Everything I Know About Power My Uncles Learned in Viet Nam (Part II)

The second story is less about the private power of family and more about understanding a personal response to public power’s willingness to sacrifice life it feels has no value.  The history of this country is marked by that kind of sacrifice by men just like my Uncles.  As a scholar of the death penalty, I am constantly reminded of the willingness of the state to sacrifice black bodies on the alters of power and progress.  In times of war, this domestic inclination goes international.  As a person who has met men on death row, I also know that, in often small and unacknowledged ways, men like my uncles resist.  In that afternoon of my high school years, my Uncle James would tell me how he also resisted the attempts of the state to sacrifice him for its better good. 

Both my uncles fixed things in the military.  My Uncle Alex repaired ships.  My Uncle James repaired tanks.  My uncle explained the difficulty of moving a tank through a jungle.  I have now spoken with three of my Uncles about their experiences in Viet Nam, and the most common narrative is the brutality of the terrain.  Always wet and bogged down in mud and muck, the war was as much with the nature of the place as with the people. All their accounts gave me the impression of constant movement toward some unspecified point periodically interrupted by the encounters with an unspecified enemy.   When the tank could not maneuver the terrain or just broke under the stress of combat, they would stop.  When the tank stopped, my Uncle James was the first step in the return to forward motion.  In that war with nature and men, movement seemed to be somehow equated with safety.  

Uncle James was the lowest level mechanic. He was only authorized to repair the most basic functions of the tank. He repaired belts, wheels and chains. At least these are the parts my girl child brain recorded.  I am truly unsure if tanks have wheels, but if they did, I am sure my Uncle fixed them.  Because of the emphasis on forward motion, all repairs had to be made within a certain time period.  If he could not make the repairs in the specified time, he would be left on his own to make the repairs and he would follow with the next unit to cross his path.  They would leave him alone in a jungle in Southeast Asia. They would leave him, like black men and poor men of all races before him, as a lamb awaiting slaughter for America’s obsession with forward motion. But, my Uncle would not lie down.  He would resist.  He understood who he was and the meaning and manipulation of power.

 All more complicated repairs had to be made by mechanics with higher levels of training—the upper echelon.  The upper echelon consisted, as I was told, mostly of white men.  Maybe these men had some college or just more training from the army. I do not know.  They were responsible for the sophisticated repairs and my uncle the simple.  If my Uncle could not make the repair, the sergeant would be forced to call in the upper echelon allowing my Uncle to continue with his unit.  In true military fashion and in the life all my Uncles later lived, the division of labor was rigid.  My uncle was not the in the upper echelon in Viet Nam nor in the United States.

By the time I was interviewing him about his experiences in Viet Nam, he had created a different life than the one he lived immediately after his return.  All of my uncles returned to various parts of the U.S. broken and drinking.  The need to self-medicate was not completely motivated by the loss of Viet Nam.  My Uncle James used alcohol to push back the memories of war, to numb the pain of being spit upon by anti-war protesters on his return, and surely to lighten the load of baggage her carried with him from the poverty of Jim Crow Texas.   Most of my Uncles would sober by the time I was in middle school.  My Uncle James’ transformation would be the most profound.  He returned to Philadelphia to find his wife, child and business gone. He went to work at a tool and dye factory.  He drank and then he stopped.   Then in the mid-nineteen eighties, he heard the calling.  He went to seminary at night and got a degree in theology. He would then spend the rest of his life ministering to senior citizens.  He found is daughter and they reconciled.  Together, they would prepare dinner and hold services in the community room of the oldest residential facility for black senior citizens in the United States for nearly two decades.   When he died, he was as much my father as my uncle.  By the time I was interviewing him, I could not have believed he was capable of sabotage. I am older now.  I know he was capable of surviving and the ethics of survival sometimes require sabotage. 

My Uncle took his duties as a mechanic seriously.  He would work hard to make the necessary repairs.  I remember the brief hesitation and then the sincerity in his voice when he relayed the next part of the story.  Even years later, he had difficulty discussing the fear that was with him all the time.  In the beginning, he would follow the protocol.  Make the repair.  If the repair could not be made in time, stay behind and follow with the next unit.  After this happened several times, he began to think about his wife, his child and the rest of his family.  It is often only in the context of family that black people truly know they are valued and valuable. I believe in a tank in Viet Nam, distant from my family’s loving context, that he learned things of value must survive.  When it became clear that he could not make repairs he knew were within his echelon of knowledge in sufficient time to continue with his unit, he would do what he felt it took to survive.  He would wait for a distraction.  He would find his moment.  He would then break something that could only be repaired by the upper echelon. 

I know as I write this some will only see him as saboteur.  This is not the traditional story of heroic service to which most Americans are accustomed.  As one who has existed in the lower and upper echelons of both personal and professional battlefields, it is the only type of heroism I can now trust—fearful attempts to do the right thing fueled and tempered by a desire to survive.  By the time we were discussing his experiences in Viet Nam, he was already my hero.  My awe for him then was a childish adoration for a man who loved and doted on a small girl who needed a father’s love.  I am no longer a child.  In my maturation, my awe for him, at times, overwhelms me.  I think about him as a young man alone in a tank with mind racing trying to do the right thing and to live.  Now as a woman, I know that what is right is not fixed when one’s survival is on the line. 

