THE SUNADY PROFILE : War Stories : The place: Saigon. The date: April 30, 1975. A moment in history brought a lifetime of memories for a Vietnamese civilian and a U.S. Marine. And for one Vet, it marked the beginning of a personal journey.

Bill Short

Tucked inside the Short family Bible is a $10 bill. But this piece of paper doesn’t proclaim trust in God, who saw fit to do away with the government that issued it--the Confederacy.

It’s a souvenir of battle treasured by a family that equates war not just with manhood and patriotism, but with the sanctity of history. It belonged to James D. Short, a Union Army corporal and great-great-grandfather of Bill Short, himself a former Army man, an infantry sergeant assigned to Alpha Company, the First Battalion, 26th Infantry, in Lai Khe, 40 miles northwest of Saigon.

The base was on a North Vietnamese supply route that snaked down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos, Cambodia and finally South Vietnam. It was officially called Highway 13, but the North Vietnamese had their own name for it--the Highway of Blood.

In a sense, Bill Short’s landing there was inevitable. He’d sprung full-grown into a Midwestern military-minded family, where virtually everyone was a captain, a major, a colonel. Short’s earliest memories were of gawking at his grandfather’s Army tattoos. But it was an uneasy alliance. And when it shattered, when Short laid down his weapons and refused to pick them up, he was sent twice to the brig--the Long Binh Jail, or L.B.J. as its inhabitants acidly referred to it.

When he returned to the United States, Vietnam came with him. His waking days were a fever dream of protest, his nights an anesthetic brew of booze and drugs. Even years after the anti-war movement died, the tiger wouldn’t let him go. Until finally, nearly two decades after the Paris peace accord, Short found his own separate peace. He made it by returning to Vietnam--not to destroy but to create, not as a soldier but as an artist, a photographer documenting the lives of Vietnamese who had resisted U.S. military involvement.

“I’ve heard other vets say this who have gone back, and I would leave this to some psychologist to figure out,” Short, 47, says in his West Los Angeles home, sitting beneath sepia images of a young Vietnamese boy in counterpoint with a snake.

“You have this feeling like you’ve gone home, and I think it might have to do with the fact that we were all so young, and that it was such a pivotal part of all our lives, and that we were all so impressionable, that even though it was strange and exotic and horrific, that it became a familiar warm place in many ways.

“And maybe it’s because it’s such a strong part of my psyche that if I don’t acknowledge it, that if I don’t have a relationship with it, that it’s denying part of my identity. And if I deny that part of my identity, then I’m not whole. I’m not a whole person.”

*

Where, exactly, was the champagne?

It was clear from the start that Short’s upbringing and its limpid view of military valor hadn’t accounted for the knotty reality of South Vietnam. “I had these visions of being greeted with bottles of wine and champagne and flowers and everything that had been in my memories from watching all the John Wayne movies and hearing stories from family members.

“The first thing I remember--and a lot of vets will tell you this--was the wall of heat that hits you when you walk out of the airplane. And this was winter in Vietnam, but it was still this intense wall of heat that was almost suffocating--like somebody threw a wet, hot blanket on top of your head and then told you to take a deep breath.”

Short had been drafted in 1968 after finding the counterculture’s recreational opportunities more alluring than his studies at Ohio University in Athens. When he was booted out, he lost his deferment.

It took four long months of combat for Short to realize that he’d made a dreadful mistake. First, there was the poverty beyond any sense of reason. It assaulted him on his first work detail, riding shotgun on a garbage truck to make sure the trash collectors who came to the American base weren’t saboteurs or thieves. What he found instead were parents who sifted through the waste for half-eaten chicken legs to feed their families.

“I was totally unprepared for the poverty, just the smell of rotting vegetation, the smell of feces, the smell of garbage, the sort of filth that was there. I didn’t know how to process the information. It put me in a state of shock, and I didn’t know how to understand it other than something seemed dreadfully wrong with the picture that I was seeing.”

The dissonance mounted. Short watched troops use a Vietnamese cemetery for target practice, shooting grenade launchers at the headstones, defiling a culture anchored in honoring one’s ancestors. In his first act of resistance, he refused to aim at the graves.

“Over and over again, the rhetoric you heard from our government was that we were coming to help the Vietnamese people who had asked us to come and help them liberate their country from these Communist invaders from the North. And here we were, shooting up these tombs that were part of their heritage. It was totally insane.”

