Mike Boehm

I served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, one year in Cu Chi with the 25th Infantry Division, G-3 Plans, and six months in Vung Tau. I didn’t go to Vietnam for patriotic reasons. I didn’t know anything about communism (or democracy for that matter) or where Vietnam was located on a map. Like many boys throughout history I went to war to please my father.

I drifted through my year and a half in Vietnam during the war and returned home seemingly unaffected by the war.

It wasn’t until a few years after I returned from the war that I began coming across information that countered the reasons given by our government for why we went to war with Vietnam. I attended the Madison Area Technical College from 1976 to 1978 with my schooling paid for by the government because I was a veteran. The summer between those two years, 1977, was when all the information I had come across concerning the Vietnam War jelled and I went to my mother’s house, went to the attic, and then took my uniform and medals and threw them in the trash. At the beginning of the second year at MATC I went to the Veteran’s representative and told him I wasn’t going to accept the GI Bill money for schooling anymore because it was ‘blood money’. He was furious because that wasn’t playing the game. But that gesture was too little, too late, the war was over and I couldn’t undo my part in it.

RETREAT FROM SOCIETY
Over the succeeding years I began to look into our other wars, military and economic, and I realized that the Vietnam War was not an aberration. I began a steady retreat from society until, finally, I ended up living in a shack with no plumbing or electricity in the country outside of Madison. I couldn’t participate in a society with a history such as ours and whose only reason for existing seemed to be consumption.

In retrospect, life in the shack turned out to be a necessary transition period for me. It gave me time to heal and think. It was during that period that at age 40 I learned to play the fiddle. I also took in orphaned young wild animals to nurture them until they could fend for themselves and then I released them. I kept my circle of friends with whom I played music, went bird watching, and canoed. It was toward the end of my stay in that shack that I took the step that would lead me back to Vietnam.

VIEQUES
In 1991, I went with a group of carpenters to Vieques, Puerto Rico, to help rebuild houses destroyed by Hurricane Hugo. I had never heard of Vieques before and was to learn that our navy had, for nearly 50 years by that time, been shelling that small island for practice. Aside from the complete disruption of life on that tiny island cancers rates had soared from the chemicals released from the shelling. Learning this ramped up the hatred I already felt toward my government but for the first time in my life I discovered that by building, creating, in that context, I was able to transfer anger and hatred into peace. Flying home afterward I immediately began thinking about using my carpentry skills in Vietnam.

RETURN TO VIETNAM
The following year, 1992, I traveled with eleven other Vietnam veterans to Vietnam for the first time since the war under the auspices of the Veteran’s Vietnam Restoration Project (VVRP). VVRP, for years, has been raising funds to build clinics in Vietnam and then gathering Vietnam veterans to go to Vietnam and work alongside the Vietnamese to build these clinics. I will always be grateful to VVRP for that opportunity to return to Vietnam because it was a profound life-changing experience for me.

As we worked on the clinic I realized I was having serious emotional problems being back in Vietnam. I was lashing out at the others and in the privacy of my room breaking down in tears. This was completely unexpected because I felt I had no trauma from the war. I worked in an office during the war. I never fired a gun and I never saw a body during the war. When I could finally sort out my feelings I realized the problems I was having came down to one question, ‘why?’. As I got to know the other American veterans I was working with I began to hear their horror stories of the war and then I learned of the horror of their lives after the war; drug abuse, alcohol abuse, suicide attempts. Then I would hear the Vietnamese stories. The Vietnamese man who was in charge of building the clinic was extremely tense around us. We finally learned that his whole family, his wife and all his children, were killed in an American bombing raid. The intensity of the bombing was such that their bodies were essentially vaporized and all he could do to bury them was to gather up the soil with the bits of their bodies mixed in and bury that. That question ‘why?’, why all that death and destruction, was making me crazy.

What finally arose from this stew of emotions was to go to My Lai. I had long ago come to think of My Lai as representative of the Vietnam War, that the war itself was an atrocity. After the clinic was finished five of us veterans traveled to Hanoi by van and on the way north I insisted we stop at My Lai. When we got there I took my violin which I had brought with me to Vietnam and in front of the statues depicting the angry and defiant Vietnamese I played ‘Taps’. Although ‘Taps’ is a military tune, for me it has always meant farewell and rest in peace. I played for everyone, Vietnamese, Americans, Koreans, everyone who had suffered and died in that war. It was tough to play. We were all crying and my hands were shaking badly. But I finished, bowed, and then we left.

After I returned from Vietnam to my shack, and the emotionally dust had settled, I realized I wanted more of whatever it was I had just experienced. And only a few months later I got my wish.

In late 1992 I received a phone call from Carol Wagner who had heard of my interest in Vietnam. Carol had led a study tour of women to Vietnam on behalf of Global Exchange in the fall of 1992. A number of us met at the Friends Meeting House in Madison to watch her slides. Afterward, Carol told us that while their group was in Vietnam they had received a proposal by the Quang Ngai Women’s Union to fund a micro-credit project for the poor women of My Lai. She said that while Global Exchange applauds this concept, loan funds are not the kind of programs Global Exchange funds so would we be interested in taking over this proposal. We eagerly agreed, and for me, there was no looking back.