While President John F. Kennedy was talking by phone with his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, on the morning of Tuesday, June 12, 1963, he suddenly exclaimed: “Jesus Christ!”

The president’s outburst had nothing to do with their conversation. Rather, he was responding to a photograph taken the day before, splashed on the front pages of the newspapers just delivered to him. The photo showed 73-year-old Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc engulfed in flames on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam while sitting calmly—it seemed—in the lotus posture. He hoped his drastic action might bring the world’s attention to what the Buddhists saw as the persecution against their religion by the Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Buddhist organizations had called for freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to assemble in public, and an end to the supposed Catholic bias in appointing government officials.

Captured by Malcom W. Browne, the head of the Associated Press’s bureau in Saigon, the photo retains its ability to stop conversations to this day, making it an enduring symbol of the power of protest. Meanwhile, critics insist that the photo, and the reporting from Vietnam by Western newsmen including Browne, David Halberstam of the New York Times, and Neil Sheehan of United Press International, were responsible for Diem’s downfall and America’s ultimate defeat and humiliation in Vietnam.

But Browne had been determined, he insisted, only to provide his readers with a “continuous, honest assessment of the situation” in what he called “a puzzling war.” He believed that officials in Vietnam—Americans and South Vietnamese—should have tried to do the same. Browne thought that living in a free society meant a journalist had to “tell all of the people all of the truth all of the time. The newsman is obliged to fight forces that interfere with this vital process.”

Criticism continued to follow Browne. Later, when he reported on the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, detractors back home accused him of harming the American cause in its fight against Iraq. “This is just silly, of course,” Browne said. “To the extent that America newsmen ‘took sides’ in either Viet Nam or the Persian Gulf, it was on the side of the United States.” For all societies at war, the important truth, he suggested, was the truth “that tells you ‘we are the good guys and we are winning,’ regardless of what team you’re on,” reflected Browne.

Yet as American involvement in Vietnam wound down, it no longer seemed possible “to believe in the goodness and rightness of our cause,” Browne noted. The public had been regularly promised by its government that there was “a light at the end of the tunnel”—yet victory never came. Instead of pointing fingers at the individuals who involved the country in the conflict, many in the United States decided to “blame the messengers—people like myself who had been sending back discouraging tidings of how bad things had been going,” Browne said.

The story of the monk’s self-immolation began on May 8, 1963, when South Vietnamese army and security forces had killed civilians protesting a new governmental decree outlawing the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddha’s birthday in Hue. These killings sparked protests against the Diem government’s perceived anti-Buddhist policies.

Quang Duc’s fiery sacrifice was the latest of these protests. Thirty-two-year-old Browne captured it on a cheap, Japanese Petri-brand camera. Browne had arrived in Saigon on November 7, 1961. He had witnessed the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam grow from about 3,000 American military advisers when he arrived to more than 16,000 by the end of 1963. Tipped off about the demonstration the evening before, he was the only Western reporter on the scene to capture the horrific event on film.

The elder monk uttered no sound as the flames consumed his body, and did not change his position. But from his spot about 20 feet to the right and a little in front of Quang Duc, Browne could see that his “features were contorted with agony” and could hear moans from the crowd that had gathered to watch, as well as the ragged chanting from the approximately 300 yellow-robed monks and gray-robed Buddhist nuns who had joined the protest.

The newsman found himself “numb with shock” at the horrible scene. Though witnessing anyone commit suicide or suffer a violent death “is always a hard experience,” Browne later noted, “you can get used to it in war, but there was something special about this. It was kind of a horror.”

After about ten minutes, the flames died down and the monk “pitched over, twitched convulsively and was still.” Seemingly out of nowhere, a coffin appeared and fellow monks attempted to place Quang Duc inside. It was no use. The monk’s limbs, Browne recalled, “had been roasted to rigidity, and he could not be bent enough to fit in the casket. As the procession moved off toward Xa Loi Pagoda, his blackened arms protruded from the coffin, one of them still smoking.”

Browne’s film soon made its way from the AP bureau in Saigon to Manila with the aid of a “pigeon”—a regular passenger on a commercial flight willing to act as a courier to avoid censorship by South Vietnamese government officials. The photos were sent via the AP WirePhoto cable from Manila to San Francisco, and from there to the news agency’s headquarters in New York. There, the images were distributed to AP member newspapers around the world.

The reaction was immediate. While millions of words had been written about the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, Browne’s pictures possessed what the correspondent later termed “an incomparable impact.”

A group of clergymen in the United States used the photograph for full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post decrying American military aid to a country that denied most of its citizens religious freedoms. Vietnamese Buddhist leaders emblazoned the image on placards they carried during demonstrations. Officials in communist China used the image for propaganda purposes, distributing copies throughout Southeast Asia and attributing the monk’s death to the work of “the U.S. imperialist aggressors and their Diemist lackeys.”

When President Kennedy called Henry Cabot Lodge to the White House to discuss his ambassadorship to South Vietnam, the president had on his desk a copy of the monk photograph. “I suppose that no news picture in recent history had generated as much emotion around the world as that one had,” Lodge noted.

Browne’s photograph has become one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War, seared into the collective American conscience alongside two other AP photographs—Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution,” his graphic shot of a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla being summarily executed at point-blank range by a South Vietnamese police chief, and Nick Ut’s “Terror of War,” showing a naked, nine-year-old girl screaming as she runs down a road with her skin burned from a South Vietnamese napalm bombing that mistakenly hit her village.

Browne, who won a Pulitzer in 1964 for his reporting from Vietnam, was often asked if he could have done anything to prevent Quang Duc from taking his life. But Browne realized that it would have been fruitless to try to intervene. The monks and nuns gathered for the protest stood ready to block anyone who dared to interfere. When a fire truck appeared, some of the monks had leapt in front of their wheels to stop them.

Quang Duc’s sacrifice weighed on Browne, who died on August 27, 2012. “I don’t think many journalists take pleasure from human suffering,” he noted, but he did have to admit to “having sometimes profited from others’ pain.” Although by no means intentional on his part, that fact did not help, Browne noted. “Journalists inadvertently influence events they cover, and although the effects are sometimes for the good, they can also be tragic,” he said. “Either way, when death is the outcome, psychic scars remain.”

There were other deaths that Browne witnessed in Vietnam—losses that became mere “footnotes” in the history of the war compared to the “theater of the horrible” that Quang Duc’s sacrifice represented for his cause. Browne, however, never forgot them. He had learned during his career to deal with “the ugliest events of our times,” including keeping his wits as he observed the dead and wounded on a battlefield. Browne was able to do his job by “concentrating on the mechanics of news covering. I have the nightmares afterwards.”

The post The Journalist Who Photographed the Burning Monk appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The term “agent of chaos” has been rattling around in the back of my brain since a billionaire announced his intention to acquire a “sporadically profitable social company,” to quote the New York Times, for $44 billion, roughly 19 percent of his net worth. Some used it in the negative, but mostly it was the fandom who murmured it, admiringly, after news of the purchase broke. Their trickster king, at it again.

In this chaotic period, people like Elon Musk, who seemingly wield chaos like a lightning rod, have become lauded for such acts, regardless of their motivations, or plans, or if they even end up seeing them through. And this moniker, “agent of chaos,” has come to cloak them in a kind of neutrality—after all, they’re just sowing chaos for chaos’ sake. The label, I’ve noticed, not only seems to absolve them of any responsibility, but even holds up their pot-stirring as some kind of noble act.

The use of “agent of chaos” in this way appears to have come into vogue after the late Heath Ledger, playing the Joker, popularized the term in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

“​​Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos,” the oft-quoted line begins. “I’m an agent of chaos,” the Joker continues, “and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”

The Dark Knight, which came out in 2008, was widely considered a commentary on the American invasion of Iraq. The Joker, in turn, spoke to fans who embraced the character as the philosophical anarchist the times demanded: “He serves as a chaotic mascot for discord in an overly ordered world that ironically, to them, makes no sense,” explains a Comic Book Reviews article that gets at the character’s appeal, adding that the Joker “disrupts the status quo, standing in opposition to all society has to offer, and laughs.”

