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SHRAPNEL IN THE HEART: INTRODUCTION
© 1987 by Laura Palmer
They were ours.
In the simplicity of those three words is the power of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the purpose of this book. The memorial asks that you remember; here are their names. Shrapnel in the Heart lets you listen; here are their stories, told by the people who loved them.
We have heard about Vietnam from the generals and journalists, soldiers and spies, politicians and historians. Now it is the turn of the people who have lost the most and said the least: the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, children, friends, wives, sweethearts, and buddies of the men who died in Vietnam. They tell tenderly, painfully, and sometimes angrily about what it means to lose someone you love in a war that much of the country came to hate. But this is not a book about despair. This is a book about love, love that bombs can’t shatter and bullets can’t kill.
Shrapnel in the Heart is a collection of letters and poems that have been left at the Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington, D.C. In the five years of its existence, the memorial, unexpectedly, became a place not only to honor but to communicate with the dead. The messages that have been left there speak eloquently of loss and remembrance:
"I have dreamed of the day you’ll come home and finally be my Dad. You would have been the best Daddy in the whole world."
"I’m the one who rocked him as a baby."
"My prayer, my dear and sweet husband, is that the world would forever know peace."
"Hi Lover! Seventeen years…you’re still twenty-one—forever young, but gone. Murdered. And nothing will make your loss to us less of a tragedy."
Material like this does not exist at any other American monument. Never before, it seems, have people unburdened themselves on paper and left their intimate thoughts at a public memorial.
When I went to the memorial for the first time, on New Year’s Day, 1986, I had no inkling this book was in the offing. I went alone and spent six hours at the wall mesmerized and moved. The names seemed to go on forever; it felt eternally sad.
Vietnam has been a large part of my life. I grew up in the sixties and worked in Saigon as a reporter in the early seventies. But oddly, when I made that initial visit to the memorial, none of that seemed to matter. I was moved simply as a mother. Name one child, your own, and each of the 58,132 names on that wall will break your heart.
I was fascinated by what was happening at the memorial: one by one, without anyone suggesting it, people were silently crossing over their moat of grief and leaving a letter, poem, or other offering at the wall. It seemed almost un-American; we are so proud, so noisy, so extroverted. Yet here, in a sacred and silent ritual, a side of ourselves that we are reluctant to show was being revealed.
This rite of remembrance began with the plunk of a Purple Heart into wet cement. As the foundation of the memorial was being poured, a man asked construction workers if he could drop his brother’s medal into the concrete. He saluted as it slid beneath the surface. There have been more than six thousand similar salutes since the memorial was officially dedicated on Veterans Day, November 11, 1982.
It was then that America finally turned to embrace her own. Engraved on the wall’s black granite panels that pry open the earth are the names of every man and woman who went to Vietnam and never came back. In dedicating the memorial, America finally acknowledged that we lost more than the war in Vietnam; we lost the warriors. The war was deplorable, not the men who served. But that distinction—that the outcome of the war was not the fault of the men who fought it—had never been adequately made before. It had been nearly a decade since the fall of Saigon, but the most powerful nation in the world was finally able to say, "They were ours," and begin a long-overdue period of national mourning.
Since then, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has become the place where America is coming to terms with the Vietnam War. Shrapnel in the Heart is a log of part of the journey.
This book was researched, reported, and written during 1986. All of the letters and objects that are left at the memorial are saved by the National Park Service for preservation as part of an eventual museum collection. With determination, luck, and the help of librarians, priests, barbers, high schools, post offices, newspapers, historical societies, and long-distance operators, it is often possible to trace people who have left things there. This is what I set out to do. I wanted to know what motivated people to express their private thoughts in a public place, and how the loss of someone they loved altered their lives, relationships, and aspirations.
As I zigzagged across America, I felt the blistering heat of Kansas in the summer and ate fried catfish and hush puppies at a backyard barbecue in Texas. I saw the leaves turn in New Hampshire and the hunting season begin in Wisconsin. I interviewed a woman by a river in Oregon and another in a beachfront bungalow by the Pacific. I had lobster rolls on Cape Cod and sat down to Sunday dinner with Baptists in the backwoods of Mississippi. I went fishing in an Alabama pond. I looked at scrapbooks in Virginia and stood silently in a small Michigan cemetery. I listened to taped interviews from the Philippines and Japan. In Oklahoma City, I sat in the living room with a family of five as they all cried. A suburb in Los Angeles, a kitchen in Minnesota, a mobile home, a country club—the settings changed but the sadness stayed the same.
