Vietnam on My Mind

1964 – 1992

I’ve grown up with Vietnam as a troubled tenant in my brain.

The war in Vietnam got hot late in 1964 as I was finishing high school. It ended a decade later in the sad scene of desperate people reaching for the runners of a US embassy helicopter already in flight.  

During those years and for many afterward, Vietnam -- the war news drama, the history, some participants, some victims, the refugees, the memorials, the books and the movies -- have had a place in my life.

This memoir topic came to me recently when I started reading a book called Plague and Cholera. I picked it up because I thought I would learn about the science behind the cures for those awful diseases. It was about those things and lots more. It was also a biography of a Swiss doctor, Alexandre Yersin, who lived in Vietnam from the 1880s until the 1940s. It told his story of building the Nha Trang branch of the Pasteur Institute, where he found the vaccine for the Plague.

Nha Trang was familiar to me because it was a principal US naval base during the Vietnam War. Yersin built his summer home in the nearby mountain community of Dalat, also a familiar name. He did all this decades before the war we know and the revolution before it, that ended French colonialism in Vietnam.

A couple of years ago, I was reading all the books of the American author Ward Just and happened on American Romantic. I was surprised by the story. Set in Vietnam before the escalation, it's about a botched CIA mission to gather information about the Viet Cong, then still in the shadows. And it's about life in Vietnam before it got really bad. When there was still a touch of civility The contrast between before and after the war added another plane of sadness to the long story

I was on a foreign student visa during the sixties when I was a high school and university student living in LA. That meant I was not draft-eligible, but all my friends were. And virtually every male my age I saw day-to-day had been assigned a draft lottery number.

But we lived on the good side of the tracks, so almost all of them had some sort of deferment. Mostly because they were in college. So while there was guilt hanging over my head because I didn't have to worry about the draft, it was muted because no one close to me was biting his fingernails. As was usual for me, good luck piled on other good luck.

There was one exception. Rod Lovett. Rod was a fraternity brother I met in 1969 when he came home from two years in Vietnam. He lived in the frat house as I did. We had a lot in common, but we were not good friends even though, like me, he fit in well on the unstructured meter.

Rod taught me the only Vietnamese I know. “Toy dee com dow het.” This is the first time I've used it productively outside of a bar. It’s a way of saying so long. It translates to “I'm going nowhere at all.”

Rod committed suicide by jumping off a roof. This happened after I had returned to Toronto in 1970. I don't have any memories of spending long nights talking about Vietnam with Rod. I do remember him as a bit of a druggie. I guess he was masking and smothering his pain.

Rod’s was the second Vietnam War death that was personal for me. There was one earlier. And one later. More about those below. 

I first saw the movie Apocalypse Now very soon after it opened at the University Theatre in 1979. That was the first of at least six times I saw it on the big screen. And I've seen it often on TV. It's one of those special movies that give me endless pleasure even if I’m just seeing a ten-minute clip on YouTube. Others are Silence of the Lambs, Terminator 2, The Wedding Crashers and The Queen.

I think Apocalypse Now filled little holes in me that had been drilled while reading books about Asia by Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Frederic Prokosch and Somerset Maugham. The images in the movie seeped into empty spaces I needed filled.

Around that same time, the crisis of the Vietnamese boat people emerged. These were about a million people who escaped the victorious communist regime in Vietnam in two waves after the war in 1974. The second wave left later in the 70s in perilous boat journeys. Those who survived ended up in refugee camps in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In 1979 Canada agreed to take in 60,000 boat people in private-public partnerships. I was the treasurer of a group that sponsored the Nguyen family.

My first job was to meet them at Pearson airport. They were late exiting into the arrivals area, so it was a very empty terminal late at night when we met. Mom, dad, granny and five children aged 5 to 15. I remember them uncomfortably wearing what were obviously Canadian government-issue big blue parkas. They looked like refugees from Alberta.

Our group had already found and furnished an apartment for the Nguyens on Woodbine just north of the Danforth. We drove there and they went to sleep. They were dog tired.

I stayed with the family as their treasurer for a couple of years as they found jobs and schools and worked and saved. I remember they had a really nice stereo system within a year. I also remember they spent much less than our budgeted amounts on food and other things. They knew how to be frugal.

Language was, of course, an issue. It took at least a year for me to learn that dad had been a carpenter in Vietnam, not a car painter, as he was in Toronto.

Sadly, they all did not survive. After four or five years, one son, aged about 15 by then, was killed trying to cross the 401 on foot. I never found out why. That was the third of the three deaths that were close to me.

But it was the first death that affected me most. And that had happened 10 years earlier.

In 1969, while working at my part-time department store job, my role was to move around the store helping cashiers. It was a ticket to socialize with anyone and everyone. I made friends with a pretty, skinny black girl named Cletus Moore. We were not friends, like to go on a date, but we shared a streak of irreverence and a sense of fun, even though we had different backgrounds. Cletus was the kind of person you love for their sense of humour and permanent smile.

One afternoon, and I remember this like it just happened, I approached Cletus while she was working at the costume jewellery counter facing the rear picture windows of the store. The light that bathed her could not have been brighter. And she could not have been in a darker mood. Cletus was saddened almost beyond recognition. Had a worst nightmare come true? Sadly, yes. She told me her fiancé had been killed in Vietnam. I did my best to console, support and sympathize. It was about her at that moment.

And privately it was also about me. This was my draft status double dose of good luck earning its just reward. From his side of the tracks, Cletus’s fiancé was a sitting duck from the day the war began while I was sitting on the beach protected by the luck of the draw. And now I'd have to live with justly earned guilt because I didn't play in the real-world side of the sandbox.

I felt that guilt vividly when I visited The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. It had opened in1982. Of course it was controversial. It was different. Rather than being a flag-waving recreation of a battle, it is a silent subterranean vault-like monument with more than 58,000 names inscribed.

My visit in 1992 was maybe the most moving experience of my life. The feelings I felt for Cletus and her fiancé 23 years earlier ripped into my heart. I had a penance to pay. I was jolted by each name I read.

I still feel that pain today.