At 19 They Entered the Jungle and Couldn’t See Who Was Firing 

You’re 18, maybe 19.  You’re living at home, working at a gas station, stocking shelves, taking  classes at the community college, whatever. And one afternoon, your mother hands you a letter that came in the mail. It’s from the Selective Service System.    Your number came up.

 You have 30 days to report. That’s it. No appeal, no conversation. 30 days between the life you had    and a country you’ve never heard of, fighting a war that nobody, not your parents, not your teachers, not the politicians on TV, could explain to you in a way that made any kind  of sense. Between 1964 and 1973, that letter showed up in mailboxes all across this country.

Over 2.7  million young men ended up serving in Vietnam. The average age of the American combat soldier over there was 19.  In World War II, it had been 26. That’s the difference between a kid and a grown  man. We sent kids. The draft worked like this. If you were a male US citizen between  18 and 26, you were in the pool.

Starting in 1969, they did it by lottery. Your birthday got drawn    and assigned a number, and if your number was low enough, you were going. Before the lottery, local draft boards  made the calls, and those boards weren’t exactly famous for being fair. If your family had money or connections, you could get a deferment.

 College, medical excuse, family hardship. If you were a working-class kid from a small town with nobody to make phone calls for you, you went. Vietnam wasn’t a rich kid’s war. The guys who fought it came mostly from families that couldn’t buy their way around it.    Some guys volunteered before the draft caught them.

That way, you at least got to pick your branch. Go Navy,  go Air Force, anything to stay out of the infantry. Because everybody knew the infantry was where the dying happened.  But if the draft got you first, the army got you.    And the army put you wherever it needed you. And what the army needed in ’67, ’68,  ’69 was bodies in the jungle.

So, you report. You get on a bus. You end up at a training base that feels  like a different planet compared to wherever you came from. Eight weeks of basic. They cut your hair. They scream at you. They run you until you can’t stand. They teach you to fire an M-16,  and throw a grenade, and dig a foxhole.

Eight weeks. Then advanced infantry training. Another eight weeks,  maybe less. And then, they put you on a plane. Here’s what the training didn’t teach you.    It didn’t teach you what triple canopy jungle looks like when you’re standing in the middle of it. It didn’t teach you how to tell a booby-trapped trail  from a safe one. Because there was no way to tell.

It didn’t prepare you for heat that makes you hallucinate,  or rain that doesn’t stop for 11 days straight, or an enemy who’s been fighting in that jungle since before you were born. Basic training happened at Fort Polk, Louisiana,    or Fort Benning, Georgia. Hot places, sure. But American hot and Vietnam  hot aren’t the same thing.

And the guys who went through it will tell you that nothing at Polk or Benning came close to what the real thing felt  like. The whole thing, from the letter in the mailbox to boots on the ground in Vietnam,    could take as little as 4 months. 4 months earlier, you were eating dinner  at your mother’s kitchen table.

Now, you’re stepping off a transport plane  at Tan Son Nhut, and the heat hits you like opening an oven door. 100°. Humidity  so thick it has weight. And the smell. Jet fuel and rotting vegetation and something  sweet and wrong underneath it all that you couldn’t name and didn’t want to.

 That first hour in country rewired a lot of guys. Whatever they’d imagined, whatever they’d seen on the evening news  or heard from the one guy in their hometown who’d already done a tour, it wasn’t this. Nothing was this. I grew up around men who’d been there. There was a guy who worked at a garage near my house. Quiet guy, good with engines, kept to himself.

He’d done two tours. I didn’t know that until years later. All I knew as a kid  was that he flinched when a car backfired and he never showed up at the 4th of July block party. I didn’t understand why    until I was much older. A lot of towns in America had a guy like that through the ’70s and ’80s.

 You didn’t always know which ones had been over there. But if you paid  attention, you could tell. The jungle. That’s what this is really about. Not the politics, not the protests,  not the generals moving pins on maps or the body counts on the 6:00 news. The jungle. And what it did to the bodies and the minds of the boys who had to walk through it every day for 12 months.

Vietnam is tropical. Dense, triple canopy jungle in some areas. The trees so tall and so thick overhead, they block out the sun entirely. You’re walking through vegetation you can’t  see 10 ft into. The temperature on the ground is sitting around 95, 100°, and the humidity never drops below 80%.    You’re wearing fatigues that are soaked through with sweat within the first hour of the day and never fully dry again for the  rest of your tour.

