Bringing It All Back Home (17 page)

There were signs that they had up, like they do now, like
WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
.
They had signs that everybody would have in their windows:
WE SUPPORT OUR BOYS IN VIETNAM
.
And I can remember one neighbor coming in and ripping it down and my father got very annoyed. He said, “Now is the time we really have to support them more than ever. You know, now we're there; now we've got to do what we have to do. I'm not going to have my son's life [be] in vain.”

We found out, and then it's waiting for the body to be shipped home. He was buried the day after Christmas, which was tough. I can remember the neighborhood because my father and his family grew up there. There were always Christmas lights up, but I can remember that year that nobody put their lights on, because like the whole neighborhood felt it.

In 2001, out of the blue, the company medic and another member of Looney's unit contacted the family. The men had been trying to find the people they served with, and they flew in to meet and talk to Edward's family. They explained to Bridget and her father that Edward had not been alone when he died. The medic had been the one to place Edward on the helicopter that took him out of the field. The family had received a few letters, but for the most part it had seemed as though Edward had boarded a plane bound for Vietnam only to disappear off the face of the earth. With this one small act, two veterans helped to fill that void. Visiting more than thirty years after Edward's death, they gave the family a sense of closure.

When soldiers lost comrades in the field in Vietnam, they did not have time to grieve. Indeed, some commanders actively discouraged it, preferring that they focus on the tasks at hand rather than on the deaths of their peers—which inevitably brought to mind the risks of their service. Anyway, most did not have time. They literally had to soldier on. Many only felt the trauma of loss when they got home.

Jose Gonzalez served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in 1967 through the terrible battles of that year. But for Gonzalez, coming home was even worse, because his unit continued to suffer casualties and he wasn't there. He says:
I got more devastated at home than I did over there, I think. Because everything over there was always, you had no time. You had no time, you know.

While in Vietnam, he became close with another Puerto Rican soldier from Brooklyn named Geovel Lopez-Garcia. Lopez-Garcia had been sent home in November 1967 on emergency bereavement leave, missing the Battle of Dak To—one of the bloodiest battles of the war. When Lopez-Garcia returned in-country in December, Gonzalez was rotating home permanently.

And we saw each other again, two young kids. And then he gives me his address: “Go see my mother.” I did.

The Tet Offensive opened in the last days of January 1968, and Lopez-Garcia was killed two weeks later. Gonzalez continues:

His mother, somebody called me, that he was missing in action, and the next day they confirmed it. [He was dead.] Then they brought him home at the funeral parlor, over there on Park Avenue and Tompkins. I went to junior high school right there when I was a kid. I walked in, I was in uniform, and his mother saw me. She lost it. I lost it. I walked out. I walked right out. I never saw them again. I never saw them again, and I didn't go to his funeral. I went on a drunk. I don't know how long it was. I was AWOL from my next duty station. I didn't care.

Statistics consistently reported elevated mortality rates for Vietnam veterans in the years between the end of the war in 1975 and 1983. While Vietnam veterans' death rates have stabilized in the years that followed, the stories of loss live on.
3
The widow of one Vietnam veteran told me a story about her husband, Ray, about his struggle with PTSD and cancer after the war, and what it all eventually cost her and her family.

I don't think things went too well for him over there. I heard stories, a lot of stories, that were very gory. These guys who went over were very young; Ray was about seventeen when he went over, and it was very hard for them.

Ray drank. At first she didn't think much of it, because, she said, at the time everybody was drinking. Ray didn't sleep much either, averaging three or four hours a night. He liked to work night shifts and had a very bad temper. On one occasion when he had their children with him, someone said something to Ray that provoked him and a fight began. It took seven New York City Transit Police officers to subdue him. Another time, at the VA hospital in Brooklyn, he lost control, and it took another half a dozen police officers to subdue him.

It was hard on me because you didn't know when he was going to explode. But I loved him, you know, so I was trying to help him. [I] tried to get him into therapy quite a few times. He went a few times. It was just very hard for him.

Sometimes, Ray would disappear for days on end. She heard that he would dress in his fatigues, put paint on his face, and walk—on the Belt Parkway from Brooklyn all the way out to Long Island. He could get violent, but never with their children. Eventually, she had to leave. Ray died in 1997. She believes that he too was a casualty of the war.

He developed asthma about five years before he died. They said it was cancer. We don't know if it was directly caused by Agent Orange. That we never found out. But because of the cancer, I think maybe Agent Orange did have something to do with it.

In speculating about the cause of Ray's cancer and its connection to his Vietnam service, she is on solid ground. The Veterans Administration presumes that certain “diseases can be related to a Veteran's qualifying military service.” There are fourteen categories of disease on the current list. Lung cancer is among them.
4

Almost a half century after the war in Vietnam, the bodies are still coming home; the costs are still being calculated. In 2009, the New York
Daily News
reported the story of Jose Sanchez. Born at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, Sanchez was killed fighting in Vietnam, and his body had only just been recovered—he was coming home. Sanchez had been killed in Quang Tri province, South Vietnam, in 1968, along with three other Marines. The news reported that Sanchez's mother, Virginia, died five weeks after learning that her son's remains had been identified. The
Daily News
reported: “Her mind at ease, Virginia Sanchez died five weeks later.

“‘Finally,' says son Peter, ‘she could rest.'”
5

8

WELCOME HOME, JIMMY: THE BACOLO TWINS

Jimmy and Mauro Bacolo are twins who were born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 1947. Their father, Mike, was a decorated World War II veteran, and they grew up wanting to be like him. Jimmy says:
We knew about my father. I mean, everybody knew about it. He didn't talk about it. Him and his whole generation didn't talk much about what they did.

