Bringing It All Back Home (36 page)

Just as there are multiple ways of presenting oral history to the public, so are there different theories about the best way to represent orality, people's spoken narratives, in print form. One approach, common among linguists and social scientists, argues that spoken language should be represented on the page precisely as it sounds to the human ear. That is to say, oral historians ought to print every “um,” every “er,” and every “and.” This way of thinking holds that this is the most faithful way of reproducing speech. It hews the closest to the actual historical record and is therefore the most intellectually honest way to proceed.

While I recognize the integrity of that approach, I take a different one. In my view, shared by many practitioners of oral history, the act of transforming spoken language into written text is already a form of translation, and any good translator has dual responsibilities: not only to the veracity of the translation, but also to the end user, the reader. Therefore, I have taken the liberty of excising unnecessary words, such as verbal stumbles and tics, and adding punctuation where appropriate. I have also inserted, where necessary, additional words in an effort to render the text easy to read. Additional words not spoken by the original narrator are always indicated with brackets, thus: []. At no other point have I inserted words the subjects did not actually speak. Throughout the book, the words of my interviewees are represented in italics to distinguish their voices from mine. Because the book is a conscious effort to “share authority” for the telling of the story, I have often used long quotations, allowing veterans to speak for themselves in a relatively unmediated way. Various viewpoints, theirs and mine, have a place in this story.

The memory of war and its consequences is enormously powerful for a variety of physiological and psychological reasons. Psychologists have established that a person's ability to recall a past event is enhanced if adrenaline was present when the event occurred. Therefore combat memories, with all of their associated sights, sounds, and smells, can be powerful and vivid long after the original traumas have drifted into the past. Additionally, narrative researchers have identified the so-called reminiscence bump, a spike in the quantity and quality of memories individuals seem to be able to retain from their late adolescence/early adulthood.
8
Memories from this time of life, which of course matches the age at which most service personnel went to Vietnam, would therefore be especially acute; they would become the figurative text from which veterans would often draw the lessons that guided their life choices later. For these reasons, the Vietnam War has played a powerful role in the lives of the men and women who served in it. That experience shaped the memories, and thus the social identities, of the people who appear in this book, because memory and identity are linked.

Critics of the oral history method complain that the “data” recorded in interviews is soft, that the vagaries of memory make it unreliable. I have heard it said that “the plural of ‘anecdote' is not ‘data.'” If one is looking for statistical proof of historical claims, then oral history is not a preferred approach. Numerically verifiable information is better obtained through census records, court documents, and other sources—and even when one uses such sources, attaining proof can be hard. In any case, oral history's mission is not the mere accounting and accumulation of data. Instead, it looks for the meaning of events as recalled by informed interviewees: it adds a texture that helps the inquirer find truth. Oral history provides access to what Portelli calls “ways of remembering”; it reveals the shape and structure of individual memories and what those memories share; in the case of this book, it suggests how they have created the sense of what it means to be a veteran in New York City. These are the “truths” that people, veterans, carry with them. Oral history therefore is not a study of historical “facts” as they are often understood in academic discourse—as something grounded in contemporaneously created documentation. It is instead an investigation of the “facts” of memory, the “reality” of perception and recall.

One profound advantage of oral history is that unlike traditional historical writing, it insists that the competing voices of historical actors cannot and will not resolve into a single story with a solitary meaning. History does not work that way anyway. My book shows that the common view of the Vietnam vet as deranged and dangerous is a travesty and that a great many veterans were inspired by their war experience to lead full and successful lives—whether out of loyalty to the war effort or in opposition to it. And yet that too is an interpretation that does not reveal the whole truth. While historians are tempted to construct for themselves narratives with seeming explanatory power, counternarrative is not only possible but necessary. As the Vietnam veteran and author James R. McDonough wrote in his memoir,
Platoon Leader
, “There were no typical experiences. If anything was typical about the Vietnam experience, it was that it was different for everyone.”
9

Oral history reminds us of this truth.

