preview

Personal Essay: Life After The Vietnam War

Decent Essays

It was May 1975. McCoy woke slowly. Heaven had a peculiar smell, sterile. In the following days, he learned that he was one of three survivors. The bright light was the Army dropping a load of Napalm into the area. An infantry unit diverted around a large NVA group heading south and retrieved him. Except for the lost month, everything else was intact and functioning properly. The physical scars would heal emotional scars were another matter. He was transferred out to Nuremberg Hospital in Germany. The war ended officially days latter. McCoy slept through the evacuation of Saigon, now Ho Chi Min city. Contempt for authority allowed McCoy to survive during this quirky time. He found it useful to transfer this feeling against the enemy. It was …show more content…

They provided training, motivation, and money. It was three hots and a cot…three meals and a place to sleep. It was hot, humid and rainy, warm food was not high on the “must” haves. The cot as it turned out was whatever real estate you happened to claim. For McCoy this was an upgrade in life. If you really put your mind to it and got with the program, you could earn respect and recognition, two things he never got at home. It was amusing; from 1973 to ‘75, his military record showed citations and medals. Hell, they even provided formal ceremonies to wash away the blood and provide a crystal clean illusion of it all being legitimate. It was politics at its best. They only asked you to be all you could be, or so the ad slogan read. In July of 1973, this just meant that you did not mind killing as many people as you could. The Army was tolerant; the victims did not always have to be the intended targets, mistakes happen. The term “people” meant enemy combatants, those who were trying to kill you. So killing them first seemed a reasonable goal. One could argue that we were intruding, but that’s a whole different issue. If you ever find yourself in a similar circumstance, apply a simple rule…do not let facts gets in the way, especially controversial facts. The only fact is your personal desire not to

Get Access