With immense gratitude to Spike Lee and the cast of "Da 5 Bloods"

Experiencing "Da 5 Bloods" today was a healing gift beyond measure.  Today I know I am not alone.

Listening to Michael Dempsey: A Black American Vietnam Veteran

It took some time to read the transcript following this long interview with Michael Dempsey from the Courage to Resist website.  If you have the time, I recommend listening to it or reading the transcript.

An excerpt from the July 1, 2019 podcast:

Michael Dempsey: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you this. There has never been a movie made that comes close to what war is. The closet thing that I’ve seen was “Saving Private Ryan,” and I have yet to watch that movie, because that opening scene, where they’re getting off, they’re landing on the beach, and those bullets are hitting?

It’s like, that brings everything back to me, and I can’t stand it. I can’t. I’ve tried to watch that movie three times now, and I’ve even tried watching it, like, from in the middle. And I’m watching it in the middle, and that guy is standing in that window, and that sniper shoots him? You know, and it’s like, yeah. I go, “I can’t watch this.”

I would say, that is the closest thing to reality about war that I’ve seen. Yeah. This laborer said to me one day, he said, “Are you seeing a psychiatrist?” And I said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” He said, “You have post-traumatic stress disorder.” I said, “What the hell are you talking about? And how do you know that?”

No, I didn’t. Actually, I had a longtime girlfriend for like seven years, and one night, she told me, she said, “I can’t do this anymore.” She said, “I wake up in the middle of the night, you got your alarms, you got your hands around my throat, you’re yelling and screaming.”

And she said, “Sometimes you’re fighting with people while you’re sleeping, you’re throwing punches and kicking,” and she said, “I can’t do this anymore,” and she left me. [See am's note below **]

I still— Again, I didn’t realize what was going on, and it was actually 30 years to the day that I got out of the service that I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration. He told me… He talked to me for… He interviewed me for 15 minutes, and said, “You have severe post-traumatic stress disorder.”

*

While R was on the plane on his way to Vietnam in 1970, he wrote his first letter to me and began drawing on the backs of the envelopes.  It took me three days of letters to realize what he was spelling out.  Before he left for Vietnam, we committed to writing each other every day, if possible.  We kept that commitment.  

**A few nights after R returned from Vietnam, R punched me in the face in the midst of a nightmare.  When he woke up, he was devastated by what he had done to me.  Since then I've come to understand how common our experience was.  When R died in 2008, he was blind in one eye, just like Toggle in the Doonesbury strips in 2009:

My art work from the 1970s through 2008 was the best way I could express what I couldn't speak of in words.

Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post.  Fifty years ago, I felt absolutely alone with my experience of being against the war and loving a veteran who was against the war before he went to Vietnam and remained against war until the day he died.  I've come to understand that we were never alone.  I may not watch "Da 5 Bloods."  Maybe all I need to do is be grateful for this photo taken in connection with the film.   For me, it says something hopeful, something beyond words.

Time Has Come Today

Watching the trailer for "Da 5 Bloods" was startling for many reasons, one of which is that in one of the documentary film clips that Spike Lee used, the white soldier wearing dark glasses and sitting shoulder to shoulder with a black soldier looked so much like my R that it took my breath away.

R was in training to be a helicopter mechanic at the Army school in Newport News, Virginia, in 1969 when Jimi Hendrix was singing at Woodstock in the context of the war in Vietnam.  R and his Army friends thought about going to Woodstock to see Jimi Hendrix. 

After watching the trailer and becoming aware of what I was feeling, I decided that it was probably not a good idea for me to watch "Da 5 Bloods" now that I am conscious of what I need to do to take care of myself, having learned how to do that as a result of years of counseling.  I've come a long way since 1970, but it doesn't take much to bring back that troubled time in my life and to re-traumatize myself. 

Although I watched the first night of the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, I was unable to continue watching.  It is occurring to me that it is because Ken Burns wasn't a soldier in Vietnam that his vision didn't match the vision I have as a result of the letters R wrote to me every day that he was in Vietnam.  Ken Burns' vision didn't ring true for me.  A Vietnam veteran on a hotline I called in the early 1990s as a result of my acute distress in connection with the First Gulf War told me that I was a veteran, too, because I had lived with R during the traumatic months immediately after his return from Vietnam.  

Oliver Stone was a soldier in Vietnam.  When I watched "Platoon" twice in 1987 and once again years later, I came as close as I ever have to experiencing the nightmare that R and so many other men of my generation had experienced.  

Tim O'Brien was a soldier in Vietnam.  His book of short stories, The Things They Carried, brought me more understanding of the traumatic experience of war.

The Sorrow of War, a novel by Bao Ninh, gave me a much-needed Vietnamese perspective on living in a war-torn country for one's entire life.

Spike Lee wasn't a soldier in Vietnam but, as I write, it is occurring to me that although he was not a soldier in Vietnam, he is a black man who lives with the ongoing violence and threats of violence that have been directed at black people for generations in the United States.  For that reason, I am going to find a way to watch "Da 5 Bloods" and listen to his message.

Last night, with just a few minutes of searching on YouTube, I found the complete documentary footage of the soldiers using a gun as a marijuana pipe.  The documentary was filmed in 1970 which is the year R was in Vietnam, but the soldiers filmed were on a base 50 miles northeast of Saigon.  R was much farther north, about 50 miles from what was then called North Vietnam.  Although the soldier with the dark glasses looked just like R in the first few frames, the following frames made it clear to me that it was not R.  There is another soldier who also looked like R in a single frame but not at all like R otherwise.  

For years after 1971, I would be stunned and sometimes frightened when I would see a man in a public place who reminded me of R.  This happened frequently.  The bond I had with R goes deep.  It's been called a trauma bond.  R brought the violence of the war home with him on December 8, 1970, just a few months after Jimi Hendrix died.  R and I separated after he turned that violence on me five months later in May 1971 and yet, years later, I chose to be with him in the ICU of the Palo Alto VA Hospital in the week before he died in 2008.  

Oddly enough, the night after I looked closely at those YouTube images of the soldiers that Oliver Stone borrowed and reenacted in "Platoon" and which Spike Lee used in "Da 5 Bloods", R appeared in a brief vivid dream in which all that happened was that we gave each other a long warm affectionate hug.  

This blog was created in hopes that I would find, in sharing my art work and writing about it, the healing that had eluded me for so many years in connection with the war in Vietnam.  I never expected to become part of a blogging community with members in Canada and Europe as well as the United States and to see the world from so many illuminating perspectives.  I didn't know that there would be more wounds to heal.  May we all be healed from the wounds that are a part of life.  May we see the everlasting beauty.