But the agent of chaos archetype is one that humans have been drawn to throughout the ages. The character appears in mythologies, folklores, and religions around the world—from the Coyote, a trickster character who frequents Native American tales, to Anansi the Spider, which originates from the Asante people of Ghana.

The origins of the literal term agent of chaos, however, is somewhat shrouded. The creation of the phrase itself arguably traces back to an 1895 book Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton by German Old Testament scholar Hermann Gunkel. Its arrival in popular culture appears to have come much later, with the term agent of chaos possibly debuting as late as the Cold War.

Its emergence in the 1960s came at a point when chaos was everywhere. The culture reflected this with offerings like Get Smart, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s parody of the spy genre, where KAOS was a literal institution, in fact, the international organization of evil. Even scientists began taking chaos seriously at this time. In 1963, meteorologist Edward Lorenz published a paper documenting observations from a computer model he’d built to predict the weather. His discovery gave rise to modern chaos theory—which holds that even apparently random systems possess some pattern or order.

It was in this moment that American science fiction author Norman Spinrad published his second novel, titled Agent of Chaos, in 1967.

“As far as I know I invented that term,” Spinrad told me over the phone about Agent of Chaos, which drew new attention during #Brexit for the name of its main character, which so happened to be Boris Johnson.

Years before the real Johnson became a global agent of chaos, Spinrad’s fictional Johnson was the bumbling head of the Democratic League, one of three powers competing for world domination. The League’s main nemesis was the powerful totalitarian Hegemonic Council, led by Vladimir Khustov, but a more dangerous opponent lurked in the background chasing them both: the Brotherhood of Assassins, led by Robert Ching, otherwise known as Agent of Chaos. The book opens with the question, “Which of these leaders would you follow?” But Spinrad cautions against making a hasty judgement. “Don’t make up your mind too fast,” he writes.

Spinrad wrote Agent of Chaos in San Francisco, with the Vietnam War on his mind. “My point was that these two things working together”—democracy and totalitarianism—“end up with a third thing, which is chaos,” he said.

Over time, Agent of Chaos has acquired a cult following, particularly among readers who are incarcerated, many of whom have gravitated toward the novel’s pushback against clear-cut power structures.

“My idea of chaos was more positive,” says Spinrad, reflecting on the work’s legacy. “It was a different idea of consciousness and politics. Now, the agent of chaos is something more negative with things falling apart. In that sense that’s not the way I intended it to be. But there it is.”

With this framing, it’s worth pausing to consider who the agents of chaos of our time really should be.

After all, reading about agents of chaos throughout history, what quickly becomes clear is that while some were bad actors, many were working to better society. I especially appreciated the perspective of professor Namorah Gayle Byrd, who is Chitimacha/Cherokee and an expert on trickster tales. In her writings, she calls attention to how tricksters are actually a force of good because they challenge the status quo and make people reevaluate their choices. That’s why she refers to them as “society’s caretaker.”

If such characters cross a line—and “become oppressors and abuse their power to transform spaces”—then, she argues, they no longer deserve the trickster label.

For those who don’t meet the requirements—because they “use their powers of chaos and transformation to destroy rather than to balance or rebalance societal norms”—they still have an important role of their own to play, according to Byrd. They’re “the types that call the real Tricksters to arms.”

The post You’re No Trickster, Elon Musk appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’d hoped to avoid ground combat by enlisting in the Navy, but within nine months of joining, I found myself in Vietnam.

During those long 13 months at war, the one good thing was the circle of friends I made, first as a hospital corpsman in an aid station in the jungle, and then onboard the hospital ship Repose.

The first gay man I met was at the aid station located in Dong Ha near the DMZ. His name was Matt, and we laughed when we found we both loved the movie The Group, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Mary McCarthy. The story of the friendship of a group of Vassar College women who deal together with discrimination, jobs, and men, The Group also had a secret lesbian character who gave us an idea. Matt introduced me to a buddy of his, Joe, and together we bonded like the girls of The Group, and for the same reasons. We added more members who also loved the name—ultimately seven in all—and so we called ourselves “The Group.”

We were noticed, and maybe recognized as gay, but no one bothered us. I know some of our officers knew about us. It didn’t matter. We were in a war zone, and as long as we did our jobs, what the hell?

I had a difficult upbringing. I was born in a field on a farm in California’s Salinas Valley, and my father beat me from the time I was 7 years old. My mother tried to protect me, but one day my father nearly killed me by beating me with a pipe. He left, at my mother’s insistence, abandoning her to raise three children by herself. The last time I saw my father, he said, “I know what you are. I never loved you. I hate you.”

I hated the war, but suddenly because of the Navy, I had a place where I belonged. A family called The Group to share a life with.

Then in mid-December 1969, back stateside and stationed at the Quantico Marine Corp Base, the bottom fell out. I was summoned by the commanding officer of the Marines, who directed me to report to OSI, the Office of Special Investigation. I sat in a small room, where I waited for what seemed like hours. Finally, a man dressed in civilian clothes came in and introduced himself as a special agent of the OSI. He said allegations had been made against me.

I knew immediately what this was about. It was my secret, and it’d been found out.

“What allegations?” I asked anyway.

“You being a faggot,” he said.

I’d been turned in by a man called Anonymous. My military career ended even as I was coming to the very end of my enlistment. My year of service in a war zone counted for nothing. My passion for saving the lives of my fellow servicemen counted for less.

The OSI man said he wanted names and ranks of other homos I knew, and that I was going to have to submit to more detailed questioning by other agents.

“You will report back here to my office at 0900 tomorrow. Do you understand?”

A shipmate in Vietnam, David Monarch, had been arrested for being gay and removed from the ship. A very private man who’d kept to himself, he wasn’t part of The Group. But we all found out that he’d been court-martialed and sentenced to prison. Just months before OSI called me in, I’d gotten word that David had died at Leavenworth Federal Prison. I never learned how and why, but in 1960s America, we gay men deserved to die, according to popular thinking. So, who was going to investigate the fate of a queer Black man behind bars?

I was filled with terror at the prospect of dying like David.

I might as well die now, I thought. On my own terms.

Hours before I was supposed to return to the OSI office, I went to the small laboratory, where I worked as a medical technician. The bottles and beakers looked frightening in the thin 2 a.m. light.

Removing a Bunsen burner from the gas valve, I used the attached tubing to fill up a large plastic bag, which I then taped securely around my neck.

I shut my eyes. Was it the war? Was it the harassment for being gay? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I hated being gay and that I felt like I didn’t deserve to live.

As the gas replaced the oxygen in my system, my head started spinning, and I heard squeaky noises inside my skull. But then I realized I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to give into them. I pulled the plug on the gas pipe, tore off the bag, and sat up.

After I reported my suicide attempt to the psychiatrist in my clinic, that stopped the legal proceedings in their tracks. Even the U.S. Navy wasn’t so cruel as to deny treatment to someone endangering his life.

I was first treated with strong psychotropic drugs and kept in a padded cell to protect the other patients from the “homosexual.” Later, I was released into the general population but kept on drugs with regular interviews and discussions with a military psychologist, all to treat my homosexuality rather than the PTSD I’d suffered because of the war, which remained undiagnosed. I spent nine weeks in the hospital.

Ultimately, it was decided that I must be discharged. A military medical board promised me a General Discharge under Honorable conditions—but it was qualified. On my Military Separation Paper DD214 were three codes: #265, unsuitability because of a character disorder; #256, admission of being a homosexual, acceptance of discharge in lieu of board action and punishment; and a re-enlistment code of RE4, unsuitable for military service.

This is known as a “bad paper discharge.” Other codes tell stories of drug use/sales, anger/aggression toward others, drunk driving, and any number of crimes or misdeeds. And there are other types of discharges, too, including Dishonorable and Bad Conduct Discharges.

