An Offering Ann Collette At 11:00 a.m. on the morning of April 30, 1975, a lone North Vietnamese tank burst through the gates of the presidential palace in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon). The Vietnam War was officially over. Unfortunately, TV cameras missed the shot, so the tank backed up and rolled over the gates again for posterity. That's sort of how you feel, visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. for the first time-like you've been rolled over by a tank, knocked down and crushed by two wings of black granite slashed into the earth, inscribed with the names of 58,191 people. It's here my almost obsessive reading of Vietnam fictions and memoirs has led, so I shouldn't be surprised that it's here the whole war becomes most terrifyingly real to me. In Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country, the Wall brings a peace of sorts to a teenage girl whose father was killed in Vietnam, and to an uncle accompanying her, himself a veteran of the war. The healing properties of the Wall really haven't been fully addressed in fiction, though. Laura Palmer's excellent work of non-fiction, Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, does a far better job of explaining this by putting faces to some of the names-eight female-etched into the memorial. As I rest on a bench facing the Vietnam Women's Memorial-a beautiful statue of three female figures dressed in fatigues, one of whom cradles a wounded soldier-I cut glances over to the Wall, glinting through the light mist that's falling on this late November day. Twenty years after the documented end of the United States' longest and second most divisive war-only the Civil War cut deeper-the Wall may be instrumental in helping a nation come to terms with both the moral and human cost of Vietnam, but right now my struggle is more immediately to keep my composure in public. In the early 1970's, I used to work for the telephone company-a place where, perhaps because no particular qualifications were required to obtain a job, a lot of returning Vietnam veterans were able to find work. Most of the guys who went to Vietnam were young; the average soldier was 19.2 years old, with only a high school education behind him. He'd probably never been away from home before, and his values were still in transition. Unlike the largely female environments in today's telephone company TV commercials, very few women worked inside Central Offices (where telephone service originates) in the early seventies. Huge rolling ladders, enormous spools of wire, banks upon banks of constantly clattering switching equipment held no allure for me; the size of the paycheck, for working among such things, surely did. And the vets used to talk to me, tell me their stories of Vietnam, confide in me the occasional terrible secret about slaughter, battle, nightmarish horror. Maybe they thought my being a woman would make me more understanding and sympathetic to their pain. They were wrong. The guilt I still feel over my insensitivity, my complete ignorance, comes back to haunt me as I rise from the bench where I've been seated and walk over to the statue of the three "grunts"-young infantry-men, sculpted into a more traditional monument erected to appease those who disliked Maya Lin's searing but abstract creation. They look to be the age of the guys I used to know at the telephone company, and I wonder how many of my former coworkers have been able to put Vietnam behind them. According to Dr. Jonathan Shay's brilliant Achilles in Vietnam, a work that links the Vietnam combat vet's experience with that of the warriors in Homer's Iliad, The National Coalition for the Homeless has found that one third of homeless men are Vietnam vets, "with 150,000 to 250,000 veterans homeless on a given night." Since reading that, I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop, fully expecting some day to recognize one of the grizzled, dirty homeless panhandlers, the living monuments to Vietnam, lining the main streets of the city where I live. As Shay points out, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, once known as "battle fatigue," haven't changed since Homer's time. Fifteen percent of the 3.1 million men and women who served in Vietnam still suffer emotional numbness, a reduced capability for intimacy, flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations, difficulty in sleeping and exaggerated startle responses, among other things. Many of the best memoirs written by Vietnam vets were published before these symptoms became as familiar to the public as they are now. Ron Kovic's raw and angry Born on the Fourth of July may not be a great work of literature, but its passion and honesty earn it a top place on any list of Vietnam memoirs. A more elegant writer on the subject is Philip Caputo, who landed in Danang on March 8, 1965, a gung-ho infantry officer with the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, "the first U.S. combat unit sent to Indochina." By the book's end, Caputo is awaiting the verdict on his court-martial charge for the murder of two Vietnamese he believed were Viet Cong. "I already regarded myself as a casualty of the war," he writes, "a moral casualty, and like all serious casualties, I felt detached from everything." In Indian Country, another of Caputo's books, he attempts to create a sympathetic protagonist suffering from severe PTSD. But his memoir A Rumor of War remains his strongest-and one of the strongest overall-works on the subject of Vietnam. Memoirs are still being written. Tobias Wolff, acclaimed for his childhood chronicle This Boy's Life, recently published his Vietnam memoir, In Pharaoh's Army. Subtitled "Memories of the Lost War," the book is disappointing. The writing is beautiful, but it skims over the surface of events; language seems more of a concern to Wolff than Vietnam. But at least he's still around to write about Vietnam again, if he chooses to. I wonder if the name of Lewis Puller Jr.