 You’re carrying 60, 70, sometimes 80 lbs. Your rifle, ammunition, grenades, claymore mines, water, C rations, a rain poncho, extra socks that  won’t stay dry no matter what you do, a first aid kit, and whatever else your platoon leader decided you were humping that week. And you walk. That’s  what most of the war actually was.

Walking. They called it humping the boonies. Moving through jungle on foot,  day after day, patrol after patrol, looking for an enemy that did not want to be found. You could walk  for 3 days and see nothing. No contact, no enemy, no sign anyone had ever set foot in that jungle  besides you and the bugs.

And then, one afternoon, without any warning at all,    an explosion under someone’s feet, gunfire coming from directions you can’t identify, guys screaming,  and half your squad is down before anyone figures out where to shoot back. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese    didn’t fight the way the American military had trained for.

They didn’t hold ground and defend it. They hit,    they damaged, and they disappeared back into the jungle or down into tunnel systems that ran for miles underground.    Tunnels too narrow for most American soldiers to even fit through. Entire complexes down there. Rooms,  supply depots, field hospitals, command posts.

 All of it invisible from the surface. And then, there  were the traps. This is the part that crawled inside guys’ heads and never  left. The jungle floor was seeded with booby traps. Punji stakes,  sharpened bamboo driven into concealed pits, sometimes smeared with filth  to cause infection.

Tripwires rigged to grenades or mortar rounds. Pressure-detonated  mines buried under trails that looked exactly like every other trail you’d walk that week. Every single  step could be the one that killed you or took your legs off at the knee. That does something to a person that doesn’t undo itself.

Walking 10, 12 hours a day for months, knowing the ground underneath you might explode. That rewires your nervous system in ways that don’t just switch back when you come home and the ground is safe again. Some of those guys came back to the states and couldn’t walk across a parking lot without scanning the pavement in  front of their feet.

30 years later. And there was one more thing the jungle did to them    that they didn’t even know about at the time. The Air Force was spraying a chemical defoliant called Agent  Orange over wide stretches of the Vietnamese countryside to strip away the canopy and deny the enemy cover. Millions of gallons of it dropped from planes.

  The soldiers on the ground walked through it, breathed it, drank water contaminated with it. Nobody told them it was dangerous.  It was decades before the government acknowledged what that chemical did to the men who were exposed to it.    Cancers, nerve damage, birth defects in their children.

Another bill that came due long after the war was supposed to be over. The days  bled into each other. You were either on patrol or back at a fire base waiting to go out  again. Sleep was broken and never enough. Mosquitoes carried malaria. Guys took chloroquine pills  that turned their skin yellow and gave them nightmares.

Leeches dropped out of the canopy and latched onto any exposed skin. You’d find them inside your boots, under your collar, behind your ears.    And the rain, during monsoon season, was unlike anything you’d ever seen in the states. It didn’t stop. Days of it. Everything turned to mud. Your feet rotted inside your boots.

 The skin would crack and peel and bleed, and there was nothing you could do about it because nothing ever dried.    And the whole time, the entire 12 months of your tour, because unlike World War II, Vietnam operated on a fixed rotation.  You knew exactly how many days you had left. Guys scratched the count into their helmet liners.

A short-timer’s  calendar. 365 days. And the math every morning was the same. Make it to tomorrow. The guys who’d been there a while had a look. Eight, nine months in country. There was something  behind their eyes that the new replacements could see, but couldn’t understand yet. A flatness.

 Not toughness,  exactly. More like something had been switched off behind the face. The FNGs. That’s what  they called the new guys. And I’ll let you figure out what the F stood for. Came in nervous and wide-eyed, and the  veterans barely looked at them. It wasn’t cruelty. It was survival.

 You stopped learning names until a guy made it through his  first month because names made it worse when somebody didn’t come back from a patrol. There was no safe place to decompress, no town with a bar you could walk to. Some guys got R&R. A few days in Bangkok or Sydney  or Hawaii. Five days of remembering what normal felt like, and then back.

A lot of guys said the R&R made things harder, not easier, because for five days,    you remembered what the world was supposed to be, and then you went back to a place where nothing about the world made sense  anymore. Contacts, firefights, were fast and  chaotic, and usually over before you fully understood what had happened.

   An ambush could last 10 minutes, 15. Long enough to tear  a platoon apart and then silence. The jungle goes quiet  and you’re standing there, ears ringing, hands shaking, smoke drifting through the trees, and somebody’s calling for a medic,    and somebody else isn’t calling for anything anymore.

