This Has Been Along Time Coming

From a email I posted 5/1/2010

Today is the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and there may even be a few editorial written today, saying we should have fought on to some mythical victory, or some will say we should have never gone. As we all know, should have, and could have, isn't what happened, and for all of us who were around at the time, and made the choices we made. We are left to live with those choices.

So after all these years, rather than debating either side of should have, could have, I'd like to briefly describe my April 30th of 35 years ago. The impact of those images of Saigon falling will never leave me.

35 years ago today I was living and working in Lincoln Nebraska. I had bought a old house the year before; I was working as an apprentice carpenter; I thought I had worked my way through all my inter-conflicts with my time in Vietnam seven years earlier, and life was good. Then I came home to my old two story frame house in need of many repairs, after work on April 30, 1975, and turned on the TV, got a beer out of the frig, and sat down to see what had happen that day on the news. Saigon was falling right in front of me. For along time I wanted the war to end, but never gave consideration as to how it would look. Well, seeing those images on television that day, it didn't take long to realize, my inter-conflicts were still present and accounted for.

There I was, forced to face a truth which I had avoided from the time I came home in 1968 to that moment. “It was all for nothing.” To give your all in a six minute wrestling match, or forty eight minutes of a high school football game, and loose. Well, everybody lives to play another day. In war, when it's all over after giving it your all, there are some who don't live to fight another day, win or loose. It was overwhelming sitting there trying to comprehend the amount of death and destruction, some of which I caused, as if I were tallying up the final score. Then the tears came that I had been holding back for the previous eight years. The events of that day made for a long night, but by morning, I had everything stuffed back down as all good soldiers do for god and country, and went to work in the morning. It was another ten years before I said ouch, thus beginning my journey home, finally.

Every soldier, of every war, win or loose, lives with the remnants of their wars. It's a downside that isn't given equal measure as countries give in it's lives lost, and dollars and cents spent. Maybe someday. Then we just might pick our wars differently