These codes, and your DD214 form, follow you for the rest of your life. Employers can demand to see the form, for government jobs, especially; it indicates your job worthiness. The Veterans Administration will use it to see if you qualify for benefits, such as medical and retirement pay. Some of these General or even Dishonorable designations are the result of PTSD or traumatic brain injury; others are the result of the same mistakes a civilian young person may make, but in the civilian world there’s a chance they’ll forgive and forget these errors of youth. The DD214 is always the same and never changes. The codes give a picture of a person that is as one-dimensional as the ink on the paper.

A bad paper discharge can lead to higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, and suicide. For gay and lesbian people, the discharge has designations showing you as a criminal for many decades.

After getting out, I tried for a job at a city agency in Los Angeles. They refused to hire me after seeing the character flaw designation on my DD214. Later, I applied at Pacific Bell Telephone to become a janitor. They didn’t check my discharge; it wasn’t necessary for someone being hired to clean toilets.

On my discharge day, in February 1970, I went to Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of a man I loved. Matt had died a hero in my arms, the last week I was in Vietnam. I remembered how we had decided to create a tribe of our own. The other men, Matt said, had their support system all laid out for them. Surrounded by killing, we gay men needed to protect our minds, and strengthen one another.

As I stood at Matt’s headstone, rivulets of tears ran down my cheeks.

I was never religious. But I looked to the sky and hoped there was a God and that my Matt was with Him. I spoke the words I had said that moment when he died: “I wish we could have been lovers. I love you, man. I love you.”

Over the past 50 years, I have had many battles with the PTSD I suffer because of my war experiences, but I have also fought hard for the rights of Matt and other men and women like me.

It was only after I retired, though, that I began to think about correcting the injustice of my own discharge.

In 2016, I was volunteering at the Los Angeles County Department of Veterans Affairs, where I befriended the chief deputy director. She heard my story and helped me use her office’s resources to start my petition for a change to my discharge. It took four years, the help of a young gay psychologist at the VA Hospital and a high-powered legal team, and it changed my life. On June 3, 2019, my DD214 was administratively reissued to show a full and unqualified Honorable Discharge.

I now belong to veterans’ organizations where Afghanistan and Iraq veterans meet. They have struggles from their wars, and I suspect some have bad paper discharges. I show them that they can have a life—a long life—after service. They are my family now, my Group.

The post The Navy Gave a Gay Man a Home—And a ‘Bad Paper’ Discharge That Haunted Him for Decades appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ethnic enclaves are commonplace in the United States, but this announcement felt like an epic diplomatic triumph against all odds, because it put the name “Saigon” back on the map. Several months after the city fell to the communist North Vietnamese Army in April 1975, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, after the communist revolutionary leader. In Westminster, surrounded by flags no longer flown in Vietnam, most of the 400 Vietnamese-American attendees, well aware of the external intervention necessary to preserve their exiled collective memory, were elated to finally see their former capital city’s name on a road sign. “Only in America is Saigon being resurrected,” said local politician Van Tran.

It was perhaps only in a place like Westminster, a town of less than 100,000 located just minutes from Disneyland, that “Little Saigon” could become a reality and sustain itself well into the post-Cold War era, with its culture and memorials dedicated to a conflict that most Americans would rather forget.

Tran’s statement, while true, would have been unthinkable 15 years prior, before refugees transformed the 9000 block of Bolsa Avenue from a mostly white, semi-rural strip into the unofficial capital of the Vietnamese diaspora. Just as importantly, in American culture at large the very idea of “Vietnam” had been consigned to the Dark Age of American history, so that refugees had to be careful celebrating even benign occasions like the Tet lunar new year on U.S. soil. Little Saigon’s social history speaks volumes about the complex bonds and activism at the local level in Orange County that were needed to build and maintain an ethnic enclave synonymous with exile politics.

But by 1988, with the blessing of the governor, Vietnamese Americans were suddenly in a position to transform a local celebration into a symbolic statement suggesting that maybe they really had won the Vietnam War. Or at least its aftermath. These nominal losers of the war itself had learned to affirm a tragic past by rewriting it. In their own way, they were simply becoming American.

We normally don’t associate exile politics with becoming American, thinking of refugees as sojourners rather than settlers. But the history of the Cold War made the fusion of exile and American identity totally feasible and virtually inevitable.

This fusion resulted from a decision by the United States—starting with the 1948 Displaced Persons Act—to defy the international community by defining refugees in such a narrow way that 90 percent of those admitted during the Cold War hailed from communist republics. In their classic book Calculated Kindness, Gil Loescher and John Scanlan argued that such a strict admission policy was politically designed to highlight global disapproval of the Soviet way of life. It also had an impact domestically. Since the vast majority of refugees from Soviet Bloc countries were adamantly anti-communist themselves, they were free to write their own pre-Cold War national histories onto their new American lives.

Ukrainians, the single-largest beneficiary of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, befriended Columbia University history professor Clarence Manning, who wrote nine books on their pre-Soviet culture. It took only eight Hungarian Americans to successfully petition the Denver city council in 1963 to dedicate a park to those who perished in the short-lived revolution of 1956. Because of the politics of Cold War migration, it did not take long for Florida’s Cuban population to become ideologically homogeneous. That the United States operated anti-communist media like Radio Martí that employed some Cuban refugees made it clear that there was no contradiction between being an exile and becoming American.

By the time the Vietnamese refugees arrived in mass in 1975, a pattern was established whereby entire ethnic enclaves functioned as transnational opposition parties to America’s communist adversaries. Because Cold War tensions poisoned most attempts to establish formal diplomatic ties with many communist states, refugee communities could often proudly and publicly espouse their claim to the lost homeland with near impunity, protected not only by the First Amendment, but also the unofficial blessing of Uncle Sam.

Thus, these Cold War traditions led to generations of Vietnamese in the refugee diaspora standing at attention to a flag, an anthem, and other symbols no longer associated with an existing nation-state. They could be assured that hardly any Vietnamese or Americans would point out the contradiction.

For a nascent neoconservative movement in the United States, regime change replaced détente as the foreign policy objective. During his 1976 bid for the presidency, neoconservative upstart Ronald Reagan audaciously met in Florida with exile leaders from Panama and Cuba hoping to plot another invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Though he failed to win his party’s nomination that year, Reagan’s hardline rhetoric pressured the incumbent Gerald R. Ford administration to jettison any plans to normalize diplomatic relations with the Hanoi government.

After the Cold War ended, exile politics shifted—and were reinvigorated—by a new threat: Globalization was transforming Little Saigon into Little Ho Chi Minh City. The refugees still had numbers in their favor, especially with the influx in the 1990s of more than 100,000 former political prisoners from Vietnam. But they had to contend with a post-Cold War world in which Vietnam had become America’s newest trading partner. In liberal-leaning Seattle and Boston, Vietnamese political prisoners longing to enjoy in exile the cherished cultural symbols and practices banned in their home country were met with disappointment.

The shift in politics became clear in 1995 when Westminster attempted to erect a Vietnamese-American Veterans Memorial. It was Westminster city councilman Tony Lam, famous for being the first American elected official of Vietnamese descent, who proposed building a special statue to honor the sacrifice of both American and South Vietnamese soldiers during the war. Internal divisions among Vietnamese people in the city stalled the project. Then the Anglo population was reluctant to get behind a project that placed Vietnamese soldiers—whom most Americans collectively remember as inadequate allies at best—on an equal footing with the U.S. military.

This was not a new objection. Six years before the monument was proposed, Westminster city councilman Frank Frye convinced the city to reject a parade honoring South Vietnamese soldiers, whereupon he proceeded to lecture the refugee organizers by telling them, “It is my opinion that you’re American, and you’d better be American. If you want to be South Vietnamese, go back to South Vietnam.”

