[pensive music]
- Lonnie Cooks: I had so many things
that I wanted to do in life.
That I felt, at age 21, I wanted to continue life
and I wanted to do so many things,
and there were so many things to do with my life.
And I didn't want Vietnam to be a stopping point
or to be a hindrance to my making a success of it.
I was about seven months in the country,
and I had been standing knee-deep in water
for about, oh, it seemed like an hour and a half or so
because it was during the monsoon.
And I was in what we call the foxhole,
and my weapon was pointed out of what we call the berm,
in an area that I could see during the night.
It looked like that to me.
That's how wide it looked for me.
And...
I just felt I had been in this war a long time,
and I had stood in this water for a long time,
and I felt tired and I wanted to get out.
So I took my machine gun and got out of the water
and went out on top, on top of the berm, which is camoflauged.
And I set the machine gun up.
And again, I was pointing it in the area
that was designated for me.
And my buddy said, "What are you doing?
What's going on?"
And I said, "Hey, I've just tired of sitting in the water,
"and, y'know, it's like, I've been here a long time.
"And it's just getting to me, or whatever.
I just don't know what's going on."
And out in front of me, the moon was kind of like a half moon.
I saw eyes reflecting or something reflecting
on the ground.
And I assumed it was the enemy moving in toward the berm.
And I guess as they got within about ten meters,
they got up and ran toward my position.
And I had a grenade in the other hand.
And he came right up to the berm.
And he was just about to lob the thing,
and I had my weapon pointed at him point-blank.
And this is an M60 machine gun.
And it was then, I would say, at least seven feet of me,
I could see his whole face, his outline, everything.
And in just those fleeting seconds or moments
or whatever, it looked like my brother was standing there
or somebody that was very close to me.
And for some unknown reason,
this enemy, North Vietnamese, dressed in a regular outfit,
just turned and ran back into the woods.
And I had my hand on the trigger,
and I put it on lock. [chuckles]
And I didn't fire.
So after he ran back into the woods,
I kind of kicked the old machine gun
off the top of the berm and just cried.
It made me appreciate life a lot more.
It enabled me to have a better understanding
of the human condition
in terms of how I fit into this complex puzzle.
Having a better understanding of just life
and what it means to live, and that word again, "survive."
[pensive music]
- Dennis Kroll: I was wounded in a helicopter combat assault.
We were hit by mortar fire.
We took mortar fire the entire day.
Reconnaissance said we took somewhere
between 80 and 120 rounds.
The last one that day was the one that got me.
It was just about dusk,
and we knew they'd be quitting their firing
because the air support would spot their muzzle flash.
And Vietnam was a lot of luck.
My luck ran out with the last one.
It was hard coming home and dealing with family,
friends, you know.
I had felt as if I had changed so much,
and I guess I kind of expected everybody else had some idea
of my experience and what I had gone through,
and would've changed with me.
You know, it wasn't the case.
I found it real frustrating to talk about Vietnam
and what was going on there.
My parents would say, "What was it like?"
I would start telling them what it was like,
what I saw, what we were actually doing in Vietnam.
It was such a contradiction to what they had seen on TV,
what they had read in the paper that they couldn't deal with it,
so they wouldn't listen to me.
I'd talk, but they wouldn't hear it, you know.
It was just too confusing to 'em.
I started working with the Agent Orange issue,
started working with Vietnam Veteranst Against the War,
and had to talk, had other veterans using me
as a sounding board for their emotions,
their feelings, their fears, their frustrations.
So working with VVAW
more or less opened up a channel for me
to direct the frustrations I was experiencing,
the anger, the bitterness,
instead of having it act as a self-destruct mechanism.
I had a channel to better my position in life,
better other people's.
That was probably the real significant turning point
in my life was the fact that I could deal with it.
[pensive music]
- Earl Cramer: When I returned from Vietnam,
I was done with the military.
And I sorta felt like a free person.
Like I was unslaved.
I had a friend through high school,
lived in a neighboring town,
and we went back to school in Illinois.
And we found that there was a great deal of veterans
at school, and there was a vets organization
that was quite large,
and they were involved in a lot of issues
and a lot of social activities.
And at that time, I decided that the best thing for me
would be to join the vets club.
I was with that organization for a couple years,
and the entire time
that I was associated with that organization,
we never talked about Vietnam.
We had large social gatherings.
We did lobbying in Illinois at Springfield,
and there was people that were paid
to do lobbying in Washington.
And there was people involved
with the government of the university,
but never was there any effort made
at trying to unravel our involvement with Vietnam.
I think that Vietnam caught up with me
12 years after I was home,
because to some extent, society laid a foundation
that Vietnam had to be forgotten before it could be talked about.
I felt that something probably went wrong in your life
if you ended up in Vietnam.
That if you were doing the right things in life,
you were having more successes
and you're not a Vietnam veteran.
And I desperately was looking for success.
Vietnam turned out to be another failure.
So I took a risk and I walked in the door of this building
called the Vet Center.
And I guess as I look back, I was very paranoid.
I didn't want to tell 'em my name.
Didn't want to tell them where I lived.
I didn't want to tell 'em anything
that connected with the service
outside of the fact that when I was asked was I a veteran,
I said, "Yes."
And they were very polite to me and said,
"Well, this is a counseling center for Vietnam veterans.
"You know, do you have some interest in that area?
Are you a Vietnam veteran?"
And I finally admitted that yes, I was.
It really took me about two or three initial meetings
with these people before I realized that
that there was probably a real care center
that had some previous experience
in dealing with veterans, that understood veterans,
and they functioned in a therapy group with other veterans.
And in time, there was a group put together
in which we came here.
And for the first time in my life,
I really had a chance to talk about it.
And when you got about nine guys together,
and you listen to their various stories,
and you had to encourage 'em to get this out of 'em.
