How to Tell a True War Story

The Vietnam boys had a hard go. Both their war and post war experiences were vastly different from those of the WWII generation as well as the current War on Terror vets. This always seems to manifest in their writing a need to explain themselves. Not for acceptance or sympathy, but to show that they were normal people and that they are products of their environment, not the other way around. What I mean is that war changes people, and I believe most vets feel that they were changed for the better. The problem is that this change is so significant that they are rendered almost unrecognizable to those that once knew them the best. The other half of the problem is that the veteran initially doesn't realize they have changed.

The beginning vignette illustrates this point perfectly. The soldier writes the sister of his recently deceased friend. Talks of all the things that made him a great guy. Things that any soldier can appreciate. His ability to kill, destroy, sacrifice, make war a much more bearably place. At the end of the letter he pours his heart out, says that her brother and him were practically the same person. She never writes him back. He has described to the sister a monster. Not only that but in doing so he has described himself as a monster. Combat is easy to handle emotionally when surrounded by others who get the joke. Finding humor in the violence you can control makes it easier to handle the violence that you cannot. That humor is often completely unacceptable to peaceful society and the cavalier way that combat vets handle the idea of death is seen as ghoulish to most.

The hardest part of combat is returning home. It's difficult because communicating becomes a battle in itself. Your old friends do not find humor in death. Probably every combat vet in history has had his old friends look at him uncomfortably after telling his war stories for the first time. It's a hard reality for the vet to accept, that everyone either doesn't care or simply doesn't want to hear it. The judgments are many and often unspoken. One must never forget that soldiers are people, just like you and your friends. However, when those vets are your friends it becomes all to easy to forget. That's how I see this work, as a plea for understanding.