Ironically, Frye’s reputation for such politically incorrect statements gave the new plans for the memorial a boost when, as Mayor of Westminster in 1996, he embraced the project and began convincing white conservatives that it was a good idea. When a protest against a shop owner who displayed a photograph of communist hero Ho Chi Minh energized the Vietnamese community, it became the impetus for a series of concerts to raise the $1 million for the project.

But the momentum for the monument inspired its own backlash. Despite the benefits that Vietnamese businesses provided to Westminster, the majority-white city council, as epitomized by member Margie Rice, had grown weary of exile politics. “I feel like (the Vietnamese) are taking over our city, plain and simple,” Rice said. “I would think that after 20 years or so of being here and being given the freedoms that they want, they would calm down. By God, how long can you go on fighting this war?”

But once the Hanoi government demanded that the city erect a statue featuring American and North Vietnamese (i.e. communist) soldiers shaking hands in the spirit of reconciliation, the city council dropped its objections. Whatever problems that conservatives whites had with rewriting the past to portray South Vietnamese as equal partners with the United States were trivial compared to a much more radical rewriting of the past depicting Americans soldiers and communists seeing eye to eye.

On July 13, 1999, with more than 100 citizens present, the city council voted unanimously to approve the refugee version of the war memorial, which was finally unveiled in April 2003. Social worker and music industry insider Nam Loc Nguyen, who mobilized the community to raise the required funds, considered that effort his proudest accomplishment as a Vietnamese American. As he told me in an interview, “There were 400 Vietnam War memorials, but none of them talked about the Vietnamese soldier. So my dream was to build a memorial for them. All I want is to bring their soul here, so I can look at the memorial and see my friend. And a wife can come pray for her husband.”

And this was but one expression of how refugee identity was not a refusal to assimilate, but rather another way of becoming American. In this case, a refugee American.

The post How the Cold War Fused Exile and American Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Intensive therapy at the Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital in West Los Angeles helped with my severe PTSD. But it also pulled up everything I had suppressed to the surface, and put me into a kind of limbo. I couldn’t go back to where I was before, but I was also “out of sync” with society.

I can honestly say that the VA saved my life. But even though I have only good thoughts about it, I still feel like I fell through the cracks. When I was discharged, I told a social worker that I didn’t have a place to live, and she dropped the ball, I guess. I left the hospital with no food, no money. I was given a razor, a deck of cards, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a bag of medication.

In the ’80s, there were lots of veterans coming through the VA, but I remember hearing about budget cuts. I saw buildings being shut down and overworked staff trying to handle a three-person workload in one shift.

I saw so many homeless veterans during that time living on the streets, in parks, or under bridges. And I became one of them.

Once I was out of the hospital setting, I isolated myself. I had issues with anxiety and flashbacks and I was suppressing all those bad memories again. As soon as I dropped my guard, I was in trouble. I couldn’t trust people. I couldn’t trust the VA. I had a bag of medications, but a little voice in my head started picking at me: If you take those medications, they’re probably going to kill you. They’re not going to work. I had already been experiencing bad side effects, like nausea and headaches. I really felt my body couldn’t take all those medications.

The VA grounds became my safe zone—it felt protected so that’s where I was from sun up to sun down. On one of my first nights out of the hospital, I went out to the golf course. It was a clear, beautiful night. I laid down on one of the golf greens and looked up at the sky. And I actually fell asleep for a few hours! When it was warm, that was one of my favorite spots to sleep.

As a Marine, my life had been “search and destroy.” This was “search and survive”—search for a place to sleep and feel safe, search for food. For the first three weeks, I pretty much just ate crackers, jelly packets, and lemon slices from the VA cafeteria. I can’t believe that I went so far as to borrow food from the VA, but it was a matter of survival. Sometimes I’d follow behind a group of doctors—they always had to eat fast. They’d leave fresh, untouched toast on their breakfast trays. It was gourmet food compared to the crackers. Sometimes I got lucky and ended up with a piece of bacon.

This was the first time in my life that I was homeless. I never dreamed it would happen to me. But I had cut myself off from my family, and couldn’t reach out for help. I didn’t want to sleep in a bed at a homeless shelter because I didn’t want to be with smelly, loud, and rude people, or people who were on drugs.

My relationship with God was something I always hung onto. Over time, I realized that He continued to be there for me. So I made a promise to God that I would never quit and that I would do everything within my power to move forward. I would always expect a miracle, no matter how bleak the future looked.

Sometimes I’d think: God help me or take me out. I’m just existing. But then something would happen to make me keep going. Like the time I found an avocado tree and feasted on crackers and avocados that tasted like food from heaven.

One afternoon, I was headed to the cafeteria to get my crackers, jelly, and lemon slices when I saw a veteran in a wheelchair making his way up a hill to the VA hospital. I asked him if he could use a push, and he said yes. I thought, This is going to really hurt! He was a big guy, and my arthritis pain was real bad. I was biting bullets, but I pushed him the distance of two football fields up the hill. Miraculously, my pain that started at an 11 or 12—off the chart—dropped down to zero.

Someone once said: “The best way to forget about your pain is to help someone else.” I now understood the power of those words.

I started to go in for weekly physical therapy appointments at the VA for my arthritis. Another veteran told me I could get meal tickets if I volunteered. So I asked Wendy, a physical therapist at the VA whom I had a rapport with, and she let me make the beds and set up the rooms.

Captain Ed Wright, Charlton Heston, Colonel Patrick Field, and Rick Martinez at Los Angeles National Cemetery (1985 or 1986)

No one knew I was homeless. I was for sure the best-dressed homeless veteran in Los Angeles in my shirt and tie. A social worker I met a few weeks earlier let me help myself to clothes that veterans had left behind. I had a handful of decent shirts, a few pairs of slacks, and a nice pair of tennis shoes. I was also clean—I had found a bathroom where I could shower and shave.

This volunteer job was a turning point. I started talking to patients in physical therapy and began to come out of my shell. The positive feedback that I received was some of my best medicine. When the physical therapists acknowledged that I did a good job, it was a big push. I hadn’t heard anything positive in so long. I found a purpose, a reason for living, after so much painful wandering. It wasn’t about me anymore. It became about helping other veterans.

Outside of the VA, I earned $600 helping another veteran with a house-painting job. After about four months of being homeless and sleeping here and there, I earned enough money to buy a tiny Pinto station wagon. It was not ideal, but at least I finally had a place of my own to sleep in.

Little by little, my life began to change for the better. Just when I would reach the threshold, just when I thought I couldn’t take another day, God would give me a gift, a small chance at hope.

I had to forgive my enemies, who were just doing their duty, like me. I had to forgive everyone who ever hurt me. I had to forgive my country, for the turbulent time when Vietnam veterans returned home and people spit on us at the airport, called us “baby killers,” and flipped us the bird. I had to forgive my family for not understanding my pain. Most important, I had to forgive myself and move on with life.

I was homeless for a total of four years. It was a hard pill to swallow. But, as strange as this may sound, I would not trade that experience for anything in the world. That experience is what made me more grateful.

It was only after all this time going in and out of the VA hospital to get treatment and thousands of hours of therapy that I started to gain the upper hand in the hardest battle of my life—the war within. I listened to every word the doctors and therapists said. I took notes. I took medication. This was a matter of survival! I was praying all the time. Somehow the doors kept opening.

The post I Never Dreamed I Would End up Homeless appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Vietnam veterans have the highest suicide rate of any other group of Americans. As a Marine, you’re taken down to nothing and built up again as a killing machine. After serving our country, many of us were just released back into society with all these intrusive thoughts and all this anger.

I could have given up or isolated myself—that’s what the PTSD monster wanted. In the end, I didn’t make that choice. As close as I got to suicide, and as many times as PTSD overwhelmed me just when it seemed like I was making progress, I chose to fight the hardest battle of my life. And I made it out alive.

I can see now it was the little things that gave me the strength to keep going. When I was living out of my Pinto station wagon, I never strayed far from the VA grounds. That is where I felt most comfortable.

