Tag Archives: Vietnam

Growing Up With Violence: The Real American War in Vietnam [w/ @NickTurse via @majorityfm]

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I’m not a violent man. I’ve rarely gotten violent with anyone in my life. But I’ve witnessed a lot of violence, up close, often.

My father was insane from the Vietnam War, abusive; my mother used to fight him off with anything she could grab. Once, for example, she chased him up the stairs by swinging a plastic trick-or-treat pumpkin at his head. You know the ones—those hollowed out plastic pumpkins with the black plastic strap that you’re supposed to put your Halloween candy in.

Dad had backed mom into a corner, another fight, and wrapped his calloused, strong, construction worker hands tightly around her slender throat. So, mom, choking, groping for her life, found the strap of one of those trick-or-treat pumpkins, clutched it tightly, and swung it hard at my dad’s head, over and over, backing him up the stairs like a tamer would a lion with a whip.

Each swing landed with a hollow thunk—the pumpkin meeting dad’s skull. He never stopped laughing. Each thunk was accompanied by my mother screaming, sobbing:

“You motherfucker!” Thunk “I fucking hate you!” Thunk. “You motherfucker!”

 

#njpoet

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The Untold History of the United States via @democracynow #ows

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#njpoet

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SP4 Charles Joseph Bivona, Btry. A, 2nd Bn., 77th Arty. [Vietnam, 1967]

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for my dad
 

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Let’s Start With #Demilitarization via @TomDispatch #war #antiwar #ows

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According to the Pentagon, the production and acquisition costs of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, the military’s most expensive weapons program, have risen yet again, this time by 4.3% since 2010 to $395.6 billion. If you’re talking about the total cost of the system, including maintenance and support for the nearly 2,500 planes that will some (endlessly delayed) day be produced for the military, that has now reached an estimated $1.51 trillion, a 9% rise since 2010. All this for a plane that some experts doubt has any particular purpose in the future U.S. arsenal.

At last, however, the House of Representatives seems to have had enough of wasteful spending programs. Perhaps its members also read the recent poll that shows Americans generally support more funds for the Defense Department — until, that is, they are told just how much is spent on defense compared to other budget items. Then, 75% of them (67% of Republicans) back significant cuts, an average of 18%, in that budget to reduce the federal deficit.

Whatever the explanation, last week the Republican-dominated House finally took out the pruning shears and acted with remarkable decisiveness. They sent a bill to the Senate cutting $310 billion from the deficit over the next decade. The F-35 program went down in flames.

Oh wait, that’s my mistake. Actually, they slashed food stamps, children’s health care, funds to hospitals that serve the poor, and Medicaid — all in order to shield the Pentagon from future cuts. In fact, the House bill actually adds more than $8 billion to the Pentagon budget. As the New York Times reports, if the House bill were to become law, “the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that more than 20 million children would face reduced food and nutrition support, almost 300,000 would be knocked off the federal school lunch program, and at least 300,000 would lose access to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.”

-Tom Engelhardt

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Old Photograph: My Dad in Vietnam, 1967

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“The US soldier hunted down an Afghan family like military targets.” #quote via @Guardian

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His victims were all asleep as the 38-year-old US staff sergeant began trying, door by door, to force himself into the mud-walled homes of Afghan farmers.

Eventually, a lock gave way, and the gunshots that killed the first of 16 civilians meant the others, mostly women and children, were awake when he arrived to murder them, said Agha Lalai Dastgiri, a senior official charged with investigating the shooting spree in the early hours of Sunday morning.  -The Guardian

Familiar.

A senior U.S. defense official in Washington rejected witness accounts that several apparently drunk soldiers were involved. “Based on the preliminary information we have this account is flatly wrong,” the official said. “We believe one U.S. service member acted alone, not a group of U.S. soldiers.” -Reuters

So familiar…

“It was just a small massacre in the context of much greater atrocities,
much bigger massacres.”

