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At Newark airport, I climbed into a taxi. Wearing my uniform with all my ribbons and my Vietnamese airborne beret, I kept waiting for the driving to make a big fuss and exclaim "Hey! You're just back from Vietnam, aren't you!" Nothing. So I fed him hints like, "Gee, I haven't seen Newark for a while." But he dropped me at my mother's place with scarcely a word... I was pretty disoriented. I couldn't think about anything but Vietnam. The war was all over the newspapers, but people seemed not to care. Even when Mom introduced me to a few of her friends, they only said things like, "Well, I guess now you'll be able to get on with your life." No one wanted to know about Vietnam: the public wasn't caught up in the war, not at all like the spirit I remembered from my boyhood, during World War II. After two days I wanted to run through the streets yelling, "Hey! In Vietnam people are dying! Americans are dying! How can you act like nothing is happening? (en) |
