for example, was a continuation of Vietnam by other means. Now, five years after the last American soldier left the soil of Vietnam, the sum of our added knowledge is small. Smug in our apathy, few of us would take time to admit that today's problems might in some way be related to the war in Vietnam.
Our refusal to face our Vietnam experience honestly has meant that the national nightmare of Vietnam continues to poison this country's sense of itself, and that refusal postpones the needed reckoning with our own dark history as well.
Today, I talk to the 19-year-old children who will soon be dead in the Oil Wars (to them Vietnam is some kind of Chinese breakfast food), and their face-value acceptance of what the government has defined as their patriotic duty puts a cold chord of fear and helplessness into my gut that is not unlike Daniel Ellsberg's response to the death of Robert Kennedy--total impotence in the face of unbridled ruthlessness.
Recently I have been investigating the possibilities of living in Australia. Perhaps someday the survivors of America will come back and will build log cabins in the streets. At least, as Hemingway said, it's pretty to think so.
Meanwhile, I ask you to join me in celebrating the fifth anniversary of the final withdrawal of the United States from Southeast Asia with a degree of pageantry and excitement comparable to that we all enjoyed during Vietnam Veterans' Week--by popping open a cold can of beer and raising a toast: "Here's to the good old days, when we knew who our enemies were and were sanctioned by society to deal with them accordingly. Here's to the good old days."
Goodby, America. And goodby to Vietnam and the friends who died for nothing.
Still Gagging on the Bitterness of Vietnam
By Gustav Hasford
LOS ANGELES TIMES, April 30, 1980
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. After millions of words have been written trying to determine the lessons of Vietnam, I can only share what I, as a Vietnam veteran, believe that I have learned. (I am not, and will never be, a spokesman for Vietnam veterans. I speak for myself alone.)
The very first thing that I have learned about Vietnam as a writer is that I am no longer talking to two-thirds of you. The word "Vietnam" in the first sentence of this article triggered a negative response somewhere, and most of you are about to turn the page. To those stalwart few who remain: Welcome to the world of the disenchanted.
The second thing that I have learned after 12 years as an unreconstructed Vietnam veteran is that, while I deeply respect, and would fight to preserve, the Constitution of the United States, I am now and must remain a devoted enemy of the federal government of the United States.
Talking about Vietnam, I have learned, is like talking about cancer at the dinner table. For more than a decade now, my friends have humored me in what they have called my "tiresome obsession" as I continue to work at understanding the roots and lessons of our involvement in Vietnam. It is difficult for them to understand what I mean when I attempt to explain that I cannot forget the war because there's gunpowder in my cereal bowl.
I write about the war in Vietnam in a more or less futile attempt to convince a dwindling handful of people that an important part of the American dream is dead and down there in the tomb with John F. Kennedy. When the battle is lost, the soldier attacks. When the cancer is malignant, the doctor operates. So do writers write. And I echo the words of Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July, who said: "They should be glad that I came home from Vietnam and wrote a book. I could have bought a gun."
I am not an expert on the Vietnam War. All I know is what I read in the newspapers and what I observed as a Marine Corps war correspondent in Vietnam.
During the five years since the fall of Saigon, I have learned almost nothing about the longest war in U.S. history from television, except that the world is full of violent Vietnam veterans who have inconvenient memories of combat experiences and who subsequently shoot at people they believe to be Viet Cong. After a satisfyingly dramatic climax, the crazed veterans are captured unharmed and turned over to sympathetic social workers by compassionate SWAT teams. Recently, the TV executives who during the war cut from body bags to beer commercials have given us a new sitcom called "Six O'Clock Follies," featuring two GI reporters and a "cute weather girl" in the Armed Forces radio station in Saigon.
The most important truth that I have learned about Vietnam came from the Academy Award-winning documentary, Hearts and Minds, when Daniel Ellsberg, with tears in his eyes, said that when he heard that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated he suddenly felt that there was no longer any hope of changing America.