One day in 1984, I found Jackie Robinson Stadium, where the UCLA Bruins played baseball. I have always loved baseball. I was in Little League and grew up going to the Los Angeles Dodgers games. I’d go to the baseball field when no one was there to pray in the bleachers or the dugout. Sometimes I lay down in deep center field and smelled the fresh-cut grass. Being out there with the high fence behind me, I felt safe.

Then, one day when I was heading to the stadium, I heard bats cracking and balls hitting gloves. The Bruins were there for practice. I crawled through the fence and saw this guy in a blue-and-gold uniform picking up balls inside the batting cage.

I probably looked more like a doctor than a homeless veteran—I had a volunteer job in the VA’s physical therapy department, so I wore a badge over my shirt and tie. The guy looked up and said hi. I asked if he wanted help picking up the balls. “Sure!” he said. I started putting them in a bucket. Then he picked up a bat and started throwing balls up into the air and hitting them. I said, “Wow, you have a nice swing. Hey, do you want me to toss you some balls?” Again he said, “Sure!” I took my tie off, rolled up my sleeves, and started pitching him balls.

I met some of the other Bruin players that day—a few of them went on to play in the Big Leagues. The high point of that experience though, was meeting “The Skipper” (Gary Adams, UCLA’s head coach). We hit it off. I became part of the team that day—an honorary Bruin! I also became a coach for his UCLA baseball camp. That was the beginning of a special lifelong friendship that I cherish to this day.

UCLA baseball coach Gary Adams and Rick Martinez (1985 or 1986)

I started going to the baseball field every day after I finished my volunteer work to help with batting practice and the players’ gear. My back had been so locked up from spending almost a year in bed and from my arthritis. So it was good for my body to be working out.

It was also good for my spirit. Baseball was one of the tools that I believe God used to help integrate me back into society. It felt safe and familiar, and it was fun. Even though I have a hard time with crowds, I liked going to the Bruin games. For me, a baseball game is like going to church. Coach Gary and his Bruins were my therapists, and baseball was my best therapy.

The days started to begin in a different way. I would wake up and thank God for a new day. I would avoid all stressors. I would not let any negative thought play over and over in my mind. I learned to laugh. I learned to appreciate God’s creation and beauty. I would soak up the warmth of the sun. I would not complain about my pain. I had a new attitude, and with the feeling that things were finally starting to go right for me, I started to be more open.

Deep down, I knew I still needed medical help, so in 1988—after four years of being homeless—I jumped at the opportunity to go to the VA in Palo Alto, California, for a six-month inpatient program for combat veterans with PTSD. It was an intense program that was all about cleansing, acceptance, and rebuilding yourself. Sometimes I was so overwhelmed when I reflected on my past. Thanks to my fellow veterans, I got through those tough times.

The Palo Alto VA had a wall of success stories and photos—guys who left and got a job and a place to stay. They were heroes to me. That’s what I wanted. I felt as if I had the tools I needed to finally get my life back on track.

Others saw the progress, too. Five months into the Palo Alto program, my sister and her husband offered me a job at an air freight trucking company they were starting in L.A. County. This was my chance to get back into mainstream society—to be a success story and make it onto that wall.

So, in 1988, I got a studio apartment in Inglewood. I had a kitchenette, a little room, and a balcony. It was nice to be out of the elements and to have a job and a home. I put all my energy into helping to build the company with my sister and brother-in-law.

By 1990, our business had picked up. I moved to a nicer apartment in Manhattan Beach. My life at that time was work, go home, and repeat. It was 20 years after Vietnam by now, and I still sometimes had a hard time feeling comfortable with people.

Then Operation Desert Storm threw everything out of gear. I drove a truck, transporting laser guidance systems used on U.S. military jets in the war. I hung my Marine Corps flag in the cab of my truck. I thought: Wow. I was trained at 18 by the U.S. government to be a combat tactical driver—and I’m doing it again.

It felt good to be serving my country again. But it was a crazy schedule. Sometimes I worked 20 hours a day, making pickups at the airport and deliveries to the Barstow Marine Corps Logistics Base.

I was proud, but I was getting beat up. I wasn’t 18 anymore. Plus, I started watching the news. Somewhere in the combination of not eating right, pushing my body to the limit, and seeing the body count and devastation of war on TV—I snapped.

The adrenaline was full throttle. I started to flashback to the combat zone. I knew I needed help. So I went to the West Los Angeles VA for a month. The doctors put me on mild tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and antidepressants.

The end of the war didn’t make me feel any better. There were no more shipments to deliver. I remember thinking: Now what? It was almost the same feeling of emptiness I had when I came back from Vietnam. As a veteran, it can be hard to find a job that doesn’t feel trivial and meaningless compared to your military job assignments. I think this is a major reason why there is so much homelessness and suicide among veterans. It’s the emptiness … the void.

I went in and out of the VA hospital again for a few months. It was a fine line between feeling pretty good and losing it. Within a matter of months, I was on top of the world and the next thing I knew I was on the ground, feeling like I did not have the strength to carry on. But I kept that promise I made to God … I would not quit.

After I was discharged from the VA hospital, I couldn’t go back to the Manhattan Beach apartment. My friend Norman—who had worked for our trucking company and was a fellow Marine and brother to me—found out I was staying in a hotel near the airport. He came to visit me and suggested I rent the trailer on his mom’s property in exchange for help around the house.
This was another miracle for me. It was a nice, comfortable little trailer. And Norman’s mother, Maria, ended up becoming my loving and understanding wife.

We moved to San Antonio, Texas, in August of 2000 and live a pretty quiet life. Maria has been my pillar of strength. I’ve worked hard to chisel away at the wall I built around my feelings. It has not been easy, but Maria has stood by my side.

We travel whenever we can—this summer, we put over 20,000 miles on our Suburban. We like to sit in our garden, sometimes for hours, watching the hawks fly overhead and taking in the peaceful stillness of the morning. Our greatest joy is our family, and watching our beautiful grandchildren play baseball, participate in beauty pageants, and graduate from school. I want to experience everything I can with them, like coloring sessions, trips to the beach to collect seashells, dancing and laughing together, and holidays.

Rick and Maria Martinez and their granddaughter, Greta Jacobson (2014)

It has been 45 years now since I returned from Vietnam. I feel better, but I am still grappling with my PTSD. I still have a difficult time sleeping and find myself doing perimeter watch. In a corner outside of my house, I set up a bunker with military-issue olive drab sand bags. I go there to calm myself, on war anniversary days, every Memorial Day, or whenever I feel the anxiety reaching the threshold. As soon as I’m settled in, I feel safe. I meditate, reflect, and give thanks to God.

I’ve survived a few wars, and I feel that the worst is behind me now. I am alive and grateful. I look forward to growing old with Maria, and filling our life together with joyful chapters. Someday I want to hold my great-grandchild. On that day, with a tear in my eye, I will thank God for every miracle … There have been so many!

It’s hard for me to read that 22 veterans commit suicide every day. But if there’s one lesson I’ve learned from everything I’ve been through—and I especially want to it share with my fellow veterans—it’s that healing from trauma can take years, but there is so much hope in gratitude and forgiveness.

The post Gaining Ground in the Battle with My Memories of Vietnam appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My youth on King and North Verde streets was about American kid stuff—baseball, bugs, riding my bike, my crush on a grammar school classmate named Katherine, playing John F. Kennedy in the Kennedy-Nixon mock debates at school, trying to make new Levi’s look worn, swimming during the summer at the officers’ club pool at the Air Force base, watching Andy Griffith and The Mickey Mouse Club (the first letter I ever wrote anyone was to Mouseketeer Annette Funicello).

I ran away from home once. That entailed walking about 100 yards on the railroad tracks near our house. I came home because I got hungry.

That was life in Rialto in the 1950s. You never saw any drugs. You stood up when the flag was raised. You didn’t call adults by their first names.

And you saw more and more kids show up, because America was a place that grew. New elementary schools popped up everywhere. When Eisenhower High School opened, President Dwight D. Eisenhower attended the dedication.

