John D. Casey

NOT YET!

I have seen death. It stared me in the face for a few fleeting seconds one hot summer morning in 1971, on the steps of a schoolhouse in a small village so many miles away, and then passed me by. I often wake with a start, remembering this time over and over again, and wondering why it didn’t claim me, when around me so many innocent people were dying. Was it merely mocking me, knowing what my future would be, or was it that someone or something had decided that my time on this earth was not yet to come to an end?

I had chosen a career as a soldier, and as such accepted death as the maximum penalty for carrying out my profession. After all, wasn’t I being paid to be a killer if the situation arose? If the circumstances of that day were reversed, would I have pulled the trigger, ending the lives of others? It is a question I will never be able to answer, yet one that continually haunts me.

When I look back on the times since, I wonder if death that day would not have been preferable. There would have been sorrow and grieving at my passing, but this would have diminished with time, unlike the sorrow and grief that I have brought to those around me since that day. I would have been merely one more statistic of that war without end, but surely that would have been a far better figure than the numbers I have wronged since by living through that day.

Had I reached for my rifle instead of sitting and staring at the two people, ‘the enemy’, who held my life in their hands, the lives of so many would have been changed in that blink of time in that far away country. Others in my unit would have found my body on the steps of that school, and wondered how it had happened, but their lives would have gone on, and in time they probably would have forgotten all about me, except for maybe an occasional fleeting thought.

When I think of the country I came home to, the people who saw me as a murderer, baby killer and defiler of another country they knew virtually nothing about, and the way that we were derided by veterans of past wars because ‘we had lost our war’, I have often felt that those who came home in body bags were in a lot of ways the lucky ones. They had paid the supreme sacrifice, many of them not even old enough to vote, and in most cases they had not sought out death. It had come to them suddenly out of the night or in the daylight hours from the jungle around them, probably when they least expected it, sometimes swiftly, and other times agonizingly slowly, but it claimed them none the less.

Like John Winton, the ‘beanpole’ Kiwi Lieutenant, who was not only my boss, but also my friend and tent-mate for three months. Why did he take out that one last patrol when he had only ten days left in the ‘Funny Country’ before going home? He found death in the form of a booby trap, without even seeing the enemy, but it was death just the same.

Where are the friends I knew, the ones I had come to help save, and yet who in the end were lost, abandoned by those who were their allies because it was no longer ‘politically expedient’ to continue to be involved in a war that had gone on for ten years. For them it had been going on a lot longer, and would continue for another three years, until that last day in April 1975, when the country finally succumbed.

Where is Thuy, the girl I had known so well and held so dear in my heart? Is she, like her village, now a part of eternity, an example to the rest of the country of what would happen if they continued to resist? Had she been torn apart on that ANZAC Day, just five days before war’s end, on that day of all days when we remember our dead from wars past, or had she somehow managed to escape the carnage?

Where are Sister Augustine and the other nuns from the orphanage in Baria, who swore that they would try and get out of the country with the children if the war ended the wrong way; Xuong, the gentle smiling one who spent her life teaching the orphans and other children of Baria; Rong the interpreter, who fought the war so far from his family, and was always fearful that he would never see them again?

And particularly the children, those smiling, mischievous little devils who accepted their lot in life with a maturity and stoicism beyond their years, and who in turn made my life so happy when I was with them? A smile, a giggle, a gentle touch, a game of tag, or just a shy look around a corner, all these things helped me forget about what I had to go back to when the day was over.

There are so many faces that parade before me, making me want to reach out to them, to once again know their friendship, their embraces, and share their longing that this terrible war that was ravaging their country and tearing their lives apart would end.

Perhaps if in those few fateful seconds so long ago the pendulum had swung the other way, I would be with them now, if they have indeed gone to a better place, where suffering and sorrow are no longer a part of their lives. If they were spared and continue their lives to this day, I hope they have been able to find happiness despite the changes that were wrought on their lives, and that somehow my thoughts can reach out to them across the distance, and let them know that I have not forgotten them, and will hold their memory within my heart.

Many times I have been urged to forget the ghosts of my past, to put it all behind me and think only of today and the future. But how can I just shut out the memories that have been with me for over 23 years: the faces and names of all those I will never see again. To do this would be to betray the promises I made to them before I left that country I had come to think of as home, to put up a wall between now and then.

When I listen to other veterans talking about Vietnam they do not seem to have had this same close contact with the Vietnamese people. Their perceptions of them and their country are in a lot of cases completely opposite to mine. Was this their defence mechanism, a way of making themselves believe that if they had no feelings for them they would have no memories of them, because they would realize they were indeed human beings? That fraction of time could have cost them or a mate their lives. Was their way right and mine wrong? It is something I have never had to question before.

Once more I feel like an oddity from that time of carnage and death; a time when the whole world, the country I was born in and the ideals I had seemed to be turning upside down around me. I came home in body, but stayed there in spirit, whole on the outside but empty within. I couldn’t make others see what I had seen, or feel what I had felt, so I stopped trying and kept it to myself. Perhaps I have kept it within me too long, and others are right; now is the time to let go. But I don’t know if I am strong enough just yet to make that decision.

Only time will tell if they are right and I am wrong!