You had to give a little bit to do that.
It would've been easy to say, "Hell no.
"I ain't gonna get involved.
"I'm just gonna sit here
and I'll see what they're gonna lay out on the table."
And that's not what we did.
And slowly but surely,
I could see that maybe I could help some people too.
[pensive music]
- Tom Deits: Coming back from Vietnam,
I don't really know what to expect.
I mean, I was a real confused kid at that point in time.
Although I was a little older than a lot of vets.
I was 21 when I came back.
I was a confused kid, basically.
I came back, you know,
only about 18 months of my life had been disrupted.
But those 18 months seemed like 18 years in some ways.
I mean, I was no longer the person that had gone to Vietnam.
I didn't know what I'd become in Vietnam.
In some ways, I thought I was an animal.
Some ways, I thought I was just a real good survivor.
Sometimes, I thought I was a warrior.
Sometimes, I thought I was a coward.
I had lots of confusion about who I was.
To me, being a survivor means that
you have to depend on your own resources
to get through the world.
And to take on the world,
you literally have to be able to take on anything
the world can hand you.
In Vietnam, it handed you the very worst.
And you had to be able
to be responsible for cleaning your weapon,
loading your weapon, aiming your weapon,
firing your weapon, you know.
YOu had to be responsible
for being in the right place at the right time,
being awake, being alert.
Being constantly on guard for what could happen next.
That's a real defensive posture in this world.
You know?
Survivor is a defender,
someone who defends himself very, very well.
I became very good at that, but that really limits you.
You're almost reactionary in nature.
It limits what you can get out of this world
if all you're doing is trying not to get hurt.
And originally, you try to not get hurt physically.
And the greatest fear for me physically
was I would lose an arm or a leg, not that I would die.
Death had no meaning for me.
I didn't know what that was.
I still don't know what that experience would be like.
I have an idea of what being cut is and being mangled is,
and breaking a bone or something.
I have some way to correlate what that might be like.
And I did not wanna come back, you know,
less than what I went over there.
So my first defense was physically.
I think naturally what happens is your psyche tells you,
"You gotta defend a lot of other things, buddy."
And those are things that subconciously,
I started to defend.
The pain, the guilt.
You know, the fear, the agony of day and night,
being out in the ambush situations.
So you start to survive psychically
or psychologically as well, you know.
Emotionally, you start to survive.
And that's a defensive posture also.
So you stop taking risks with your life.
You stop taking chances.
The issue is that we haven't learned much from Vietnam.
And if we're gonna learn about it,
we're gonna have to take a look at it again.
We're gonna have to go through the pain.
And that's not only as a veteran issue.
That's as a society's issue.
I think there are things to be learned from it.
I think there are ways that Vietnam could be
a real stepping stone out of the track of the warrior and the war
and into the track of, "We gotta do something more lasting
than fighting wars every 20 years."
'Cause I think the one thing a veteran will tell you
is war is unforgiving for anybody that participates.
Civilians, munitions makers back here,
the society that fight, the leaders that fight,
especially for the warriors that are asked to fight.
It's unforgiving.
[pensive music]
The Vet Center program was established nationwide in 1979,
and it came to Madison in 1981, and it came out of a study
called "The Legacies of Vietnam,"
which is about 700 pages of documentation
that in fact, the war in Vietnam has caused significant problems
in the lives of a significant number of Vietnam veterans.
We are set up primarily to deal with the inside of the veteran
and the impact of having gone to war,
coming home to a, shall we say, an unfriendly society
or a society that, in veterans' eyes,
didn't care very much.
And what we do here is help the veteran
go through the pain of Vietnam again,
to understand why it is they have blocks in their life,
why those blocks are there.
And then we try to help them adjust to everyday life.
Now, what we see here
are people who cannot get close to their loved ones
or should be their loved ones.
Relationships falter in lots of Vietnam veterans.
Not all, but many.
And that directly ties to having been to Vietnam
and seeing people wasted, is the word I would use.
Blown away.
People that you knew today are gone tomorrow.
It causes you to kind of get into a shell.
And we think lots of veterans are still in that shell today.
One of the reasons that programs like Vet's House upstairs
and our program down here exists
is because we were able to label problems statistically
throughout the '70s.
Statistically, veterans had higher unemployment rates
than their peers.
Lots of reasons for that.
Some of those date back to the veteran themselves,
dropping out, isolating.
The market.
But we know that their percentage rates sometimes
are almost double their peers.
We also know that more Vietnam veterans are ending up in jail
than they should've been, for whatever reason.
I think, my own opinion would be that
some of the inhibitions about breaking the law
are now gone.
When you've done all there is to do, you know,
in a combat situatin,
there aren't many laws that are left to break.
They don't have any meaning.
So I think some veterans found their way in jails that way.
And I think also, you learn to deal with anger in Vietnam
as opposed to other issues.
But I think the statistics that even struck me
as a Vietnam veteran, and I don't use these loosely.
It's a fact, accepted by almost all agencies
that deal with Vietnam veterans,
that more veterans have taken their life since coming back
than were killed in combat.
Now by that, I don't mean directly taking a gun
and putting it to their head and blowing their brains out.
I mean by getting in cars and driving very, very fast
and driving off the roads.
Mysterious deaths of Vietnam veterans.
But also plain-out suicides.
We know that around 60,000 veterans were killed
and their names are on the wall in Washington.
There are probably 60,000 other veterans
or more than that right now.
Those names also belong on a wall someplace.
Once you work through Vietnam, once you understand the impact,
and once you understand what you can do with it,
it can actually be in your corner.
It can be something you can grow from.
It can be something, once you take all the strides
and take on these issues,
you can become a better person for having been there
rather than a lesser person,
which a lot of Vietnam vets see themselves as.