The whole time we were in Vietnam we were mentally preoccupied with going home. We had high hopes of things we were going to do when we made it back home, or to "the world." For those of us who made it home, it was unsettling to see the radical changes in people resulting from the Vietnam war. The majority of Americans didn't want to hear about what we had gone through in Vietnam. A lot of the college students acted as though we had betrayed the country by going to Vietnam. Most of my former high school friends were doing various kinds of drugs. The drugs of choice seemed to be marijuana, hashish, cocaine and hallucinogens like mescaline and LSD which tend to distort reality. Others were also shooting up drugs such as methamphetamine and heroin. A lot of our big plans of what we were going to do when we got home had to be put on the back burner. There were no jobs and the country was a political mess. Mass protests were taking place all across the country to end the war in Vietnam.
After surviving Vietnam, I now had to assimilate into this unfamiliar American culture. The Vietnam experience, however, had instilled in me a need to think more in practical terms which conflicted with older traditional American standards. The Vietnamese didn't see a need to wash their dishes with soap and water. They just brushed the left over food off and set them aside. They didn't shower every day, or even once a month. They didn't have showers, or a different set of clothes every day. When I was there, I was lucky to get a shower once every two months. They really didn't have anything except each other and that's what they seemed to think was most important.
It's difficult for some people to understand that I no longer have to have a new car or a new house. They just can't seem to comprehend it. Money is good to have, but most people can't seem to see how some one can be happy without much of it. In Vietnam, it was a blessing not to have the monsoon rains pelting down on us, and good fortune to have water to drink in the dry seasons. It was especially nice when we weren't getting shot at for a few days in a row. Needless to say, since Vietnam, things money can buy don't give me the amount of satisfaction that they used to be able to.
After making it back to "the world", I found that it wasn't much like the one I used to know. As I look back, I find it hard to describe mainstream society. I guess the easiest way to describe it is to say there was no common set of standards, values or beliefs. Society seemed to have lost its cohesiveness. It appeared to be torn apart into two major categories, pro-system or anti-system; "system" was in reference to the U.S. government. I didn't quite identify with either side when I first got home. I wanted to be practical and do the practical thing, but nothing seemed practical. Consequently, I just kind of went along with the crowd in order not to loose any friends. It was kind of a blind approach to life. Originally, I'd been fortunate enough to grow up as a lower middle class blonde haired, blue eyed, Anglo Saxon. Other than Vietnam, I hadn't experienced the hardships that the poor and the minorities experienced from discrimination. I felt very much in control of my life and wasn't necessarily bound to any governing authority other than the the ones I had to go through to get a good paying job.
Pressure to conform to traditional societal norms came mainly from my biological father. However, for some reason, I didn't share his same values and beliefs, quite the contrary actually. Some things seem to take time to figure out. Sayings such as, "There's one on every corner, they're a dime a dozen, and a penny a pocketful," didn't seem to ring true to me. This was in reference to having more than one sexual relationship at a time of course. When I had a relationship with a female, I took it seriously. At this point, I'm sure many would say, "why?," life is only a game as in, "The goose hangs high, better luck next time, and learn how to play the game!!" I've refuted the argument that life is a game on more than one occasion....
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