By Michael Brewer
Special to the Alpine Mountaineer
Editor’s note: Michael Brewer is a Vietnam veteran who returned to the country this year. He is writing about that experience in a series of articles for the newspaper.
When the “love letter” (aka draft notice) came in the mail, I followed the path of thousands of other uninitiated young males and joined the United States Marine Corps. Why? Knowing that most 18- and 19-year-old boys were being shipped out to Vietnam in 1967, the belief was that we would receive superior training in the machinations of war by joining the Marines and therefore increase our survival chances, never realizing that the enemy bullets do not know military branches and booby traps don’t discriminate.
From the senior prom in May to enlistment in December of 1967, the whole world changed – from the Summer of Love to the summer of death dealing. The 19-year-old former altar boy lost his innocence. And, like many other lads, my girlfriend dumped me. I was informed later that many girls did this as they could not tolerate the notion that their lover would not return home alive.
So, I entered the war zone as a lean, mean, killing machine and very sad, coupled with an intoxicating intrigue of going to an exotic country 7,000 miles away to stop the spread of Communism.
A MedCap Patrol in a hamlet to treat children with napalm burns.
I’ve read of our heroes
And wanted the same
To play my own part
In the Patriot game.
-Irish lyric
History had another plan.
Now, 56 years later, I returned to the jungle of darkness and carnage in search of that lost innocence and possibly purge a permeating life-long sadness, psychic numbness and a general disconnect from the civilian population. Living a life like a permanent guard dog gets old, especially when you are an old dog.
It is time to eclipse that phantom self and the perennial dance with the demons and send them out to sea.
There is a Buddhist phrase, “The place is the healing.” It began to work upon a late-night arrival in Hanoi. Arriving solo and not meeting up with my pals Peter Sternberg and Jerry Lane until the next day in Hue City, I embraced the alone time in my hotel room and 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.
Supper of some form was in order, but it was now dark and I would admit to a small amount of fear, but was comforted by the front desk staff that all was safe in the streets near the hotel. So out I went on a new kind of patrol.
The flood of smells, hamlets, doorstep restaurants, cacaphony of voices, open air markets with pigs on large skewers and the legions of bikes and motorbikes, often four abreast, offered up the first round of memories couched in the remembrance that these are the people we were defending. Battle sites were several days away, so I allowed myself to be immersed in the culture of the of day.
Since it was a day later and 14 hours difference, it was too late to connect with my wife on WhatsApp and elected to just shower and crash in an uncommonly modern, quite large hotel room that was $40 a night!
I fell off to sleep reading the one book I packed, The Terrible Love of War by James Hillman, and whispering to myself, “Am I really in Vietnam?”
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