An Open Letter to a Vietnam Veteran

Abstract

The author was a seminary student in Berkeley, California, when she wrote this letter to her partner back home in Florida. She wrote it in part as a term paper for a seminary class on war, specifically the Vietnam War, hence the title “An Open Letter.… ” In the letter she describes their first encounter with each other at Kent State University in the early 1970s when he was newly returned from Vietnam, and they collaborated on the exposure of an agent provocateur in the Kent Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Most of the letter describes their years together as partners, which began 14 years later, and what it was like to watch the increasingly devastating toll on him of the PTSD that resulted from his service as a medic in Vietnam. She details the inadequacies of the term PTSD as descriptor of both the traumas of war and their continuing later effects on body, mind, and soul. She describes an experience of creating a “handmade midrash” in a seminary class, an experience that brought home to her how she felt about her inability to heal him but also her commitment to stay with him and support him in his efforts to be healed and to get across to others, especially youth, the realities of war. The author read excerpts from her “Open Letter” as a memorial service eulogy after her partner killed himself a year and a half later.