I am heading back to Eger on the 9:59 a.m. train from Veszprem. On either side the land is flat and fertile; vast seas of good farmland, greening as they should in April.
I have been in Veszprem the past two days participating in something called "America Week," a joint effort sponsored by the University of Pannonia and the Veszprem American Corner (which is to say, the U.S. State Department).
The idea of America Week is to bring together speakers across a range of American interests and issues. Some spoke of music and of the arts; some spoke of history, and of philosophy.
I presented on The Moving Wall, the half-scale replica of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial located on The Mall in Washington, DC. (If you would like to read more about The Moving Wall, please visit my blog Rolling With The Moving Wall).
My America Week audience was a mix of faculty, students, and local citizens simply interested in things American. My host and session organizer, Ildy, informed me and my two co-panelists that, as we had a two hour slot to fill, we could each speak for 30 minutes, as opposed to the 20 minutes originally allotted. I was grateful, but in the end I still had to rush to finish.
Because my audience was largely young, and almost exclusively Hungarian, I wasn't sure how much they would know about the Vietnam War and the need for a memorial commemorating not only the sacrifice of those who lost lives or loved ones fighting in it, but also the sacrifice of those who served and lived through it.
And so I told them of the war's having been made visible through advances in journalism, and how, with those advances, the war was also made unpopular. I showed them iconic images of the war's barbarism, gasped at in the front-page photos of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Vietcong fighter Nguyen Van Lem,
of civilians gunned down by Charley Company at My Lai
of children fleeing a napalm bombing.
For many Americans such images came to represent what the war was about. For some Americans, such images came to represent what American warriors were about.
And so I told my audience that when soldiers returned home from Vietnam they were not assured of receiving a hero's welcome. Sometimes they were greeted with bile and spit.
Unsure of their civilian status as Vietnam vets, many who returned home laid low and kept quiet about their tours of duty, hid who they were, went underground. I told my audience what John Devitt, Vietnam vet and creator of The Moving Wall, once told me: that if you were applying for a job, you kept your service record off of your resume; you didn't bring it up in an interview.
I told my audience of Jan Scruggs, also a Vietnam vet, and how, after watching the film The Deer Hunter he felt compelled to do something to reclaim the veterans' collective psyche by creating a memorial to them, and how after some bitter wrangling (with others than Scruggs) Maya Lin's black chevron -- The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, aka, The Wall -- was finally dedicated on November 13, 1982.
I told my audience how John Devitt, who had scrounged money to make the cross-country trip from San Jose, California so that he could be present at the dedication, was so moved by what he saw there that he felt he had to do something, too. Because, I told them, transporting as The Wall was for those vets and their families who visited it, John knew that confronted with financial, physical, or psychological obstacles, many of those most needing to see The Wall never would. Devitt knew that there were broken lives all across America for whom Washington's salvation or emancipation would remain out of reach.
And so finally I told them about The Moving Wall,
And Devitt has come to know a lot of them; perhaps has even become known to them. Without seeking to be, he is sought. One March night, late, while I was visiting him in White Pine, MI, winter home to The Moving Wall, John and I were elbows on the bar at the Konteka Inn, and in the corner sat a shadowy soul. A fellow vet. After a while he slid over a bar stool or two and began speaking with John about veteran's benefits, and the trouble he was having getting his. John gave him some advice, and the man slid back to his shadows. I asked John about post-traumatic stress disorder, something of a new term coined since the Vietnam War to account for some of the psychological troubles Vietnam vets were experiencing, the kind of troubles made cinematic in The Deer Hunter. John told me that every war has produced PTSD, though under different names. Others have said so as well.
Still, Vietnam vets seem to struggle differently than vets of other wars. Perhaps they're just more open about it. Or perhaps their war was categorically different than other wars. Maybe the war in Vietnam lowered the threshold for what it means to be human and to act human. This much is clear: the mind of the American vet in many instances was ill-equipped to process that war. I am thankful that my mind never had to.
I write this because here, in Central Europe, where Jewish survival was solely a matter of luck, where being in the right place at the right time as opposed to the wrong place at the wrong time determined one's lifeline, and where the literature of Hungarian Jews, and no doubt Jews of Poland, Germany, France, and on, and on, can find no reason why some lived and others died, why I lived and you did not, I suspect that those who visit The Moving Wall, and John Devitt himself, wrestle with similar questions.
From the Holocaust, from Vietnam, some have survived, but have never lived beyond their survival; they are flesh hung on bones; spirit, the light, sputters. But some, somehow, have gone beyond surviving, have found a jet within themselves to feed the light, a light that burns not just for themselves, but for others.
John Devitt fought in the Vietnam War. The same war as those whose names appear on The Moving Wall; he returned from the same war as those vets who come searching among the names. But Devitt has managed to survive it in a way that many of his comrades haven't. That night in the Konteka Inn, when I was asking him about PTSD, he finally mused: "Hell: I'm the poster-child for PTSD. My whole life is that war. I've never moved beyond it."
Perhaps. Though it would be hard to imagine that Devitt could have done anything more noble with his life than to have shepherded The Moving Wall for the past quarter century. Consider the alternative: no Moving Wall. What a huge tear that would have left unstitched.
There is a Hebrew phrase, tikkun olam, which means "repairing the world." We are all called to it, to repair the world, but few of us actually do. While he may not realize it, John Devitt has been practicing tikkun olam, has been repairing the world -- year by year, town by town.
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