Bringing It All Back Home (18 page)

Coming home was rather emotional, being away for twelve months, going through Vietnam, just to get out of a cab and walk in the door without a few minutes of sort of downtime. I didn't want to just step out and step into the house, so I asked the cabbie to drop me off at Smith and Ninth Street, and he said, “Why? This is not where you live.” And I explained to him that I used to always walk that Z shape to school and to work, so I needed that block and a half of zigzag just so I could sort of compose myself, you know? After being away for twelve months and most of the time walking on grass and weeds and bush and mud, I needed to find me back on asphalt and concrete.

Jimmy described what it was like to finally walk in the door:

And [
long pause, taps with fingers
] it was a school day, so my brothers and sisters, the younger ones, were in school. But my mom was home, as usual, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee because she always had a pot of coffee on, and I think she was eating toast or zwieback biscuits, which she loved with butter. It was emotional. We used to call her Tiny Tears because she would cry at the drop of a hat for anything; I mean, if a baby was born, she would cry. If somebody died, she would cry. If something was this, she would cry. She, my mother, was very emotional that way. She would always cry.

So I walked in the second door—we had a vestibule—and I still had a key because I always had a key to the house, and no matter when we moved away or where we went, we always had a key to get back to the house. And I just opened the door and walked in the first door, then I walked into the second door, and she heard the doors opening and she started to get up and I could just catch her from the corner of my eye at the table with the coffee and the zwiebacks and she turned and she got a little—I would say hysterical, more than emotional. I mean, she couldn't believe that I was home.

Jimmy's mother called his father's best friend. About ten minutes later three carloads of longshoremen showed up, including his father, his uncles, and his best friends.

My father was beside himself. He wasn't one for showing too much emotion at certain things, but he was taken aback, and it was good to see him. We had a couple of beers, and then he said, “Come on. We'll take you down to the neighborhood.” We went back down to my uncle's bar, where all the rest of the longshoremen were because the longshoremen were strictly 100 percent behind the war or behind the troops, and we went down there and I met my cousins and other friends and all my father's longshoremen friends, and none of them went back to the ship that day. We stayed in my uncle's bar, and we all got smashed. We had a good time.

They had a sign out, which I still have. They took a piece of wood, painted it red, white, and blue, and they put Christmas lights on it, and they hung it up for Christmas out in the window. And it was still there when I got home in May:
WELCOME HOME JIMMY FROM VIETNAM
.
When my mother passed away in 1989, I went down in the basement. I found the wood sign dry-rotted but still painted with the words, and I brought it to my house, and I have it down in the basement covered up. That was the only welcome home I got—was the family and that sign.

He came home in 1968. The New York City Fifth Avenue parade was five years in the future. By the time it rolled around, it was irrelevant to him. He compared his own experience with his father's return home from World War II,
when everybody had time to sort of relax a little bit. By the time they got everything secured, they got to the ships and all, they spent twenty-something days coming home. Here in Vietnam you were always flown home, individual or in groups, and within forty-eight hours from the time that I left Hill 29, I went to Chu Lai overnight, and from Chu Lai I went to Cam Ranh Bay overnight. That's two days. On the third morning I was flying home. Within seventy-two hours I was back in the States after being out in the field and in LZs and firebases. So in that seventy-two hours' time you went from one extreme to the next. Meanwhile, the battle, the war, was still going on and guys were still dying, and you were leaving guys behind that you knew well.

Jimmy's sense that he had abandoned his fellow soldiers is a common refrain in Vietnam veterans' stories. Jose Gonzalez said the same thing, as did Joan Furey and many others I interviewed. World War II and Korean War veterans had long journeys home together, mostly aboard ship. Jimmy and his generation were separated and atomized by the service's procedures, which generated bitterness. Most often, people came home individually, not as part of a unit, as their tour of duty in Vietnam ended—at twelve months for people in the Army and thirteen months for Marines. The men and women returning from Vietnam never had the opportunity to effectively decompress before returning home. This lack of downtime led to resentment. Many returned home feeling like so much surplus baggage.

Jimmy's brother Mauro recalls a relatively safe time in the Navy.

We put things in the war; we took things out of the war. We researched the rivers, tributaries, and canals to measure the depth and breadth of them. We did water samples; we made charts. We turned them over to the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Army Corps [of] Engineers, and a sundry of other organizations that needed the charts. We worked for the Oceanographic Institute in Washington, D.C. The minute we went under way, we were measuring the water clouds. That's what the ship was, the Geodetic Survey ship AGS-15. That's what we did. It wasn't a horrid experience. I didn't earn any great ribbons; I didn't draw blood on my own.

He also describes homecoming as “uneventful.” He was in the Philippines with his ship when his time was up.

I remember coming in, landing, it was morning; got in a cab and came home; it was bitter cold and I was home. The neighborhood had changed tremendously. A lot of the guys were on drugs, in jail, some had died, some were in Vietnam, others were in the military, several had died and I hadn't been aware of it. None of us went together as a group or unit; we all went our own individual ways, on our own.

At the age of sixteen, Mauro had left school to work at Ohrbach's department store on Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. He joined the military the next year, in 1964, and got his GED while in the Navy, along with some college credits. He was married June 3, 1966, and reported to his ship in Bayonne, New Jersey, a week later. He arrived in Vietnam in September 1966, and his wife gave birth to their daughter in January 1967. Mauro saw her for the first time that May, on a two-week leave, and then headed back to Vietnam, finally returning to the United States for good in December.

My daughter was one month short of one year old
.

When he returned from Vietnam, he had a drug problem.

He worked a variety of jobs, went to Woodstock in 1969, and hung out in Greenwich Village. He remembers the 1969 New York Mets victory parade in lower Manhattan.