Perhaps that’s why, when my mom decided to pitch kids from our school, St. Catherine’s, to the CBS afternoon TV show Art Linkletter’s House Party, the staff who prepared one of Mr. Linkletter’s feature segments on the show, “Kids Say the Darnedest Things,” quickly agreed.

So one day, three classmates and I traveled to L.A. We had lunch at the Farmers Market and were given a tour of the studio. Then we were told by the show’s “teacher” who prepared us for the taping that Mr. Linkletter would ask each of us to ask him one question, and that we needed to prepare that question ourselves.

I was the first kid to be interviewed. Linkletter looked at me and said: “So, Ernest, what did you want to ask me?”

“Mr. Linkletter, what political party do you belong to?” I asked.

The audience laughed. Linkletter did not pause—he answered, with a smile, “Baptist.”

The audience laughed again. We chatted some more about school, hobbies, and other kid stuff. He winked at me, then went on to the next kid. The show aired on March 26, 1959. We were so well received that we went back a second time about two months later.

Such moments of light were sometimes shadowed in Rialto. There were adults, including my father, who were alcoholics. I knew the bars in Rialto (the Rainbow Room, Jimmy’s) because I walked into them often to ask my dad to come home as my mom sat in the car. I knew what a whiskey Coke was before any other kid in town. I hated trying to get him to leave these dark places; they seemed like fun.

Almost every grown-up I knew smoked—Chesterfields, Marlboros, Lucky Strikes, Parliaments. And almost every grown-up I knew told me that smoking marijuana would send you right to hell.

There were a lot of rules at that time, and parents and teachers struggled to relay all of them to us. Until eighth grade, I attended St. Catherine’s, where all the teachers were Franciscan nuns who kept me anxious about whether I’d die and go to hell. We were taught that the big-ticket sins—mortal sins—sent you right to hell. For the venial ones, you went to purgatory. You got rid of all of them by going to confession.

But when I went to that heathen new high school, Eisenhower, we were less anxious. On Monday nights, to keep us godly, I had to go to Catechism class. We’d ask the teacher, “Mr. Dowd, how much can you steal so that a venial sin moves to a mortal sin? What if you keep it under $100? And, what about kissing my girlfriend? If I kiss her more than once, is it a mortal or venial sin?”

Poor Mr. Dowd tried to answer as best he could: He reached the conclusion that stealing more than $100 was a mortal sin, and encouraged us to hold hands instead of kiss.

Not all teachers were so ham-handed. Red Bates, my coach on the Pony League Baseball Hi-Testers, was like a second dad to me. I wanted to be good in baseball, and he made me better than I thought I could be.

Mr. Bates had been drafted out of Iowa by the Yankees in the ’30s as a left-handed pitcher, and he brought professional standards to his coaching (his career ended early due to a back injury). You had to show up at the ballpark with a clean uniform. When sitting on the bench, you had to know the score and the count, or Mr. Bates yanked you. You played to win—it was more fun. But, in playing to win, you gave great respect to your opponent. These rules made more sense than so many of the others teachers and coaches tried to impart.

I’m sad to say that, for as much Mr. Bates meant to me, I didn’t talk to him for years after high school. At San Bernardino Valley College, I started Students for Peace in opposition to the war in Vietnam. And I made a big assumption about him—I believed he was too old-school and politically conservative to understand what I was up to, and that he would be displeased with me if I told him.

Then, one day, at about age 40, I was driving to Rialto to see my mother. I don’t know what spirit hit me but I decided to go see Red Bates. I drove to his house (I found it out of pure memory), got out of my car, walked to his front doorstep, and rang the doorbell. He opened the door. I froze for just a moment. You see: I was standing three steps below the front door, and that angle caused me to look up to Mr. Bates from the same angle I had as a 14-year-old. I swear I thought he would tell me to run a lap or ask me for the score.

He looked at me and immediately said my name. He opened the door, offered his hand, and said, “Come in.”

We sat together for four perfect, wonderful, endearing hours. He had, of course, aged a great deal, but he was still Red Bates and still my coach.

We replayed the signals he threw to hitters as he coached third base. And we went through his signals to me as a catcher. Glove hand to the side was a fastball. Wiggle the glove hand was a curve ball. Hand straight up meant walk the guy. We both remembered all of that.

I then changed the subject to what had haunted me for years. I said, “Mr. Bates, you know I opposed the war in Vietnam. That was not easy for me as a son of a lifelong military man. But, I did it with integrity and from the best values I knew; I thought my country was wrong in those years. I did not visit you for all of these years because I was afraid to—I was afraid you would be angry with me.”

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Ernie, I was proud of you. I was proud of the choices you made.”

I so loved Red Bates, and I had been wrong about his views. To hear him, someone I knew to be thoughtful and straightforward, say that about me was one of the best moments of my life. I then asked him to sign a baseball for me to keep. He walked into his bedroom and pulled out a big league baseball manufactured in the early ’40s and never taken out of its original box.

I still have it, a memento not just of Red Bates but of Rialto. Sure, I heard gossip and saw pettiness there. But I also saw how a nation, and a national perspective, could shape local life in the best of ways. I saw schools get built. I saw neighbors care for each other. I saw my dad pull the car over and get out so he could stand and salute when we visited the Air Force base while the flag was being lowered.

Since then, I have been part of protests against the conduct of my country. I have been part of political movements for justice and equality. And I have had to answer questions harder than Mr. Linkletter’s. I think I participate because I always wanted my country to be, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, a place of “humane harmony.” I want the whole country to be like the American place where I was raised.

The post The Town I Loved, the Protestor I Became appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I asked Henry, “How do you define danger?”

Henry answered, “Everything.”

I made a mental note. Later, I added the entry to the unique dictionary Henry and I are creating together. We call it a “thicktionary.” It documents the language of his mental illness. Other entries include “Chicano,” which means Americano, and “alligator,” which means you want to make friends with them but they have their own defensive mechanisms.

Henry, my oldest paternal uncle, has lived a life that’s constantly taken him in and out of danger—a life that has made me consider about what danger really means.

Even in my earliest memories of Henry, I feared the words that might come out of his mouth.

“Real estate on the moon⎯” he once started to say during a Christmas dinner at my grandma’s house in Whittier. An aunt yelled, “Shut up!”

My throat tightened. I wished my uncle would vanish.

After dinner, a cousin pulled me aside to whisper, “When we were driving home a couple of weeks ago, my mom pulled over ’cause she saw police shoving a homeless man. She started crying because it was …” Her finger pointed in the direction of Henry, who was wearing the same clothes he’d worn last Christmas, which smelled as if he’d worn them every day since.

He disappeared early from that dinner, riding his bike into the evening. Before driving us the 150 miles home to Santa Maria, my father went looking for Henry in Norwalk, where he and Henry grew up. With us kids looking on from the car, he found Henry camped out in front of a Wienerschnitzel near his childhood home, his possessions bundled and bungeed to a 10-speed that looked as worn as he did. My father parked, walked to Henry, and handed a pile of McDonald’s gift certificates to a man whose intelligence had so impressed the Army in 1967 that they enrolled him in officer candidate school in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

When Henry’s draft letter came, he went to basic training, then for training in field artillery, and then to northern Vietnam. Henry says the most dangerous part of Vietnam was that “your ammunition might go off to early. You could be eradicated in full respects.” He felt a great responsibility for other people’s lives.

After Henry returned from the battlefield, he briefly attended college using GI Bill money. Then, he started avoiding baths. He started asking my father and his sisters if they, too, could hear the voices of the people he’d killed or hurt in Vietnam. He put his Bronze Stars in a coffee tin, carried it to the backyard, and held a funeral for his medals.

