Returning to Vietnam, Forty-one Years Later

{Image by Cal Mackenzie}

Last night as I was getting ready for bed, I clicked into a story shared on Facebook by Colby College, where Michael and I went to school. It was a story my dad had mentioned he was working on (he’s the managing editor of the college alumni magazine), but I hadn’t seen the finished piece yet. I read the words several times over, even reading parts out loud to Michael, tears rolling down my cheeks.

The piece is a beautiful essay written by Cal Mackenzie, the professor who inspired me to go into government. I had the pleasure and the privilege of working as his research assistant for two years, and I still joke that I wouldn’t mind spending another few years fact-finding in the basement of the library for another one of his books. I learned so much during that time.

Cal has been a professor at Colby for more than thirty years, but in 1969 he was drafted and served in Vietnam. This past year, he and his wife, Sally, both received Fulbright scholarships to go back to Vietnam. For Colby magazine, he wrote an essay about the experience of returning, sharing feelings I’ve wondered about but wasn’t bold enough to ask. Cal also shared some of the incredible photos he took while he was there. Here are a few excerpts from his essay, which you can read in full here.

The bus ride on Sept. 4, 1969, is spectacularly clear in my mind. Earlier that morning about a dozen of us – all draftees – had been inducted into the Army, and we were on our way to Ft. Dix for basic training.

What did you talk about with a stranger on the way to war? In those days, you talked about how you ended up on that bus.

All the conversations were about failure to avoid the draft. Couldn’t find a physician to certify an “injury.” Couldn’t get a draft-deferred job. Didn’t have any political connections to get into the National Guard. Failed a course and lost a student deferment.

Not then, nor in any of the time I spent in the Army or in Vietnam, did I meet a single person who had gone to war because he believed in the administration’s policy or because he felt the Viet Cong were a genuine threat to American freedom. Maybe such people existed and simply escaped my acquaintance. In the rare moments when we tried to put a noble face on what we were doing, we spoke of “fighting for our country.” Politicians might say those words with a straight face; the grunts couldn’t.

***

I left Vietnam, but Vietnam never left me. As the years passed, the hope grew that I might find a way to return. In 2011 I applied to be a Fulbright professor in VIetnam. On my application, I wrote:

Forty years ago, I was drafted into a war I did not support and sent to fight an enemy I did not hate. Yet, in the midst of the agonies of war, I came to develop a deep affection for the ingenuity and endurance of the Vietnamese people and for the powerful beauty of their country. Those feelings have never dimmed. I would like to return now, unarmed and unashamed, on a more positive mission: to help the people of Vietnam in every way my skills and experience will permit. I look forward to this, not as a guilt trip, but as the most important opportunity I will ever have to right the balance sheet of my life.

Finally, this is an excerpt from his last letter home before he returned to America in 1971 (to a one-year-old son he had never met):

I had hoped to be young forever, to live in the brightness of unstinting optimism, to know that things would always work out. But now I’m afraid that I’ll leave my youth behind me here. You cannot watch all these young men slowly losing their sanity and not knowing it. You cannot see the same stumbling, inept mistakes made over and over again by fools. You cannot smell the smell and see the dark sights of death without losing a very valuable part of your youth in the process. … I will come home and I will be older in so many ways, and you will sense that.

War, as something more than the abstract, is something we so rarely talk about, especially with people who actually fought. It’s hard to imagine what the extent of the fear and loneliness and homesickness was like for hundreds of thousands of men and boys – men and boys who, for the most part, returned to normal life and rarely speak about that time in their lives. An essay like this is such a powerful and heart-breaking reminder of the strength and stoicism that so often goes unseen.

You can see more of Cal’s photos from Vietnam here and read the full essay from Colby magazine here.