Vietnam!
It’s just one word, but if I say it out loud I instantly see flashbacks from fifty years ago; I am transported back instantly; I am raw.
I watched the Vietnam series by Ken Burns these last two weeks, and once again I was blown away by the storytelling ability of Burns. The man is a master at his craft.
That’s what that series was, you know. It was a story, told by a storyteller, and within his story were the stories of those who were touched personally by that war.
In a very real sense we were all touched by that war . . . and still are!
The Civil War and Vietnam . . . they haunt us still today. We still, as a nation, have not recovered from the effects of those two conflicts. It appears we won’t recover in my lifetime, and I find that to be sad.
If you saw the series then you saw the haunted looks on the faces of those who were involved in Vietnam. You heard the pain in their voices. Their words, and I’m sure their memories, were visceral.
I could not hate a soldier in 1967 and I can’t hate one today, no matter my viewpoint on war. They have seen things no sane, compassionate, empathetic human being should ever see, and because of that they deserve, at the very least, understanding.
Taking a life should be costly. It should have a profound effect on those who survive. It is horrible, and it is a shame our leaders cannot experience the anguish when a steel-jacketed round, from their weapon, tears out the wiring of an enemy soldier. Perhaps some of them would not be in such a hurry to declare war on North Korea, or Iran, or a handful of other nations who dare to disagree with our economic policies and philosophical beliefs.
My father was not the same after World War 2, or so I’m told. My uncle suffered from “shell-shock,” PTSD as we know it today, and drank his way through the next twenty years of his life. A cousin of mine never recovered after being sent home from a prison camp in Hanoi in 1970, and eventually he hung himself on a cold February evening in 1980.
We are writers, but we are also storytellers, and to a larger degree we are the chroniclers of history.
Tell your history! Will it please everyone? Probably not, but that’s not the point.
Be a storyteller! Will your stories please everyone? Probably not but again, that’s not the point.
Make your readers feel it.
That is the point!
Bill
“Helping writers to spread their wings and fly.”
Billybuc
Artistry With Words 