PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE DAY THE WAR BEGAN: JANUARY 16, 1991 : THE VIETNAM VETERAN

For me, this war will be different. This time I will not mix death with dinner and dessert. During Vietnam I watched events unfold, tidy and clean, on my television set. Men and women died before me like actors on a movie screen.

Inspired by them, wrapped in the invulnerability of youth, motivated by a mild patriotism and hoping to prove myself, I became a Marine officer at 21. After several years of training, I went off to Vietnam and there, away from television and my easy chair, learned something of what real war is all about.

I remember a little Vietnamese girl, her face tear-streaked and ashen, running toward me along a paddy dyke. Could I help her father? Walking hand-in-hand we found him slumped by the paddy wall, his head covered by a conical hat. Cautiously lifting the hat, she gestured for me to look. Sick with horror, I saw a blackened, bloody, pulpy mass that once had been a human face. Working with a hoe to shape the paddy wall, her father had struck a dud grenade embedded in the mud. Its explosion had torn his face away.

I will never forget that little girl’s eyes looking up at me, glazed with shock and anguish. In that rice paddy, at the interface of high explosives and shrapnel with flesh and blood, the war became very real and deadly earnest.

Watching the telecasts on the night of Jan. 16, I was aghast at the feeling of deja vu . Calm, handsome men in business suits described events with barely restrained excitement. Retired generals and admirals provided “color” and expert commentary. Once again war was to unfold on our screens like a giant football game, only this time the score seemed lopsided and distinctly in our favor.

There was no hint of screaming, bleeding, dying. Instead, the war seemed clean and abstract, uncluttered by human suffering. As if war were fought with scalpels, not blunt instruments. Planes and missiles moved toward targets, casualties were few, everything was “satisfactory.”

But this time I knew different. I knew that under, in and beside every “target,” real men and women huddled in terror and outrage. In every plane and behind every missile, other frightened men worked to do their duty. This time I knew that war is about the killing and maiming of human beings. Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers die. Parents and children are left behind. This time I knew that war is not a form of popular entertainment. It is not a Roman circus staged to stimulate viewers sated by lesser forms of violence. The deaths we soon shall see will be all too real.

I also knew that the effects of war persist long after the guns are silent. Last summer I returned to Vietnam, this time as a physician and child psychiatry researcher, to study Vietnamese Amerasians, the children left behind by U.S. servicemen.

Ironically, these children are now the age their fathers were when they conceived them. For these young people and their families, for hundreds of thousands of war widows, orphans and crippled veterans, the war’s power reaches out even to this day. Shooting ceases, pain and suffering never seem to end.

I watched, then entered, the Vietnam War as a young man, naively confident in my strength and courage. As this latest war unfolds, I am not so young nor quite so strong and brave.

Worse yet, I have a draft-age son. Several months ago, he announced to me his intention of applying for the Marine Corps’ flight training program. I heard his words with a mix of pride and fear. Now my pride has gone and in its place is an awful dread.

Will he, like his father before him, see on the TV screen a call to glory rather than the horror I now know it to be? Will he, like me, enlist and find his way out to the desert sands? I could not bear to lose him. Yet war is about fathers losing sons. It is an irrevocable, unimaginable loss, in no way balanced by a folded flag and purple medal.

In my heart, I finally knew on Jan. 16 that this is the real reason our latest war is so different for me. I am a father now. I will not sit in my living room and watch my son and other fathers’ sons and daughters die. This is no sport, no game. It is the end of hopes and dreams, a vast, shadowy field of sobbing, pained goodbyes. I will not let the TV set cheapen this tragedy for me.