-son of the famous WWII and Korean war hero "Chesty" Puller-will be added to the Wall. Puller Jr. subtitled his memoir "The Healing of a Vietnam Vet." On May 11, 1994, addicted to painkillers which controlled suffering induced by the heinous wounds he suffered not even three months into his Vietnam tour (Puller lost the thumb and little finger of his right hand, most of his left hand, his left leg above the knee and his right leg at the torso after stepping on a mine), he shot and killed himself. Certain friends denied his death was due to Vietnam, blaming a marital breakup and clinical depression, instead. But anyone who reads Puller's memoir Fortunate Son will have no doubts as to the real cause of his suicide. The name of Lieutenant Sharon Ann Lane, an Army nurse killed by hostile fire while serving in Vietnam, is engraved on the Wall, and Lynda Van Devanter (author of the groundbreaking memoir Home Before Morning) dedicated her book to Lane. Until Van Devanter went public with her experience as an Army nurse who worked in the OR at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku and the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon, though, the stress suffered by female nurses in Vietnam-and the subsequent toll it took on their lives-was little recognized. Van Devanter's book inspired Winnie Smith to write her devastating account of serving as a front line nurse in Vietnam, American Daughter Gone to War. Smith's book puts more of an emphasis on what it was like to be a "round-eyed" American woman in "this man's" Army, where the PX in Saigon didn't carry the white duty uniforms, white stockings, and white shoes regulations required her to wear-let alone personal items necessary to women no matter where in the world they're stationed. Both works are brutally honest; each builds, through the accumulation of intensely personal detail and horrific events, a valuable record of what war is like for the caregiver who breaks down because of it and ends up needing care herself. American military and civilian women who served in Vietnam were genuine trailblazers. Because of them, and the advances they made, "separate but equal" distinctions applicable to women who joined the service prior to the Vietnam War were eliminated, making it possible for the 37,000 women who served in the Persian Gulf to occupy a variety of jobs formerly closed to them. To us, I should say. I thought about joining the military myself, back in 1969, right after I graduated high school; I even went so far as to write for an application. But when it arrived, I was damn glad to be able to just say no. What would I have done, though, were I a male? Certainly, my age and class background would have made me vulnerable to the draft. My mother claimed, had I been her son instead of her daughter, she would have sent me to Canada without a moment's hesitation. You look at the east and west panels of the Wall, each 246.75 feet long, with their chronological order by date of casualty, and it's easy to wish they'd all gone to Canada. These men and women were doing their duty, as they and their country saw fit. And I want desperately to believe it was all worth it, but no matter how hard I try, I can't. None of the best fiction writers on the subject of the Vietnam War seems to feel it was worth it, either. Tim O'Brien, the best Vietnam novelist, declares this with every word he writes. On a purely technical level, O'Brien broke new ground with his 1990 series of interrelated stories which combine into a whole and form the prize-winning novel The Things They Carried. O'Brien weaves a man named Tim O'Brien into the novel, never letting you forget-just as he can't seem to-the culpability he still feels for his actions as a foot soldier in Vietnam. In his most recent work, In the Lake of the Woods, he tackles the atrocity of Thuan Yen, the little subhamlet known to the world at large by the name of My Lai. Though he had no connection to the slaughter in the village, O`Brien-simply by virtue of serving in Vietnam-appears to hold himself responsible for what happened in the war at large, and refuses to let himself off the hook. Anyone reading his books has to face up to the wrongheaded tragedy of Vietnam, too. Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers, Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green, and Larry Heinemann's Closequarters and Paco's Story, all written by men who served there, are other brilliantly effective, in-your-face fictions on Vietnam. These, and the countless other pieces I've read, along with the memories of co-workers gazing over my shoulder-the "thousand yard stare" glazing their expressions as they related stories of killing the Vietnamese peasants' water buffalo "for fun"-have brought me to this place of horrible beauty. Vietnam seems to have killed something in everyone who served there, no matter what shape they actually returned home in. Even someone who, like me, has only read about the place still feels ravaged by what went on there. One of the reasons behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial's popularity is its famed healing powers. Relatives, friends, and fellow troops of the names on the Wall have found it helps to leave something special there-a memento of some sort, symbolizing their relationship to the dead. Maybe next time I visit, I'll leave a copy of this essay. It isn't much, but for now it's the best I can offer. Ann Collete, a film critic and book reviewer, lives in Cambridge. She is currently at work on her first novel. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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