If you want to truly observe Veterans Day this Friday, go to the Waterworks Visual Arts Center and observe what local veterans have shared for the exhibit, “Through a Soldier’s Eyes.”
There you’ll see photographs from more than 40 years ago, capturing both their youth and their experiences in Vietnam — shirtless G.I.s sharing a Christmas Day meal as they sit on the ground, a small Vietnamese man giving a soldier a 25-cent haircut, screaming children running past bodies on a sidewalk.
You’ll see old boots, newspaper headlines, and notes scribbled on the “Message to a Hero” board.
“Thank you all and God Bless you.”
“Rest in Peace My Brother and Welcome Home.”
And you’ll see a pile of smooth rocks, each bearing the name of a fallen soldier, and all of them filling in a heart-shaped space. Love. Remember. Honor.
We honor veterans for serving our country. But we gloss over their horrible experiences and the war that continues to rage in them long after they come home. Until we get them to break their silence.
That’s what Sharon Raynor did.
“There was so much we didn’t know about my father,” Raynor, an associate professor at J.C. Smith University said during a talk at the Waterworks last Tuesday. She came across his war diary while she was going through a drawer one day, and it opened for her a chapter of his life that he had closed, shutting himself off from the world with it.
He was withdrawn and showed little emotion, she said. He wouldn’t hug his children like other dads did. He didn’t talk about the war — wouldn’t talk about it — until his daughter started asking him and other veterans a lot of questions.
The result was Raynor’s oral history project, “Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans.” Her father is part of a team of veterans who not only shared their stories with Raynor but also became a support group for themselves and other veterans.
Raynor shared film footage of the men talking about being in Vietnam.
• One man told of writing home every night yet going four weeks without hearing anything in return. “Is we still in the world or are we on another planet?” he recalled wondering. “… I didn’t realize what it’s like to be 10,000 miles from home.”
• Said another: “…. Vietnam was not my cup of tea. I had to do it and I did it. … War is not fair to anyone.”
• “I didn’t really live. I just survived,” another man said. Alcohol and drugs were the way he dealt with the war, both in Asia and when he came home, but he neglected people close to him. “I thank God that over the years, things did change.”
Not every soldier battles demons after returning home. But they all have stories to tell — and they are all due respect and honor as we celebrate Veterans Day. “We make war that we may live in peace,” Aristotle said. No one deserves that peace more than the veterans who won it.