I’ve done a lot of reading this year. I’ve spent a lot of time in hospital, most of which was spent waiting and drifting from breakfast to lunch to dinner. So to make up for that I set myself a higher than normal reading challenge on Goodreads and made a concerted effort to read much more than I normally would.
I garnered a rather unhealthy obsession with the Vietnam war. A war often forgotten about because it was so unjust and for the longest time America wanted to move on and hide their shame. It is afterall, up to that point, and probably thereafter, the only war America has ever lost.
The war went on for nearly 10 years by the time it was all wrapped up and troops had all moved out. A lot of kids grew up in that period and a lot of politicians, and world leaders, came and went.
I have been comparing my experiences of that war and some other battles fought with my own battles this year. The essence of this is, that there is always someone in a worse state or having a worse time. Vietnam basically has two seasons: hot and hot and wet. The climate is horrendous. Insane humidity that no one can train for. The training that troops in America undertook before shipping out, were nothing like what they were to expect. Nowhere in North America is as wet, hot and humid as Vietnam Jungle is for the most part of the year.
So you’re sitting in the jungle, it’s hot, you’re soaked through and you’ve not slept properly for a fortnight or more becuase each night you’re dug into a foxhole in the pissing rain with your boots disintigrating and your clothes rotting with no change because supplies have run out. To add to the mix your radio equipment is unreliable and you’ve lost contact with HQ and each night you’re bombarded with mortar shells and machine gun fire.
8 months of chemo, where I spent 3 weeks at a time for most parts in a hospital ward getting little sleep but getting fed 3 meals a day on a regular basis and as much tea or coffee (as bad as it was) as I wanted is nothing compared to what thousands went through in Vietnam.
So I compare my own experience with the things I read and decided it could have been a whole lot worse and it’s not worth complaining about. Afterall, it’s just a little speedbump in the road. I feel for the hundreds that didn’t make it back from Vietnam, fighting an unjust war that in the end no one wanted to fight.
I’ve also added in a second book below which tells the real life story of a 17 year old boy on the Eastern front in Germany (just in case you’re fed up of jungle and humidity) where he endured starvation and freezing cold, wearing inadequate clothing, and suffering frostbite whilst fighting for his life!
Cancer is bad, but these folks had it a lot worse!
You may want to read:
- A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo (Vietnam War)
- The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer (WW2, Germany, Eastern Front)
You may want to watch:
- The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
- The War, by Ken Burns
(YES, both bias towards America but believe they’re telling the whole story).
