Vietnam vets to frontline workers: ‘We stand with you’
Linda Spoonster Schwartz was on the telephone recently talking with a nurse friend in California when the inevitable topic of the pandemic came up.
“Kate, did you see those pictures of those body bags?” asked Schwartz, former state Department of Veterans Affairs commissioner, as well as the former assistant secretary for policy and planning for the federal Department of Veterans Affairs under Pres. Obama.
Of course Kate had seen the body bags. So had Schwartz. So had the rest of us.
“Oh my God, it was ‘Yeah, and did you go to that place you haven’t been in a long time?’ ” said Schwartz. The body bags, and the daily body count are all too reminiscent of the time Schwartz and others served in
Vietnam, Schwartz as an Air Force nurse.
As the state cautiously prepares to get back to something approaching normal, Vietnam veterans want to make sure we remember one thing: Our frontline workers are going to need us postpandemic, just as we’ve needed them during the pandemic. Veterans from the Vietnam War know what it’s like when much of the world gets back to normal, when the world won’t ever be normal for some. That may apply most acutely to the people who have worked through this unprecedented crisis that has now claimed more victims than the Vietnam War.
So last month, a group of bold-faced named Vietnam veterans wrote a letter (posted on the Vietnam Veterans of America website) that steps through the mists of a half a century to stand in the breach.
The letter also draws stark parallels between veterans’ service at war, and front-line workers service in the pandemic.
Think about it. Neither generation was prepared for the fronts that drew them. As the letter said, the two groups share the same isolation from family, the “endless, incoming casualties,” and the power and pain of impossible triage decisions. And only someone who has served can ever understand the life-changing intensity serving requires.
Only there’s an important difference between then and now, said Schwartz.
“We were like talking about the fact that it took years for that many people to die,” she said. “This is just months. It’s so hard to process or to even fathom what’s happening.”
This pandemic is everywhere — and the effect will linger beyond our ability to shop, get haircuts, and sit inside a restaurant. If we all simply move on, we do so at the risk of leaving important people behind.
Schwartz’s father served during D-Day aboard the Susan B. Anthony. The transport struck a mine and had to be abandoned, and Schwartz’s father ended up in the drink, covered with oil. He was eventually picked up, but, concerned he’d been rescued by Germans, he elected to keep quiet. He was taken to a displaced persons camp located in what he thought was Germany. He eventually saw a priest in the camp and asked to speak to him. The priest, who thought Schwartz’s father was German, was surprised. “You speak English!” he said.
Schwartz only learned the story because her mother once made her father sit down and tell her everything while she wrote it all down.
Schwartz, herself, was severely injured in a training mission in 1983 when a door blew off the aircraft she was riding in at 30,000 feet about 500 miles off the coast of Virginia. The apple Schwartz was eating went out the hatch, and Schwartz nearly followed. She was left with decompression sickness of the brain and spinal cord. For several years, she said, “I was not hitting on all cylinders.” Her husband, who is also a veteran, had to advocate for her.
She was discharged in 1986, but she never really left the battlefield. Instead, she became a skilled advocate who changed vets’ lives for the better, first in Connecticut and then nationwide. Veterans loved her. She was and is one of them. And she and others are not about to sit idly by while another generation returns from the front – even a domestic one – without the proper support. If there’s one thing the Vietnam War left us, it’s the understanding that there is such a thing as post-traumatic stress disorder. We can call people heroes, but heroes deserve our attention after the hearts and banners come down.
The letter ends: “You are not alone. We stand with you.” As such, VVA has promised to support pandemic workers in whatever way they need. That band of brothers and sisters, said Schwartz, “stand with you. It means that when this is over, we’re going to fight for what you need.”