After the Viet Nam War physically ended, it carried on as a presence and influence in every facet of U.S. society and culture. Now, half a century later, I’m at an age where I feel its aftershocks unexpectedly, almost more than ever, some 55 years after the last day I was in it, and the deaths of three childhood friends lost in that old war that never ends are more galling to me than ever as I witness our democracy belittled.

Where I’m from, we all went in (signed up) for a variety of reasons, and some of us, all members of the struggling working class, were primed from childhood to join the service before fading into factory or coal mine oblivion, or some such, and many simply had nowhere else to go. There was no meaningful work for us, and zero education opportunities. We didn’t graduate from indifferent public schools but dropped out to try to create functional lives. Some of us had to do it just to find an adequate job, shelter, food, even decent shoes, but we all knew and accepted that we also had to do our duty to the country, and we wanted to, no matter what, and joined up, and though waiting to be drafted was no badge of honor, if it happened you’d still be embraced and supported. I was certainly both a patriot and desperate for a way out, plus a kid up for adventure, partly motivated by wanting a real education, knowing the GI Bill for that would be waiting at the end. I only had to make it to that end, and I was more than game.

We were all too young and naive to know what we were getting into, but were also patriots to varying degrees, willing to serve, and in JFK’s words (possibly adapted from a Kahlil Gibran passage in The Prophet, wildly popular then), we wanted to do what we could do for our country. I’m still a patriot, and will die one, but my version has nothing to do with flags, hats, and billionaires. It has to do with knowing that patriotism can’t be purchased, schmoozed into existence, or brought to life by hatred and racism. It can’t be faked or manufactured out of thin air and money, and can’t be taken away or eradicated. It’s an invisible spirit tailored to every country on the planet, and you either have it, acquire it by adoption, or not, but you don’t dance it around like a plaything, a ploy, or means to an end. You live it and protect it and the rights of everyone who has or wants it, and never to the exclusion of others, which reduces it to a possession no better than a toy.

Still, to this day, except for very close friends, or in the context of a public event where something I’ve written about war is a topic, I don’t casually tell people I was in Vietnam (the war), and don’t talk about it in detail except for moments shared with the writer Wayne Karlin (the first Vietnam War veteran friend I made, years after the war), or my late younger brother David (who served on the flight deck of a carrier off the coast of Vietnam), and my wife, Daisy, who understands war as well as anyone because she has also been in one, though of a very different type.

I also don’t normally discuss details of my experience in the war. If I do, I find myself constantly selfediting, careful not to exaggerate or lapse into typical war stories. One comes to understand that in the case of war, the truth as you know it is enough, and whether or not it’s entertaining or engaging is a concern for fiction, poetry, drama, or cinema; not to say those things don’t show the truth—they can and do, sometimes spectacularly, but it depends on the artist’s talent and objective. I’ve discovered that one thing we can’t always be sure of, as years pass and memory dismantles, is the exact sequence of events outside the historical record and that it’s hard not to be affected by current realities, especially now when events are confusing and everything in the country is going haywire.

Still, war memories appear out of nowhere sometimes. One that comes back to me on occasion is more like an impressionistic memory fragment that I’ve never been able to shake.

I had just turned 21, it was not quite dawn. It was 1969 Vietnam. The light that morning was gray like the fog we see rising from the Pacific every morning from our apartment window in San Francisco, my beloved poet wife and I.

In the memory, I’m exhausted, sitting halfway up a flight of external wooden stairs that lead to a long balcony row of locked doors comprising the admin offices of the hospital where I worked downstairs in the emergency room–triage area with a small crew of other medics, next to a helicopter pad. I was contemplating the quiet dawn, the gray light, regrouping, putting my head back together as one often needs to do in war. I was smoking, exhausted, wearing a sweaty green surgical smock, shaking somewhat from whatever disaster I just emerged from downstairs, a detail I can’t remember because there were so many disasters. It had to be something major to make me shake.

Being calm as possible was imperative. I had to project perpetual sangfroid, regardless of what I felt, no matter what happened. It was part of my job, an essential responsibility. Effective medics cannot appear rattled or afraid, no matter how rattled or afraid they are. Our whole crew had to be 24-7 cool—we knew it and practiced it, and I didn’t normally worry about it. I’d been a medic for over three years, worked in other emergency rooms, and experienced many harrowing moments, including in Libya during the Six-Day War (which Libya and the United States were officially not part of, a position that looked quite different on the ground; the day before it began with a sea of dead sheep bobbing in the ever-stunning Mediterranean that adjoined our base).

But my usual calming methods weren’t working that morning in Vietnam; my unease was getting worse instead of better. We’d been pulling 12-hour-on, 12-hour-off shifts for a long time, so I thought it was just exhaustion, but we’d also been on alert a lot that month, told to stay on our toes, and, unknowingly, were only weeks away from a deadly Vietcong sapper attack on an Army convalescence hospital across base.

