When Michael Brewer got his “love letter” (draft notice) in the mail, he followed the path of thousands of other young males and joined the United States Marine Corps.
Michael Brewer with Col. My, a former NVA MiG pilot, in Vietnam on Brewer’s return to the country.
Why? Knowing that most 18- and 19-year-old boys were being shipped out to Vietnam in 1967, he thought he would increase his survival chances by joining the Marines – not realizing that the enemy bullets did not know military branches and booby traps don’t discriminate.
Brewer says he entered the war zone as a “lean, mean killing machine,” sent off to an exotic country 7,000 miles away to stop the spread of Communism.
Fifty-six years later, Brewer returned to the jungle in search of his lost innocence. He was seeking to “possibly purge a permeating life-long sadness, psychic numbness and a general disconnect from the civilian population.”
He quotes a Buddhist phrase: “The place is the healing.” It began to work, Brewer said, when he arrived late at night in Hanoi.
“I was soon engulfed in a silence that surpassed understanding – like the silence at the end of a movie or when the casket closes. The ‘place’ triggered the healing. I honestly did not expect anything like this to happen so quickly.”
After a night in Hanoi, Brewer flew to Hue City, where he met up with two pals. Their guide, Tuan Tran, was a former Army of Republic of Vietnam solider. Tuan shared a quote from Ho Chi Minh with the former U.S. soldiers: “We did not need to win, we just wanted to ensure we did not lose.”
Brewer said that one of his motivations for the journey was his own “reconciliation with the collateral damage we inflicted. In layman’s terms, atrocities.
“I wanted to go to enmesh myself in the culture of the people we were allegedly liberating. I wanted to know them and feel their pain. I wanted to make peace with the historical fact of the number of civilians we slaughtered with indiscriminate bombing, including the damage done by Agent Orange and napalm.
“All of that was achieved by participating in some potent Buddhist rituals with our guide and practicing qigong on the China Beach in Da Nang. Closure was achieved.
“My flight out of Hanoi banked over the South China Sea to Tokyo,” Brewer said of his return home. “In our day we called it the ‘Freedom Bird’ back to the world, as we called America. None of us would be considered heroes in the homeland. It would take 50 years to utter a heartfelt, ‘Thank you for your service.’ No crowds, no parades, no chiming of church bells, just jeers and dark looks. Our only victory was we survived.
“My daughter and grandson met me at LAX with a big ‘Welcome Home’ sign – 56 years later, that is as good as it gets.”
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