Bonds Run Deep in a ‘Son Misplaced by War’

For those who served, the war in Vietnam must have seemed like a violent tornado that struck randomly and unpredictably. It swooped down upon young lives, picked them up, tossed and heaved them in the wind. The lucky ones were set down gently and returned to the lives they had left. The unlucky ones never saw home again.

And some--like Steven DeBreau--were not untouched and not destroyed but irrevocably changed, as though the tornado had plucked them from one spot on the road and put them back down in a different place, facing a different direction.

DeBreau, 47, a former Marine, has suffered the familiar range of afflictions we have come to associate with some Vietnam vets--survivor guilt, alcoholism, post-traumatic stress.

Like many, he has worked hard to put those troubles behind him. But what he could never shake were haunting thoughts of the Vietnamese peasant family that had “adopted” him during the war.

He came to know the family through an unusual and little-known Marine effort called the Combined Action Program that paired Marines and Vietnamese Popular Forces soldiers in integrated platoons from 1965 to 1971.

When DeBreau returned to the village of Tam Hoa last year, he found the family he felt he had abandoned 26 years ago. They told DeBreau that his return was like the homecoming of “a son who had been misplaced by war.”

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CAP Marines will tell you their war experience was unique.

They were assigned in squads of 14 to work with local militias in rural villages. They were immersed in the language, political structure and culture of rural Vietnam. Many became fluent in Vietnamese. They functioned in semi-isolation--operating with virtually no air nor artillery support. Sometimes, they went six months without seeing an officer.

Their mission was to destroy the Viet Cong infrastructure in each hamlet, to provide public security and to reinforce the sympathies of villagers toward the South Vietnamese army.

In the process, they came to know the people of Vietnam in a way few Americans ever did, and they returned with a unique set of problems.

“CAP unit veterans do not identify with other Vietnam veterans, especially around the issues of experiences with and attitudes toward the Vietnamese people,” said one former CAP Marine. “The CAP volunteers lived intimately with villagers and formed powerful relationships, which were traumatically severed upon their return to the States. This has resulted in feelings of loss. . . . Often these feelings are compounded by a sense of having abandoned the villagers who depended on them.”

Certainly this was true for DeBreau, who was yanked out of his tiny village on 15 minutes’ notice after living there for seven months in 1967-68.

DeBreau had volunteered because it looked like a good gig from his vantage point as a cook for the 1st Marine Division headquarters in Da Nang. CAP Marines came and went as they pleased, hardly ever saluted officers and were left alone by MPs.

“Mostly line grunts volunteered for CAP,” said DeBreau. “They thought it would be safer. You didn’t have to hump up and down hills and carry everything with you. As one of my friends used to say, you could die more comfortably in a CAP unit.”

About 5,000 Marines participated in the program; it is estimated that fewer than half survived. Two-thirds of the survivors received decorations for heroism.

DeBreau earned a Purple Heart.

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For years after the war, DeBreau was unfocused. Unable to concentrate on college, he joined a commune briefly. He worked as a welder, a tuna fisherman, a janitor and a gardener.

“A lot of my combat stuff has to do with witnessing. I don’t know that I ever killed anyone--you fired a lot at night at muzzle flashes and at tree lines and in the morning sometimes there were bodies or blood trails. But I saw a lot of children affected by the war, and by poverty and illness.”

To cope, he drank.

Seven years ago, he got sober. And then he went to work on himself. He spent as many months in a VA post-traumatic stress disorder clinic as he did in his Vietnamese village. He continues counseling, belongs to a veterans’ support group in East L.A. and plans to train as a physician’s assistant or surgical technician.

Finding his Vietnamese family after no contact in more than a quarter century helped close a gaping psychic wound. But his ultimate healing work will come if he can complete a mission he has undertaken on his own for his Vietnamese family and the village he briefly called home. “A Foreign Son’s Project” he calls it. Operating out of a friend’s Glassell Park home, he hopes to raise enough money to fund construction of a sorely needed truck bridge in the village, and to repair the roof of the local Buddhist temple.

He is editing 10 hours of crudely shot videotape of his return to Vietnam to use as a fund-raising tool for the project. Now that the United States has resumed diplomatic relations with Vietnam, DeBreau hopes to pry a bit of goodwill money from American firms that stand to profit from the lifting of the embargo. He is not sure how much money he needs, and has virtually no experience asking for money. If he can get the word out, he thinks, people will be moved to help.

What DeBreau envisions is bringing construction materials to Tan Hoa so the villagers can build their own bridge.

“That’s what we learned in CAP,” said DeBreau. “If the Seabees built a school and the Viet Cong blew it up, it was no big deal. But if the Vietnamese built it, that was another story. . . . I guess I’m trying to restart another CAP unit in the village. It’s important for people to know there are veterans who don’t hold grudges, that some of us have familial feelings. There are bonds.”

And where there are bonds, there can be bridges.

Of all kinds.