Bringing It All Back Home (35 page)

Jimmy Bacolo (at left) served in an Army artillery unit and later worked on the Staten Island Ferry. His twin brother, Mauro (at right), joined the Navy; after the war, he became a landscaper.
(Photograph by Philip F. Napoli)

Bernard Edelman poses at a temple in Vietnam. An Army journalist during the war, he is now Deputy Director for Policy and Government Affairs for Vietnam Veterans of America.
(Photograph courtesy of Bernard Edelman)

After joining the Marines, Ed German was wounded in a May 1969 ambush and returned home that June. Today German works as a radio personality on Long Island.
(Photograph courtesy of Ed German)

After leaving college, Robert Ptachik was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1966. He was wounded by a booby trap in 1967.
(Photograph courtesy of Robert Ptachik)

Upon returning, Ptachik became a founding member of the Brooklyn chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America. He is currently Senior University Dean for the Executive Office and Enrollment at the City University of New York.
(Photograph courtesy of Robert Ptachik)

Herbert Sweat served as an infantryman with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. Today he serves on the board of Black Veterans for Social Justice, Inc., a not-for-profit social service agency founded in 1979.
(Photograph by Philip F. Napoli)

A retired New York City public school teacher, Neil Kenny served in Vietnam in 1968 and later struggled with PTSD. In 2005 he attended a Memorial Day event at the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza.
(Photograph by Philip F. Napoli)

Neil Kenny in Vietnam.
(Photograph courtesy of Neil Kenny)

Vince McGowan says, “I got my education in the Marine Corps with two tours in Vietnam.” Today, he is Chief Operating Officer at Battery Park City Parks Conservancy in lower Manhattan and president of the group that puts on Manhattan's annual Veterans Day Parade. Here he observes Vietnam Veterans Recognition Day at the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza, March 2011.
(Photograph by Philip F. Napoli)

 

A NOTE ON METHOD

NOTES

RECOMMENDED READING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

A NOTE ON METHOD

This book draws on the in-depth oral history interviews I conducted with more than two hundred persons between 2004 and 2010. Interviews varied in length from forty-five minutes to more than thirty hours. Altogether, some six hundred hours of recordings were gathered and transcribed. In conducting and presenting my interviews, I elected to employ a life-story technique so as to comprehend the trajectory of Vietnam veterans' lives.
1
Dan P. McAdams, a clinical psychologist and one of the leading authorities on the life-story model of human identity, defines life stories as narratives “based on biographical facts, but they go considerably beyond the facts as people selectively appropriate aspects of their experience and imaginatively construe both past and future to construct stories that make sense to them and their audiences, that vivify and integrate life and make it more or less meaningful.” He adds that an individual's “life stories are psychosocial constructions, coauthored by himself or herself and the cultural context experience within which that person's life is embedded and given meaning.”
2
Using McAdams's life-story technique, I asked my interviewees to explain how they became the people they are today. In response, the veterans produced narrative reconstructions of their lives; they selected the bits and pieces of individual memory that seemed most important and arranged them into a meaningful story to be shared with an interviewer—and the general public.
3

I chose this method in large part because of the peculiar, living, and evolving nature of my source material—living witnesses. Annette Wieviorka's provocative book
The Era of the Witness
records the rise of eyewitness testimony in the twentieth century and reflects on the dangers in using eyewitness testimony, including oral history, uncritically. She argues that historians should not look to autobiographical narratives of this kind for “clarification of precise events, places, dates, and numbers, which are wrong with the regularity of a metronome,” but should instead pay attention to oral history for its “extraordinary riches,” for “an encounter with the voice of someone who has lived through a piece of history.” The genre offers “in oblique fashion, not factual truth, but the more subtle and just as indispensable truth of an epoch and of an experience.”
4

Wieviorka would agree with Alessandro Portelli, who is perhaps the most important living practitioner of the craft of oral history. In Portelli's view, “Oral sources are credible but with a
different
credibility. The importance of oral testimony may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge.”
5
Oral histories are therefore texts to be explored for their plot and structure, for imagery, metaphor, irony, archetype, and all of the other devices that narrative analysis may discuss. Oral histories give us access to the subjective experience of historical actors functioning in history and living through historical time. They occupy the liminal space between the psychological realm and the social world of a shared daily reality. Therefore, they cannot be understood as a “transparent form of evidence” granting some kind of magical direct access to past events or experience.
6
Oral histories must be listened to closely and interpreted in order to be valuable.
7