"The Making and Un-making of a Marine"

An Accounting

How much has Vietnam cost me? If I were to add up the twenty five years of psychotherapy, two divorces, and a number of career changes, I'd be pushing three to four hundred thousand dollars. Does that equal what I think America owes me? Yes! And I'm not adding the emotional pain, some of which is collected in a poem I wrote after returning from Vietnam.

As a fifty nine year old man looking into his future I don't have much in the bank for retirement. I've given away two houses in divorce, and built numerous swimming pools for psychotherapists.

You're asking why I didn't go to the VA. I haven't gone to a VA because they are connected to the same organization that sent me to war beside the main help they have to offer is pills.

After high school many men my age went on to college for an education during this same time the Marines were teaching me to kill. At a minimum these guys got a four year head start on getting the good jobs. They never had to try and figure out how to bury the military training to kill, and they got their pick of the college girls. These finely educated moved into corporate jobs first, plowed their savings into 401-K's and never had to wake up from the American dream. The Vietnam nightmare is alive and well in many of us Vets. The society did not know how to welcome and integrate their warriors back into society. Shame about the war destroyed the honor these returning soldiers deserved. Shame and guilt scattered many of us to the outer limits of our culture. We dug foxholes to protect ourselves from the "friendly fire" of our own people. Forty years after Vietnam men are still climbing out of their foxholes. My own foxhole cost me a lot of cash and as I step from it into my community of successful men and women I want them to pay for the freedom I gave them. No I don't want their money, give it to the young men and women what I did so many years ago. Pay for their healing, honor them and don't turn you back on them with the same indifference you did on me.

 
Larry Winters