~Noam Chomsky~

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What Everyone Ought to Know about America’s Vietnam War

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The representation of the Vietnam War still dominant in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century is based on a series of fantasies originally constructed from 1954 through the 1970’s and then elaborated and embellished during the 1980s and 1990s, especially under the Reagan (1981-1989) and Bush (1989-1993) administrations. Among these fantasies are the following falsehoods, accepted as true by most Americans—or rather by most Americans other than those who simply prefer not to know anything about the war:

  1. Before the United States became involved, there were two separate nations called South Vietnam and North Vietnam.
  1. South Vietnam was a democracy with an elected government.
  1. South Vietnam was being invaded by North Vietnam, a communist dictatorship.
  1. This invasion was supported by China and the Soviet Union as part of a communist attempt to take over the world.
  1. In response to this invasion, the United States provided economic and military aid to South Vietnam.
  1. Then in 1964 North Vietnam attacked U.S. destroyers in the international waters off the Gulf of Tonkin, and the United States responded with a brief retaliation.
  1. North Vietnam then attacked U.S. advisers in South Vietnam, and the United States responded in 1965 by sending in troops and bombing North Vietnam.
  1. The 1968 Tet offensive by the “Viet Cong” and North Vietnam was really a military victory for the United States, but it was turned into a political defeat by the news media and politicians.
  1. The United States lost the war because we “weren’t allowed to win” and we were fighting with “one hand tied behind our back”; that is, the military was unduly restrained by politicians, the news media, and the antiwar movement.
  1. The United States may have lost the war but it never lost any battles during the war.
  1. The United States didn’t lose the war; the bombing of Hanoi in December 1972 forced North Vietnam to accept Washington’s peace terms.
  1. Before the Vietnam War, the United States had never lost a war.
  1. When American veterans came home from the war, they were routinely spat upon and abused by antiwar activists. Read More»
  1. After the war, North Vietnam secretly kept hundreds or maybe even thousands of American prisoners of war, to be used as slave laborers or hostages or “bargaining chips” or sources of technological information about U.S. aircraft or simply victims to be tortured. Read More»

[So, what’s the truth about America’s Vietnam War?]

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This article is an excerpt from the book
Vietnam and Other American Fantasies»

Reprinted with permission.

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War is Child Abuse: Dissertation Freewriting w/ links

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Yes, I equate war to child abuse—as in, the government abused my unborn childhood when they sent my father to Vietnam in 1967—one of the worst years of Johnson’s escalation.

They sent him to a country that was foreign down to the smells of the place…[see Appy] —put him in kill or be killed positions. He killed a lot of people. [details about the battle]

He also saw friends explode in front of him. In mid-sentence, he would say: “one minute he was talking to me then he was just gone.” He always laughed in a “can you fucking believe that?” kind of way—shaking his head.

It’s laugh or go further crazy, I reasoned.

He has bullet shrapnel in his leg. They dumped Agent Orange on him. He survived to carry a purple heart, and a bronze star for going above and beyond to save the friends that didn’t explode in front of him, and for killing a lot of poor rice farmers in the process.

I think his medals shame him. He refused to leave them to me in his will.

“I’ll put them in a nice case, display them in my home, to honor you.” I argued. “I mean, you’re literally a war hero, dad.”

“Killing people.” he told me, “is nothing to be proud of.”

My adult life has been a search for answers about my father’s time in Vietnam. My hope has always been to understand the emotional dynamics of war and war trauma—of what happened to my father—through the literature of traumatized soldiers.

This life study has added context to my childhood memories, inspired this website, and led to a deeper healing, forgiveness than counseling alone can offer.

It has not been a pleasant journey. War is the ugliest of human phenomenon. Innocent civilians, soldiers, marriages, families, and childhoods—war destroys everything it touches. War is poison. It should be abolished. I wish to contribute my voice to that argument.

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Zen and the Art Of

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I was supposed to be following my breathing. I was supposed to stare at this white wall—“the emptiness of it”—and silently “count my breaths.”

Simple Zazen: Breath in and count one. Breath out and count two. When you reach ten, begin at one again.

I was supposed to sit on this hard buckwheat pillow, legs in a half-pretzel pose, and learn to ignore what the Zen Master called my monkey mind—“always fidgeting around!”

“You are undisciplined!” he told me in our private talks. “You emotionally react to your thoughts!”

He folded his monk’s robes in a fluid motion and relaxed into a full lotus. It was like watching a dancer move, or a serious athlete. He sat directly across from me. Very close. Too close. I could smell the onions on his breath. He continued his speech.

“For most people, getting emotional about thoughts isn’t much of a problem,” he began poking me gently in the forehead, “but that imagination of yours is dangerous, boy. You must tame it.”