"Isn’t it depressing?" was the question my friends asked most frequently during my research. The answer was and remains an emphatic no. It was never depressing because people were grateful for a chance to tell their stories. Sequestered so long with grief, each survivor seemed to think he or she was the only one who continued to mourn so deeply. Time after time, I saw smiles or relief when I told someone about someone else I’d interviewed whose sadness remained intense, even after fifteen or twenty years.
People, I found, not only want to talk about the person they lost in Vietnam, they need to talk. It is a deep yearning in many, suppressed because of the wildly erroneous notion that by now they should be "over it."
The people I interviewed have been given a lot of well-intentioned but bad advice. "Put it behind you, go on with your life." "He was only your brother." "You’re young, you’ll get married again." "Maybe you are better off," one mother was told. "What if he came home crazy, crippled, or maimed?" Such suggestions only sealed the sorrow deeper inside. I was startled to see that some people felt apologetic, almost guilty, for having so much to tell.
Shrapnel in the Heart is about breaking the silence. Nothing I can write, no story I can tell, will erase anyone’s pain, but it can, I hope, crack the isolation which is the tyranny of grief.
Grief, I learned while writing this book, is as individual as a fingerprint. A mother kisses her son’s picture every night before she goes to bed; another continues to carry his last letter in her wallet because it is the last thing of his that she can touch. Another mother finds solace in writing to her son in the quiet hours after dawn. A father wears his son’s Rolex watch. Parents keep his bedroom just the same.
I think the controversy over the Vietnam War stifled a lot of grief. The shame society felt over Vietnam delayed for years any national recognition for the men and women who served there. America’s shame, confusion, and humiliation certainly did not dent the pride or love families felt for their sons, but it did lessen the likelihood of their talking about it.
The bitterness surrounding Vietnam stripped it of any honor, and the veterans who did come home were stripped of their dignity. They were ignored if they were lucky, scorned if they were not. And if you lost someone you loved in the convulsion of Vietnam, the way to protect his memory was not to talk about it. As Eleanor Wimbish, a mother I interviewed said, "I could find people to share my grief because I lost my son, but few wanted to hear where he died."
The soldiers who served in Vietnam were the youngest ever to leave our shores. They fought, and died, at an average age of nineteen, seven years younger than their counterparts in World War II. I always winced when a mother told me her son had never spent a night away from home until he went into the service. These young men became the unwitting pallbearers of America’s only military defeat, and it was years before they were forgiven for it.
Courage is the common thread that runs through these stories. Shrapnel in the Heart brought me, quite literally, to the doorsteps of the quietly courageous. I have always been struck by the savagery and randomness of the blows that lacerate some lives. I am in awe of the courage it takes to go on.
Rarely do we notice the triumphs that are forged by putting one foot in front of the other, one day at a time. Did we ever really that each bullet that took a life in Vietnam stopped several other lives here dead in their tracks? The flag on the coffin covered only the obvious tragedy.
It wasn’t just the bodies that were buried, it was the dreams. "I was supposed to marry Joey Sintoni in 1969," remembers Angela Matthews. "I didn’t find it easy to progress to Plan B. Marriage was killed in action."
When I began the research for this book, I expected to encounter people who would be unable to talk about the person they loved who died in Vietnam. I thought these people would most likely be mothers, but I was wrong. They were the brothers and sisters. I think their trauma is the least expressed. I think siblings are the least understood victims of the Vietnam War.
Their own needs were underestimated in the avalanche of emotion that descended on their families. Society expects mothers to fall apart and grieve. At least initially, there is a lot of support for a woman who loses a child. But brothers and sisters are told they have their whole life ahead of them. They do not always get a chance to grieve adequately for the part of their life that is behind.
I think the grief of siblings was often internalized because they didn’t want to burden anyone else. Sometimes it was discounted completely. No one put it more vividly than Yvonne Sherman, who remembers people responding to her news of losing a brother in Vietnam by saying, "Oh, I feel so sorry for your mom and dad." Difficult, too, was measuring up to a brother who became perfected in death.