From politicians the verdict on our Vietnam adventure has been more encouraging. Jimmy Carter, the first political faith-healer to win the presidency, has granted the American people a verbal presidential pardon for any and all sins that we might have committed in Vietnam, and has officially designated Vietnam to be over and done with, case closed, blood under the bridge. Henry A. Kissinger, for whom no American ever voted, has called Vietnam a "mere footnote" to the great achievement of the new relationship with China. And former President Richard M. Nixon, ignominiously forced to leave the White House after the Watergate scandal, has assured us that Vietnam was "America's finest hour."
From my fellow citizens I have learned that people fear change more than they fear oppression. We Americans are like cancer patients who prefer to die before accepting the fact that we have sickness that requires treatment.
From my fellow veterans I have learned the most meaningful lessons of all. Vietnam veterans in America are the children of Frankenstein; you know that you are a Vietnam veteran when your sister won't let you hold her baby. I have learned that for many Vietnam veterans life is a flower without color. Vietnam veterans are often unable to transcend Vietnam, to build on the experience, to go beyond the war to other stages of their lives. For many of us, the Vietnam experience damned the American way of life as a lie from top to bottom. The war shot away our roots.
I've seen the quiet vets who work organizing rap sessions, who publish newspapers for veterans, who have marched arm in arm into forests of police batons. But I have met the casualties as well. I've met the closet veterans who deny that they served in the war at all, cowed vets who are intimidated by their peers' demand that they repudiate their true experiences and perform as dishonest mimics of themselves, touting the exciting fabricated war stories that everybody wants to hear. I've met the bitter veterans with "bad-paper" discharges who hate themselves and everybody else, too. And the maimed and the lame, the blind and the speechless, the victims of Agent Orange who love their deformed children fiercely, the multiple amputees who needed assistance when they came to throw their Purple Hearts and Silver Stars onto the steps of the Capitol, the apprentices at suicide, the angry and violent veterans who vowed to turn the guns around, who swore that "If we fight again it will be to take these steps . . . the Capitol steps . . . ." And then there are the endless ranks of psychic burnouts, the zombie veterans who were killed in action for all intents and purposed but who don't know enough to lie down and die. And I have met dozens and dozens of Vietnam veterans who tell me that they have been completely unaffected by the war, while it is obvious that they have pushed it down deep, that they have swallowed a whole continent of pain and sadness that remains undigested and is choking them one day at a time.
Hawks hate the Vietnam veterans for being a candy-ass who couldn't get the job done; those World War II boys won their war and didn't whine about how tough it was, either. Doves hate the Vietnam veteran because, in their view, each and every one routinely slaughtered helpless civilians, especially babies.
America's breast is a milkless stone, and she demands heroes from her sons. A recent Harris poll shows that 63% of the American people feel that Vietnam veterans "were made suckers, having to risk their lives in the wrong place at the wrong time." Vietnam veterans probably will in fact go down in history as "suckers," but we fall from glory alongside the nation that bred us, because a country that degrades, stigmatizes and humiliates its young for committing the heinous crime of steadfast loyalty can no longer be trusted or taken seriously by anyone. Even animals protect their young.
What have I learned about Vietnam from the federal government? I have learned, for one thing, that politics is a ballet of devils, and that politicians, with paper roses falling out of their mouths, cannot conceal the blood from distant wounds that stains their neckties--but they do try, and millions do listen and believe, and choose not to see.
Vietnam, in my opinion, never ended. Peace is only a continuation of hypocrisy by other means, just as Watergate, for example, was a continuation of Vietnam by other means. Now, five years after the last American soldier left the soil of Vietnam, the sum of our added knowledge is small. Smug in our apathy, few of us would take time to admit that today's problems might in some way be related to the war in Vietnam.
Our refusal to face our Vietnam experience honestly has meant that the national nightmare of Vietnam continues to poison this country's sense of itself, and that refusal postpones the needed reckoning with our own dark history as well.