When I first met the master,  I told him that, as a child, I would uncontrollably imagine entire narratives for strangers.

For example, if I saw a person genuinely smiling—the smile that hits the eyes—I’d compulsively create a story to explain that happiness. I’d weave an entire tale that ended with that one smile.

It was my private game, sort of. I mean, I assumed everyone did it, and I generally enjoyed it.

Unless people’s misery caught me. Particular looks of suffering,  scowls or deeply sunken eyes,  depressed tones of voice—any of these cues could thrust me into a dark fantasy. Deeply unhappy people overwhelmed me.

On several occasions, these are emotional memories, I literally burst into tears, wept over the look in a stranger’s eyes. Flashback: “Oh what a cute baby!” Explosive sobs. My poor mother.

The Zen Master had heard enough. He sat me on an earthy crunchy pillow, and told me to:

“Detach from your thoughts. All that you are is breathing. Follow your breathing and ignore your monkey mind.”

He sat to the left of me, facing me, upon a three foot raised platform: to watch.

“Do not move!” He commanded. He always bellowed his voice. I always flinched, involuntarily. “Do not move, I said!” Again and again.

As I sat there breathing, I could see him peripherally: a wooden statue frozen in the corner of my mind. Stone. Rigid. Watching me. Not even blinking.

What is this person? I thought.

Then I felt the bamboo reed on my left shoulder. See, the advanced students strode silently around the meditation hall. This was their meditation. They were training to be masters by watching the beginners for signs of wavering focus—“slouching, a slight fidget, breathing too noisily.” The master had explained all of this.

The bamboo reed was an offer of assistance. My hyper-focus on the looming master was setting off major alarms. I had moved my right foot, slightly.

“Would you like some help?” the reed figuratively asked me. The master was watching, and I wanted to please. I said yes in the way I was trained to: hands together and raised to my forehead.

The first two quick whips were sharp–like two wasps stinging my right shoulder. The second couplet—to my left shoulder—were harder. They felt like belt straps.

The four lashes jerked my spine straight. I stared at my wall.

Breath in and count one! Breath out and count two! When you reach ten, begin at one again!

I put the pain to the side, but I did not ignore my thoughts. I thought about my father. I was twenty-two years old, and I hadn’t seen or heard from my dad in over ten years. His war trauma had ripped my family apart. By my eleventh birthday, he was court ordered to remain far away. And he did.

In many ways, this is where my story begins.

Chapter One: I was hanging out with these abusive Zen-assholes for a few months. I don’t know why I was there. I guess I was looking for something. Anyway, this one night, one of them gave me a good old-fashioned beating! And I fucking took it. In fact, I asked for it. Can you believe that shit? I let this scrawny, cue ball motherfucker whip me with a bamboo reed!

Thank you, sir! May I have four?!

I couldn’t fucking believe it. I mean, I just sat there wounded, pretending to meditate, thinking over and over and over again, like a new mantra: Fuck, I have to find my father.

#njpoet

 

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I can teach anyone almost anything, but…

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When it comes to explaining myself—the author, Charles Bivona—I really suck. People are generally dumbfounded by my groping attempts at self-literary analysis.

Many have constructively criticized my writing, my many blogs, my political poetic tweeting.  What’s this all about? they ask me. I think they sense the conflict at the foundation of my character.

See, on the one hand, I’m a nine-year-old boy who dreamt of being Walt Whitman. I celebrate myself and sing myself, and all that jazz.

On the opposite hand, I’m a ten year old boy who saved his mother’s life by damn near killing his own father, or at least snapping and trying to.

Luckily, the above-mentioned love of poetry saved my mind. Poetry gave me an outlet. I know it’s a huge cliché, but it’s true: I started writing in a journal when I was five.

On a parallel third hand, I’m a man who pushed through twenty years of intensive psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, group therapy, daily Yoga practice, meditation, and serious Buddhist training—all to get a grip on the trauma of growing up with my violently unstable Vietnam Vet father. I considered becoming a Buddhist monk, but I really love sex. True story.

I still wanted to be Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg, and T.S. Eliot, and, and, and…So, I followed this path of least resistance all the way to graduate school. I am now in the last lap of my PhD program. I study Modern History and Literature with an emphasis on War Poetry—specifically, the Vietnam War. The war my father re-enacted in my living room has become a career. The aging Buddhist monk in me insists that this is an example of very good karma.

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