And then you keep moving. Because that’s  what you do. There’s no front line to fall back to. No rear area that’s really safe. No way to measure whether any of it is working. You couldn’t point to a hill and say we took it. We hold it now. We’re winning.  You’d take a hill, lose guys taking it, and get ordered to abandon it 2 weeks later because it didn’t  matter.

That happened. More than once. Hamburger Hill, 1969. The army sent soldiers up a mountain in the A Shau  Valley. 10 days of fighting. 72 Americans killed. Over 300 wounded.    They took the hill and then they left it. Walked away. The North Vietnamese moved right back in. Guys who’d bled on that hill,    guys who’d watched friends die on that hill, they read about it in Stars and Stripes and couldn’t believe it.

What was the point?  Nobody had a good answer. Nobody ever had a good answer for most of what happened in that war. That’s the thing  that separates Vietnam from every other American war. In World War II, you could look at a map    and see the line moving forward. There was a direction.

There was an objective.  In Vietnam, there was no direction. Just the jungle and patrols and ambushes  and helicopters and body bags and one more day where nobody could tell you what any of it was for. And then your number came up again. Except this  time, it meant you were going home. 12 months.

Tours done. You get on a plane, and within 48  hours, you’re standing in an American airport in your uniform, and nobody is clapping. The homecoming. This is the part that cracked a lot of them open. Not the war itself, but what came after it.    There were no parades for Vietnam veterans. No ticker tape. No bands.

 No welcome home ceremonies at the dock  like the ones their fathers got. You flew back. You processed through a base in California, and you were out. Back in the  world. That’s what they called it. The world. As if Vietnam existed somewhere outside of reality, and you just  stepped back in. Some guys got spit on.

Some heard things shouted at them that    I’m not going to repeat. Some walked through airports and had civilians, college kids, people who’d never been within 5,000 miles of a jungle look at them    like they were the problem. Like the war was their idea. A lot of veterans learned fast to change out of their uniforms before they got off the plane.

They’d put on civilian clothes in the airport bathroom so  nobody would know. Think about that. Guys who just come from a combat zone hiding the fact  that they’d served their country because wearing the uniform made them a target in their own airports. These were 19, 20-year-old kids who got drafted,  who spent a year watching their friends die, and the country that sent them there couldn’t even say thank you.

Couldn’t even look them in the face. My neighbor growing up, Mr. Halloran,  he’d been a door gunner on a Huey helicopter. He came home in 1970 and didn’t  talk about it for almost 30 years. His wife told my mother once that he’d get up in the middle of the night and go sit in the garage with the lights off.

   Just sit there in the dark. Nobody knew what to do for guys like him. There wasn’t even a name for what was wrong. They didn’t call it PTSD until 1980. Before that, you were just somebody who couldn’t get over  it. The Veterans Administration estimates that about 30%  of Vietnam veterans experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. 30%.

That’s over 700,000 men who came home carrying something in their heads that the rest of the country didn’t want to hear about. Substance abuse, homelessness, marriages that fell apart, suicides  that nobody reported and nobody counted. The numbers are all documented    and I’m not going to recite every one of them because the statistics aren’t the point.

The point is that these were American teenagers who got a letter, spent a year in a place that broke something inside of them, and came back to a country that looked the other way. Of the 2.7 million Americans who served in Vietnam, fewer than 600,000  are still alive today. They’re in their 70s now.

 Some in their early 80s. A lot of them still haven’t talked about it. Not to their wives. Not to their children.  Not to anybody. The ones who did start talking    years later, decades later, at VA groups or in interviews or quietly to a grandchild, almost all of them say a version of the same thing.

 It wasn’t the jungle that hurt the worst.    It wasn’t even the fighting. It was coming home and understanding that nobody wanted to know what happened to you over there. There’s a wall in Washington. Black granite  cut into a slope in the ground, 246 ft long. 58,220  names etched into the stone. If you go there early in the morning    before the tourists show up, you’ll see guys standing in front of it alone.

Old men now. Some of them reach out and touch a name. Some just stand there.  Every name belonged to somebody who was young. Somebody who had a family that got a telegram  instead of a homecoming. Somebody who went to a war that America has spent 50 years trying to decide how to remember. Most of those names belonged to boys who were 19 or 20 years old.

 Same age as the kid who bagged your groceries last week.