Letter from A Veteran

It was a war without glory. It was endless nights of waiting in rain-soaked, mud-caked fatigues for death to strike from the bush, counting the hours till dawn, the days, the months, trusting no one, existing utterly alone. It was an enemy who rarely showed his face and murdered arbitrarily when he did, who used his school children as terrorists and brutally tortured his prisoners. It was bearing witness to countless mutual atrocities and concluding that the Geneva Convention was a joke politicians told to each other. It was the grunt who watched his friend's legs blown off by a booby trap, the helicopter nose-gunner presented with the gruesome aftermath of his handiwork on a village, the green private who killed one of his own with a fumbled grenade, the short-timer who fragged his field commander for ordering an impossible assault. It was the freckle-faced kid transformed into a steely-eyed killer by fear and rage and unendurable frustration, an ordinary human being so inured to unspeakable acts of violence that stories of hacking off the ears of old women, smashing babies against tree trunks and castrating prisoners during interrogation were met with icy indifference. It was cursing the ability to reason and wondering, in ever-suppressed horror, just how far one could push the envelope of sanity.
It was a peace without honor. It was walking point and dodging sniper fire along the Mekong Delta one morning, then stepping off an airplane in San Francisco 48 hours later, dumped back into America's lap and expected to act civilized. It was being spat upon by one's own countrymen who, angry and frustrated by an immoral and undeclared war, found it difficult to distinguish between vandals and victims. It was never knowing if your buddies made it back and living with the slow-burning fuse of survivor guilt, muted by the sheer magnitude of the experience, the onslaught of ineffable emotion, the dumbfounded expressions of those who hadn't been there and couldn't possibly understand. It was separation and divorce and dulling the anguish with drugs and alcohol, subsequent years of nightmares, embarrassing "startle" reactions, unrelenting memories, and uncontrollable tears.
It was an epic whose heroes were unsung....
This is a frightning and vivid letter written by a vietnam veteran who was eighteen years old when he arrived in Vietnam. He thought if he could just survive for twelve or thirteen months he would make it though ok. Very often the joy of going home masks the effects of combat PTSD. On arriving home most Vietnam veterans were spit on and treated like criminals by the people around them. Having gone through unimaginable horror and finally coming home to such an unwelcoming reception is traumatic in its own right.