Being unemployed gave me a lot of time to be with my fiance. Even though we were together a lot, I couldn't seem to get on the same wave length with her. We both wanted to get married, but I wanted to be sure that our relationship was what it needed to be first, especially in understanding one anothers core beliefs. Even after several months of being together in all kinds of circumstances, I didn't feel as though she knew me well enough on an intimate, or personal level. Aside from her mother's wish for us to marry rather than live together first for a few months, I couldn't see why she was holding the socially acceptable aspects of marriage over the more important aspect of trying to make sure we had it together first. It appeared that she was looking to marry first and whatever else later... I'd always thought of myself as a true blooded American, but my views on life had changed so drastically since Vietnam that going along with traditional all American values was really hard for me to do, and still is...
Meanwhile, my civilian life was falling way short of what I expected it to be. There wasn't any action or excitement to speak of. The activities of fighting in Vietnam, living in the hospitals afterwards, and then protesting against the war in DC were hard to measure up to when it came to doing something meaningful later on. I'd looked forward to coming home from Vietnam with a passion. I thought that if I was ever able to get there, back to "the world," life would be great and a whole lot easier. I was right about it being easier, but it was just a little too easy... And I was only finding remnants of the greatness that I remembered it to be. Other than relationships, there wasn't anything I could see to put myself into 100%.
There were a lot of things that weren't going the way I hoped they would go. I was at my wits end at trying to get a halfway decent job. The relationship I had with my fiance was growing worse by the minute. My mother and step-dad were separating, and my younger brother was running away from home. The family situation was dismal. The world I used to know, including friends and family, was falling apart around me. At the time, it seemed as though it was only happening to me, but later on I realized that there were a lot of veterans coming back from Vietnam that were having the same kind of readjustment situations...
It seemed that the more I tried to remedy the problems in my family and understand the changes our country was going through, the more troublesome everything got. As a result, I was ending up with more questions than answers on things. I felt that I needed a better sense of direction on what to do, so with the spare time I had on my hands, I started searching for some answers. In the process, I read through various articles and books relating to the origin of life as well as to the meaning of it all. My fiance had a few books from her first two years of college that I went through. One of them I read was a text book on the human anatomy. She also had some books on poetry as well as eastern mysticism. From her childhood, she kept a Bible that she never read. Meanwhile, from an outside source, I found a Michigan State University text book on evolution to read. I needed to find something that made sense in the seemingly insane world I was living in...
In order for me to give it my all, like I did in Vietnam and in D.C., whatever I was gonna do, it needed to make sense! There was no way I was gonna commit myself to a job or to a person that I didn't fully believe in. Thanks to the bodily injuries from the grenade, I had enough disability pay coming in every month from the VA to get me through the times when I wasn't working. It was a little cushion that enabled me to spend some time reading on my own. I wanted to get a better understanding of what was going on around me as well as within. One question that continues to remain unanswered to this day is how I made it out of Vietnam alive. In addition to the questions I had, I was finding out that neither the people or the country I lived in, seemed to have any rational explanation for living and believing the way they do...
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