Jimmy Went To 'Nam

“The dead know only one thing…that it is better to be alive”

-Full Metal Jacket

“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” 
―The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

This happened a while ago. And I’ll never forget it.

It was a few years ago now…maybe 3 or 4. I was working for a dispatch phone sex service located in New Jersey. This meant that a secretary would call me at my home in Toronto, and tell me what the caller wanted ahead of time. I had 6 characters (college age white girl, black girl, Asian girl, transsexual, MILF, dominatrix) they assigned me when I got hired to pick from. I’d pick the character, and the secretary, after processing the clients credit card information, would patch me through. All the secretaries had accents and sounded like Janine from “Ghostbusters”, like they were shouting through their noses from across a football field. 

One fateful day, I got a call, as one does while working a phone sex line. I was living in a shitty, dirty, room in a run down party house with a bunch of people who hated me. I was a hard core agoraphobic and my cat was my best friend. I had become a phone sex worker after being inspired by watching Spike Lee’s “Girl 6”. 

The dispatcher told me that the caller wanted me to be a young buxom blonde who was sexy and bubbly and talkative and fun loving. I thought that the caller wanted a vapid party girl, some hair flipping, giggly airhead. 

I was, like I so often am, terribly wrong. The callers name was Jimmy. He was maybe in his late 50’s or early 60’s, and he didn’t want a giggly airhead.

Jimmy had served 4 tours of duty in the Vietnam War. That comes to roughly 4 and a half years of time in combat. 

I’m from Canada, so, until Jimmy, I had only ever met a Vietnam vet once, in Detroit. He was a homeless man with a dope vintage coat that I had the exact replica of at home (take that, style). 

The Vietnam War is a faraway thing for me, it’s a time and place that is totally constructed from movies of varying quality, CCR and Time photojournalism. 

Jimmy had been drafted. He grew up on a farm, and had the extreme misfortune of being young, male, and able bodied at a time when the country he was born in was willing to throw him to the dense jungles and the merciless Viet Cong.

No one, especially in hindsight could have blamed these men for draft dodging, but, I was assured by Jimmy that this wasn’t an option. The shame of fleeing was intense, both for the men and their families…especially when so many young men came home in coffins. It was deeply dishonourable, and better to die for an unjust war than run.

So Jimmy went to ‘Nam. Jimmy went and fucked every whore in sight. He, along with his fellow soldiers, fucked as only doomed men could fuck.

Jimmy caught the clap more times than he could remember. The treatment for the clap was something he referred to as a “router treatment” that seemed to involve snaking a tube into the urethra. It was deeply unpleasant. His squad leader kept asking him why he wouldn’t just use the condoms that were issued to all soldiers. Jimmy said that no one used the condoms that they were issued, except on their feet. The condoms kept their feet dry in the oft wet jungles, and everyone feared trench foot the most. The clap was fine, but trench foot was truly the worst. 

Jimmy was proud to say that he left Vietnam with perfect feet. 

There were constant rumours about “The Black Clap” a version of the STD that made your dick rot off. If you caught the Black Clap, the legend claimed, you would never be allowed to go home. You’d be be sent to a sort of leper colony for the dickless and brave. 

The Black Clap has always been a military rumour, but Jimmy and his soldiers didn’t know and didn’t seem to care. 

I asked Jimmy once, out of the blue, if he had ever burnt down a village. 

He told me, quietly, that yes, he had. I asked him why. He told me because he was ordered to. That’s all it was, orders. So, Jimmy and his platoon burnt villages, killed the livestock of the people who lived there, yelled, and brought angry aimless terror to people of the land they were sent to save from the horrors of communism. 

Jimmy learned Vietnamese when he was a soldier, but he couldn’t remember it now. He was never sure if he even really understood it back than, or if it was some made up bastardized version of the local tongue filtered through the chaos of combat. 

Jimmy smoked a lot of weed back than, which, on the one hand eased the anxiety that comes from knowing that you could potentially get stalked and killed by a Viet Cong at any given moment, but on the other hand greatly increased your chances of being stalked and killed by a Viet Cong at any given moment. 

When his time with the army was over, Jimmy went back to the U.S, to sunny California. He walked into a bar the day he came back, and met a buxom blonde. She was the first person he talked to when he came back home. They got married. She was the love of his life. 

A little over ten years before Jimmy called me, his wife died of cancer. They didn’t have children, only each other. 