Today, I talk to the 19-year-old children who will soon be dead in the Oil Wars (to them Vietnam is some kind of Chinese breakfast food), and their face-value acceptance of what the government has defined as their patriotic duty puts a cold chord of fear and helplessness into my gut that is not unlike Daniel Ellsberg's response to the death of Robert Kennedy--total impotence in the face of unbridled ruthlessness.
Recently I have been investigating the possibilities of living in Australia. Perhaps someday the survivors of America will come back and will build log cabins in the streets. At least, as Hemingway said, it's pretty to think so.
Meanwhile, I ask you to join me in celebrating the fifth anniversary of the final withdrawal of the United States from Southeast Asia with a degree of pageantry and excitement comparable to that we all enjoyed during Vietnam Veterans' Week--by popping open a cold can of beer and raising a toast: "Here's to the good old days, when we knew who our enemies were and were sanctioned by society to deal with them accordingly. Here's to the good old days."
Goodby, America. And goodby to Vietnam and the friends who died for nothing.
Friday, January 04, 2013
VIETNAM MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY
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Wednesday, January 02, 2013
I THINK I'M GOING TO HATE THIS MOVIE
You join the Marines, and in 1967, you go to Vietnam...
"It was exciting," Hasford continues. "It was a foreign country, even if you didn't exactly know where it was. I didn't have the slightest clue of where Vietnam was. People say, 'Weren't you afraid you'd get killed?' Nah. When you're 18, you don't have any fear that you're going to get killed. You think you're immortal."
--from the Birmingham News, 1987
Friday, October 13, 2006
Dale Dye on the Thunderbird Club
An excerpt from Dale Dye's forthcoming autobiography, courtesy of WarriorsInc.com:
THUNDERBIRD CLUB – HILL 327, DANANG, SOUTH VIETNAM
We lost a lot of good men during the ten years America prosecuted the war in Vietnam, trying at the last to get unstuck from that Asian tar-baby and having no more luck than Brer Rabbit did. That’s a crying ass shame, but more about that in a page or two. What’s another under-appreciated crying ass shame is our failure to disassemble, crate and ship the infamous Thunderbird Club from its perch on the military crest of Hill 327, just below the Command Post of the fighting 1st Marine Division in Danang, to re-assemble it at some easily-accessible location Stateside. We’d have a damn site fewer cases of PTSD among some of our Vietnam Vets if we’d done that when we un-assed the area back in 1975.
The Thunderbird was an oasis for the cooks, clerks, label-lickers, box-kickers and other rear-echelon Marines who supported the fighting regiments of the Division out in the bush. It was strictly for enlisted men. The officers and senior NCOs had their own sanctorum where – due to their advanced maturity and rank – they were allowed to purchase a snort of hard liquor and get hammered like shit-house rats without fear of frowns from the riff-raff they ruled. For the enlisted swine laboring in the Division rear, it was the Thunderbird and beer only, usually hand-me-down cases of Carling Black Label served lukewarm in rusty cans. That swill was enough to gag a maggot. It was also cheap and served by bandy-legged Vietnamese girls exposing only a few suppurating jungle-sores beneath their mini-skirts. For the REMFs who labored through a mind-numbing tour of duty in the shadow of the flagpole, the Thunderbird was a pit stop between the shop and clean sheets in hard-backed hooches. For those of us who spent most of our time bashing the bush and chasing – or being chased – by the bad guys, the Thunderbird was nirvana. You’ll learn more about this shortly as it figures relatively large in my Vietnam experience but it’s important to give you a feel for the thing.
Understandably, the pogues did not care for bush-beasts dropping by the Thunderbird bristling with weapons, stinking of paddy mud and wearing faded, sweat-stained jungle utilities above boots scuffed white from hard humping. The Invasion of the Bush Beasts was a close encounter with the war they were missing and an unwelcome reminder that they were – like it or not – in the rear with the gear; a mere scale in the tail of the dragon, well behind the teeth of the line outfits. That’s why those of us who served in 1967-68 as Combat Correspondents with the Division and spent the majority of our time out with infantry battalions dearly loved to descend on the Thunderbird – just to remind the pogues that they weren’t shit…and we were.
