Vet of Other War Has Little to Celebrate

He knows he should not be saying this. He knows America does not want to hear it. Not now, not while we are all so happy.

“I see all these parades for the Gulf War vets,” he said. “I see all the TV specials. I see the ads about how they can get cheap airline tickets and all the rest. And it makes me sick. It just makes me sick.”

His war was Vietnam, and he didn’t get any parades or airline tickets. What he got from his service to his country was a drug and alcohol problem that he now says he has licked.

He is out of work. He gets his last unemployment check on June 9. He and his wife have three small children. They are getting government-subsidized food for the kids. He says their savings are gone. And his nightmare is falling over the edge and becoming homeless.

His name is Robert A. Pearson. He has 20 years experience in construction and a college degree. He lives in the town of Berwick, Pa., on the Susquehanna River. In the last 10 months he has sent out 200 resumes and filled out 100 job applications. He has received 22 responses. One offered a job, but only if he paid $2,000 up front.

Just down the river from Berwick is the town of Bloomsburg, Pa., and it is soon going to have a big parade for the returning Gulf War vets there. Robert Pearson is not going to be one of those lining the streets.

“It’s going to be a huge party,” he said. “Bloomsburg has something like 15,000 people in it, and they are expecting 50,000 to 70,000 at this parade. The whole place is awash in yellow ribbons.

“When I came back from Vietnam, we got fruit thrown at us, not parades. I’m not kidding. It was San Francisco, 1970, and they threw fruit at us.

“Now, it’s these Gulf War guys who are getting the jobs, the free trips, the free rent. Do I resent them? No. I resent the idea of them getting everything. It makes me sick, to be perfectly honest. They went to Saudi Arabia and sat around for eight months. Some of them fought for 40 days. And now they are the heroes. And we are still the rejects.”

His wife recently found work for about half the salary she used to earn. He stays home with the kids, writing letters, sending out resumes. Their medical insurance ran out eight months ago.

“But, hey,” he said. “A lot of people are worse off. I’ll make it. I’ve made it before and I’ll make it again.”

He was born Christmas Day, 1950, and when he graduated from high school in Cocoa, Fla., in 1968, he was neither a flower child nor a rebel with a cause. He was just a kid who had gotten into a bunch of minor trouble and had no idea what to do with his life. So he joined the Army.

“I had never heard of Vietnam,” he said. “I joined the Army to learn construction.”

You never heard of Vietnam? It is 1968 and you never heard of Vietnam?

“I didn’t read newspapers,” he said. “I lived on the streets. I ran away a lot. I didn’t watch TV. I was 17. My mother signed the papers for me. I had signed up to be a construction utilities engineer. It sounded important. I mean it wasn’t the infantry or something like that.”

Not that it made much difference. On Feb. 4, 1969, he stepped off the plane in Saigon in that country he had never heard of. “I reported to the 9th Infantry at Dong Tam,” he said. “I was in a construction unit, assigned to build barracks, retaining walls, helipads. I was there, you know, incoming rockets, attacks on the perimeter. That’s when I first got concerned. It finally hit me: I was going to be shot at.”

In a strange way, however, he liked it. For the first time, he felt a kinship, a sense of family. “I was driving 10-ton trucks by then, and all the truck drivers were comrades,” he said. “It was exciting to carry around a gun all day and run amok in the truck. We were like cowboys.

“Drugs? Oh, yeah. Most of the time we were driving we were high, mostly on pot. I started smoking pot a month after I got in country. Couldn’t avoid it. Never done it in the U.S. There were two little clubs in camp: the Heads and the Juicers. The pot smokers and the drinkers. You were one or the other.”

He got into some trouble, giving the officers a hard time and getting into fights. He never got into court-martial trouble, but trouble enough that the Army decided he needed “counseling,” which amounted to prescribing 500-milligram doses of Valium for him.

“So I’m in Vietnam, taking Valium, drinking, going on R&R; to Bangkok, smoking opium and I’m all of 19,” he said. “By now, we’re getting rocketed regularly and the NVA (North Vietnamese Army soldiers) are coming through the perimeter at night. I’m firing off my weapon mainly out of fear, and I’m a teen-ager.”

He served 18 months in Vietnam and then the rest of his enlistment at the Presidio in San Francisco, which was considered a very plush assignment. He was still in a construction unit, but he got a special little job.

“Funeral detail,” he said. “No, no, not digging the graves. We were the military honor guard. I was either a pallbearer or one of the guys who fired the 21-gun salute. It made me feel bad. Very bad. In Vietnam, the only dead people I saw were Vietnamese. They would prop up the bodies and put sunglasses on them or a cigarette in their mouths. That kind of stuff. I never saw a dead American in Vietnam. And now I was burying them. Everybody standing around, crying. It was bad.”

He and his buddies would go into San Francisco in their civilian clothes, young men, prime of their lives, looking for some fun. But they couldn’t fit in. “It was 1970 and we were walking around in short hair,” he said with a laugh. “So we’d go to the topless bars, stuff like that. I never had the nerve to ask a girl out. I had spent 18 months with Asian whores, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask an American girl for a date.”

He got an honorable discharge, went back to Florida and did construction work. He married, had a child, went back into the Army for three years at a desk job at Ft. Knox, Ky., and eventually got divorced.

He moved to Maryland and got involved in the building boom. “I had gone to college and got my BS degree in electronics,” he said, “and I could have gone to IBM for $12,000 a year. But in construction, I could make $18,000 a year. So that’s what I did.”

He worked for home builders all over the state, becoming a superintendent, making good money. He remarried. His wife had a good job, and eventually they were pulling down about $75,000 a year between them. They had twins, a boy and a girl, and then, 14 months later, another girl.

And then the building boom went bust. He wasn’t working, his wife wasn’t working, and they moved to Pennsylvania to be near her family. Now, each day, every day, he looks for work.

“I’m looking for construction work,” he said. “I have the experience. I pick up phone books and cold-mail resumes to 60 or 70 names. I have sent resumes to people as far away as Kansas City.”

He writes. He calls. He takes care of the kids. He watches television. And he sees the parades and the parties for the veterans of a different war, a happier war, a war we won.

“We were fighting for democracy, and these Gulf War guys were fighting for oil,” he said. “And they are the heroes. A lot of Viet vets are living in the woods; they are having all sorts of mental problems. Look, I’m not that bad off. I know things will start looking up for me. I am not looking for sympathy. But I see what is happening.

“America is trying to ease its guilt. People know they didn’t treat us well, so they’re going to treat the Gulf War vets well to make up for it. OK. Fine.

“But how do you think the guys who were in the rice paddies feel today? They got shot at for two years, and now some of them are wandering the streets homeless. Where was their parade? Where was their TV special? What did they ever get?”

He knows he should not be saying this. He knows America does not want to hear it. Not now.

Not while we are all so very, very happy.