Recovery?
Notes de la rédaction
“Recovery?” is published in Revue LISA/LISA e-journal with the kind permission of Gary D. Rafferty.
“Recovery?” is an excerpt from Gary D. Rafferty’s expression inVietnam 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
1Recovery?
2 Recovery? This is not about recovery. I hate that word. As if you can “get over” combat, like you get over a cold. No, this is about what I’d try to say to all or any vet who would listen. About what has seemed to help me?
3 I say this, knowing that it will require completely different answers and actions for you (a vet) than it did for me. We’re not doing something simple here. Each of us is on our own journey. The American Indians called it “The Sacred Path.” For me, in an effort to regain some feeling in my life, I returned to those things that had meant a lot to me from my time before the war. As a member of perhaps the last generation to grow up outdoors, I lived in the woods. Dawn to dark, I was outside. I hated staying inside. Fishing and hunting were a part of my growing up. I’d never felt any fear in the woods, night or day. Animal behavior was to me much easier to predict than that of people. Plus, contrary to popular opinion, I think they’re smarter.
4 One spring, I bought a twelve-foot aluminum rowboat, got an outboard motor and started to fish for land-locked salmon. I wasn’t going to catch anything I wasn’t going to eat. When I first began to fish, in the often wild and frigid water just after the ice goes out, when the salmon can be taken on light tackle, if it was just choppy enough so I could barely keep from swamping with each wave, with a salmon on and the reel howling in protest, well, that was nearly perfect.
5 Later, when I got a better handle on my adrenaline addiction, I got a bigger and safer boat. A twenty-footer with high sides. She was in a boneyard and like me, she was a complete wreck. But she had potential. That spring, I fixed up the old aluminum hull. Stripped out everything, including the transom, top to bottom. Kept me busy all spring and as I remember it, it was a pretty good spring for me. For years, the promise of salmon fishing gets me through the long hard winters and my "anniversary time" the time of year when my heaviest combat happened. That dangerous time when everything seems to go wrong and the beast is just outside the door, the season of that horrid spring of 1971. The ice here normally goes out around April 10th. Which, incidentally, is also the date I got back from Vietnam and was discharged.
6 Then in the fall, which in New England is the best time of the year to be outdoors, I still went out deer hunting. Okay, I realize that I can’t, and don’t, recommend this for all vets. But, the preponderance of my combat involved indirect fire weapons-mortars, rockets and enemy artillery-and all I can say is, it’s worked. Most people’s perception of what deer hunting is like, is not what it really is. It’s vastly different. You can say that about what their idea of what combat is, too. It’s not simple. In fact, it’s quite complex. Most importantly for me, there’s the mental challenge. Trying to figure out the travel pattern of a big buck and get there ahead of him, and above all to do it without him knowing it is a challenge so complex I don’t have the luxury of dwelling on anything else. Even when I fail and the odds are always in his favor, I try my best to take it in stride, because it’s all about the quest. It’s about being out there, in the predawn, with the sound of duck wings whistling overhead in the mist, with the smell of autumn in the air and listening for deer coming through the leaves. It’s being in the woods during "the magic minutes" at dawn when the light grows just enough for colors to show. Trees and then the whole landscape finally appear and being there again after sunset and watch the whole process reverse itself. It’s the place where I most belong.
7 Why do I explain this? Because, you (vets) need to find a place where you belong. Find something that works for you, writing, fishing or whatever it is, even, God forbid, golf. Whatever it may be for you, is one of the keys. Find activities, keep busy enough to stay out of your own head. (When you’re inside your own head, you are behind enemy lines and you’re with the one person who’s absolutely, the most dangerous to you.)
8 This is not to say that there isn’t a lot of “luck” involved. Any combat vet knows what I’m talking about. There’s an important poem about luck and surviving by Wislawa Szymbroska, There But for the Grace. I’ve had a lot of luck. Times when the path forked and I stumbled the correct way. Times when an invisible hand flicked me back into the water as I gasped like a stranded fish. Luck? Fate?? I think it was the Grace of God. This from someone who is not religious. If I ever entered a church, I’d be responsible for the building collapsing. But, that’s what it was. While on the subject of luck, or more correctly, Grace. One of the luckiest things that ever happened to me was to meet Christine. A fellow poet who had been through her own dark night of the soul. Who loves the outdoors and its animals as much as I do and who’s great at netting a salmon. A skill that’s vastly underrated. Ten years on and the irreverent laughter continues for us. That’s as good as it gets. I wish the same for you.
9 And, I’ve come to finally accept some things. First, because of what I’ve been through, because of who I am, I will ALWAYS and in ALL WAYS be different from the rest of the world. Things they consider important, I see as irrelevant.
10 Second, I would not trade my hard-earned reality for all their wishful thinking and the false security of their COEXIST bumper stickers. Human nature hasn’t changed since we came down from the trees. This thing called civilization is a thin veneer over the abyss.
11 Third, I know the average person is, well, stupid. Not so much intellectually, but that too. In my experience some of the most formally educated lead the pack. No, rather it’s that they are what Nam vet poet Bruce Weigl called “the sweetly uninitiated.” Bruce was too kind, in my view. They’re just bovine, in their cud-chewing blind trust of government and the inevitability of a good outcome. Plainly suicidal in their belief in the basic goodness of man, which requires the willful denial of human history. Frankly, I don’t know why I still care about them, but despite everything, I do. I have, however, given up on their ever smartening up.
12 Why do I explain all this? Because as time goes by, despite all the therapy, my guess is that you too will feel constantly alienated from the civilian world. There’s more to it than the fact that you are a combat vet. Our eyelids were welded open by what we’ve seen. Being unaware is no longer an option. Not all your observations, harsh though they may be, are wrong. The vast majority of our fellow citizens ARE profoundly unserious. We are led by incompetents. In a world that we know is a very serious place. Your hard-won knowledge is not bad. You and your loved ones have a much better chance than most to survive. You and I, my brother and sister combat vets, are the sighted in the kingdom of the blind.
13 There’s a quote from The Man in the Arena by Teddy Roosevelt which I used to have on the firehouse wall.
Excerpt from the speech “Citizenship In a Republic” delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
14
15 You, we, are those he describes. For us, the real journey home is the hardest one of all.
16“In the long run, common sense and dogged persistence avail him more than any qualities.” My other favorite T.R. quote. He’s talking about hunting but, it’s a metaphor for life. That’s TR on being stubborn.
17 This world is shit and miracles. I try to put up with the shit and concentrate on the miracles. Seems to work out better doing it that way, rather than doing it the other way around.
18 Try to wrap some yarn of life and yes, love around the razor wire of yourself. My advice is to not waste your time trying to change the damn wire. You may just wrap enough around you to make it safe for those you love to hold you and for you to really feel it. That’s important.
19 I’ll never be “recovered.” I have given up the whole idea of such a thing. Recovered is a unit of measurement that no longer exists. I am, however, alive. Many of my comrades are not and more than a few gone by their own hands. Me, I wouldn’t give the powers that be the satisfaction of that outcome. Stubborn, I am.
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Référence électronique
Gary D. Rafferty, « Recovery? », 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/12306 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.12306
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