Kevin Sites - The Things They Cannot Say

Finally, he adds, “The longer I was in the country [Vietnam], I learned more restraint.” While en route to a mission several months after the shooting, the chopper Caley and Baron were riding in was shot down. It landed on its side in a rice paddy. Caley slammed his back against the center console of the aircraft but, like everyone else, got out mostly unharmed. He did, however, lose his rifle during the crash. For the rest of his time in Vietnam, he never sought a replacement.

“They gave me a forty-five but I never went out with a rifle after that. I could work better trying to save lives rather than taking lives,” Caley said. But taking that life was not something for which Caley could ever really forgive himself. When he returned home, like so many other veterans of the war in Vietnam, he threw away his medals and his service records, something he would regret later, both because he had nothing to hand down to his children concerning his experiences in Vietnam and because it would make it more difficult to file a claim later for the post-traumatic stress disorder that continues to haunt him. When he returns to Vietnam in his mind, he relives the crash, the constant enemy shelling of the forward bases he worked from in Tay Ninh, Quan Loi and An Khe—but most of all, the memory of the old man whose life he had taken, dropped in the middle of a dirt path decades ago, while he carried food, destined for the mouths of Caley’s enemy… or not.

Back in the U.S., Caley never talked about his experiences in Vietnam and most of his friends never asked. In fact, he says, many didn’t even realize where he had been since he saw them last. In the war’s aftermath, he took jobs like the one he had in Vietnam, where he worked alone, often at night, which was just as well since he couldn’t sleep. He worked at Republic Steel, testing the metal’s tensile strength, then as a delivery driver. He says his brain wouldn’t let him go back to school; his mind would wander and he just couldn’t do it.

The war had turned him into a twitchy insomniac; he was constantly on guard, reacting to loud noises, backfires and the sound of helicopters. He self-medicated with alcohol and joints but quit with the birth of his two children. His marriage however, couldn’t survive the strain of his isolation.

“I didn’t trust anyone and I brought that feeling home,” he says.

“I felt guilty, basically every time you got into an argument. They couldn’t understand why you feel the way you feel. You just get mad and you can’t tell them why. I mean, who are you going to talk to about it anyway and what are you going to say?”

Like in Vietnam, Caley felt he had only his dogs to console him. Ironically, it was current wars that finally made Caley confront his own war from the past.

“I saw the soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan and saw what they were going through. I didn’t want them to go through the same thing that I had.”

Caley began going to the local veterans hospital seeking treatment for himself and sharing his story with other returning veterans. There is a sense of betrayal, he believes, they all share.

“We have two or three from Afghanistan and Iraq and if you listen to them, they appreciate us and our experiences are pretty much the same as theirs,” he says. “Same thing, just a different time zone, a different war. They’re getting the shaft from people they were dealing with, just like us.”

This idea of being betrayed by politicians and military commanders is a recurring theme in soldiers’ stories across wars and generations and is a central tenet of much of classic literature about war, including Homer’s epic poem The Iliad . Dr. Jonathan Shay pointed out in Achilles in Vietnam that the betrayal soldiers feel is directly related to their leadership’s putting them in positions that contradict their sense of morality. “When a leader destroys the legitimacy of the army’s moral order by betraying ‘what’s right,’ he inflicts manifold injuries on his men. ( The Iliad is the story of these immediate and devastating consequences.)”

Perhaps because of the sketchy reasons that prompted the American involvement in Vietnam or because many Americans were drafted like Caley, instead of volunteering, the morality of the war was already in question for those who found themselves in the middle of it. They were experiencing a crisis of conscience before they ever had to pull the trigger.

But for Caley, recognizing this “betrayal” narrative that binds him to other warriors has given him enough comfort to slowly rejoin the society he’s been alienated from for decades. Rather than hiding his past, he’s confronted it by seeking the help he needs. He’s been awarded 50 percent disability and receives about $800 a month from the government. His service also entitles him to medications and the psychological services that he’s just now begun to take part in, more than forty years after his war ended.

“I’m probably in a better place now,” Caley says. “I understand why I feel this way. When I’m in therapy, when they talk to me they help me to understand, it’s not what I did in the war, it’s what the war did to me. That was a self-revelation. You still have to live with the consequences. But I’m finding that a little bit easier now.”

In 2010, Caley returned to Vietnam with a veterans’ therapy group to confront the ghosts of his past (including the rice bearer). But he conceded after that the process wasn’t particularly helpful: “We met with some of the guys we fought against and they said it was just another war to them. They called it the American War. We also met some of the guys that were supposedly on our side and they asked us why we left them. So the whole thing still didn’t make sense one way or the other.” Caley said two things have helped, however; the first was volunteering at a local veterans’ center and the other was learning to write poetry as a way to share what is sometimes too difficult to say. But he knows that for those who have never been to war, it’s still hard to grasp. “I let my wife read it [his poetry] and she said it was kind of dark.”

His parents were both pacifists and at dinnertime Thomas Saal’s father talked about how America had no right to be in Vietnam, that innocent people were dying for no reason. So at twenty-one, Saal, without much forethought and no malevolence, did the very thing most likely to crush their spirits—he quit college and joined the Marines.

“I did real well at Parris Island [Marine Corps recruit depot, South Carolina], graduated first or second in platoon,” says Saal. “I’ve always been physically adept and I was a little older, twenty-one when most were eighteen. I was almost like a natural at it. Then I got to Camp Lejeune [Marine Corps base, North Carolina] and applied for officer’s school. I went on to OCS [officer candidate school], and graduated at the top of my class, after twenty-five washed out.”

In December 1967, Saal was a second lieutenant and a platoon leader in Vietnam, based south of Da Nang. Though he was as green as his uniform, he struck a fearless pose. In one photograph from that time, the wiry, shirtless Saal, flanked by two other soldiers, smiles directly, self-assuredly into the camera, as if there were no place he’d rather be.