Philip Jacobson wrote three sobering reports on America 10 years after the end of the Vietnam war for the Observer Magazine of 28 April 1985. The first was a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington DC which, at the time, bore the names of nearly 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam (it’s since been added to).
Jacobson highlighted one affecting letter stuck to the stone: ‘This is my father, I never knew him. If anyone knows him, please write to me.’ Alone of ‘the majestic symbols of America’s past all around it’, the memorial ‘bears no stirring message of patriotism and service in a noble cause,’ said Jacobson.
He then focused on the tiny community of Bardstown, Kentucky, which had 15 of its young men killed in Vietnam – probably the highest proportionately in the US. Even though the memories of those deaths were still horrific, the people there had not lost their faith.
‘One thing that pleases me today is that Americans are beginning to discover that the war wasn’t so shameful after all,’ said one veteran.
Jacobson wrote that conditions had been relatively good for the Bardstown soldiers: ‘There was even ice from machines donated by the people of Bardstown, who wanted the best for their boys; fridges and electric fans, too.’
Jacobson’s third piece was a counter to the Vietnam Vet stereotype of the ‘drug-crazed psychopath’, an interview with Tom Martin, now in a wheelchair. Even though he ‘went through months in a fog of Valium, pain, depression and abject fear of the future’ there was no self-pity among the new life he’d built in Tennessee with his wife and daughter.
But 10 years on, concluded Jacobson, ‘America finds the ghosts of Vietnam more difficult to bury than the bodies that came home.’ As one of the vets said: ‘There will always be a division in my generation between those who served and those who did not.’