Time occasionally makes loss more bearable. But for siblings, their own passage through life can be a jarring reminder of just how much their brother missed. Sally Van Valin summed it up when remembering her youngest brother, David Stoll. "I always thought someday we would be grown up and visit each other with kids and play cards in the evening, and it just hasn’t turned out that way. I miss him, all the things that might have been, and finding out what he would have been like as a grown-up person. I would have loved to see how he would have held a baby and taken care of a child of his own."
I also believe that the ideal of the strong, silent man is still very much with us. Fathers. One of the saddest things I heard while interviewing was the comment of a woman who said she had never seen her husband cry about their son’s death. "But sometimes he’ll go out in the garage and spend a couple of hours there and he’ll come back and his eyes will be all red and I know he’s been crying."
While reading through the hundreds of letters and poems that have been left at the memorial, I never encountered one that was written from a father to his son. Sometimes a man would write "Love, Dad" on the bottom of a note from his wife, but rarely was there anything more. Fathers who were home when I arrived participated in the interviews with eagerness and candor, but they are apparently less inclined to express themselves in writing.
Minorities are also severely underrepresented among the traceable letters left at the wall. When I began this book, I was certain that some of the letters would turn out to have been written by blacks. Only one did, and the writer, through a friend of her brother’s, declined to be interviewed. I was never able to speak with her directly. My dilemma was that my work was defined not by what I sought, but by what I was able to find.
It may well be that blacks leave material anonymously; black vets may be more likely to leave a medal or other object than a letter. So far, the lack of letters from blacks remains a mystery to me. What is undeniable are the simple facts of Vietnam: in the first fully integrated war, blacks fought as ably and nobly as any other soldiers. In fact, in some years they gave more; for example, from 1965 to 1967, blacks represented only 11 percent of the U.S. population but roughly 23 percent of the war’s combat casualties. (However, by the end of the war blacks represented only 12.5 percent of the total killed in the Vietnam War.) Those who survived came home and found their service in Vietnam was one more reason for discrimination in America.
Women also made enormous contributions and sacrifices in Vietnam, something that has until recently been forgotten by everyone and hidden by many of the women themselves. An Army nurse who did just that tells why in this book.
Everything that is left at the memorial is being processed by MARS, the Museum and Archeological Regional Storage facility. Each item that arrives at the warehouse is dated and tagged and carefully preserved in metal cabinets with cushioned drawers. See the material for the first time is like wading through emotional debris hurled to the surface years after a terrible shipwreck.
Throughout my research I was surprised by not only the amount but the richness of the poetry that is left at the memorial. I wondered why people who may have had little exposure to poetry chose it as a way to express their feelings. The best explanation for the phenomenon came from a Vietnam vet in Wichita, Kansas, Rick Rogers, who told me, "When you’ve been to the abyss and stared into the pit of hell, you look for the opposite to explain it, sort of like yin and yang."
Veterans leave many of the mementos. There are dog tags and dilapidated combat boots, boonie hats and helmets, ragged sweatbands and medals of all kinds, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. Except for a few knives, no weapons have been left at the wall.
The array of objects is eclectic: a can of Vermont maple syrup and seventy-one cents in change. A blue high heel, a Viet Cong wedding ring. There are Bibles and bumper stickers, Buddhas and Saint Christopher medals and a book of Jewish prayers for the dead. There is an eighty-nine-cent shot glass with lyrics from a Billy Joel song tucked inside: "Remember Charlie, remember Baker, they left their childhood on every acre."
There are several teddy bears and scores of flags with messages printed neatly in the red or white stripes. On a dollar bill is written, "A debt so long unpaid, and the beer I promised." There are drawers full of POW/MIA bracelets and cans of C-rations. Someone has left a faded orange wallet-sized calendar with the days crossed off and "Kathi and Bobby" and "Bobby and Kathi" written inside ballpoint hearts. There is an eight-track Carpenter’s tape and a can of sardines. A three of spades and a pack of Luckies have been left along with a bicycle-tire tube and a Golden Melody harmonica. Someone left a small Ziploc bag filled with dirt and someone else left seven LOVE stamps in a long white envelopes. "Please Write" was scrawled across the front.