These were the days of delirium. He remembers drinking warm Budweiser and playing cards with the rest of his Air Mobile Assault Group, on call to help other poor souls who were pinned down--trapped--by enemy fire. The men sat around drinking beer and smoking dope under yellow alert, which signaled a potential sniper attack. Between bursts of rocket fire, they would bitch about the war and try to maim each other by jumping off the bunker onto each other’s legs, because a broken leg was a quick ticket out of the service. It didn’t work, mostly because they were too drunk to aim.

Early on, Short figured he could get out of combat by signing up for the Vietnamization program, sold as a way to help the Vietnamese. He volunteered to distribute medical and material aid to villages, but he later learned that the aid would be used as a cudgel: If the Vietnamese refused to inform on Viet Cong movements, it would be withheld.

The company commander blew off Short’s request anyway and sent him back to combat. And then one day the platoon was pinned down by heavy fire for three hours--not by enemy fire, but by American 115-millimeter howitzers.

“They were big enough that trees--as big around as my wrist--were being cut down by the shrapnel that was flying over our heads. And just the ineptitude and the insanity of the whole thing. I watched our company chaplain regurgitate the same ceremony, the same words over and over again for everybody who got killed in our unit. Everything seemed so surreal and absurd.”

One of the final horrors was booby-trapping Vietnamese bodies, tucking spring-loaded grenades under corpses. When their friends came to bury the bodies, “We’d get a couple more kills,” Short says in GI-speak. Finally, he and two others told the platoon lieutenant that they refused to go on any more operations.

“We were desperate. I mean, I just didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to be taking part in the horror show any longer.”

Eventually, the other men were persuaded to return to combat. But twice, Short refused to fight. Twice he was court-martialed and sent to jail. At one point, an Army shrink questioned him.

“He said, ‘What are your fears about this?’ I said, ‘My only fear is my family, my relationship to my peer group.’ He grabbed a copy of the New York Times and opened it to a full-page ad listing well-known people who opposed the Vietnam War.

“The anti-war movement had just grown incredibly after (the) Tet (Offensive) of ’68. And the psychologist said, ‘Follow what you think your true convictions are. And I think you’ll find a place for yourself when you get back.’ ”

*

Those distant protesters were changing hearts and minds in the military, and Short credits them with shortening his sentence and helping him get an honorable discharge. When he returned to the United States, he joined their ranks at Ohio University, where they occupied the ROTC building. The National Guard moved in with tear-gas.

“My dad said, ‘Goddamn it, you didn’t come back from Vietnam and go to prison just to get shot by a National Guardsman on an Ohio campus.’ ”

And Short still felt out of sync. In the anti-war movement and in radical political groups he later joined, he was that tainted being, a former vet. He kept his background a secret, although his past--and his upbringing--still claimed him.

“I felt a little bit like a double pariah, because even though I felt I had done the right thing, there was part of you that felt you hadn’t fully succeeded in passing your rite of passage to manhood, so there was a certain amount of guilt that went along with that.”

It wasn’t until 1989 that Short found redemption. That was the year of his first trip back to Vietnam.

Short, who now teaches photography at the California Institute for the Arts, had earned his master’s in 1985. He’d tried to still his demons by completing a book of photographs and oral histories of veterans with his wife, journalist Willa Seidenberg--”A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War” (LaVigne Press, 1992).

But it wasn’t until he returned to Vietnam that the country was transformed for him. He went first to help curate an art exhibit of work from both countries, and later to work on the couple’s book-in-progress documenting Vietnamese who opposed U.S. military involvement.

“I met all these people I fought against, and I was the first American vet they’d ever met. I didn’t count on making such close friendships. I was just shocked at how receptive and how friendly and how inquisitive the Vietnamese people were.

“You tell them you’re American. It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re American. How wonderful.’ Then you tell them you’re a vet. They say, ‘Oh, you’re a vet. Bring beer, bring beer.’ Then you tell them you’re a combat vet. ‘You’re a combat vet? Bring the whiskey, bring the whiskey.’

“They saw a shared experience beyond the politics. They saw a shared experience of horrible events, an experience that’s so deeply personal that it transcends the politics. On a human level, it transcends the politics, the struggle to survive, to stay alive to see the next morning.”