Every morning at five, in the tan Buick LeSabre, two six-packs of cold Coors, and on the dirt roads south of town, north and east and west, a rooster tail of dust, a splash through mud where irrigation water escaped from lower ends of fields and ditches. Skunks in the road and racoons; the dogs of farms on long chains barking their ugly fury.

One beer two, the trailer houses white and brown, the farm pickups, black irrigation hoses, cottonwoods on the corners sucking all the water from the ground, the hawks of spring on the tops of poles, the kettles of vultures circling, circling.

The Sunday after I returned home from the war was Easter. My mother begged me to go to church. I remember her asking me to make a talk about the war. At the podium, the words crumbled and stumbled out of my mouth. Women in white dresses sat and gawked. Afterwards, they cornered me, their eyes like windows of sorrow. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

On Cinco de Mayo I met friends and we traveled to Nogales, Mexico, for the bullfights. I had a date with a girl I went to grade school with. I hadn’t seen her since the fifth grade. She didn’t excite me, but neither did the two blind dates I had earlier during my post-Vietnam leave. Women looked like mirrors that showed only my face, a wounded face, a face in need of more than they could deliver.

The bullfights turned my stomach. The picadors with their long spears jabbing the bulls and the banderillas with their barbed sticks stuck in the bull’s shoulder muscles and then the matador weaving his red cape magic then stabbing the bull, a thrust through a small opening behind the head and into the heart, the kill.

Two of the three matadors couldn’t kill the bulls as what tradition and the crowd demanded. When the third did, the celebrants crammed in the bullring went insane with their cheers. It made me sick to my stomach.

I wonder why I continue to write this stuff after fifty-eight years. Maybe I don’t have an answer. Maybe I need to figure out what I think and by writing it out, I will know what I think. Maybe I think it’s important enough to visit, and visit, and visit again and try to get it right.

The best and the worst of men I met in Nam, and sometimes we were one and the same: bad, and good, the necessities of duty and survival a broad, heavy yoke. We were just kids carrying the load. Good men, yes. Many, some of them I guess I loved. They say that battle and bad times make for strong bonds.

I wrote a letter to my parents in late February 1968 when the Siege of Khe Sanh pounded my very existence, ripping my mental condition into pieces that would never fully fit back together the way they were prior to my tour of duty. In the letter I was bitter and defiant, mostly, I think, due to articles we read about us being in peril, a peril—though real—we didn’t want to acknowledge.

Unbeknownst to me, my mother gave that letter to the woman who wrote a column in the local paper, and they printed much of it verbatim. Some of my vitriol was aimed at protesters. I think we, the men of Khe Sanh, felt betrayed, in a way, by what was happening in streets and on campuses across the globe. I understood dissent and the right to express your feelings and the right to not be in favor of the war, but on an emotional level, all that dissent stung.

When I got home, people mentioned the article to me and thought I was a war monger. I was called war monger. I fought that dammed battle at Khe Sanh and hated it. No one who went through that would love war, but in the same vein, we felt we’d done something important, stood up to a much bigger adversary and prevailed.

I felt betrayed.

Nothing at home was the same, or would it ever be, for me, the world tilted on its head, so to speak.

~ By Ken Rodgers

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Thank you for reading and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this story with friends and other veterans. BRAVO! can be viewed on Amazon Prime. We also have DVDs available, which can be ordered on our website at https://bravotheproject.com.

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