FMF GRUNT CORPSMEN

UNDERSTANDING FROM VIETNAM

And I know that when I return home, they will not understand.� They will not comprehend a monsoon rain cleaning my bloodied face, dirtied by the severed body there...my best friend.� I am one of thousands yet I live in a solitary World.� As long as I do not talk, I cannot tell you about the nights that are never darkened, the last cry of a child, my will that endures without my body�s consent.� I run and I Don�t stop.� I cry and I am not strong.� I am young, and that is beside the point.


You write me a letter but I cannot respond to your high school dances and latest crush. Your friends support me. You are foreign to me and I am in a land strange to you.� Strange because of conflict and death.� Put these thoughts out of your mind. You are too young to understand.� Yet that is beside the point.


When I hold her hand again she will not know me.� I cannot feel her hand In mine.� It is too innocent for touch.� I have felt death.� I have created it, wounded it, and wanted it. She will tell her friends I am different.� I will tell no one what I have seen.� She will pretend to want to understand.� I will pretend that she wants to hang on. Flashbacks comfort me.


I have done the work of the devil, yet I still pay him taxes.� People protest at your University.� I suppose they mean well. I suppose the devil meant well. Is that why I cannot tell who my enemy is?� Is he in the jungle.� Can he kill me now, but wants to wait?� Do they laugh at my inexperience?� They do not know what I want to be when I grow up.� I do not tell them.� I do not tell you because I do not grow, I relive, each moment, each day and I am too young to explain this.


When I am not afraid, I think.� I plan for you and for me.� I am sane, not because I want to be, but because I have to be.� I have learned here, not to think about what is truly happening.� I kill without remorse.� Yet I do not tell you that.� I listen to the story about your prom date.� I don�t know if I will ever return from Nam, though I sit next to you.�� If I could find a way for us to meet half way, would you?� You do not know, and I don�t want you too.� What I have seen will be written about and put on the big screen.� You will watch it and be moved and see it again with your friends.� You will eat pizza and go to bed as I sit through a scene that runs day and night, my own private screening of a film I never want to share.


I cannot come back to you for fear that we will be a statistic.� I want to be an honorable statistic.� Speak of my nobility.� Tell of the night we met and of the love at first sight. Tell them about my kind heart and my life cut short.� Speak of my aspirations and intentions.� Because I wanted to be a doctor.� I wish I could heal you know. But to heal is to bring you here.� Otherwise you will never know, this land, the politics, the gas, the death.� You do not know me, but I am not even twenty, yet when I leave this world, that will not be the point.

������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Holly Smith
������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� May 1999

Welcome, my purpose for this web page is to educate the young and to honor the warriors who fought in Vietnam.
On these pages I would like to show the events and people who meant so much to me. Being a history teacher I will also try to give those who care a little history lesson on the Vietnam war.
Disclaimer:� This is a personal web site and is not� affiliated with The United States Government, the DOD, The United States Navy or any other Government Agency

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