My aunt took Henry to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Long Beach. The VA doctor diagnosed him with schizophrenia. Mental health organizations often cite schizophrenia as one of the most debilitating mental illnesses. It manifests through disorganized thoughts and perceptions. It reconstitutes reality, and a person with schizophrenia might see, or, more often, hear things that others do not. The language of schizophrenic people is particularly compelling. A schizophrenic might speak in constant poetry. Metaphors and other abstractions mire their speech, making their intent a beautiful mystery. While the doctor did not explicitly state that Henry’s tour of duty triggered his decline, it’s hard to see how war didn’t worsen something that’s often at least partly genetic.

In the years after his diagnosis, Henry experienced bouts of homelessness, but as he aged, he returned more and more to his childhood home in Norwalk. This tract home sat unoccupied after my grandmother remarried. Henry stuffed the house full of treasures salvaged from dumpsters or exchanged for pennies at swap meets. My father and brother used to drive three to four hours from Santa Maria to visit Henry every month.

In 2012, during a historic summer heat wave, Henry’s neighbor phoned my father after seeing Henry collapse in his front yard. I lived 20 minutes away, so my father asked me to meet the social workers he called about Henry.

I met two male social workers on nearby train tracks—tracks my father and Henry played on as children. The social workers lectured me on Henry’s civil rights, stressing that it was unlikely that they could do anything for him. I nodded, silently cried, and walked them to the driveway. The color disappeared from their faces when they saw my dehydrated uncle, looking like a castaway, crouched on a strip of soiled carpet. Grime, including his own feces and urine, caked his clothes and person. He held a pair of rusty, yet sharp shears at arm’s length. He aimed these at the men.

The social worker standing nearest to Henry unhooked his phone from its holster. He dialed and said, “I’m going to need a bus and back-up.”

An ambulance drove Henry to a Long Beach hospital. I followed behind the gurney as paramedics wheeled Henry into the psychiatric unit. There, I helped him bathe and change into a gown, and placed his clothes and belongings in a plastic bag.

After about four hours, a doctor came. He shook hands with Henry and introduced himself, and then my uncle issued one of the perfectly crisp proclamations he occasionally makes: Henry Gurba. United States Army. Second Lieutenant. Artillery. I served in Viet-nam.”

Then, he mumbled, “You look like Shatner.”

“What?” asked the doctor.

“My uncle says you look like William Shatner,” I said. “He’s complimenting you. You’re charismatic. Like Captain Kirk.”

I had unofficially become Henry’s translator.

Mostly I glean what he means through deductive reasoning. For example, Henry once pointed to empty wall space above his bed, where his calendar had been hanging, and said, “My chickens flew away. Have you seen them?” Each calendar month features a large, glossy hen photo. Chickens mark Henry’s concept of time.

“We’ll find your calendar,” I promised. We did.

Decoding his intent is a matter of listening, and looking, and keeping track of the other relationships in his “thicktionary.” But Henry needs more than translation.

Getting him proper care has been a battle. When my father went to the VA Santa Maria Clinic to ask how he could get medical care for Henry, a representative insisted Henry had to go to a VA hospital to seek it. When my father protested that Henry’s mental illness made that complicated, the representative insisted that Henry’s “military training would make it easy for him to navigate the system.” But aside from the initial diagnosis, the VA has done nothing to attend to his psychological needs.

Henry doesn’t necessarily want care from the VA either—though we family members know he’s entitled to it. He doesn’t trust the Army or anything related to it. He once told my father, “They tried to kill me once. I’m not going to give them a second chance.” The only time we experienced timely attention was after we phoned Henry’s congresswoman’s office. The VA has also failed to place Henry in one of its nursing facilities, even though we requested it about a year ago. Medi-Cal, health insurance for low-income Californians, covers Henry’s care at the residential nursing facility where he lives now.

But of the dangers Henry has faced, the worst is loneliness. That’s why Henry knows the name of every resident, doctor, clerk, administrator, nurse, and orderly at his nursing facility, and when he sees them, he smiles and greets them. They smile back and greet him.

I moved to within five minutes of Henry in Long Beach and visit him at least twice a week. I take him to the Santa Monica Pier, Chinatown, the tar pits, and the zoo—places that evoke childhood memories or that have animals.

During our outings, Henry often talks to strangers and I watch, observing how once Henry’s words dip into the poetry of schizophrenia, listeners’ facial expressions shift. Their facial features conspire to say, “This dude is crazy.” They turn and walk away.

But my time with him has taught me that, with love—and by love, I don’t mean greeting-card sentiments but love founded on expansive curiosity—Henry can be understood. And one of the primary shifts in my understanding of Henry is that it’s easy to feel that he is a danger. It’s harder, but vastly more loving and real, to appreciate how for him, everything is dangerous.

The post My Uncle’s Years of Living Dangerously appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the time, I was fascinated with what psychologists call “mental time travel”—the way old family photos or home movies can reanimate an emotion and cause you to re-experience physical sensations you felt at the time. It can also happen with historical events. Images of President Nixon’s resignation trigger a rush of feelings in me—even though I experienced the event as a 10-year-old watching it on television.

August 9, 1974 (Washington, D.C.), 2011, 21” x 18”

Orange County is a fertile site for Nixon time travel. The 37th president was born in Yorba Linda and lived in Whittier and San Clemente. I wondered if, when he visited El Toro, he ever stood on the site of my temporary art studio. When I looked out the window at the rows of newly planted date palms, I tried to picture jets on the runway, Marines in jeeps, and 5,000 supporters pressed against a chain-link fence waiting for the president to descend from the sky—to time travel to that unforgettable day in 1974 when Nixon landed here, a few hours after flashing his famous “V” sign and boarding his helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House for the last time.

I decided to see if I could trigger people’s “involuntary memories”—memories evoked by cues rather than conscious effort. I wanted to know if the former base was haunted for others, too. So every Sunday for seven months, I went to the park to hold “open studio” hours and asked people to tell me their memories of Richard Nixon. As people visited with me and told me stories, I worked on large pen and ink drawings based on well-known images from the Nixon presidency, and I made drawings to illustrate the personal stories I had collected from park visitors over the previous weekends.

The Vietnam War figured into many of those conversations. Every American man over the age of 60 told me his draft number and how he either served or avoided the war. People also told me about the antiwar protests at nearby UC Irvine, which surprised me. I taught in the university’s art department for five years and never heard anything about student protests.

October 4, 1965 (UC Irvine Science Lecture Hall), 2012, 25” x 38”

In fact, I had an impression of Irvine as a placid postwar utopia. In conversations with park visitors, I heard about neighborhoods where you “felt like you were in the best place.” People told me about growing up in the newly built housing tracts of the planned community and described how the town smelled of the Eucalyptus trees planted as a windbreak between the orange groves and lima bean fields.

Irvine was a lima bean farm until 1960 when the University of California bought 1,000 acres from James Irvine for $1. At that time, California had a problem: The children of the postwar baby boom were reaching college age and would soon overwhelm the state’s educational institutions. UC Irvine was one of three new campuses to open between 1960 and 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson presided at the UC Irvine dedication.

The layout of the UC Irvine campus and an adjacent community planned for 50,000 residents was designed by William Pereira, the architect who drafted the master plan for LAX. In photographs that ran in the September 6, 1963 issue of Time magazine, a dashing Pereira gestures to his blueprint of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs—“the perfect place to live, work, shop, play, and learn,” as described by Irvine Company literature.

University of California, Irvine, First Increment (Irvine, Calif.), 1968, Julius Shulman. Getty Research Institute.

How did the Vietnam War transform this brand-new utopian campus? Inspired by my interviews at the park, I decided to investigate in the UC Irvine Archives and Special Collections at the Langston Library.

A sleeve of 35mm slides from October 4, 1965, opening day of the University of California, Irvine reveals many buildings still under construction, and bare ground dotted with fragile saplings staked to posts. Smiling girls with bouffant hairdos and boys with crew cuts carry armloads of books through William Pereira’s vision of the perfect future—all space age cement curves and expressionistic patterned facades.