The hundreds of snapshots that have been left at the wall form an Instamatic history of the Vietnam War. Some are hideous—disemboweled enemy soldiers. Most are poignant—smiling, bare-chested GIs their arms slung nonchalantly around one another’s shoulders. They lean against sandbagged bunkers in lonely-looking places. You think, "They look like kids," and then you realize they were.
Two months after my first visit to the memorial, I went to MARS to work on a magazine article. I spent hours alone, reading, thinking and sometimes weeping. The temperature is deliberately kept cool, for preservation, and it is quiet; only a few people work there full time. That cold and silent backdrop creates an eerieness so palpable it gets you by the throat. Each time I’ve gone there, I’ve wanted to flee, but I felt compelled to read, to listen. I had tapped into a gigantic reservoir of pain and I wanted to find out what it meant. How could a memorial elicit such a staggering response?
It happened, I believe, because there was a staggering need. Vietnam isn’t behind us at all; it’s in us. Sometimes it is only a shard of memory; sometimes it is a ferocious trauma. It defined one generation and influenced those that preceded and followed. To understand it, we need to think about it and feel it; the memorial is the one place we have in common where those feelings can be expressed.
Until we go there, we are, in a sense, incomplete, and so is the memorial.
Maya Ying Lin, the architect who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial when she was a twenty-year-old student at Yale, says she never thought of it as V-shaped. She always conceptualized it as a circle to be completed by the thoughts and feelings people bring.
She describes it as the boundary between the living and the dead. We cannot enter their world, but we can peer into it; that is why the memorial is black. In a city of towering alabaster monuments, here is receding and dark. "White is like a wall, a barrier; it shuts the door. I found black a soothing, deep, deep color because you can look into it forever." She knew not only that the memorial had to be black but that it had to be granite, because granite, when polished, is deeply reflective. When you look at the wall, you see yourself reflected behind the names of the dead. Clouds move, kites fly, trees sway in the reflection behind the names. It is a way of saying that once we can confront and go beyond death, we find renewed life.
This is the essence of healing. Maya Lin understood that it begins with the confrontation of the past and the finding, facing, and touching of a name. So she made her memorial into a journey. One begins by looking up a name in a directory. Then one walks along to a specific panel and finds a specific line; on that line is a name. Because the memorial is arranged chronologically, the name is grouped with others killed on that same day, in alphabetical order. Maya Lin felt that if people could go back and face the traumatic moment in their past, they would be able to go forward again. As she points out, "When you leave the memorial, you have to walk back up into the light. You must choose to do it, to go beyond. To me, it is very much a journey. You have to walk out and leave it in the end."
Her vision originated as a class project at Yale, which earned her a B. She was talked into entering it in the national competition to pick a design for the Vietnam Veterans memorial, although she was sure she had no chance of winning. But out of the
1, 421 entries, hers was ultimately the unanimous choice of a panel of prominent judges.
The designers’ identities had been kept secret until a winner was selected. When the judges discovered that the architect who was about to rocket into national prominence was a Chinese-American woman who lived in a university dorm, they were shocked.
And so was Jan Scruggs, the grunt-turned-graduate-student who had conceived the idea of building a memorial to his dead buddies. One night after midnight he was sitting alone in his Maryland kitchen drinking scotch. He had been to see The Deer Hunter, a gritty, violent film about a Vietnam vet. His mind flashed back to the most disturbing moment of his tour in Vietnam.
On January 21, 1970, twelve of Jan’s friends were blown apart while they were unloading an ammunition truck. His eyes fill with tears as he tells the story. Before he changes the subject, he describes how helpless he felt, wandering among the lifeless forms. He tells about seeing a friend with his brains spilling out of his head. When it gets too terrible, he stops.
That night in his kitchen he vowed that he would build a monument in Washington, D.C., with all the names on it. In the coming months, a national fund-raising campaign was organized by Scruggs and Jack Wheeler, Bob Doubek, and Sandie Fauriol. In two years, they would raise nearly ten million dollars, all of it from private contributions.
No one involved with the creation of the Vietnam Veterans memorial had any idea of how significant it would become. Jan Scruggs thought it would initially attract thousands of visitors but then would turn into just another pretty place to play Frisbee on the Mall. No one anticipated that nearly twenty million Americans would visit it during its first five years.
