I hid my Vietnam war scrapbooks beneath the mattress of my pink checkered canopy bed as my body turned from girl to young woman. I hid the images of bodies with missing legs, yellow body bags and widows throwing themself upon the wounded men returning from Vietnam. I moved from plastic dolls with unbendable arms to a childhood layered with an obsession about a war that was delivered to my family each day on the radio, on a television with rabbit ears and the trusted voice of Walter Cronkite.
Just by turning on the television or opening the pages of the daily Philadelphia Inquirer, our family witnessed the horrors of the battlefields. My childhood was disrupted by something that would forever be out of my control.
I lived on the daily tarmac of grief with mothers and fathers and wives and children at airports waiting for the wounded or dead to return, so when the movie Deer Hunter came out we watched that too - transfixed - because by then we knew the damage the war had caused to the men who returned, and that those who survived physically were wounded in ways that couldn’t be healed, unraveling families.
I wore out the knees on my pajamas in my childhood bedroom praying for the safe return of the prisoners of war, dreaming about humid swamp land, and muddy boots and men eating out of cans, not knowing one day I would fall in love with one of them.
I was ten, then twelve, then finally fourteen when the war ended.
How could I possibly know my prayers and obsession with that war would return one day when Mike walked into my office in Los Angeles? I fell in love with a man who carried the war in his pockets, who had once fallen in love with a girl with one eye in the village of Cau Hai when he was separated from his platoon in Vietnam, just eighteen years old.
We had a daughter together, and though I tried to love the war out of him, I was not able. We eventually found our way into a different kind of love, co-parenting our daughter and remaining friends. He spent his years working with veterans returning home from wars and their families.
When my daughter was eleven we stood together in line with Carrie Fisher and her daughter at the Whitney museum in New York to get in to see the 60’s exhibit. Once inside, my daughter stood in front of the photographs of the men in Vietnam, dropped her mouth open and said Mom, is this dad’s war?
I nodded, holding my breath, both my daughter and me knowing not to speak in the past tense, because it will forever be his war. Carrie Fisher took my hand so I could exhale. Our daughter then was the same age as I was when gluing images of the war on dusty brown paper, and I knew the war also belonged to her.
On my last trip to Oregon visiting my grandchildren, my ten year old granddaughter asked me about her grandfather and if I saw him when I was in L.A. I told her we went to the Veteran’s cemetery and she asked if he had fought in a war.
She’s just the age when I tucked the war in between my mattress and my boxspring, so I was careful when I spoke. I simply told her that her grandpa was in the Vietnam war, he was a brave man, he loves to dance and he spent his life helping others returning from wars.
A few days ago Mike texted me a photo of him in the war with his Vietnam buddies from his platoon. I didn’t want to ask him how many of these young men made it home alive, as I’m certain we visited some of their graves on my last trip to Los Angeles.
I can’t celebrate wars, but I can honor the man who returned from the Vietnam war and gave me my daughter and grandchildren, and of course have compassion for my young self, the girl who tucked all that sorrow between my mattress and my boxspring, and perhaps prayed my future into being.
Photo of my daughter’s father and young men in his platoon he loved. My daughter’s father today.
Laura Lentz is an author of Freeing the Turkeys and STORYquest, the Writer, the Hero, the Journey. She is the founder of LITerati Academy, an international community of writers creating together in small groups weekly, with themed, curated classes to invite the muse. She is the curator of the upcoming winter Literati journal SYNcreation, featuring poetry and essays by writers inside Literati Academy.
Upcoming Writing workshop: About our Fathers June 12 and 13th.
thank you. held lightly, held completely
Beautifully written. My own story does not include Vietnam, but I related so much to the essence of your story.