I was on Broadway and Wall Street the day that the Mets won the World Series. I remember the windows opening and the roar and din, but I was on LSD. I wasn't a sports fan, so I could care less about the Mets. [But] I was sort of caught up in it … and when the paper came down, I was standing in the middle of Broad and Wall up to my waist in paper and trying to figure out why they were throwing this paper out.

Mauro went briefly to City College and then to the New York Botanical Garden's School of Professional Horticulture, from which he graduated in 1974. From 1979 to 1982 he worked for a young-adult landscape-training program, then bought a nursery in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which he ran until 1986. While he did okay, Mauro regrets the years he lost to drug and alcohol use.

I say to myself, “Look what I missed.” I could have been a nerd like that. I could have gone to college and graduated because I would have been with a crowd that gravitated toward that.

In late 1986 he started rehabilitation, as an outpatient, finally getting clean for good in February 1989. He celebrated his twenty-third anniversary of being sober in February 2012.

While he doesn't blame the war for his drug use, he does attribute the lack of purpose and direction he felt after the war to the combined effect of his experience in Vietnam and social unrest in America.

I wanted us to be the winners; to vanquish the enemies, so to speak. But then all the politics involved, you know. So it changed me. Not so much my eleven-plus months there, but that whole period from '63 or '64 to '73 or '75, because … that whole ten-to-twelve-year period was all around Vietnam and the social unrest. You can't separate one from the other, because there was so much going on and I had four years in the military. I left with short hair; [then] I went long-haired hippie, drugs …

In 1975, when he heard the news about the official end of the war, it was a devastating moment for Mauro.

I remember the day. I was sitting in the apartment at 247 Garfield and they made the announcement and I broke down; I was in tears. I remember calling my brother Jimmy and [I] said, “Did you just hear the news?” He said, “Yeah.” He was in tears too. I said, “But why, Jimmy? What happened?” It's very vivid. I can feel the sun coming through the window just sitting there in the little anteroom that we had off to the side overlooking Garfield Place, and I just sat there and cried. What happened, what happened? The war was over.

I wanted us to be the winners
.

9

AGAINST WAR: FRIEDMAN AND LOUIS

The public memory of the war in Vietnam is dominated by several stereotypical images. The first is that of a dirty soldier in the midst of combat in a dense jungle. The second image is that of the civilian protester, voicing displeasure about American policy in Vietnam. The third is that of the returned veteran as victim. It has remained difficult for the American public to see beyond these clichés.

Plenty of veterans protested against the war—and continue to protest against present wars—and they speak with an authority that few others can match. They know what war means because they have seen it and experienced it. Some continue to live the consequences of the war in Vietnam every day. The experiences of Danny Friedman and Fred Louis reveal something of what it has meant to be an antiwar veteran.

The organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War has its roots in New York City. In April 1967, a Vietnam vet named Jan Barry, then known as Jan Crumb, marched in demonstrations under a banner held aloft by members of an organization called Veterans for Peace (VFP), a pacifist group made up mostly of men who had fought in World War II and the Korean War. VFP put up a sign reading
VIETNAM VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR!
mostly to see what would happen. In fact, as the historian Gerald Nicosia has noted, there was no Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization at the time, but Barry and five others would soon create one.
1
This veterans' organization would go on to deeply influence the lives of many and would have a significant impact on the national discourse about the war. Hundreds—some say thousands—of men and women moved through the organization, which continues to exist to this day.

Friedman grew up in the Homecrest section of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in a relatively liberal Jewish family. He had a stable upbringing: he lived in the same house from the age of six until he went into the Army. His parents, who both worked, volunteered at the local Jewish community center. His mother kept a kosher house, and the family kept the Sabbath, but over time religious observance became a less significant part of family life. While the family continued to go to synagogue on the High Holy Days, they did not attend on a regular basis. Still, they made certain that Friedman went to Hebrew school and had his Bar Mitzvah. Social consciousness was a component of their culture at home, albeit of a rather passive variety. He recalls:

We watched all the stuff on TV about the racial problems in the South with horror. We were offended by what was going on; we were outraged. We weren't activists; we didn't go join marches or anything. But mostly my friends in the neighborhood, we didn't really discuss stuff like that. It was just stuff that happened somewhere else. What we were involved in was the Giants and the Yankees and the Dodgers and the Mets and you know—the Knicks and the Rangers. That was important.

After he graduated from high school at the age of sixteen, he attended Kingsborough Community College for three semesters, until late fall 1966.

When he arrived at Kingsborough, the school was new, but many of its buildings were World War II–era barracks left over from a defunct military base. Friedman recalls taking part in the demolition of some of the older structures dotting the area. The school had the advantage of being close to home, and Friedman did not have a car.

In the mid-1960s, the antiwar movement was just beginning to take shape nationally. In March 1965 students and faculty at the University of Michigan held one of the first antiwar teach-ins, followed by an even larger one at the University of California, Berkeley, in May. Friedman remembers seeing groups like Students for a Democratic Society and antiwar activists on campus, especially in the student center. But like many American college students at the time, he viewed them with little sympathy. While antiwar momentum would later grow on college campuses, at this stage the movement remained quite small.

Academically, Friedman did not perform as well as he had hoped. If he felt interested in either a subject or a faculty member, he had the ability to get As and Bs, but some subjects, like economics, seemed to stump him. By the end of the third semester he was on academic probation.

Friedman knew that without a student deferment, he would be drafted. As a result, he tried to enlist in the National Guard, Air Force, and Navy Reserve. Of course, many young men had a similar idea, and these branches of the military had long wait lists. Rather than matriculate back at school for a fourth semester, Friedman took a job.