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2020
Writers F to L
Pauline F. Hebert

For the living, there can never be peace

Pauline F. Hebert

Notes de la rédaction

“For the living, there can never be peace” is published in Revue LISA/LISA e-journal with the kind permission of Pauline F. Hebert.

“For the living, there can never be peace” is the second part of the excerpt from Pauline F. Hebert’s expression in Vietnam Veterans Unbroken: Conversations on Trauma and Resiliency © 2019 Jacqueline Murray Loring by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandbooks.com.

Texte intégral

1For the living, there can never be peace

2          In October 1968, while I was in Vietnam, my kid brother called to say he got married. He didn’t wait for me to come home. When I got home, my mother was dying, so Vietnam wasn’t my only stressor. My mother’s death at Christmas left me feeling like an orphan. My sister let me move in with her family.

3          I didn’t have any knowledge of trauma reactions at that time. I learned I have what they call impacted grief reaction. It’s grief that gets stuffed down so deeply it takes time for it to come out. I wonder if the people shooting other people have had abuse trauma in their lives.

4          Some vets don’t have the ability to control emotions. My reactions are always in excess of what they should be. I took a course at Northampton on anger management. They taught us to stop and think, to modify our reactions.

5          I went to a program in Maine. The one where they taught us to use a tube to beat on our pillows. What I’d tell new vets if they asked is to learn about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ 1969 book On Death and Dying. I think every vet should understand the five steps of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It works for people dealing with things like cancer. But war crushes people caught in it. This is serious rage.

6          When I got home from Nam, I kept myself and my days busy, filled with school and work and my sister’s kids. I’d find things to do. Stuff as much as I could into each day. Traffic jams around Hartford actually worked in my favor. I drove a Chevy Camaro stick shift so I had to pay attention to the other cars.

7          I tried to keep myself busy by challenging myself to learn new things. I took a lot of classes. Tried to improve my golf game. I had to have knee surgery for a jammed piece of cartilage that prevented full extension of the joint. Regardless, I follow golfers all over the world, every month of the year. The game has given me a lot of enjoyment. I have a sister who follows the Red Sox the same way.

8          I’ve been a birdwatcher since I came back to New Hampshire in 1984. I go to evening get-togethers and particularly like watching birds in my own yard. I feel a responsibility to keep them supplied with food and water.

9          I sometimes shake my fist at the sky if a Huey helicopter flies by. I think, “Just get through today.”

10          Once I offered to paint my sister’s kitchen and picked out a soft violet color I liked. When her husband, Dick, came home from work, I heard his screech. He said it was purple so I repainted it. Kept me busy.

11          When I lived with my sister she was preoccupied with her kids. She had already had a three and four-year-old and her third child was born a month after my mother died in January 1969. Her fourth was born that same year in December. They kept me involved. A few years ago, I told her she was the “Wings Below My Feet” because she gave me a place to stay when I came home from Nam.

12          What I’d tell newer veterans is to get comfortable with talking out their feelings. Talk about what they did in combat. Even if it’s hard.

13          In Nam, I’d sit next to the bed of a guy who had his genitals blown off by a Bouncing Betty. Most of the time, they didn’t want to talk but I’d encourage them, tell them they were going to get through it. Going to go home and have a life. Talking helped them to deal with their grief and loss. Sometimes I’d tell them I was going to sit with them for fifteen minutes whether or not they said anything. I’d sit quiet but stay there with them.

14          They have had parades and celebrations to welcome home Vietnam vets at the Concord Airport. I was surprised by that.

15          Gary Rafferty invited me to attend the Joiner Center (William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences) one afternoon in maybe 1996 to hear a panel that included Lynda Van Devanter, author of Home Before Morning, a book that became the basis for the 1988 to 1991 television series titled, “China Beach”. The other women I can remember who were on the panel were Patience Mason, a writer, blogger, wife of Vietnam vet and Chickenhawk author Robert Mason, Carolyn Forché who is a poet, editor, translator, and human rights advocate, poet and educator Martha Collins, and author, translator, editor, and columnist Lady Borton.

16          Lynda was also a nurse in Vietnam. I thought she was tightly wrapped. I remember thinking we looked benign, like anybody else. Lynda died in 2002. I’ve often wondered if I will live long enough to see the government give Purple Hearts to people with PTSD. It’s a wound you can’t see over clothing. I think back to the Centurions. They were given estates.

17          I started attending to the two-week Joiner writers’ workshop in June 1997 and went for several summers. Joiner and writing poetry helped me immensely. I write what I need to write.

18          My last nightmare about Vietnam was two weeks ago. When I awakened from that event, my cat was meowing at me in a soothing tone. I was sopping wet, gasping, my nose was running, and I was panting. All I knew was it was about Vietnam. That is not how I wake up when it is an ordinary nightmare. I have those too. When I’m so upset, I have learned to get up and just cry it out. Or write it down.

19          Poetry is my vehicle to transmit a compelling message about war’s extreme cost paid by those who do come home. If one young man is spared the experience of going to war by something I wrote, I will feel my life, after Vietnam, has been purposeful.

20          I got a letter last week from the VA saying if you lived more than twenty miles from a VA hospital you could still get health care. I was on the way to Northampton to find out what the letter meant and to see my therapist, Dana, and got stopped by a cop. I told him I was on my way to a VA appointment in Northampton.

21          He asked, “You a Nam vet?”

22          I said, “Yes.”

23          He said, “My father’s a Vietnam veteran.”

24He let me off with a warning. I think I was going seventy in a forty-five mile-an-hour zone.

25          I think most Nam vets realize that there are no war survivors. For the living, there can never be peace.

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Référence électronique

Pauline F. Hebert, « For the living, there can never be peace »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], Anthologie vivante sur les Mémoires de guerre, mis en ligne le 18 juin 2020, consulté le 21 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/12161 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.12161

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Pauline F. Hebert

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