But Jimmy has studied his father's past. Mike Bacolo served in the Forty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, part of the Seventh U.S. Army that invaded North Africa. From there he went into Sicily with General George Patton and then landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944. He was wounded three weeks into the battle. Jimmy's uncle fought through the Battle of the Bulge and into the Rhineland with General Patton's Third Army. He says with pride,
Between the two of them they got five Purple Hearts.

In part to carry on the strong family military tradition, Jimmy wanted to enlist in the Navy at age eighteen, but a petty juvenile crime record prevented it. Instead, he found himself swept up in the draft and sent to Vietnam as an Army artilleryman in 1966. His brother Mauro enlisted in the Navy, where he took part in the recovery of an H-bomb that had been lost at sea off Palomares, Spain, in 1966. He went to Vietnam later that year.

Today, both twins are retired—Jimmy from his job as a Staten Island Ferry repairman and Mauro from his work as a landscaper for the New York City Parks Department. Both men also suffer from cancer. Jimmy believes he may have been exposed to Agent Orange.

Recalling his service in an Army artillery unit, Jimmy emphasizes that his job was relatively easy. He was not
a “ground-pounder,” “trigger-puller,” or “grunt.” We got lifted with the guns and placed down, but it was usually secure … what they would call an LZ [landing zone] or a firebase. They were already secured by the airborne troops that went in there, you know? They would go in and secure it, and then the artillery would be brought in.

Nevertheless, his time there wasn't without danger.

I was scared enough just being over there, knowing that you had 5 million people and 4.5 million hated your guts and you couldn't tell them apart, because nobody had uniforms. You know, they all wore pajamas, whether it was different colors or not. There was no battle lines; there was no secured areas. You could walk into a village one day, and the next day they're dropping rockets and mortars on you. Or at night, you know, there's a guy … he's cutting your hair in a village in the daytime, at nighttime he's lobbing mortars into your position.

By 1968, the Pentagon estimated that eighty thousand Vietnam-era veterans were being returned to civilian life each month.
1
These men and women were, as the journalist William Barry Furlong put it at the time, “peculiar.” They were unlike returning World War II veterans. Furlong wrote, “The feeling of total anonymity strikes the Vietnam veteran right down to the neighborhood level.”
2
Even after forty years, my interviewees reported feeling both isolated and anonymous when they came home.

Anonymity led to the effacing of a veteran's military identity. Sandy Goodman, writing in
The Nation
in 1968 about service members returning from Vietnam, described them as “invisible veterans.” Goodman asserted that, “as a group, the Vietnam veterans resemble neither the noisy, assertive veterans of World War II, who clomped around as if they owned the country, nor the quiet, apathetic young men who shuffled aimlessly about after Korea, ‘staring nowhere,' as one observer described them. Like the men of Korea, the Vietvets are relatively few in number … but unlike the Korean veteran, the Vietvet has no glassy, faraway look in his eyes. He knows exactly what he wants: to throw off his identity as an ex-GI and become a civilian again as fast as possible.” Some hoped that shedding the identity of soldier might lead to an easy transition to civilian life. Goodman even quoted a Veterans Administration official who said—with what sounds now like painfully ironic optimism—that the Vietnam veteran's readjustment to civilian life is “the smoothest in recent history.”
3

In some ways, the return was smooth. In 1971, a Louis Harris & Associates poll conducted for the Veterans Administration indicated that both the general public and employers overwhelmingly respected returning veterans. Ninety-four percent of respondents indicated that Vietnam veterans deserved “the same warm reception” as veterans of earlier wars. Veterans—95 percent of them—believed that their family and friends greeted them warmly upon return, and 79 percent believed that “most people respect you.”
4
And despite the impression that veterans were not welcomed home from Vietnam, there were parades and brass bands for the returning soldiers, Marines, and airmen. On March 31, 1973, New York City played host to one of the largest parades in its history, the Home with Honor parade.
5
Charles Wiley, at that time a writer for
The American Legion Magazine
and one of the parade organizers, many years later said about the parade:

On this day, unknown to the overwhelming majority of our people, one thousand servicemen, all of whom had volunteered and fought in Vietnam, all of whom had volunteered to give up a weekend to represent their service, marched a two-mile parade route through cheering, flag-waving Americans. The Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard were there to be saluted on a day that was officially called Home With Honor Day. However, what happened after they completed the route-of-march made it one of the greatest homecoming parades in the history of the world. At the end of the route, the thousand servicemen sat in the grandstand while 150,000 people welcomed our men back from Vietnam by marching the two-mile parade route behind them. They tell you that there were no brass bands to welcome our men home. How about 120 brass bands to welcome them home? Probably the biggest massing of bands in history!
6

It took only about seventy-two hours for Jimmy Bacolo to move from the depths of the jungle in Southeast Asia to the cement jungle of Red Hook, Brooklyn. He felt as if he had to prepare himself for the emotional intensity of the moment.

Bacolo had gone over to Vietnam aboard a ship, a journey that took about twenty days. Coming home, he traveled on a commercial airliner. From his artillery unit he was sent first to Cam Ranh Bay for out-processing. He turned in his combat equipment and jungle fatigues and was given a new set of clothing, including a garrison cap, which is generally worn only in the United States. After his papers were in order, he flew to Japan for a short stopover, then to Alaska for a refueling stop, and finally to Fort Lewis, Washington, in the Seattle-Tacoma area. At Fort Lewis, Bacolo was processed out of the service. After a short stay in San Francisco, he headed for New York.

It was 1968. As he flew over New York City, he looked down at the skyscrapers, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Manhattan skyline.
You know, you were looking at America right then after being in Asia. It felt great.

Several Brooklyn-reared soldiers from his unit were on the same flight. Together they flew to John F. Kennedy International Airport and then shared a taxicab home. Jimmy was the last to get dropped off because he lived on the waterfront, at Red Hook.