We Were Told To Just Forget About It, To Just Get On With Life
Told by J. Abell Longmore, Jr.
Originally appearing in Slackwater, Volume 6
Abell Longmore was born in St. Mary’s County in 1943, near the end of World War II. As Mr. Longmore came of age, he and his peers across the nation faced another war, this one in Vietnam, a war with a very different mission. Mr. Longmore, who passed away as this issue of SlackWater went to press, served his country in Vietnam with honor. In 2007, Mr. Longmore talked with Laurie Pisel about his experiences as a medic in Vietnam, drawing parallels with that conflict and the one in Iraq.
I chose the military reserves in order to finish my college education. But I was activated out of that prior to finishing my degree. That was in 1965, March of ’65. I was in the Army. I was a combat medic, so I went what they call “TDY” [temporary duty] which was to volunteer into another unit for special projects. I worked with the Navy for the most part in Vietnam. So, out of my sixteen months in ‘Nam, I spent eleven with the Navy as their primary medic for one small unit up north in the mountains.
In those days there was the draft. I mean, everyone understood that, so you either knew you were probably going to go through your own will or through the draft system.
The war was not popular at that time, or ever, and if it weren’t for college students, if they had not gotten involved in protesting, I think a lot more people would have been killed. Most of us feel, felt at that time and obviously today, there was no way that that was a useful war. Very similar to Iraq at this moment. I mean, it serves no purpose but to kill our own people and waste a lot of resources.
I think it was the year I came back from ‘Nam, and I was very much out of the world until I met [my wife] Mary Ann the following year, and Mary Ann brought me back into the world and helped me grow into a positive person.
[In war] you don’t know who you are dealing with. Our men are over there [in Iraq]; every time they knock on a door, it’s recorded for the world, but really don’t know whether this is an Iraqi that they needed to shoot, or one to take care of, someone who stayed in Baghdad to protect their home or their business and didn’t leave.
That parallel of not being able to recognize friend from for in ‘Nam is in the killing of our men. When we went into the jungle, the North Vietnamese knew the jungle, they could set traps for us in every arena. The enemy is very savvy, and that’s because it’s their home, they know it. And they can see the Americans. Most American soldiers look American and have the same uniforms. We’re all there playing the same role [in Baghdad], and in ‘Nam that was true too. The other side of that parallel is that we don’t know who we’re looking at - whether the person is North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese, or a friendly Iraqi, and it’s a very scary thing. You are just being run up night and day, you can never relax, and you never know where they’re going to be, and that’s why we’re probably going to have a lot of people with this stress syndrome when they come back.
We talk about it on the newscasts and study groups that do nothing but talk about it. It’s in every paper you want to pick up, from The Wall Street Journal down to guys like The Washington Post, but in fact we’re not doing enough of it – we’ve got too many of them coming back, and if they don’t ask for help, they’re never going to get any, and we’re gonna see a lot more of these kids going around and doing foolish things.
I could not take any more college courses when I got back. My mind had been through all of this other stuff. It happened to be on this campus [St. Mary’s College of Maryland]. I was sitting in a psychology course; I needed the credits for my degree. I just couldn’t assimilate to these things in society. Dr. Donhiser saw that, and she was the one who suggested I take time before I come back to classes, and I just thank her for it to this day.
I still carry some of those pains, but I was lucky enough to find a woman like Mary Ann, who cared enough to help me come out of that, and a father who researched and found this doctor who understood the Vietnam problems. This doctor’s own son was killed. He was a medical doctor, but went back to school to get his degree in psychology. How my dad found him I don’t know, but this guy helped me. I mean he really told me what I had to do, after listening to me, to get back into a life where I could love people, and love what I’m doing. Many didn’t have that privilege, and many aren’t going to have the privilege here.