 

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

  
1
. Hynes,
Soldiers' Tale
, 177–78.

  
2
. Ibid., xiii.

  
3
. Ibid., 177–222.

  
4
. Ibid., 201.

  
5
. Willenson,
Bad War
.

  
6
. Hynes,
Soldiers' Tale
, 221.

  
7
. Ibid., 222.

1. MAKING SOLDIERS: THE BOYS WHO BECAME THE MEN

  
1
. “2,000,000 Will See City's War Parade,”
New York Times
, June 12, 1942; “Fifth Ave. Crowd Put at 2,500,000,”
New York Times
, June 14, 1942.

  
2
. “Births and Deaths on the Rise This Year,”
New York Times
, July 18, 1943.

  
3
. Richard Goldstein,
Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II
(New York: Free Press, 2010), xi.

  
4
. German,
Deep Down in Brooklyn
, 6.

  
5
. Ira Rosenwaike,
Population History of New York City
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 117.

  
6
. German,
Deep Down in Brooklyn
, 32.

  
7
. Joshua B. Freeman,
Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II
(New York: New Press, 2000), 29–30.

  
8
. Flanagan,
Born in Brooklyn … Raised in the CAV!
, 18.

  
9
. George Q. Flynn,
The Draft, 1940–1973
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 166–87.

10
. Flanagan,
Born in Brooklyn … Raised in the CAV!
, 28.

11
. George Lankevich,
American Metropolis: A History of New York City
(New York: New York University Press, 1998), 163.

12
. Meyer Berger, “Our Changing City,”
New York Times
, June 20, 1955.

2. PROFESSIONALISM: RICHARD EGGERS

  
1
. The baseplate holds the mortar in place for firing. The 81-millimeter baseplate weighs approximately twenty-five pounds.

3. FUTILITY: SUE O'NEILL

  
1
. Westheider,
Fighting in Vietnam
, 170.

  
2
. Vuic,
Officer, Nurse, Woman
, 11.

  
3
. Ibid., 45–46.

  
4
. Susan O'Neill, “The Non-matrixed Wife,” Peace Corps Writers, accessed July 2, 2012,
http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/pages/2005/0501/501pchist.html
.

  
5
. O'Neill,
Don't Mean Nothing
, xiii.

4. WAR AND LIES: JOSEPH GIANNINI

  
1
. Blog comment, posted May 18, 2010, at 12:09 a.m., accessed Jan. 20, 2012,
http://blog.lemuriabooks.com/2010/04/why-i-write-karl-marlantes/
.

  
2
. Raftkeith Eros Baker, private first class, D Company, First Battalion, Third Marines, Third Marine Division, III Marine Amphibious Force, U.S. Marine Corps, Chicago, Illinois, accessed May 1, 2012,
www.virtualwall.org/db/BakerRE01a.htm
.

  
3
. Pete Bowles, “Man Acquitted of Killing Cop Got Away with Murder; Judge,”
Newsday
, April 26, 1990.

  
4
. Trial testimony transcript in possession of the author. Laura Palmer, “Killing Tied to Vet's Flashback,”
Houston Chronicle
, July 16, 1990.

5. FOLLOW ME: ANTHONY WALLACE

  
1
. “U.S. War Deaths Highest Since September,”
Palm Beach Post
, April 17, 1970.

6. THE BELIEVER: JOAN FUREY

  
1
. A recent dissertation asserts that between seventy-five hundred and eleven thousand military women served in Vietnam. See Jean Dunlavy, “A Band of Sisters: Vietnam Women Veterans' Organization for Rights and Recognition” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2009).

  
2
. Scott,
Vietnam Veterans Since the War: The Politics of PTSD, Agent Orange, and the National Memorial
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 32.

  
3
. One version of this ad appeared in
The American Journal of Nursing
68, no. 8 (Aug. 1968): 1778,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3420960
.