Jimmy had taken to calling phone sex services. He called my service looking for someone who sounded like her. I was the one he chose. 

He would talk to me, but than he would talk to her too. He would reminisce with her. He would ask me, “do you remember this…?” And I would say, “yes, of course.” And we’d laugh together like we were sharing a memory. 

He never cried. He never got upset. He was just happy to talk to her. 

The first time I realized what he was doing, I cried when I got off the phone with him. I cried because it was so sad, and so moving to me that he had found a way to soothe his grief. 

At the time, I was feeling the effects of the rape I had experienced, and have written about in previous blogs. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing the effects of PTSD, which is something Jimmy and I had in common, unbeknownst to me. 

PTSD is what happens to you when you encounter a malevolence that you are not prepared for. We all know that evil exists. It’s another thing to have evil find you specifically and try to destroy you. When evil is no longer an abstract thought and becomes a reality that you are experiencing, it changes you on a molecular level. It’s so shattering that it can be difficult to reconfigure yourself and your relationship with the world around you, or even with yourself. 

This is why soldiers can have such a time reentering society. They have just come from the hellscape of the battle field, and now they are expected to leave that behind and resume living alongside people for whom the battlefield is just an abstraction. Good luck with that. 

I was a really shitty person when Jimmy called me. I’m not going to blame my trauma entirely for this, because I chose to become shitty in some ways. Talking to Jimmy was the nicest thing I did for anyone. And, I was getting paid for it, it wasn’t something I was doing altruistically. I just happened to sound like his dead wife. 

I doubt I really even sounded like her at all. I bet I was just good to talk to for Jimmy. It was just coincidence. 

Around this time, something else happened that changed me. I was out one day, taking my daily, quick, paranoid trip to the store. I was waiting for a light to change when I heard a woman’s voice saying “excuse me?”.

I turned, and saw a woman a few feet away from me, and saw she was holding a laser stick. People could hear her, and were walking right past her. I sidled up to her and asked if I could help her. She needed help crossing the street to get to the streetcar stop. I took her arm and helped her. Her eyes were very clouded and sunken in. I would guess that she was born blind. She smelt nice and her skin was soft. She needed help, but there was nothing to pity about her. She had no sight, but she was still living her life more fully than I was. 

It wasn’t some grand humanitarian gesture, but, it was the nicest thing I had done in the longest time. It gave me a glimpse into a side of myself that I could let live if I really wanted to. 

Vietnam’s history is a treacherous one. Colonized by the French for over 80 years, they fought for a decade to expel them (along with the Imperial Japanese), only to face a 20 year war that saw their land and their people literally raped and terrorized by foreign armies and their own country men. Agent Orange was dumped upon their lush lands and a 12 million gallons of the dioxin, an extremely toxic biological weapon, was placed into their soil and the DNA of all that were exposed to it, causing decades of mutations and environmental issues. 

Despite this legacy, as well as the adjacent tyrannical rule of Pol Pot in Cambodia, a country that hugs the borders of Vietnam, for 20 years, Vietnam has rebuilt itself. The North and South were reunified following the Vietnam War. It has diplomatic relations with almost every country in the world, belongs to the WTO and the United Nations, and is one of the world’s fastest growing economic centres, and poverty rates have been reduced significantly since reforms were introduced in the 80’s. No small feat for a country that is only one of four one party socialist states in the entire world.

Unfortunate sons got shipped off to a war in a country where they put a toxin into the land that ruined the soil and made the natives babies come out twisted like monsters. But those people put businesses on that haunted land and made money and created lives for themselves regardless. They would not be defied by those events of the past. By those pictures frozen in time on the covers of magazines. They would not let that be them forever. That might be the Western world’s image of them, but it is not the image that they have of themselves. They saw a future, and showed the world what they could see. 

Maybe that is why Jimmy was always so happy when he spoke to me. He could see something I couldn’t. He was a smart guy, he was a fan of science. Maybe all I could see was a man who had suffered tragedy, but he could see himself differently. Maybe he could see his whole life inside his own mind’s eye and knew about infinity and the parallel universes of the past, present and future and  he could see her, alive, at some point in time, and time stretches,  and he found a way to save her from time itself and brought her back to where he is now, and so she really was here, with him, and he knew she would never die as long as he was alive and could remember her. He could always jump back and save her and they could always be together in some sort of way. 

How could anyone ever be sad when they can do something like that?

"“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.” 

-The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien