A Few Notes About Vietnam (#46)

On the Damned German Language!

In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.
-Mark Twain, Notebook #14, 11/1877 - 7/1878

Vietnam is the war that never ends for those of us who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s. We lived it; we breathed it. We participated in it and marched against it. We saw it every evening on the news and heard about it on the radio. Some of our friends died there and some burned their draft cards as others went to Canada or Sweden. Michael Herr, in Dispatches, wrote “Vietnam, Vietnam. We’ve all been there.” He was wrong, but I know what he meant. Vietnam colored our lives whether we spent a tour of duty or more there or not.

A large number of us both went to Vietnam as soldiers, Marines, whatever, and came back and protested against the very war we were a part of. Some of us who went feel we betrayed them. I don’t think we did. It is not a betrayal to come to the realization that a thing is wrong, even a thing that we became a part of, and then shout out loud that it was wrong. I think we have a moral responsibility to do so.

At any rate, in the summer of 1973, I enrolled in a quasi-submersion intensive German class. I’ve written about it before in an essay called “The Woman of My German Summer” (published in Eclectica and revised for The Texas Review), an essay probably much more interesting than this blog entry since it was filled with romance and loss, learning the vocabulary of German love while staying up late at night in bed and using the point and touch system. What a fine way to study a foreign language! Neither of us knew German when we started and both of us were pretty good when we finished the course. Fifteen hours of language credit for one summer class and we earned every bit of it. I am no longer very good at what Sam Clemens called the “awful German language,” just as I am no longer a good Vietnamese translator/interpreter.

Vietnamese Years Later

I did, at one time, dream occasionally in Vietnamese but that was decades ago. I dreamed, once, that I was moving from one place to another in Austin and had a U-Haul trailer fastened with bungee cords to the back of my VW convertible. As I drove through the streets of Austin, the trailer kept stretching farther and farther behind me. As if it had a mind of its own, it veered from right to left, lept curbs, over-turned people’s propane barbecue pits, took down mail boxes. And then we, the trailer and I, were driving down Highway 14 in Pleiku and over-turning vats of nuoc mam, chased by hordes of Vietnamese women with betel nut-blackened teeth. And then we, turned west onto Highway 19 and I careered on up the hill, the trailer setting off land mines. You should be aware that not once while I was stationed in that area did I ever even see a mine explode! I pulled into Engineer Hill and woke up.

Another time, in San Antonio, I was able to use what Vietnamese I still retained. I was in a Stop ‘n Go (Shamrock gasoline) when the San Antonio Police brought an old woman into the store. She was lost and they were trying to find out where she lived. Bright guy that I was at the time (I make no such claims now), I realized that she was muttering in Vietnamese. I introduced myself to her with words much like these: “Ten toi la Hoang…toi giup do ba duoc?” Okay, no tones because I don’t know how to make them here. I told her (I think) “My name is Hoang.” (That was my Vietnamese name back in Language school and in 1967-1968 in Viet-Nam.) “Can I help you?” I suspect both the tomes I used and the words were not correct, but she stopped muttering and looked up at me. “Ba song o dau?” I asked. (“Where do you live?”) She told me…and I told the police. They took here there. That is, I think, the last time I ever used Vietnamese seriously though I have said Hello,. how are you? in Vietnamese to a few of our international students from Vietnam.

Back to the Subject

I am very much off the subject of this blog. Back to Germany! Back to language study. One afternoon, the students growing restless, student activists on campus called for another march down Guadalupe street. Our German class was meeting that day and one of the team of TAs teaching the class started mouthing off about the United States. We were going to cancel the afternoon session (class met from 9 – 12 and from 1 -4 every day) so we could all march against the imperialism that was American foreign policy. That was too much for me. A German national lecturing us (five of us were graduate students, two of us Vietnam veterans) about imperialism!!! I made a few mild references to the Franco/Prussian War, to WWI and to WWII, and to the generosity of the Marshall Plan that had helped get his country on its feet and him to the U.S.A. to criticize the U.S.A.

I would not have done that with Frau Hilda Schucking, a fifty-year-old TA who frequently talked to me about the Lost Generation of young German men from WWII and how it had affected young German women like her: lack of young men when she was coming of age. That afternoon, somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to him, I caught up with Gerhardt on the march and shook his hand, said We’ll just have to disagree about some things.

That march was somehow not as memorable for me as the march that ended up as a sleep-over under the UT Tower when a young woman and I zipped out sleeping bags together and lay down under the stars while someone in the Tower played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” on the carillon.