The ambience was strictly GI with locally-fashioned picnic bench seating and an overall décor of painted plywood, but the Thunderbird did have a long plank bar where you could belly up and feel like you were pounding brews back in The World somewhere - as long as your supply of Military Payment Certificates (MPC) lasted. With beer at ten cents a can, that was usually about the time you puked or got hauled away by the Division MPs. If you were tapped out and the pogues weren’t feeling overly resentful, you could usually cadge a free round for the price of a good no-shit war story. If you’ve never been involved in insane shit like what went on regularly at the Thunderbird Club, Hill 327, Danang, your canteen cup will always remain half empty. You can’t find those kinds of kicks shooting nine-ball at your local sports pub.
THUNDERBIRD CLUB – HILL 327, DANANG, SOUTH VIETNAM
We lost a lot of good men during the ten years America prosecuted the war in Vietnam, trying at the last to get unstuck from that Asian tar-baby and having no more luck than Brer Rabbit did. That’s a crying ass shame, but more about that in a page or two. What’s another under-appreciated crying ass shame is our failure to disassemble, crate and ship the infamous Thunderbird Club from its perch on the military crest of Hill 327, just below the Command Post of the fighting 1st Marine Division in Danang, to re-assemble it at some easily-accessible location Stateside. We’d have a damn site fewer cases of PTSD among some of our Vietnam Vets if we’d done that when we un-assed the area back in 1975.
The Thunderbird was an oasis for the cooks, clerks, label-lickers, box-kickers and other rear-echelon Marines who supported the fighting regiments of the Division out in the bush. It was strictly for enlisted men. The officers and senior NCOs had their own sanctorum where – due to their advanced maturity and rank – they were allowed to purchase a snort of hard liquor and get hammered like shit-house rats without fear of frowns from the riff-raff they ruled. For the enlisted swine laboring in the Division rear, it was the Thunderbird and beer only, usually hand-me-down cases of Carling Black Label served lukewarm in rusty cans. That swill was enough to gag a maggot. It was also cheap and served by bandy-legged Vietnamese girls exposing only a few suppurating jungle-sores beneath their mini-skirts. For the REMFs who labored through a mind-numbing tour of duty in the shadow of the flagpole, the Thunderbird was a pit stop between the shop and clean sheets in hard-backed hooches. For those of us who spent most of our time bashing the bush and chasing – or being chased – by the bad guys, the Thunderbird was nirvana. You’ll learn more about this shortly as it figures relatively large in my Vietnam experience but it’s important to give you a feel for the thing.
Understandably, the pogues did not care for bush-beasts dropping by the Thunderbird bristling with weapons, stinking of paddy mud and wearing faded, sweat-stained jungle utilities above boots scuffed white from hard humping. The Invasion of the Bush Beasts was a close encounter with the war they were missing and an unwelcome reminder that they were – like it or not – in the rear with the gear; a mere scale in the tail of the dragon, well behind the teeth of the line outfits. That’s why those of us who served in 1967-68 as Combat Correspondents with the Division and spent the majority of our time out with infantry battalions dearly loved to descend on the Thunderbird – just to remind the pogues that they weren’t shit…and we were.
The ambience was strictly GI with locally-fashioned picnic bench seating and an overall décor of painted plywood, but the Thunderbird did have a long plank bar where you could belly up and feel like you were pounding brews back in The World somewhere - as long as your supply of Military Payment Certificates (MPC) lasted. With beer at ten cents a can, that was usually about the time you puked or got hauled away by the Division MPs. If you were tapped out and the pogues weren’t feeling overly resentful, you could usually cadge a free round for the price of a good no-shit war story. If you’ve never been involved in insane shit like what went on regularly at the Thunderbird Club, Hill 327, Danang, your canteen cup will always remain half empty. You can’t find those kinds of kicks shooting nine-ball at your local sports pub.
Monday, May 29, 2006
Memorial Day 2006: "Reviling the Veteran"
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