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Honorary Member - Veteran
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Wayne Karlin
U.S. Army
D.O.V.E. Fund Honorary Member since 2024
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What a gift to have acclaimed author and Vietnam veteran,Wayne Karlin, join the The D.O.V.E.
Fund at its annual Dinner Auction. Wayne signed copies of "Memorial Days" and enjoyed
meeting veterans and supporters of the D.O.V.E. Fund. We are grateful for his support.
(Comment by Dan Gregg)
Delighted to have been the speaker at the annual D.O.V.E. Fund raising dinner. Some
250 people attended and over $180,000 was raised for building schools and other
projects--including for lepers and Agent Orange aid-in Vietnam by this voluntary
Vietnam veteran organization with no overhead. Over 11,700 students attended schools
built by The D.O.V.E. Fund last year in Quang Tri Province. Here's my speech--and a poem--if
you have the time:
Wayne Karlin:
I’ve been told it is a Vietnamese custom to open a speech with an apology.
At the same time, it’s customary for an American speech to open with a joke.
So I’ll start by apologizing that I don’t have a joke. I’m honored and grateful
to have been invited to speak to The D.O.V.E. Fund foundation. I want to especially thank
Dan Gregg and Nguyen Do for thinking of me, and asking me to join you at this wonderful event.
At times I’ve been asked if I felt any pride in my service in the Vietnam War,
and my response is that on one level I regret my participation in what I came to
believe was a tragic national mistake, while at the same time I take pride in the
courage, camaraderie and sacrifice I witnesssed: the helicopter crews who put
themselves into fire to save lives, the brotherhood of the infantry, and yes,
the less-than-altruistic pride that I had experienced something that those of
my countrymen and generation who did not go will never understand, and who some
are foolish enough to envy. But I believe I take the most pride in the fact
that it has been Vietnam veterans who have taken it upon themselves to go back
in peace in order to bring peace and healing to that country so torn up by their
war, to be healers even as they heal themselves.
The man who for me epitomized that was my friend, our friend, John Borman, who I first met
in May of 1966, when he taught me the art of firing a .50 caliber machine gun from the
port side of a CH 46 helicopter. He struck me from the beginning as an affable
and even gentle man—in all the shades of meaning of that word, yet John knew
and practiced that gunner’s skill fiercely and bravely in the war, and later
he brought that fierceness and courage—and gentleness — to his career as a lawyer,
defending the wronged and exploited, as a peace maker, bringing the force of his
intelligence and compassion to areas of conflict in Africa and in the Middle East.
I hadn’t seen him since the war when he contacted me about the work The D.O.V.E. Fund was doing,
particularly in the construction of the schools in Cam Thanh and Ai Tu, areas where so
many helicopters went down during our time, and where so many were lost—American and the
Vietnamese—then and since then, as you well know. We fell into our frienship again the
way it happens with some friends, an easy taking up of threads as if time had not passed.
John embodied the spirit of reconcilation and the practical work that must accompany
it—as does this wonderful organization. I want to dedicate my part of today’s ceremony to him.
My own form of reconciliation has largely been through literature: my work and vocation
and calling has been story-telling, as a way we can use our imaginations to enter, as
humanly and humanely as possible, into the perceptions and experiences and lives, of other human beings.
“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself,” wrote the story-teller Ian McEwen,
“is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of
morality.” Literature, the poet Lucille Clifton said, “can be a window and a mirror.” We see
into lives unlike our own as if through a window, while at the same time we see that window as
if it is a mirror that reflects ourselves: our own hopes, fears, loves, hates and perceptions.
“I can’t help but feel,” says the teenage girl Hanh who is the main character in the great novel
"The Mountains Sing"
by Nguyen Phan Que Mai, “if people could read each other’s stories, there
would be no war on earth. When I first encountered Vietnamese who had been on the other side
of the war, at least in a situation where we weren’t trying to kill each other, I got to know
them not only by meeting them, spending time with them, eating and drinking with them, but at
a deeper, more human level, through their stories. And since I feel that is the moving spirit
of the D.O.V.E. Fund—you are writing the new stories that will be the final chapters of that war
that previously defined our relationship with Vietnam—and ourselves--I want to end this little
talk not with an apology or a joke, but with a poem I wrote about one of my first experiences
meeting folks who were on the other side.
Drinking with the Enemy
“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete
names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms--
I was the only American at the table. We were all veterans.
Christmas evening in Hong Gai. In the war, one of the men said,
you bombed the church here. He laughed uproariously.
It still doesn’t have a roof, he said. A red plastic Santa Claus
and a green plastic Christmas tree stood in the lobby.
We played a drinking game with glasses of beer.
At the count of three everyone had to drain his glass.
If he couldn’t he had to drink another glass.
We drank to empty ourselves, a film run in reverse.
The man sitting to my right smiled at me, gently, tentatively.
Like many who had been in in the war his teeth were bad,
brown-stained and broken.
His skin was pitted and lined with the years we shared
and didn’t shareand he walked slightly hunched over,
like a farmer looking down at his earth,
or like a man in a rice field crouching under
the sound of my helicopter rotors.
ở đâu? he asked me.
Then: Where? It was his only English word.
He tapped his chest with the carapaced fingers of his farmer’s hand,
trying to dislodge the two questions we all asked each other and the two question we didn’t.
When? Where? Did you try to kill me there? Did I try to kill you then?
I took his hand and pushed it against my chest. Quảng Nam, Thừa Thiên Huế, Quảng Trị, I said.
He grabbed my other hand and pushed it against his chest. I could feel his heart beating hard
through the skin of my palm.
Quảng Trị, Quảng Trị, Quảng Trị, he said. One of the other veterans yelled một,hai, ba, yo!
We drained our glasses ten times. Nine of them for the nine years the man to my right was
there longer than I.
His eyes grew desperate. His farmer’s hand was trembling.
He pointed at his filled glass, pointed to his mouth, tapped his forehead hard
with his blunt, callused finger.
Quảng Trị, Quảng Trị, Quảng Trị, he said, tapping violently
to dislodge the seepage flowing with the beer into his brain,
pushing heavily into the cavities of his heart.
I took the glass of the man to my right from him and I drank it
for him, into myself, all of it, for him. It nested in my chest, an icy stone.
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