MEMORIALS IN THE HEART: A VIETNAM VETERAN’S HOLIDAY REFLECTION

MEMORIALS IN THE HEART: A VIETNAM VETERAN’S HOLIDAY REFLECTION

We carried the Vietnam War home with us. No matter the therapy, no matter the pills, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t outrun it. We couldn’t out-train it. We couldn’t outlive it. The trauma, they called it PTSD, but it was a slow, steady poison. It worked on us all the time. It worked to kill our joy, our peace. We’d never escape it.

And still, everything I do now, here in the civilian world, I measure it against what happened in Vietnam. I walk down the street, sit at a table, hear a helicopter or a jet engine. My body remembers. My mind knows it’s not real anymore, but it doesn’t matter. The tension, the fear, the nerves come anyway, and I don’t control them.

I think about those 58,000 brothers who didn’t come home. I think about the 150,000 injured others. It’s a weight I carry. It doesn’t go away. Not when the holidays come, when the world celebrates when everyone else moves on. I feel gratitude for the life I survived. And I feel sorrow for those who didn’t. Their names are on the wall, cold and black, forever etched. I can still feel my hand on those names, still feel my knees give way when I saw them when the tears came. I’ve never gone back.