The image of my Uncle in that tank comes to me as frequently as the taffeta prom dresses he bought for me and every girl child in my family for decades or our trip to the Liberty Bell on my first visit to Philadelphia when I was 12.  In a crucial moment, he understood who he was and who he did not want to be in relation to powers that were both outside and within his control.  Eyeing the constraints of his situation, he took his fate as much into his own hands as he possibly could.  He was neither martyr nor sacrifice.  He was a man who chose to live even when living for black men was not easy.  I cherish these stories because they help to fully explain the man, and men, I came to know in their later years.  I cherish these stories in a family that, at times, equates physical proximity with communication.  Sometimes the most difficult thing to see is the thing right next to you.  Distance has given me my greatest view of my family.  

When that distance took me to Ann Arbor and then colleges through out the U.S. in my search for academic employment, I would remember my Uncles’ education in power.  Because so many of my Uncles, cousins, and racial kin went to Viet Nam, I have sometimes forgotten that young men did other things during that time.  On more than one occasion in an academic setting, I have been told by older, usually white, men that they had not intended to make a life in academia.  They had prolonged their educations solely to avoid the war in Viet Nam.  These would-be colleagues brazenly, sometimes tinged with braggadocio, relayed all the things they did because they did not want to go to Viet Nam.  I would think.  My Uncles also did not want to go to Viet Nam, but they did not know that classroom doors were escape hatches.  I know what classrooms can mean.  They, my Uncles, were intelligent men.  In that small town whose mention led my Uncles one to another in Hawaii, my family is known for their smarts.  In these interactions with men who did not know that sabotage can be one’s salvation, I was not angered.  I would not wish the experiences of my uncles on any one.  I was aware, however, of the difference between these men and my Uncles and how their differences still defined their difference from me. 

Academia is not literally a war zone, but at moments I have felt threatened and fearful.  It is those identities—not the experiences—that distinguish my would-be colleagues from my Uncles that have put me in their midst and at times, their crosshairs.  I, like my Uncles, grew up poor in the racial complexities of Texas, but in a time when a black girl could be rewarded for intellect.  I, like my Uncles, am young and black and in a place that views my body and its effort as a tool for someone else’s project.  I, like my Uncles, do not inhabit this battlefield alone: my twin sister, Melanye, also a university professor shares it with me.  I, like my Uncles, have had to remain keenly aware of the shifting landscape that could at any point strand or engulf me.  I study the law because I have always had a need to know the rules. 

Unlike my Uncles, I am now, in certain ways, in the upper echelon. I hold more degrees than most people and teach in places where blacks have only recently been allowed entrance and have solidified my place with tenure.  In my personal and professional life, I fix things or at least try.  I am always aware, however, in all my attempts at repair that in our society’s commitment to hierarchies there are those who still hold positions above and below me with corresponding relations and access to power.  I am very proud of the place and space I possess in the world, but I am never brazen about it nor do I brag.  Too many are still in echelons that make their survival a hope or a question.  I try to remember that people like me have not always been kind to people like me and my Uncles.  I try not to strand or sacrifice—in the small ways that we can—anyone in my pursuit of survival, but my family has taught me that I am valuable.  Valuable things must survive.

My Uncle James died a quick but brutal death from pancreatic cancer the summer after my first year in law school.  Two years later, I graduated and was sworn into the Texas Bar the next day.  As I stood a few steps away listening to the plans of a classmate, I heard my mother and two of her siblings speaking in tones that as a child always made me want to listen harder.  These tones signaled conversations that were not for children’s ears—the best kind of adult conversation when you are young.  Now, each time they ring in my ear I must remind myself that I am grown now.  Without moving, I still strained to hear the conversation of my mother her siblings who would be the last of their kind standing.  My Aunt Mary says how proud and exciting.  She is my touchstone for enthusiasm—always a phone call away with praise and interest.  My mom, the picture of graceful reserve, says yes it is.  My Uncle Joe, the only of his brothers not to do battle in a far away war, is the last man standing in many ways.  He has no children, but we have made him a father.  He is a watcher and lends his words when they are only perfectly crafted for impact.  There is silence and he says, “You know who would have loved this?”  I cannot see them clearly, but I know they are shaking their collective heads.  My mom, the matriarch of our family since her oldest sister became ill shortly after my high school graduation, speaks for them all.  She said with love and sadness and power, “James.”

For the students who fill my classrooms today, Viet Nam has little personal significance.  Though I was barely living, Viet Nam will be as much my war as the two in the deserts of the Middle East and caves of Afghanistan.  When I chastise my students for the failure to appreciate this recent history, they ask me why is it so important.  I tell them everything I know about power my Uncles learned in Viet Nam.  They look at me quizzically.  Maybe this will explain.