Coming Home

"Stray Dog" on the PBS series, Independent Lens, features one seventy-ish Vietnam veteran named Ron Hall.

To make this 90-minute documentary, the filmmaker spent months getting to know this good man;  I spent ninety minutes engrossed in Ron's story.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365587235/

Vietnam veterans (and casualties of that war) were my classmates in this life school--most of them three or four years ahead in actual school.  The boys fought a war they didn't choose, and it will never be over for the survivors like Ron Hall and his friends. For many, the only families left are their brother veterans.

Most of them came from homes like all of our homes--with families and roast beef dinners, drive-in movies and music. They fell in love, went steady and got cars.  They were lifeguards and athletes and drummers, mechanics and college students.  They listened to rock 'n roll music and danced.

Middle and lower-class boys of the Sixties usually went into the infantry because they had to--or they signed up for other branches of service to avoid the draft.  Their dreams for their futures were probably sketchy--just as the dreams of their girlfriends and sisters were--but they were ended with that war or put on hold.  I dare say their dreams rarely included being soldiers in a faraway war.

Ron Hall is one of those men.  He runs a small trailer park in Missouri where he lives with his dogs and his Mexican wife.  We see him sitting in a bare-bones trailer practicing his Spanish on an old computer. A warm-hearted biker, he still wakes up, as so many do, fifty years after combat, with nightmares.

"I was eighteen when I went over there," Ron said.  "I had no business making those kinds of decisions at that age....Old men make up the wars and young men go die in them."

What strikes me about this close-up of Ron and his biker/veteran friends is how often they talk about home. When they memorialize a fellow soldier who died, they say, "He didn't get to come home."

They support each other as only people who've been in the same wars can do.  They remember what it was like over there; they talk about what it was like when they first came home.  

Those young soldiers, now old men, didn't come home to flag-waving, cheers and patriotic music. Their homecomings were more muted than the homecomings after World War II, and the soldiers were scorned for a war they hadn't created.

Today, so many Vietnam veterans live on the street or in homeless shelters or--as the film depicts--they barely scrape by, living in poverty.  One of the men in the film had to pull his own teeth because he couldn't afford dental care.  Many suffer psychological damage or have died of suicide. How does this happen?  How is that so many of these young men, our classmates, gave their youths to a terrible war, then came home wind up homeless or living in poverty?

O'Malley made an excellent point in the Democratic debate Saturday night:  Let's stop calling these men "boots on the ground."  He quotes a mother of a veteran of Afghanistan: "My son was not a pair of boots."