We Fight the Memories, but It’s a Losing Battle

Wars don’t really end. They just grow quiet and retreat--deep into minds that would rather not remember, deep into nightmares that trail on for years, decades. Bob Kerrey took his memories, his nightmares, out of the shadows and dragged them, willingly or not, into the light for all of us to see. Look, this is a real war story, is the message behind his confession. This is the story behind the medals and the accolades; the one that howls with screams. The one that haunts.

Wars also live on for those who stayed home and tried to understand, cope. The Vietnam War was my generation’s war; it raged in a faraway jungle, but also in the streets of America, in living rooms. It tore at our collective conscience; this was not our parents’ war, heroic and noble.

A boy in my high school lied about his age, and at 17 decided to join the Marines. He wasn’t my friend before he left school; in fact, I had never particularly liked him--the arrogant football star, too full of himself, always ready for a fight. But suddenly he was gone, and a friend of his told me he would really appreciate getting mail from someone, anyone. That began the next two years of my life, in which he was a constant presence. Thick letters, page after page of blue-ink script, arrived in my mailbox, sometimes every week. I wrote equally long letters back. Our correspondence began when he was in training, and even then I quickly realized that, in a war, letters are an artery to a world left far behind. They are blood flow, they are a reminder, they are a way out of the shadows.

His letters became a chronicle of how boys change when they are expected to do terrible things. His language was the first thing to change. Killing the enemy became “killing gooks.” Uncertainty about his ability, his willingness to take the life of another boy--in a different uniform, sent to war by his country--gave way to letters signed, “Just Another War Machine.” Once he got to Vietnam, I felt with each letter as if some part of me was being pulled into the war with him. It was so far away, yet it was there in my hands, in page after page; it crawled into my dreams.

He told me that, in Vietnam, the land itself had “more shades of green than you could ever find in a box of crayons.” He described the moon slashing across a quiet, black hillside, quiet except for the “ghost sounds” that could mean death. It was a war of ghosts; no amount of training could have prepared smiling American boys for that. I still have his formal military picture, taken when he had officially become a Marine. He is so fresh-faced, so crisp in his uniform, smiling with an innocence that he would never have again.

In one letter, I learned that his closest buddy was killed--torn apart when he put his foot down in the wrong spot on the soft jungle earth. One minute he was tall and young and counting the days until he could get back to the World; the next second, he was just pieces, scattered on the dirt and hanging from branches. I understood by then the rage, the fury, the desperation that made my friend write, “[Anyone] who gets in my sights is gonna get it. The VC are everywhere, sometimes women, sometimes kids.” The thing about understanding rage is that you start to wonder about yourself. You start to wonder about all of us--the darkness in us, the shadows that swallow who we once believed we were. Vietnam changed a lot of people; some of them never left America.

He came back to the States briefly, after his first tour was done, and he had decided to sign up for a second tour. It was summer. My father was governor of California then, and summers were spent in Sacramento. There at the dinner table, with Waterford goblets and shiny silverware, and food being served from formal platters, I got my first hard lesson in the art of war stories.

My friend regaled my parents with stories of nobility in the distant jungle war, of American boys fighting the good fight, proud to die for their country if it came to that. He even used the phrase “VC Commies.” This wasn’t the person I had come to know in all the months of letter writing. I had come to know his fury, his fear, his resolve to kill before he was killed. But there was no patriotism in those letters; there was just the raw need to survive.

Some of his letters had railed against the government that had shipped him and others like him to a land they hadn’t heard of before, to sit in the dark and watch tracer rounds and wonder if they would ever get home, get married, get old.

My father was swept up in my friend’s dinner-table stories. They made the Vietnam War seem heroic, more like World War II. I was the antiwar rebel with a friend who, my father said, “I should listen to carefully.” I didn’t answer my father. I have listened carefully, I thought--to a different story than this.

My friend stayed over, and late that night I crept into his room. But not for the reason you might think. I needed to understand why the war had suddenly become something different, something sanitized--a more appropriate dinner-table conversation.

“That’s what your father wanted to hear,” he told me. “War stories change. They’re about the storyteller, but they’re also about the listener.”

“But what’s true?” I asked him.

“Whatever you want to believe,” he said.

I lost touch with my friend after he came back from his second tour. I haven’t given his name because the last letter I ever got from him was full of nightmares and running and uncertainty. And because I want to imagine him happy--married, with kids, miles away from his memories.

Maybe the most important thing we can learn from Bob Kerrey’s admission is that no one who was in that war moves too far from the blackest pools of their memories. The details change, depending on whom you listen to. Others who were with Kerrey on that horrible night recall the events differently. But the nightmare is the same, and it belongs to all of us.

Many years ago, young boys landed in a place where the jungle whispered and rustled and then exploded. Some of them did terrible things. Some of them have returned, night after night, in their dreams. War stories are often about heroism; just telling them, just dragging them out into the light is an act of bravery. War stories are about horror, and sorrow, and letters, and wanting to come home, and wanting to forget, but knowing you have to remember.

In his powerful book “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien wrote, “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.”