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.

The Things We Carried

Ever since I heard that there was going to be a showing of a movie of a fairly recent book talk by Tim O'Brien on The Things They Carried (first published in 1990), I considered whether I should go see the 1-hour movie with a discussion afterward.  The movie was part of a series called "Writers in the Limelight," presented by Village Books (Bellingham's independent book store) at the tiny Limelight Cinema in downtown Bellingham.

Since 2006 when I began this blog, I've come a long way with the things I've carried in the wake of the Vietnam War, and I questioned the wisdom of visiting those memories today.  After a walk with a friend down by Bellingham Bay this morning and meeting with a group of friends afterward, I decided to risk opening old wounds in the hope of finding some healing for those old wounds.

Outside the theater, I recognized a Vietnam veteran who speaks in the local schools as a member of Veterans for Peace.  There were two other men of similar age along with a few women who looked to be in their 60s.  The event was sparsely attended.  There may have been a few younger people, but most of the men and woman appeared to be in their 60s or older.  After the movie, there was a short discussion facilitated by one of the booksellers from Village Books.

It was a wise decision for me to be there today.  I can look back, look at the present, and also look forward without the haunted feeling that I lived with for so long.

What I've posted below is a similar recent book talk on The Things They Carried.  It's worth listening to.  After an introduction, Tim O'Brien begins speaking at about 3:40:

Self Portrait of an Old Friend as a Young Man (1982)

This young man was drafted into the U.S. Army in the spring of 1969, went to Vietnam as a helicopter mechanic in January of 1970 and returned on December 8, 1970. Each day he was in Vietnam he wrote a letter to me, sometimes including drawings and photographs. Each day he was gone, I wrote a letter to him. In this drawing from a photograph he sent to me, I portrayed him as a man who could carry the weight of darkness and light in impossible situations. In Jungian terms, he is my animus.

Unlike the previous chalk pastel life drawings in this series, this one was done by projecting a slide onto a piece of drawing paper and tracing the image. Using that technique to produce a image was a drawing class assignment. I thought of the technique as "cheating." I can't take credit for either the drawing or the photograph from which the drawing was done, only for reproducing an image from 1970 from the war in Vietnam.

It's Christmas Eve in this season of holidays, holy days.