Washington, D.C.: Unreal City (Vietnam Notes 37)

Washington, D.C.: Unreal City

D.C. D.C. was wonderful…even in those days of assassinations and marches in the streets and people dying in Vietnam and going to jail for what they believed in or going to Canada or Sweden. Other people, most of whom also believed in what they were doing, were on patrol in Vietnam, pursuing elusive enemies, trying to win in a cause I believed was already doomed.

D.C. Washington: a beautiful city with a grimy, dirty underbelly that those of us who did not truly live there, who were involved with love and peace and national and international events, but were not involved with in its day-to-day life, could not or would not see. Janet Cook wrote about it; but she, too, did not take the time to truly discover what she thought she had found. Instead, she developed a composite of all the suffering children of Washington she could think of and, yes, this was some time after I spent my time in D.C., and publish it to the world. What Cook did was write truth while ignoring fact. Facts can sometime get in the way of truth. She’s been a bad example of ethical misbehavior in journalism classes since then, yet still, she wrote a truth bigger than her lies.

I’ve been a member of a Vietnam discussion group on the internet for almost twenty years and from time to time the discussion veers to the problem of spat upon Vietnam vets. You know the story: those hundreds of spitters just waiting for vets to return from Vietnam. There is no evidence that this ever happened though it may have happened, probably did happen, a very few times. But, fact that it happened often? No. Very few if any Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned to the United States from overseas duty. But, truth: for many of them it felt as if people had spat upon them even if they had not done in fact. I have no problem with that: The metaphor is important even if it is based upon something less factual than those vets believe.

Years after the war, many years, back when troops were returning from the first Persian Gulf War, there was some kind of effort made to reverse the lack of respect given to vets of the Vietnam War. We were, in many cases, invited to participate in the parades for the Iraq veterans. I found that extremely patronizing.

Some truths are simply more powerful than facts. Janet Cook had her Pulitzer stripped from her even though her stories in the Washington Post struck at a truth so powerful no one could deny them. The little boy she made up became a powerful metaphor for almost everything that was wrong in that grimy underbelly that was in the substructure of Washington, D.C. And, damn, the writing was good and the writing was true. It just wasn’t factual. That is also true of the stories of returning veterans from our war.

I am wandering here and I have wanted to write about Washington, D.C., as I experienced is in 1968 and 1969. But that Washington, D.C., was an unreal city. Those of us who lived there temporarily were our own city, separate from, co-existing with, something so real that we could not approach it without killing off what we had brought with us: that sense of idealism that managed to survive knowing, however superficially, where we were, the war we had fought in, those assassinations that had rocked the country. That’s why, many years ago, when some of this was starting to sink in, I wrote this:

Our Lady of the Metro
(originally published in Briar Cliff Review)

At the Metro Station in Dupont Circle
I ascend a steep escalator into a too bright
day, see a slender silhouette with hair flung
wild descend. It could, of course, be you, but

I cannot tell, only the form of an image dropping
downward into dark. A moving step ladder
carries me up, you down, until you develop
like those white sheets of paper in a darkroom,

like an x-ray reverting: meat firming,
packing onto bare bone, body budding
under sheer cloth, legs, waist, face, breasts
growing from dark outline to fleshy fullness

until I can know it is not you, not those lips,
long legs, careless hair. But for a moment
in a mandala of light, her body shaped
against the curve of sky, I longed for faith.

You see, for me, Washington was relief from daily work life at NSA where I continued the work I had been doing in Pleiku, Vietnam. The same old stuff kept happening, day after day, month after month, and, seemingly, year after year. But at 5 p.m. each day, I took off the war with my uniform when I went home to Chillum Heights. I would drive over to Linda’s home in my VW convertible and we would simply forget about the war or I would go into College Park and encase myself in Melville or some minor poet of Renaissance England.

But, some days, Linda and I would hold hands and march with tens of thousands of other people or, at night, we would light candles and walk slowly through the streets of that beautifully unreal yet somehow truthful city.