“The French and the Americans tried to stop the revolution, and in doing so they created an interregnum of violence unparalleled in Vietnamese history.”—Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake

I understand that the lessons that any one of us may have learned from the long American War in Viet Nam depend entirely upon where you were at the time, and what you were doing, and the kind of person you are or were.

My introduction to that conflict came in my eighteenth year, when I was sent there as a soldier to serve in Quang Tri Province with the 1st Air Cav. as a forward communication specialist. Because I’d grown up in a working-class family of more than a few war veterans, I’d been taught to believe that being called to serve was an honorable thing, and I went willingly. In combat, you sometimes behave in what may seem paradoxical ways, especially when observed by noncombatants. You always stay low, for example, as low as possible, which meant your face sometimes had to be slammed against the jungle floor. That low. You also run toward the fire, and never away from it, even when your deepest instincts tell you otherwise. You always ate when you had food and drank when you had water, you never slept on guard and always made sure your claymores were pointing in the right direction. Things like that. Throughout my nine months in the field, including the assault on Khe Sanh to relieve the Marines who’d been pinned down there by North Vietnamese regular soldiers, I learned a variety of lessons that I came to see would help me survive the rest of my tour: things as simple as how to walk through thick grass, how to never take your flak vest off, especially when you slept, and how to hide your worst fears by swallowing them whole, unaware of how they would fester inside you much later in your life.

But that’s a different story from the one I want to tell here. The one I want to tell here is a story that begins only many years after the facts of my wartime service. Remember, I’d told you that I was 18 at the time, not well read, and naive beyond the rough-hewn working-class culture I grew up among on the edges of the steel mill. I didn’t know anything when I got out of the Army except that I was glad I was still alive. But books saved me. I became a serious reader, and for years I seldom sat down to do anything else, even eat my dinner, without a book open nearby. I became a student of the war and a student of Vietnamese history. I also became a writer and, as a result, received an invitation to travel to Ha Noi, in the days before the embargo had been lifted. It was a life-changing trip, and it began what’s become a lifetime of experience in Viet Nam, among my many Vietnamese friends, most of them writers and artists, where I try to spend several months every year working as a writer, translator, and literary friend to Hoi Nha Van, the Viet Nam Writers’ Association. I feel comfortable writing here, 58 years after the fact, to share my lessons from the war, however particular to my personal experience they may be.

That governments, even our own government, lie, is lesson number one. I didn’t recognize these lies initially through academic research or heady investigative reporting. I only had to compare what we read in the Stars and Stripes after a battle to what we knew from our direct experience in that same battle. They were seldom the same. I learned that after-battle assessments dictated that a splash of blood in the grass would be counted as a killed enemy soldier. I learned that the care of the soldiers on the front lines was not the first concern of our government. There often wasn’t enough equipment, ammunition, food, or even drinkable water to go around, especially during times when the bad weather prevented supplies being brought in by air. This lack of sufficient resources meant more than not satisfying the simple needs of soldiers in the field; it meant that those soldiers would be put in even more jeopardy than they were already in, usually on a daily basis. To grow up among the working class, and to celebrate God and country enthusiastically and without embarrassment was as natural as breathing to me, so to be confronted, violently, by that same God and government’s lies was more than a shock to my system.

Lesson number two needs to be: Don’t let someone else tell you who your enemies are. In basic training, during bayonet practice, we had a chant that everyone was required to repeat before we stabbed the dummies with our real bayonets:

“What is the spirit of the bayonet? Kill! Kill! Kill!” We were told to imagine that the

dummies were North Vietnamese soldiers, and that by killing them we were saving the people of Southeast Asia from their Communist dominance and loss of personal freedoms. Most of us who fought came to understand quickly how committed the enemy was to their cause, how capable they were of waging war with few resources, and how fucking flat-out brave they were. The training that we’d received in the military that focused on dehumanizing the enemy did little to deter our admiration for them as soldiers in the end.

Because I’ve spent a great deal of time in Ha Noi, including stays of several months, I’ve had the rare opportunity to be invited into the Ha Noi literary and veterans’ community. I consider many of these people to be among my closest friends. They are loyal, honest, hardworking, compassionate people I love being around. More than a few of these friends and I have been careful to discover that we actually fought against each other, remembering the place, time, and the date. When I’m in the midst of one celebration or another with veteran friends in Ha Noi, it’s not unusual for me to remember the way that the Vietnamese were depicted in my earliest training as a soldier, compared to the courageous, resourceful soldiers that I knew they were from direct experience. Most importantly, I learned that these people were not, nor ever had been, my enemy.

The third lesson is not as widely spoken of as it should be, and is another kind of lie, this one a lie of science. When the government figured out that something was wrong with millions of soldiers who fought in Viet Nam, who were sharing the same symptoms of substance abuse, disassociation, social alienation, and the inability to get back to their lives after their wartime experiences, they came up with post-traumatic stress disorder. This was not inherently a bad thing, but it was unfortunately accompanied by the promise that the same government had come up with a treatment protocol of drugs and therapy that could rid the veterans of their worse PTSD symptoms.

Well, those of us who know know, and the rest of you will have to take our word for it when we tell how there is no changing back your brain once it’s been shattered by the unspeakable trauma of combat. It’s no more complicated than that. Lesson three, then, should be: be wary of the promises that liars make to cover up a failed enterprise of such dimensions that it tore an irreplaceable hole into an entire generation of Americans.

Bruce Weigl served in the 1st Air Cavalry Division in the Vietnam War. He is the author of 15 books of poetry, including Apostle of Desire, which will be released next month, and Song of Napalm, which was nominated for a Pulitzer. He has also written a memoir, The Circle of Hanh, several collections of critical essays, and translations of Vietnamese and Romanian poetry and has also edited or coedited several anthologies of war poetry. Weigl’s own poetry has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Poetry. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Poet’s Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Yaddo Foundation.