Just wanted to write a really short thought about the Vietnam War. It sucked. My brother's best friend was drafted and killed. When my brother got a bad lottery number late in 1969 he packed his bags for Canada. Big arguments in the house. My father knew a bigwig somewhere and he got a deferment. Even though he played high school football and ran track, he got the deferment because he had rheumatic fever when he was younger.
After I quit Charlotte's all hell broke loose. I was "walking the streets" (ha, George Carlin) smoking marijuana and hashish. Pretty new to it. Well, it wasn't always easy to find. Somebody had to know somebody. You didn't want to get "beat." One evening we met up with a friend of someone's brother. He had one of those green fatigue shirts, lots of people wore them, and blond hair. His hair wasn't really long, just kind of growing out long. It was somewhere near The Little Red Store on Oceanside Road. It wasn't right on the street, my memory says it was a bridge. So this guy has pre-rolled joints ready. Nobody bought it like that? They were laced with Angel Dust, that's why. That stuff is no joke and I really didn't like it.
So we're talking to the guy and he said he was back from Viet Nam for about 6 months. I asked something stupid, just because I had so many questions to ask, "You were in Viet Nam?" "Yeah." Then he pulls up his shirt and pulls his pants down a little. He had a scar, no lots and lots of scars. Running all up and down his body. Still pink. Not neat scars. But a jagged mess of stringy scars, up, down, across and over. I just can't imagine. I wasn't shocked, but in awe of this man still walking after whatever it was happened to him.
I wish I remembered his name. Sometimes we'd take the LIRR to his house he was renting in Atlantic Beach. Every time we saw him, he'd put on a gas mask that he hooked up to a pipe. He'd pull that stuff in there and just breathe till he didn't feel the pain so much. The smoke clouded his face. Things change, you move around. I don't know what happened to him. He probably wouldn't have remembered me, but I'll never forget him or the crap that some of those boys went through. And I never knew anyone that thought the soldiers were the bad guys.
i'll never forget a guy named ray that hung out by my high school, vietnam vet, long dark hair, he'd go into ptsd episodes & get out into traffic & yell sometimes, most of the time he was ok though & he'd bum cigarettes off me, & that was fine,
ReplyDeletei had a mentally ill older sister so i understood..
There was another vet that I was really friends with in Colorado. He would have terrible PTSD fits also. He told some horrible stories.
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