Nephew

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San Mateo Middle College High School

Nephew Of Two War Vets

His crystal clear, blue eyes stared back at me. There is a hint of gray in his hair and his face is worn from a long, hard life. Almost forty years old, he laughs like a child. He jokes about the interview and makes up pretend responses. One way he learned to cope with his problems was to laugh. There were other ways he learned to cope, and they were taught through the Vietnam war.
You know, they showed me the grossest things when they came back. My uncles showed me these horrible photos of disassembled bodies and people they had personally killed. Especially my uncle Bob. Bob and Tom both served in the army, but Bob was a bad ass. Just your regular bad ass. Even before the war he had to have the nicest bike and would not take anything from anyone. Not like Tom, he was so mellow. Just about the nicest man you will ever meet. Night and day that is the way to describe them. Damn shame they had to go to Vietnam. I remember taking them to the San Francisco Airport and waving goodbye.
My Uncle Bob's wife Terry was against the war. She hated the idea of Bob leaving her and the kids. She was very into politics and you could never be in a debate with her. If you did not feel the same way as her than you were in trouble. She would fight with everyone about her beliefs on the war. The only people who did not argue with her was my family. We didn't want my uncles to be over there. I was only 11 years old and I didn't know much about what was going on. All I knew was that we were in a war that we were not meant to be in. It wasn't until the past ten years that I have really found out about events that took place during the war. I guess maybe I wasn't coherent enough to understand things.
When my uncles came home we had a big party at my grandmother's house. It was great. My uncles were home. Bob had served 3 years. The crazy man served his two years, and then he went back for more. He was in the machinery part. He would help bring supplies in, but in the beginning he was just a regular soldier. He showed me gruesome pictures of the Vietcong. In the pictures there were mangled body parts, burn victims, and all kinds of other horrors. He also had a list of people he had personally killed. It was like a game for him. It somehow boosted his ego. He was damn proud of his accomplishments, and extremely racist towards Asian people.
My Uncle Tom was a great man. He left the war a good man and came back the same way. His only problem was his conscience. He couldn't sleep right because he felt bad for things he had done in the war. Unlike Bob, Tom pitied the people in Vietnam and wished he had never had to kill them.
When they were in the war they were both heavy drug users. Bob had already been doing some drugs before he left, but when he came back he was worse. They both were doing heroin and red pills. I still don't know what the red pills were, but they were like having downers and uppers at the same time. It gave you this incredible feeling. They would smoke right in front of us. There was nothing wrong with it at the time. My mom would tell them not to smoke in front of my twin and me. Her talking just wasn't enough.
The Vietnam war did not affect me directly. I went to school and had a lot of fun. There were some Asian kids, but we weren't that mean to them. I mean, I would sign up for the army if we went to war, but only if it were a war that affected the United States. I know they wanted to stop the leader because he was a communist, but it didn't affect us or our land. It was not our war.
Vietnam did change my life. I sometimes sit and think about how my life might be if it had never taken place. I wonder if I would be able to support my family better or maybe even finished school. The sad thing is I will never know. When my uncles came home they were doing hard drugs. I looked up to my uncles and respected them a lot. When I saw them doing drugs, I wanted to do them too. My uncles started giving me weed and then later on those red pills. I was only twelve years old. Just a youngster. As their drug use grew, so did mine. I became completely dependent on speed and dropped out of high school. My uncles had made it in life and they hadn't graduated. I did not think I should have to go through all the trouble of going to school.
My Uncle Bob got into a lot of trouble after the war. He couldn't control himself or the drugs. He killed a couple of guys because he thought they were talking about him. He ended up serving 8 years in the penitentiary. This "bad ass" activity seemed the thing to do. I could never kill anyone, but I thought that it made you a man if you went to jail and smoked pot. I didn't know what it would do to me in the long run.
Now I sit here, forty years old and I don't have a job. My Uncle Bob died of a drug overdose in 1985 and my Uncle Tom married a lady more spun out than a spider web. It took me until I was forty to just get my life together. I have been sober for two years and am taking it one day at a time. Somedays it is really hard, and then I see my kids and remember why I go to meetings. I don't hate my uncles for influencing my life. I love my uncles a lot, but I don't like what the war did to them. The war contributed to their drug abuse, which then led to mine. An addiction is harder to fight than any war out there, because it is a war against the mind.

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