My time serving in 'Nam was memorable in many ways

I locked myself in the bathroom of my parents' Albertson Cape Cod home and slumped to the floor. Blood streamed from my nose and mouth. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I banged on the wall, crying out loud: "Fifty-eight thousand dead! For what?"

It was April 30, 1975, and I was out of my mind with grief after watching our Huey helicopters being pushed off the deck of an aircraft carrier into the South China Sea. With American troops having left two years before, North Vietnamese tanks had rolled into Saigon, toppling the South Vietnamese government and winning the war. I’d had a few beers watching the news and was drunk and as distraught as I have ever been in my life.

Fifty years later, I was on my back on a table at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Uniondale as a wound care nurse affixed a new ostomy bag to my lower-right groin following surgery to remove my bladder, prostate and lymph nodes. "What are you thinking about?" the nurse asked. I told her about my breakdown a half-century ago and my 1971-72 Army tour in Vietnam as a clerk and then reporter for Stars and Stripes, the Defense Department’s daily newspaper. "I'm so sorry," she said.

I wasn't. It took a while and a lot of counseling, but I was able to put the trauma of survivor’s guilt behind me and have a productive career as a Newsday sports reporter and copy editor. But that year in 'Nam was the most thrilling of my life and set the tone for the rest of it. If I had it to do all over again, knowing that I would develop Type II diabetes and bladder cancer probably related to Agent Orange exposure, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I was not haunted by memories of anything I did or saw that I was ashamed of — as so many other vets have been. My job in Vietnam was exciting. I had to look for positive stories and they were everywhere: on mountaintop outposts, in choppers flying circles over bunkers so a door gunner could blast them with machine-gun fire, walking with infantry troops in the field. I was 23, unarmed, traveled with a buddy who could speak Vietnamese, and interviewed South Vietnamese generals with the same ease I had covering sports at Newsday. I used helicopters as taxies and had carte blanche to hitch rides anywhere. After I got home, my biggest problem was trying to sustain the adrenaline rush of flitting around the edges of the war.

After that night in that bathroom, and due to the anti-war feelings in the country, I suppressed my status as a veteran for 30 years and threw out my Spec. 4 dress khakis. As time went on, my wife and I worshiped with the Quakers, I ran programs on peace, and started to feel guilty about having perpetuated the myth that war is something noble and heroic.

I eventually decided to "come out" as a vet in my church since 1994, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock in Manhasset, and started raising funds for veterans' causes. In 2002, I marched for the first time against the Iraq War with Veterans for Peace. I didn't want America to make the same mistakes it had in Vietnam and get more soldiers killed. But I finally joined a VFW post and have been proud to march in Memorial Day parades and attend solemn ceremonies on Veterans Day.

I’m proud of my service. I’ll never forget it. But the lesson I learned in 1975 is that war is futile.

This guest essay reflects the views of Jim Smith, who worked for Newsday from 1966 to 2014.