  
4
. Elizabeth Norman,
Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 36–37.

  
5
. Approximately 30 percent of the nurses in Vietnam in 1969 were male, like Furey's friend. Vuic,
Officer, Nurse, Woman
, 90.

  
6
. Ralph Blumenthal, “Protesting G.I.'s in Pleiku to Fast on Thanksgiving,”
New York Times
, Nov. 24, 1969; Ralph Blumenthal, “100 G.I.'s in Pleiku Fast for Holiday,”
New York Times
, Nov. 28, 1969; Vuic,
Officer, Nurse, Woman
, 85.

  
7
. Letter to the editor,
Port Jefferson Record
, Jan. 29, 1970. Grammar and punctuation are presented here as in the original.

  
8
. Norman,
Women at War
, 28.

  
9
. Ibid., 129; Elizabeth M. Norman, “After the Casualties: Vietnam Nurses' Identities and Career Decisions,”
Nursing Research
41, no. 2 (March–April 1992): 110–13.

7. WAR AND LOSS: MIANO, NOWICKI, AND GONZALEZ

  
1
. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker,
14–18: Understanding the Great War
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 203–25.

  
2
. Jim Tutak, Remembrance for Stephen W. Pickett, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, accessed Aug. 12, 2011,
http://www.vvmf.org/thewall/anClip=207617
.

  
3
. Wisconsin Division of Health, Madison,
Wisconsin Vietnam Veteran Mortality Study
(1986), accessed Aug. 12, 2011,
http://dva.state.wi.us/WebForms/Data_Factsheets/VietnamVetMortalityStudy.pdf
; Centers for Disease Control, “Current Trends in Postservice Mortality Among Vietnam Veterans,”
MMWR Weekly
, Feb. 13, 1987, 61–64, accessed Aug. 12, 2011,
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00000865.htm
; Centers for Disease Control,
Postservice Mortality Among Vietnam Veterans
, accessed Aug. 12, 2011,
http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/veterans/default1a.htm
.

  
4
. Veterans' Diseases Associated with Agent Orange, accessed July 9, 2012,
http://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/agentorange/diseases.asp
.

  
5
. Larry Mcshane, “Remains of Brooklyn Marine Killed in Action During Vietnam Return Home,” New York
Daily News
, March 21, 2009.

8. WELCOME HOME, JIMMY: THE BACOLO TWINS

  
1
.
Data on Vietnam Era Veterans
(Washington, D.C.: Reports & Statistics Service, Office of the Controller, Veterans Administration, 1971), 1.

  
2
. William Barry Furlong, “The Re-entry Problem of the Vietvets,”
New York Times
, May 7, 1967.

  
3
. Sandy Goodman, “The Invisible Veterans,”
Nation
, June 3, 1968, 723–26.

  
4
. Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs,
A Study of the Problems Facing Vietnam Era Veterans on Their Readjustment to Civilian Life, January 31, 1972
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972).

  
5
. Robert D. McFadden, “Thousands Here Honor Vietnam Veterans,”
New York Times
, April 1, 1973.

  
6
. Charles Wiley, “The Culpability of the Media” (session of the conference Examining the Myths of the Vietnam War), accessed Nov. 12, 2011,
http://www.viet-myths.net/Session12T.htm
.

9. AGAINST WAR: FRIEDMAN AND LOUIS

  
1
. Nicosia,
Home to War
, 15.

  
2
. Homer Bigart, “War Foes Here Attacked by Construction Workers, City Hall Is Stormed,”
New York Times,
May 9, 1970, accessed June 28, 2012.

  
3
. Nicosia,
Home to War
, 227; Hunt,
Turning
, 180–82.

  
4
. Friedman also told the story to the historian Gerald Nicosia. See his account in Nicosia,
Home to War
, 224–26.

  
5
. Statement of Purpose, accessed June 28, 2012,
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/who-we-are/our-mission/
.