20 Years After The Fall : Recollections of five Times Orange County Edition staffers on how the Vietnam War shaped their lives. : No Regret, but a Wish for Understanding

Jerry Hicks, 48, Times Staff Writer

Vietnam remains an unsettling personal quandary for me--fitful, vexing, emotions unresolved 24 years after I left the country behind. When our plane climbed clear skies away from Da Nang to return to the U.S.--to the World, my Army compatriots called it--the cheers aboard were resounding. I didn’t share their euphoria. They didn’t share my emptiness.

Their Vietnam was a barbed-wire country of litter and motor scooter fumes and a local people who made easy targets of frustration that this unwanted tour of duty had separated them from their families back home. To me, it was a land with a history I still was struggling to grasp, with hard-working people--bone-weary hard-working--a place where our friendships were forged by circumstances none of us controlled, or even understood.

I worked in an Army adjutant’s office on a sprawling Air Force base. It was just outside Da Nang, a poor city in the far north, teeming with hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced from war-torn farm villages. I never had to fire a weapon, never saw a dead body, and the weekly enemy rocket attacks on the base often seemed welcome relief--our own small compound never got hit, and our collective excitement about the firepower usually eased, for a day or two, ongoing racial tensions within our battalion.

But easy duty doesn’t mean easy time. When Saigon fell a few years later, it only intensified my own frustrations. I never learned to deal with them, so I learned to block them out. I never watched movies about the war, never discussed its politics, never talked much about those days. Most who know me now don’t even know I was there.

Still, it comes back--occasions more rare now after 24 years. Because, any Vietnam veteran can assure you, there’s one place you can’t block it out. In your dreams, it reappears in snatches:

* Ronnie Lynch. We were the only two drafted that month from our small Hoosier hometown--we wished each other luck as we got off the bus at Fort Knox. Ronnie was killed near Chu Lai, down the coast from Da Nang.

* The planes. The sound of their engines was a constant, ominous presence, as they took off daily from our base for North Vietnam, carrying bombs of destruction. To this day, I haven’t sorted out how I feel about those planes.

* The typhoon. We remained safe inside sturdy barracks during its 24-hour devastation. But Da Nang was nearly leveled, thousands left homeless, their children wandering the streets in despair. When I see Da Nang in my dreams, it’s always the day after the typhoon.

* Weasel. I can’t say I liked Weasel, an enthusiastic warrant officer on his third tour of duty in Vietnam. But when his hooch was fragged--his quarters blown up--by soldiers unknown, I brooded for days. By good fortune he was away, but that fragging somehow brought home to me how little I knew about why I was there, and what I represented.

* My friends. It was so easy to like the Vietnamese who lived among us. They worked so very hard, and had such great dreams for peace. I asked Dong Thi Bu, my best friend, what future she wanted for her children. Her chilling answer: “That they not be soldiers.”

* The orphans. One of those rocket attacks destroyed a Buddhist orphanage near us. We built them a new one. They captured our hearts with their gratitude.

I was living in Washington when Saigon fell. I vividly recall that my first thoughts were of the orphans, and what would become of them. What would become of all those I had known and come to care about?

I experienced too much to ever regret that I went to Vietnam. But I wish, oh how I wish, I better understood what the hell it had all been about.