Vietnam has always been my teacher. I was twenty-two years old when I went there two months after graduating from college in 1972. I went with all the answers and left with only questions. Saigon still feels like my hometown because it is where the rest of my life began. It is where I first worked as a reporter and where I wrote the first article I ever published. More important, it is where I met friends I would love forever.
The reporters I know who worked in Vietnam would go back in an instant if it were possible. Rarely is life so passionate and intense as it is when played out against a backdrop of war. Everything matters in a way it never has before, and with constant reminders of death, life becomes both precious and precarious. The only people who really understand that are the people with you at the time. In a war you experience mankind at its worst and at its best. It is a terror and a blessing that you would never trade.
I returned to Vietnam in April, 1975, when the country was spinning out of control. It had become harder to stay away than to go back, and so for six hundred dollars I bought a round-trip youth-fare ticket from Paris to Saigon. During my first two years there I had been a radio reporter. During the last month I wrote for a magazine.
I remember the fortune-teller who confided to me her despair. She and her husband had plans to poison themselves and the children if there was a Communist takeover. I wanted to know if her clairvoyance was making her distraught. "Oh, no," she said. "There are some events that overwhelm destiny." It was the best description I ever heard of the Vietnam War.
On April 29, 1975, I left Saigon for the last time, yanked straight up into the sky by a helicopter from a city I had come to love. Tanks rolled into town the next day and the government of South Vietnam surrendered. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, but I have never been able to call it that.
Vietnam became my teacher once again in 1986. I traveled thousands of miles, knocking on strangers’ doors to ask them about the biggest loss of their lives. It was not always easy.
Yet I will always think of Shrapnel in the Heart as a blessing. At times, it seemed to extract a terrible toll from me and from the people I interviewed; we were caught in a riptide of sadness. But I know now that this book gave back more than it took. It gave me the steadying reminder that the legacies of our lives are written in the hearts of those we love.
When I began this book, I thought I was writing about dead soldiers. I finish with the knowledge that they are, spiritually, very much alive.
I don’t know if their deaths were a waste, but I know most assuredly that their lives were not. They mattered passionately to the people who loved them, and that has never changed. Their deaths caused wrenching, unending pain and despair. But the magnitude of the pain leads to an understanding of just how much these men were loved. It is by peering through the wretched gloom of their deaths that we see the magnificence of the love that still binds them to the living. Sadly, it is not a love that can stop war, but it is one that defeats death.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial enabled a nation to say, "They were ours." The book offers the simple rejoinder "Yes, and he was mine."
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Buy Shrapnel in
the Heart from Amazon [paperback]
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My Vietnam Related Websites:
Women in
Vietnam ~ Not only nurses served . . .
Dusty's Home
Page ~ Poetry and prose by a woman who was a nurse in Vietnam
Emily's
Poetry ~ By a Red Cross Donut Dolly
Battle
Dressing ~ The Journey of a Nurse in Vietnam
Tim
O'Brien's Home Page ~ National Book Award Winner and Americal Vet
Shrapnel in
the Heart ~ The most moving book you will read on Vietnam
The
Irish on the Wall ~ An effort to locate the Irish who died in Vietnam
Project Hearts
and Minds ~ Help put Viet Nam back together
All About
Vietnam ~ An annotated bibliography of books about Vietnam for sale
thru Amazon Worldwide!
Photos
from a Holts' Military History Tour ~ My trip to Vietnam, February 1998
Illinois
Vietnam Women's Memorial ~ Honoring all the Illinois women who served
My Other Websites:
Chicago
Theatre Z - A ~ This is the best theater town in the country!
Writers
Theatre of Chicago ~ And this is the best theater in town
Literature
of the Korean War ~ Don't let the literature be forgotten
Poetry
of the First World War ~ Owen, Hardy and others
Samuel
Pepys ~ One of my favorite authors
Gil
Thorp ~ THE Coach
Maybe
Later . . . ~ My Creative Nonfiction
Chi-COW-go
~ Cowz plus Commentary (this used to be a cow town)
Graham
Fulton, Scottish Poet ~ Charles Manson Auditions for the Monkees
Soccer
Literature ~ I'm a fan and I read
O'Leary Lantern ~
Fire! Fire! Fire!
Other Important Websites:
PreviewPort.com
~ Connecting Authors and Writers Worldwide
Remember
Oklahoma City ~ Civil Service and Military Employees will never forget
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| Page last updated August 18, 2002 | |