Just a year and a half later, the students don’t look as happy. In a fat folder of slides from January 23, 1967, I find young people assembled with unmistakable seriousness on the steps of the Gateway Plaza to protest the firing of UC President Clark Kerr for his lenient treatment of Free Speech Movement activists (at the urging of recently elected Governor Ronald Reagan). The students are holding hand-lettered signs that say: “In Memoriam Clark Kerr” and “R-E-A-G-A-N Doesn’t Spell FREEDOM.”

I see the students becoming more radicalized in dress and demeanor year by year. In bound volumes of The New University, the student paper, I read about how the campus participated in the nationwide Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in October 1969. In faded slides, the clean-cut boys of 1965 are now shaggy-haired and shirtless. Girls have ditched their curlers for straight hair parted in the middle like Joan Baez, and they’re wearing jeans. They wear black armbands, and many students are barefoot. The crowd has swollen, completely filling the stairs, and legs are dangling from the library balcony.

Visitors to my Great Park studio had described their memories of April 30, 1970, when President Nixon appeared on television with a giant map of Southeast Asia to announce his expansion of the war into Cambodia. In response, students at over 400 colleges and universities went on strike. In a photo from May 4, 1970, the UCI plaza and library are occupied, and no one is smiling anymore. In one photo, a crowd holds signs that read: “Did Dick Ask Us?” and “Does your government represent YOU?”

I don’t think the protestors know it yet—the 24-hour news cycle hadn’t been invented— but National Guardsmen in Ohio opened fire on an unarmed crowd at Kent State University at 12:24 p.m. that same day, killing four students and injuring nine. Based on the angle of the sun and shadows on the plaza, the massacre in Ohio has already happened. It’s a weird feeling to know this has happened when the students in the photo do not yet know.

February 8, 1965 (Irvine), 2013, 31” x 43”

The speed of the transformation at Irvine is what affects me the most. In the five years since 1965, these brand-new buildings became symbols of an establishment the students felt had betrayed them. The students rejected the utopia that was created for them, not in a symbolic sense, but literally—this utopia was created for them.

The story of war protest at UCI may not be as historically significant or well-known as the protests at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University. But it is a microcosm of the rise and fall of the postwar American Dream.

May 4, 1970 (UCI Library), 2013, 25” x 40”

I think about Pereira’s vision for a college campus as a tranquil utopia in an orderly, planned Southern California city, and try to reconcile that idea with images of Ohio guardsmen positioning their M-1 rifles in front of the pagoda on a picturesque campus 2,000 miles away. Tear gas blurs the silhouettes of students fleeing the Modernist cement buildings of Kent State, and in other pictures students crouch in a parking lot over the fallen bodies of their classmates. I guess it’s hard to “master plan” for some futures.

I put my folders back on the cart to be reshelved, wondering how long it will be until someone else asks to look at them. I emerge from the library into the late afternoon sun, blinking with the disorientation of a time traveler. I half expect to see picket signs and girls in ponchos. The Gateway Plaza is swarming with students, but they are of all different ethnicities, not the primarily Anglo students of the late 1960s. They are not shaggy but groomed and gelled. They’re texting on smartphones as they race purposefully to class. They have skateboards and backpacks, and it’s hard to imagine them protesting anything—not because they seem apathetic or indifferent, but because they’re so diverse it’s hard to imagine a single cause that could galvanize all of them.

The campus bears so little resemblance to the master plan that it’s hard to locate all eight original Pereira buildings amidst the expansion and constant construction. When I find them, the Brutalist buildings look dated and a little cartoony, dwarfed and crowded by giant glass and steel laboratories. The products of more recent architects—and their visions of an entirely different future—colonize every square foot of available space.

The post Orange County Was Not Immune to the 1960s appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s not a bad thing to have such disparate takes on a day of remembrance. And don’t worry: You’re not a bad person if you choose to sit back and enjoy your day off. But sometimes it pays to think about why we get the day off in the first place and ponder the mysterious forces that bind hot dogs, tears, and flags all together.

Decoration Day, as the holiday was once known, arose in the years after the Civil War as a way to grieve for the 750,000 soldiers who had perished over four bloody years. Families who stifled their mourning during wartime sought public ways to pay tribute to the fallen in peacetime. Understandably, graves become a focus for the bereaved, and mourners took flowers to cemeteries to decorate them.

This practice first received semi-official sanction in 1868 when General John Alexander Logan, the head of a large fraternal organization of Union veterans, designated a day each year “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” Southerners didn’t take too kindly to this initial effort, but by 1890 all the Northern states had recognized the holiday.

This emphasis on the Northern dead wasn’t just born of sectional spite. The ultimate sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of men to preserve the Union elevated the value of the nation to its citizens. Lacking the traditional building blocks of other nations (such as centuries of shared history on the land or ancient blood ties), the U.S. had long had a difficult time forging a unifying national culture. The idealistic nature of American nationhood left people hungry for a more flesh-and-blood connection to their country.

It was the Union dead who first seemed to prove that America was more than a mere idea. “Before the War our patriotism was a firework, a salute, a serenade for holidays and summer evenings,” wrote essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1864. “Now the deaths of thousands and the determination of millions of men and women show that it is real.”

James Russell Lowell, the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly, thought that the enormity of the Union Army’s sacrifice also proved something to condescending Europeans. “Till after our Civil War,” he wrote in 1869, “it never seemed to enter the head of any foreigner, especially of any Englishman, that an American had what could be called a country, except as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then it seemed to strike them suddenly. ‘By Jove, you know, fellahs don’t fight like that for a shop-till!’”

The holiday overcame sectional tensions around World War I, when Southerners—though many still revered the heroes of their Lost Cause—rejoined the fold, and the day’s scope was expanded to honor Americans who died fighting in any U.S war. Commemorating the fallen is one way that governments rebuild the morale of nations that have suffered great loss. Even in victory, losses are real to families, and depictions of a triumphant nation thankful for its heroes can be comforting to a populace trying to move forward. The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, also known as the Iwo Jima Memorial—which was unveiled in 1954 in Arlington, Virginia, and shows five Marines and a Navy corpsman hoisting the American flag during one of the bloodiest battles of World War II—is the quintessential depiction of perseverance and a classic commemoration of war.

But in the aftermath of no war do grief and glory intersect seamlessly. The needs of the state, bereaved families, and surviving veterans do not always coincide. In his book Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, Indiana University historian John Bodnar describes the main sides of the late 1970s and early 1980s controversy over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. On the one side, he writes, were national leaders, many patriotic veterans, and private citizens “who saw in the monument a device that would foster national unity and patriotism.” On the other were veterans who fought in Vietnam, people who cared about them, and bereaved families who were less interested in the memorial being a display of unity or patriotism than an expression of empathy for the soldiers who suffered and died. Empathy is paramount to the monument that was ultimately erected. The memorial—with the names of the fallen etched into black granite walls that sink into the National Mall—wound up symbolizing, in Bodnar’s words, “the human pain and sorrow of war rather than the valor and glory of warriors and nations.”

The annual Memorial Day holiday doesn’t elicit the same depth of emotional intensity as the planning of a permanent, national war memorial. But the interplay between grief and glory is ongoing. The politics and public reaction to war is ever-changing, and families who have lost soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan are likely to observe the day differently than somebody who has not had a relative in uniform since the Korean War.

Memorial Day also has divided the public in another way: between those who chose to observe the holiday and those who saw it as a chance for leisure time. While there’s no way to accurately estimate the size of each group, historians Richard P. Harmond and Thomas J. Curran suggest it’s likely that the latter always has been larger than the former. And that gap is probably growing wider.

Rather than harangue about some presumed decline of patriotism or gratitude in America, I’d suggest that backyard barbecues are also fundamental to Memorial Day’s building of national morale. Yes, it is absolutely critical to remember the fallen and the wars they died in. But, as the 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan argued, forgetting is “an essential factor in the creation of a nation.” We also need to move beyond old divisions and the brutality of history. That, my fellow Americans, is where the hot dogs come in.

The post Is Memorial Day About Grief, Glory, or Hot Dogs? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.