The general atmosphere was very tense, so when I saw sudden movement on the other side of the field where there should be no motion that time of morning, I ducked deeper into the wooden stairs and peered across the field, wishing I’d brought protection, then looked up and saw a sparkling that snapped me back to earth. Right next to me sat an enormous spiderweb attached to an upper floor beam and the rudimentary two-by-six banister close to my head. It was beautiful, beaded with morning dew, woven in uneven circles that seemed ready to spin. Motionless in the center, like a bull’s-eye, was a giant, eccentrically colored golden orb weaver at least as big as my hand (sometimes blue, in memory, and red), an arachnid mandala. It charmed me into a brief calming trance that I was suddenly snapped out of by further motion out in the field.

I tried to discern what it was, stared in its direction, wishing I’d gone back downstairs as a caution, but the spider had me. It represented a moment of nonwar, something I needed, that we all needed. Then the motion was gone. There was nothing I could see, and I assumed it had been an animal of some sort, possibly one of the stray dogs that hung around the base.

No matter how protected and secure we seemed to be in that medical cocoon, we were vulnerable. There were regular night mortars and problems at the perimeters of the base handled by helicopters and Puff the Dragon gunships pouring streams of colored tracers into the nearby hills. Off-duty medics and other personnel would sit or dance on the sandbag walls surrounding their hooches, not far from the hospital, smoking dope, music blasting, watching the light shows. I guess, in a weird way, that was our version of Woodstock, happening back on Yasgur’s farm that same summer. From the hospital, we could see them in the distance, and hear the music. We had an unofficial up-to-the-moment mainline to all the new music being released in the States and were up to date. I remember, one late evening, watching the sandbag dancers and the tracers as the stillprescient song “In the Year 2525,” a one-hit wonder popular that summer, floated in muffled tones from across the wide field and the chopper pad between us.

More than half a century later, every once in a while a dark sensation washes over me without warning or perceptible cause. It’s war, the Vietnam War and others in the present—I can’t close my eyes to wars, always watching and studying them through the lens of my own experience, like it or not, and I don’t like it. That dark sensation is mainly indiscriminate because war itself is indiscriminate, and no matter what the plan, it goes its own way 100 percent of the time. My spirits also take a dark turn if I’ve read a piece in the news about veterans being denigrated, or if their memories are defiled. I take it personally because I am one and because I was raised by and among veterans and have an unerring interest in their wellbeing and respectful treatment, which is the least they deserve.

Still, I’m not one who ever cottoned to the phrase “Thank you for your service,” though only one person has ever actually said that to me, the daughter of a dear friend who knew I’d been in Vietnam and mentioned it to her. The daughter had studied the war at university and asked if we could talk about it a little after a dinner a number of old friends had gathered for. I’d known her since she was a precocious child, her room the gathering spot for kids who came with their parents to occasional boxing parties hosted by her parents to watch major events and their cards. It was always a tremendous gathering, though not large, no more than 20 to 25 people at most, but all very engaging guests, boxing fans who were city lawyers, like her brilliant mother (a fabulous chef and beyond-generous host), who happened to be from my faraway hometown, Pittsburgh, and her father, a housing authority expert and old friend of many in the group. The occasional daylong events became key to my life and sanity in ways I’m sure no one there could tell, and I treasure them to this day.

I was introduced to that scene and a world of new friends by the nonfiction writer, novelist, and screenwriter Bill Barich, whom I met after reading one of his fine books, introduced by a mutual friend, a poet. I discovered he was very knowledgeable about poetry and knew many poets. We quickly became friends, hung out regularly, and went many places together, often with other friends he’d invite along. He became a mentor of sorts, a vastly knowledgeable resource for the many things I’d missed about our generation and culture because of my working-class background and critical years spent in the service, more than half of them out of the country during historic moments. In addition to everything else, he’d been in the Peace Corps, which impressed me deeply, and he sensed and knew things about the greater world that eluded most of our generation. His companionship and gregarious nature were exactly what I needed to finally come back from the war, though I wasn’t fully aware of it then: it was not something we ever discussed, and I only realized the true depth of that aspect of our friendship once he left San Francisco, leaving me in a state of ubi sunt, one might say, though Daisy and I have traveled to visit him and his wife, Imelda.

I’d already established myself as a writer to a degree by the time I met him. I’d published poetry collections, a scholarly work, had won fellowships, and had friendships with a number of older poets whose work I admired and whose demeanor I respected (men, mainly, from the World War II era). I also probably knew or met every poet in town by then, from mainstream to “minority” cultures, and from what was left of the Beats to the emerging new genre types, and though I respected them all to varying degrees, and would still not badmouth any of them, I just didn’t fit in. I had a few younger poet acquaintances but never felt comfortable in the San Francisco literary scene of that time, finding it rife with infighting, hustling, and selfpromotion. It was toxic, clubbish, and of no interest to me because it always seemed offbalance and less engaged with the existential world than I felt comfortable with.

