Shaughnessy married a woman who was a war protester and thought veterans were psychotics. He laughed at the time, but he found that he simply could not hold back the anger. He was driven by recurring dreams to seek counseling. Intensely controlled, he now holds a high-paying job. He was a door gunner in a helicopter.
It`s not gonna go away. There`s nothing I can do about it. There`s no way I can change what I`ve done. I can`t change what I`ve seen. My nightmares are now an accepted part of life. And that`s the way it is.
It`s like being a cripple. You can`t change being a cripple, but you can learn to deal with it, you can learn to live with it, you can look at it every day in the mirror and say it`s here.
Vietnam: I went over there to be in military intelligence; I ended up as a door gunner in a helicopter. I was all over. The Delta to Phu Bai, I got to carry secret documents and to shoot people too–what a great deal. I`m still absolutely lucky to be alive. I mean I don`t gamble now, I don`t ski now, I don`t do any high-risk activity because my luck has run out! Over there it was, well, 35 seconds after the shooting started there was a 90 percent chance you were going to be dead. You`re a wide-open target. You`re sitting in a wide-open door with nowhere to go. All you can do is to try to return the body of the fire . . . .
I know friends who were over there in `68, `69, they`re gone, they`re wasted, they`re crazy. They`ve got the 2,000-yard stare. The Veterans Administration: I made every last goddam dime myself. I didn`t like that
”help.” They didn`t help me before, they aren`t gonna help me now. They can die up there, those bureaucrats.
This country`s never said, ”What you did was all right. We know that what you did, you did to survive.” They never said that. They start saying it now 14 years too late!
You know, my parents never, to this day, asked me about Vietnam. Two years ago, my wife brought it up, and my dad didn`t know I was in combat. They never asked, I never told . . . .
If people knew what darkness was like! They think it gets dark over here. It never gets dark over here. We`ve got so many major cities, so many monuments, so many outside baseball games that the reflection is everywhere, that it never gets dark. Over there, there were no cities, no lights. When it got dark, it got dark. You couldn`t see from here to there, pitch-black, ink- black! And they`d wait. In the monsoons it`d rain, in the dark. You`d be sitting there waiting for them, you couldn`t fly, and they`d come through . . . .
JOHN SUMIDA
Mild exterior, scholarly manner, and an intellectual`s penchant for linking events all mask Sumida`s iron will. A Japanese-American, he was brought up with the concept of duty to country, the son of one of the famed Nisei who fought for the United States in World War II and proved their loyalty with horrific casualties. He went to jail rather than submit to the Vietnam draft. He is a military historian, now teaching at the University of Maryland. He served 18 months in prison in the mid-1970s.
That changed my mind was the invasion of Cambodia. I felt disturbed that Nixon and Kissinger were doing things when the president had said we weren`t. The electorate was being asked to accept behavior by the executive, allow it and legitimize it. I didn`t believe in conscientious-objector–it seemed like that was cutting a deal with the government. I knew, for example, that none of my white friends were going to war. Four hundred dollars and a lawyer could stretch out the time almost indefinitely. There were doctors, there were deferments. The other (factor) in my decision to resist was the speaker who urged people to turn in their draft cards–and after the speech I asked him if he had turned his in, and he said no.
From that point on I decided to resist. I would say no at each stage of the procedure. I had already foreseen that there were times that the only correct place to be was in prison.
One of the things that made me turn to personal direct action was that I was tired of radical politics, group actions, radical action I found hard to support.
When I went to my physical, at every point where I was asked a question, I said no. I was notified I was 1-A in the draft sometime after. In the fall of `71 I refused induction, and after refusal, I received notice I would be prosecuted. I went through two trials–at the first one there was a hung jury. My defense was not that the war was illegal–we knew that would not work. My lawyer and his assistant and I scoured the literature, and we held that a
”reasonable man” would believe that the war was illegal or unconstitutional. Ironically, it was a military man on the jury who refused to go for the guilty. The next trial we lost hands down. Two years.
Prison was not a waste of time. I practiced the trumpet four or five hours a day and read extremely widely. There were a few draft evaders, ten dope dealers, ten racketeers, and a few blacks. I was regarded as an American Indian. One of the Indians asked me what tribe I was in!
By the time I was in prison, it was good to be a draft resister because of Watergate. I felt distinctly lucky; for after Watergate it was very difficult to deny parole for draft resisters. The parole officer asked me what I would do if I had the choice again. I said I would do the same thing, and he smiled at that.
Within this framework, which is at least a framework of law, it was worth it, for if you weren`t willing to do 18 months, what were you willing to do? I was offered by the draft system the chance to make a statement. As I told the judge, this was a case on which honorable men could have a disagreement.
NANCY FRIEDSON
Somewhere along the line I saw one touching picture or heard one touching story that made me want to come here. All those names, all those stories, all those lives on one simple cut in the earth . . . I don`t know how to explain it. I was very glad I came by myself.
In the late `60s I started flying for Pan Am. I did a lot of R & R`s
(rest and recreation trips), Camranh Bay and Danang and Saigon and taking the soldiers for their R & R, and I remember just how unaware we were . . . as flight attendants, we knew there was a war going on, but we had no real awareness of what these guys were going through, and all we knew at our servicing level was that we wanted to . . . kind of get their mind off what it was that they were experiencing.
So we`d do stupid things like when we were doing the lifejacket demonstrations, we`d cut out Playboy bunnies and tape them to the overhead box flap so that when we`d pull the thing down like this there`d be a little nude girl on it; we were always doing things like this. And the guys got a big kick out of that, but when I look at that wall I think, my God! They were in a whole different world! How could they even find humor in that or in anything. I was 22.
Those flights were very different. There was a profound difference in taking them from Vietnam for their R & R and bringing them back after their R & R. . . . for one thing, and this had nothing to do with the military, they were the best passengers in the world, because they`re so used to doing what they`re told that they file in like they`re supposed to, and they sit down, and they`re so appreciative, and they . . . I seem to remember it wasn`t like one big party the moment they were leaving Vietnam, some of them seemed in a . . . a lot of them were still very quiet and somber. Definitely coming back you could have heard a pin drop.
We took a lot of them to Hong Kong and Bangkok. It was joshing around. I don`t remember any serious talks with them. I think they didn`t want that at all. Now, I think if I had that kind of flight again, I would welcome an opportunity to talk to them or have them talk to me–to share their experience. But maybe then, my age then, my inexperience–I was just a kid
–but I don`t remember any of us having serious talks, or these guys wanting to have serious talks. They just wanted to be out of there . . . .
