When You Thank A Soldier

A few months ago, I accompanied my parents on a trip to Washington D.C. I'd never been there before, but my parents had been numerous times.  This time, they were there because my mom was attending a conference. Unsurprisingly, DC has a ton of extra security measures in and out of places which has proved difficult in the past for my dad, who lost 80% of his hearing in Vietnam. He's had embarrassing experiences of holding up lines while he tries to understand what the guard is asking of him.  So, besides being nice and just giving me a vacation, my parents also brought me so that I could be my dad's "ears".  (By the way, I was terrible at this job.  Half the time I would blow through the metal detector, only to turn around and see that my dad had been stopped and was trying to read the guard's lips.  Daughter fail.)

The first day that we were there, we went to the Holocaust Museum and then all around the National Mall.  I jokingly told my dad that the day's theme was "death and destruction", which yes, may be a little glib and irreverent, but I think we needed to lighten the mood after the intensity of The Holocaust Museum.  The sun was sinking as we made our way back from the Jefferson Memorial and my dad asked if I'd seen everything at the mall that I had wanted to see.  

"Well, what about the Vietnam Wall?"  I asked. 

"Oh, ok.  You want to see that?" he asked.  He seemed non-committal, but I couldn't tell if he didn't want to go or if he was truly surprised that I wanted to see it.  While I was growing up, Vietnam was practically a sixth member of our household.  I don't mean that we talked about it a lot- in fact, we did exactly the opposite.  We did not talk about it.  We kids knew that our dad had fought in Vietnam and that he'd been shot.  When we were little, he used to tell us that the long scar on his leg was really a sleeping snake.  We learned later that he'd been shot on Hamburger Hill.  At the dinner table when I was five, I asked him if he had ever killed anyone.  After a moment of shocked silence, he quietly answered "I've killed lots of people, Tacy.", and went back to eating his mashed potatoes, while I tried to figure out why I felt like I had just done something wrong.

We lived with PTSD, not knowing that it was PTSD.  We knew he was angry, and we thought (for a long time) that it was our fault.    We knew our family was a little bit different, but we didn't know why.  Vietnam was always there, but we didn't have any words to name it, so when I say that Vietnam was a sixth member of our household, that's what I mean; it was an invisible, nameless presence.  So of course I wanted to see The Wall.  In a way, it was a physical manifestation of that invisible family member.  

However, though I knew that my dad had been to see The Wall before, I didn't know if he was purposefully avoiding it on this trip.  I didn't want to drag him over and drudge up bad memories or feelings.  So I said "Eh.  That's okay.  I'd like to see it, but I can get over to it another time."  

"No, it's okay. You want to see it.... let's go."   And he began walking towards it in the fast-paced walk that he's always had, the one that requires me to maintain a steady trot to keep up.  So I did, wondering the whole time if I was being selfish. 

When we got there, he slowed down.  I didn't know if he planned on going through it or not, so I, feeling guilty, walked ahead, planning to just walk through myself and then double back to him.  

To be honest, the experience of the memorial wasn't what I thought it'd be. The Wall itself is purposefully understated.  It's just a granite wall with names.  You start at street level, where the granite slab with the engraved names of the first few casualties is just a foot high.  Then the wall grows, and the list of names grows, and by the time you are reading names from the height of the war, you've completely descended beneath the lawn of the National Mall.  As you continue walking, the list grows smaller once again, until you've once again reached street level and the names of the last to die are commemorated on the final, and smallest, granite panel.  The names on that very last panel made my heart especially heavy, I guess because being last to die in a war that's this close to being over seems unjustly tragic. (Then again, what's just about any of those names being there?) 

I found my dad, who had hung back to look up someone from his platoon.  

"Did you find him?' I asked. 

"Nah. I'm not sure that I even have the right last name."  In silence, we began our walk back over the Mall.  

"It's a lot of names, huh?"  It was more of a comment from him than a question.  I remained silent, feeling that he was going to say more.  Anytime my dad talks about Vietnam, it feels like he's giving me a little gift- a glimpse into understanding what he's gone through.   I walked beside him until he started speaking again:

"You know, I was talking about Vietnam with a family friend once.  I said something like 'Who knows how many lives were lost there', and the friend stated matter-of-factly '58,151'- like that was the end of the discussion.  He missed my point completely.  I was trying to say that making it out of Vietnam didn't mean that you always had a life to come back to."

And then he proceeded to tell me about guys he knew who received Dear John letters from their wives and girlfriends days before they lost half their bodies in combat.  They may have made it out of Vietnam, but the lives that they had left back home- the ones in which they were a whole being with supportive wives- that life was lost in a jungle somewhere in Vietnam.  And there are thousands and thousands of people like them, not necessarily all amputees.  Some returned with their whole bodies and a hole in their soul.  The common thread is that many came back home and found that what they knew of their "life" was gone.

I don't know if my dad knew that I'd kind of always intuited that feeling about Veterans- that a lot of them were people with two lives, really; one "before" and one "after".  I've felt for a long time that war can take a life without really taking a life.  I think it's something that people who live with war-traumatized veterans just understand.   I do wonder, though, if other people get it.  I wonder if they know that when they are thanking a soldier who's been in combat, if they really know what they are thanking him/her for.  I wonder if they realize that even though he/she may be standing in front of them, the soldier's old life may have ended somewhere in a desert or in a jungle, or any place else halfway across the world.  Do they know that the road to a new life takes them through a special kind of hell and that they have to push through all kinds of physical and mental pain, all kinds of guilt and bad memories- and that it never really all goes away? Is that the sacrifice they are thanking them for?

I haven't been in combat, so I'm not in a position to state this as fact, but I do feel that surviving a war takes more courage than any act of bravery that occurs on a battlefield.  When I thank a soldier who's been in combat, I'm thanking them for sacrificing their life before and for continuing the battle in their life after.

When I thank a soldier, that's what I'm thanking them for.