Viet Vet’s Emotional Soviet Journey : Deeply Moved by Mother of Soldier Slain in Afghan War

A month ago, Jack Lyon had no idea that his life would be changed by a Russian woman named Zinaida Chivilova, but changed it was--sadly, tenderly, irrevocably.

Lyon, 48, is a San Diego businessman who once snaked through the jungles of Vietnam, shooting at the enemy. Like many men who endured such a time, he now works for peace. He is also the founder of the San Diego chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America.

Lyon recently returned from the Soviet Union, where he counseled not only Afgantsi --veterans of the war in Afghanistan--but also the mothers of men who died fighting a war that Lyon said few of them understood and that their loved ones remember only bitterly.

Zinaida Chivilova was one of those mothers, grieved by a military action that claimed her child as one of an estimated 13,000 Soviet casualties.

Lyon met Chivilova at a graveside ceremony in Alma Ata, a city of 1 million people nestled in the snowy mountains near the Chinese border. He was part of a unique delegation of Americans, many of them Vietnam veterans, who were summoned to Russia for a two-week trip that began Nov. 25 to meet with and counsel the Afgantsi .

Graveside Ceremony

That much the Americans expected, Lyon said.

The mothers were a revelation.

Lyon and the other veterans attended the graveside ceremony at the behest of the Afgantsi but against the wishes of Soviet officials, who, in the end, were overruled (one more piece of evidence supporting glasnost , Lyon said). There, Lyon met Chivilova, who startled onlookers by yelling at the Soviet brass, “Where’s my son? Why did you send my son to Afghanistan?”

Lyon said the officials answered by saying, “Why don’t you ask the Americans who are visiting? They are the ones who made the (Afghan) weapons that were killing us. They were the reason we had to go there in the first place.”

He said Chivilova responded by saying, “I’m not asking them, I’m asking you , because you are the ones who sent my son. Why did you do it?”

Later, Lyon and others accompanied Chivilova to her modest, rustic home. She made them tea and coffee and talked for hours about the death of her son, Oleg, and how his being killed in a neighboring but distant land had really meant three deaths--his and those of his mother and father. Chivilova said her husband, himself a war veteran, became an amnesiac soon after hearing of Oleg’s death.

“She said to me that, if somebody had invaded Russia, her son would have killed anyone to rightfully defend their home,” Lyon said. “But the idea of him going, helplessly, to another country, where he and the Russians had no business being, was to her outrageous and unforgivable.

“I listened to Zinaida at the ceremony. For 15 minutes to half an hour, her anger--her rage--was unbelievably intense.”

Lyon was surprised by Chivilova’s age--48. She, like many of the mothers of fallen Afgantsi , are his age. He was saddened to hear of the happy ordinariness of Oleg’s life before being sentenced, as it were, to Afghanistan. He loved music, as do many of the children of Alma Alta. He played the accordion and harmonica, and he sang--beautifully, his mother said. Lyon said it is his singing that she misses as much as anything.

Weary of Wars

Lyon said the theme trumpeted over and over throughout the visit was that Soviets, like many Americans, are weary of wars carried out for greed or “internationalist reasons,” whether the setting be Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola or Nicaragua.

“Zinaida told me the only meaning she could find for Oleg’s death was to take this experience, this pain and share it with moms around the world--to make sure we find an end to war,” Lyon said. “People who most understand the nature of war are the men who fight in them, and their mothers.

“This concept of sending 18-, 19-year-old kids off to die has got to stop. We’re finding that war doesn’t work anymore. The weapons are too savage, and the world is too small.”

Lyon was a Marine lieutenant who served in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966. He was a platoon commander who remembers his most searing moments as “watching kids die of their wounds. We couldn’t get a Medivac in. . . . We’d stay up all night, but the kids would just die, sometimes three to four a night. That was the worst experience of my life, not just Vietnam.”

Lyon learned of the opportunity to visit the Soviet Union from the Rev. William Mahedy, the Episcopal chaplain at both San Diego State University and UC San Diego. Mahedy, a pioneer in the Vietnam veterans’ movement, visited Moscow last summer with a blue-ribbon group of psychologists, computer experts and makers of prosthetic devices. Lyon’s trip was the first to involve a large number of Vietnam veterans, the majority of the 29-member delegation.

Open and Happy

“We were met at the airport by 30 to 40 Afgantsi ,” he said. “They were so incredibly open and happy to see us that it brought out a paranoid reaction in me and some of the other guys. We thought maybe it was some sinister KGB plot. The reality was, they were just honest, honorable soldiers who felt immensely lucky to get to meet us. We felt the same.”

Lyon’s crew showed the soldiers the American movie, “Letters Home from Vietnam,” which was translated into Russian.

“The impact was incredible,” Lyon said. “They told us, ‘Change the jungle to desert and mountains, and the film is about our experience in Afghanistan.’ They said they never understood whom they were fighting or why, never knew who the good guys were or the bad guys. It was also bizarre that we were the first Americans any of these guys had ever met or seen.”

Lyon is now senior vice president of National Associates, whose work he describes as “pension actuaries.” Twenty years after Vietnam, he looks back and wonders who he was, and why.

“Zinaida was trying to figure out how I could be pointing a weapon and killing somebody,” he said. “Like her son, I was 25, 26 at the time, and the job was just surviving--hanging on one more day.

“In the process of explaining this to a mother, a portion of my heart was healed. And, it was clearly the effect that all of those mothers had on every one of us.”