In the huge many-layered Port Authority bus terminal in New York, where long-distance buses are always leaving for the farthest places, you can feel in touch with the whole immense continent, all fifty states. New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago, say the bus indicators like a great Walt Whitman chorus of America, America. Hellos and goodbyes are forever being said as new chapters start to live or old ones end in front of you. It’s not unusual in this demonstrative city to see a weeping mother or wife or girl friend waving off a bus even in peacetime, dashes of grief in the flood of travellers rolling through the vast halls. But now there are newcomers to the scene who have intensified this aspect: newcomers who seem like ghosts of the forties or the Korean fifties, as if they must reappear in every generation. Kids, fresh-faced, as polished as apples, off to the front, now pass you, or returned veterans in their early twenties, sometimes with a leg or an arm missing or a heavy limp.

Hunt is on for ex-GI deserters in UK: archive, 21 October 1970 Read more

You see them having a last drink in the bar beside the bus terminal or in one of the many wilder bars in the neighbouring streets: 42nd Street is only a block away. You also see them in the long waiting-room on the ground floor or sitting upstairs where the police wake up any sleeping vagrants, or, in fact, any not very well dressed sleepers; I have even seen them waking up sleeping servicemen, which seems like a gesture back to the fading peace-time when a serviceman was just another traveller, not likely to be in any more danger than the rest of us in the city streets. Now you’re aware he might be off to Vietnam and you give him more sympathetic consideration. Before, the odd one who was high and noisy in the terminal was regarded as a nuisance to be silenced if possible; but now he’s a figure for concern, perhaps controlling his fears that way – or even his memories.

It’s sometimes hard to spot the veterans without the tell-tale wounds. I have been caught out a few times, and remembering the Second World War servicemen and even the memory-burdened veterans from the First World War who still cannot forget in their sixties and seventies and eighties, I am careful not to lay myself open to playing psychiatrist or priest. One is sympathetic, of course, but an unloaded memory, though it lightens the other person’s burden can greatly increase one’s own to the point of vicarious depression. A depression is bad enough if earned by one’s own experience, but when inherited from someone else it is as if a stranger has willed you his debts.

Most of the Vietnam veterans whom I have met in the bars want only to drink – that quick down-in-one disposal of a Scotch as if their bus is leaving that minute or a bugle is about to blow. Even if they try to talk to the barman or one of the other drinkers, it’s usually about baseball or what’s showing on the television set above the bar, the usual safe bar-room topics – in their case a little intensified perhaps, as if it was just such a routine scene that had once made them so nostalgic for home in Vietnam.

Occasionally, just occasionally, someone will want to talk about what is on his mind and then is the time to be cautious, to drain one’s glass and make for the door. Perhaps a man with an obvious wound will want to tell how he got it. You feel embarrassed, as if he’s accusing you of being lucky – of staying at home. Sometimes a soldier who has killed wants to talk about it. He usually makes it very light-hearted or at least wry, ironic; careful, anyway, not to show too much feeling. Either he’s building up his own picture of himself or, worse still, behaving the way he thinks we expect him to, or surreptitiously confessing. Whatever his aim, it’s an experience to avoid.

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