That all changed when I went to my first boxing party, where for the first time since coming home from war, I relaxed in a social scene that extended a hand of sanity and total acceptance. Bill’s invitation to tag along and check it out excited me because I’d long been a boxing fan, and once even harbored dreams of being a boxer, an ambition that finally ended at a remote outpost in the Sahara Desert, when I agreed one Saturday morning (the only idiot who would) to take on a complete mismatch who was roaring for an opponent among the two or three dozen young airmen stationed for a one- to six-month stretch in the middle of hell and bored to tears. Egged on by the whole crew, except the old sergeant who ran the camp and was off on inspection tour, we put on the gloves, and I faced my opponent in a ring of sand and sandbags. He was a foot taller and more than a foot wider, but I was game, bobbed and weaved and nailed him with a fast bunch of combos to absolutely zero effect until he knocked me into next Sunday with one punch and forever ended my romance with the sweet science, but only as a player. I remained a fan for decades afterwards, and still was one when I went to that first boxing party with Barich, who had written serious boxer profiles for The New Yorker and elsewhere, knew the major fighters, and knew his stuff to a T. They all did, the members of my new tribe of friends, who took me in without missing a beat.

The eclectic and talented group, always discovering things in common with one another, changed and evolved over the years into a loose but solid community that split into many friendships beyond the events. The group grew and evolved from the hosts and guests inviting others. A core figure was writer Steve Vender, an old friend of the hosts, who started out as a journalist and boxing columnist and became a locally famous private eye, then an intrepid memoirist. I was already part of the group when Vender invited Matt Gonzalez, a public defender (and artist and publisher) who later became head of the city’s Board of Supervisors, among many other things, and a friend to all in the group.

In addition to a variety of the hosts’ friends, the group included a panoply of other novelists and short story writers, some with a history in the ring, like my longtime friend Leonard Gardner, author of the great American boxing novel Fat City (and also the only other veteran in the group, as far as I know, though Bill (or maybe Vender, I can’t recall) once brought writer Leo Litwak, who wrote the essential World War II memoir, Medic. Leonard’s partner, writer Gina Berriault, an astute judge of boxers and storyteller sine qua non, was also always there, plus there were always a couple of poets salted in. The core group of regulars became lifelong friends, including with the hosts and their daughter. I was very happy to be one of those, and still am. The gatherings shaped some of my favorite memories of pre-tech San Francisco and led to great adventures and rock-solid friendships.

If there ever was a sense of coming home from the war, that circle of friends provided it, and when my friend’s daughter thanked me for my service, I didn’t feel a bit defensive. I was very aware of her brilliance, knew that Daisy enjoyed discussing history with her, and the evening she asked to talk about the Vietnam War she was an advanced graduate student home for a holiday. As it happened, she had an impressive understanding of the war, and because of that and because we’d known each other so long, I didn’t dare say the war was not something I wanted to be thanked for, which would have been sarcastic and thoughtless. She was serious, so I dropped my guard. It wasn’t easy, and I can’t remember what all we talked about but that her curiosity was genuine, and her questions and responses were sharp and informed, and in the end, for the first time, I appreciated the sentiment of that phrase she used, which I otherwise disliked because I thought of it as a phrase invented to make up for the wrongheaded indifference Vietnam veterans met with coming home from the war. But in the end I concluded that, yes, it sounds simplistic, and from some people even vapid, arrogantly dismissive, or rote. But now I know it can be a harbinger of meaningful, genuine moments like the one I experienced with that wellinformed young woman, youngest member of a scattered tribe of friends I’d been part of for decades. The experience surprised and moved me, caught me unprepared, and I can only hope my responses lived up to her generational curiosity and intelligence. Because of her, I’m no longer in a position to prejudge the use of that phrase or its sincerity, and no longer do. The experience reaffirmed my belief that only the young, the new generations, can save us. And they will.

I despise war, hate it, and despise those who embroil us in them—mostly men who’ve never been in war, at least not the killing part, which serves up not only participants but women, children, and the old, civilians, animals, towns, cities, poisoning the land, water, and air—men who never had to help the wounded, wrap the dead, or kill a so-called enemy.

As for the Vietnam War, half a century later we are still processing its aftermath. As for Viet Nam, the country, which we all but destroyed but never bothered to repair except for profoundly helpful programs created by American veterans who served there, created from scratch for no reward but their successes, it’s the last place on earth tariffs or any other blockade should be imposed, if only as a symbol of long-overdue reparations for one of our worst errors of the twentieth century.

George Evans served as an Air Force medic in Cam Rahn Bay, Viet Nam during the Vietnam War. He has published a number of poetry collections in the U.S., the U.K., and Latin America, including The New World, Sudden Dreams, and the bilingual Espejo de la Tiera/Earth’s Mirror. His poetry, fiction, essays, and translations have appeared internationally in magazines and anthologies. His literary awards include two poetry fellowships from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, a writing fellowship from the California Arts Council, two Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowships for poetry, and a Japanese government Monbusho fellowship for the study of Japanese poetry. He was editor and director of the national public arts project Streetfare Journal, which displayed contemporary world poetry, art, and photography on buses in major cities throughout the United States from 1984 to 1998. He also edited Charles Olson & Cid Corman: Complete Correspondence; cotranslated (with the late writer Nguyen Qui Duc) The Time Tree by Vietnamese poet Huu Thinh; and translated The Violent Foam: New and Selected Poems, by his wife, distinguished poet Daisy Zamora. They live in California.