From the day I was born, I was trained to be a soldier, encouraged in the way I was brought up to hunt, kill, dominate, rule, and control my environment. My family life was a form of war, filled with anger and violence, which made it no different from that in most of the houses around mine.
At the age of seventeen, I went into the military because I did not know what else to do, and my father had suggested it would make a man out of me. I was a high-school athlete, used to discipline and exerting physical strength. A local journalist said that if he had to charge a hill with anyone, he would want it to be with me.
By my second day in the military, I realized I had made a mistake, but I didn’t know how to get out. So instead I learned to be the best soldier I could. I trained with the intent to be a ranger, and I became very skilled in killing. In my training, I learned to dehumanize the enemy, and in the process was dehumanized myself. I remember a huge drill sergeant screaming obscenities in my face, then taking out his penis and urinating on me. I felt that there was nothing I could do.
I was sent to Vietnam, where I was a crewman on helicopter gunships and “slicks,” which were used to transport troops into and out of battle. By my eighteenth birthday I had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people.
In 1967, I was shot down for the fifth time; two of my crewmates were killed, and the other was critically wounded. As I lay pinned in the overturned helicopter, I could smell the fuel leaking and hear gunfire hitting the fuselage. I was convinced I would die, and I believed I should die: I hated myself and what I had done. But I did not die. I was hospitalized for nine months, and at the age of twenty I was discharged from the military.
I flew home a highly decorated soldier in uniform. On the way, as I changed planes in Newark, I was approached by a very attractive young woman. I thought she wanted to talk, but instead she got within inches of my face and spit on me.
I stayed drunk and high for the next fifteen years. I needed intoxicants to numb the anger and violence inside me. I joined in the antiwar movement, not because I believed in peace, but because I was against the way the war in Vietnam was being fought. I found the peace movement to be violent and ugly. Vietnam veterans were prized as long as we could serve the movement’s purpose. But the peace demonstrators, like the rest of the country, were not there to help us.
In 1970, I made the first of many extended trips outside the U.S. I left the country because I was embarrassed to be an American, and could no longer stand to listen to talk about the war. In 1974, I bought a one-way ticket from London to Tehran. I neither spoke the language nor had any idea what Iran was like; I just knew it was far away.
In Iran, it became more and more difficult to keep a lid on the simmering violence within me. I saw the secret police (the Savak) come into a family’s home, take away every male above the age of sixteen, and imprison him without trial for ten years. A cabdriver stiffed me for fifteen cents, and I trashed his car with my bare hands. I knowingly put myself at risk, hoping I would die, because I could not stand to live with myself.
Finally, one night, the Savak took me away and interrogated me for ten days, trying to make me confess to being a spy. During the interrogation, they broke four ribs on one side, five on the other, cracked both my cheekbones, ruptured my spleen, and sodomized me. In the end, they just threw me out on the street. I survived, though I didn’t want to. My response was to act out even more violently, and I ended up in jail two more times.
By 1990, I was back in the U.S. and had shut myself up in my house, afraid to leave. When I walked outside and heard jets flying overhead, I cringed and saw treelines going up in napalm and young Vietnamese fleeing their villages. In the grocery store, I couldn’t take a can of vegetables from the shelf for fear it was booby-trapped. The feelings were vivid, and I struggled to maintain my hold on reality.
A social worker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told me there was a Zen monk who’d had some success helping Vietnam veterans. She did not mention that he was Vietnamese. Six months later, someone else told me about a retreat for Vietnam veterans run by this same man. I telephoned the retreat center and registered, not because I wanted to, but because nothing in my life was working and I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted my life to be different. Terrified, I went to the retreat.
I knew how to build walls against terror. I had ridden on helicopters as fifty-caliber tracer rounds came at me, glowing as big as softballs; and when you see one, there are four that you do not. I learned ways to deny the terror and just go forward. But when this Vietnamese monk, whose name was Thich Nhat Hanh, walked into the room and sat down, I looked into his face and started to cry. I realized at that moment that I knew the Vietnamese people only as the enemy. And if this simple, peaceful man was my enemy, then surely everyone was my enemy.
One of the first things Thich Nhat Hanh said was “You veterans are the light at the tip of the candle: you burn hot. You have the ability through your experience to help in the transformation of the world, to transform the violence, to transform the hate, to transform the despair. You need to talk.” And he said, “The nonveterans need to listen. The veterans deserve to be understood. To understand someone, you need to place yourself in his or her skin.”
Whenever I had tried to talk about these things, people had told me I was too intense; they couldn’t deal with me. I now understand that they were really saying, “My relationship with you makes me touch parts of myself that I do not want to touch.”
Thich Nhat Hanh said that the nonveterans were more responsible for the war than the veterans, and I knew he was right. In Vietnam, 57,693 Americans died in combat. Since the end of the war, more than 58,000 veterans have killed themselves. Many have ended up on the streets or in prisons. We have been marginalized.
After the retreat, I approached Sister Chân Không. I wanted to make amends for the killing, but I didn’t have the courage to say that. So I said, “I would really like to go back to Vietnam.” She smiled and said, “You need to come to Plum Village first. Let us help you.” When I told her I couldn’t afford to come, she said they would pay for my plane ticket. This was my enemy. No one in this country had ever offered me an opportunity like that.
When I arrived in Plum Village, Sister Chân Không told me that I would live in the Lower Hamlet, where most of the Vietnamese residents lived. There I was, in a community of four hundred Vietnamese, and every place I turned, another terrifying memory of the war would arise. I could not work hard enough, could not keep busy enough to escape those memories. I would often approach a monk or a nun and try to explain my plight, saying, “I see the young Vietnamese women in their ao-dai coming into the zendo, and I remember a gun run in a village where I was responsible for killing thirty or forty people.” The monk or nun would say, “The past is in the past. There is only the present moment, and it is beautiful.”
I didn’t know how to deal with this. One day, after hearing this spiel yet again from a young monk, I turned around in anger and said, “The past is not in the past for me. It is in the present, and it is ugly.” When I told Sister Chân Không about the incident, she said, “If you are living intensely in the present moment, the past and the future are also here. You just need to be with them like still water.”
I went back to Plum Village the following year, and have since returned twice. On each visit I have to confront my fears over and over again. I need to heal. I need to transform. I need to challenge the principles that I have been taught throughout my life.
The first of the Five Precepts taught by Thich Nhat Hanh is “Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compassion and to learn the ways of protecting the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in my thinking and way of life.” For me, this will be a lifelong practice.
“Finding Peace after a Lifetime of War,” is excerpted from the anthology Engaged Buddhist Reader, edited by Arnold Kotler. Copyright 1996 by Parallax Press. It was originally published in Shambhala Sun. The excerpt appears here by permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California.
