The Vietnam War in American Childhood: Children, Youth, and War Series
By: Joel P. Rhodes / Narrated By: Chris Sorensen
Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
This world, yes, became my foundation
Here ya go, I’m going to date myself: I was born in 1966, and this was the world that shaped who I was, who I grew to be, and I’m still dealing with it in who I am now.
I was born into a family with a hiiiiiighly unstable father, a man known for worrying and explosive outbursts of violence and cruelty. I shared the home with emotionally scarred siblings and a mother who wanted to be anywhere else, particularly serving the poor with Mother Theresa, certainly way the hell away from the abusive home sphere she was doomed to inhabit. And the world around me? Hippies clad in burlap shouting about how the world would end in 40 days (By Day 20, I was a severe wreck), boys (Not men, my mother told me; not young men—No, boys) in body bags being sent out, Vietnam’s most reliable Export, boys wrapped in ponchos and thrust upon choppers swirling up and away in clouds and gales of dust, protestors swarming streets, protestors with hate in their eyes and spit hurled from their mouths—shouting Baby Killer at confused and wounded soldiers. POWs, beaten, tortured, starved, being met in airports by none other than Snow White from Disneyland (I mean, how disorienting is THAT?!?).
At the time, I saw those young soldiers on TV, and they gave me strength and courage: After all, look at the hell they were enduring, and they still managed to smile at each other, fling arms of friendship around one another. If they could manage to be brave and human, then CERtainly I could stop being an anxious spaz and start to show some pluck…
Why do I dump all this on you? Cuz this is what a stroll down Memory Lane it was for me as I listened to The Vietnam War in American Childhood. As it focuses on pre-adolescents, I’ve been enjoying the beJESus outta myself. It’s rather twisted, really, but I think that’s the intent of author Joel P. Rhodes—Vietnam was our foundation; Vietnam will always be part of who we became. And even though the book fails as a scholarly treatise, with little conclusions being made and only a few opinions being asserted (And I could’ve done without ALL protestors being Anti-Soldier when, really, so many were protesting the ridiculous Why and the insupportable How of the war), it does come through loud and clear with how it changed the lives of children.
Rhodes brought it all back, how Vietnam was promoted via the toys that were introduced (Yup, one of my brothers played with a GI Joe doll, and the other had small plastic soldiers “taking the hill”), how Vietnam was sold to the young via comic books. Yes, there were hawkish rightwing pro-war comic books, but there was also “Archie” getting his draft papers and sadly going to serve his country (Only after The Archies sang a song of mild protest and major solidarity). And of COURSE there was the ever-vocal, ever-sarcastically scaaaathing MAD Magazine (Many, many issues of which entered our household—Take THAT Tricky Dick!). I think it was through these allusions that Rhodes has his greatest success at showing that the powers that be really knew how to harness and promote and how to shape beliefs.
The book goes further into all aspects of the era. Young boys of a certain age viewed getting older with much fear as the war ground on, day after day, month after month, year after year. A 14-year old boy was rightly afraid that the war would still be going on when he turned 18, and it would be B’Bye for him, lights possibly out. I was only a small kid at the time, and I was POSitive I’d be going when I was 19 (The war would still be in progress, but by then girls would be allowed in combat… I know… but it really was how I daydreamed at the time…).
Rhodes also covers how women, left to fend for themselves as husbands served, became heads of single-parent households, spawning renewed interest in Feminism. Plus, he goes on to cover the semi-orphan status of children of POWs and MIAs. Also covered are the experiences of children adopted from Vietnam through Operation Baby Lift, along with the harrowing experiences of AmerAsian children of servicemen and local Vietnamese women. Rhodes manages to pack a whole heckuva lot into the book and, yes, it would’ve been nice to have conclusions drawn. But actually, I’m happy to just sit back and listen.
Not that Listening is a completely easy job as Chris Sorenson, NOT my favorite, tho’ I have ooooodles of audiobooks of his, is the narrator. As usual, he brings his standard odd odd ODD rhythm of speech to bear as he reads this to us. He has this, well it gets annoying, way where the last word of every single sentence is said with a high lilt and with an odd emphasis, making one think one is hearing a question to be answered before the narrative continues. It makes for an oft-interrupted train of thought, I tell you. I also gotta tell you, however, that his narration here isn’t as jarring as in other audiobooks of his that I’ve reviewed. I think that it’s perhaps due to the fact that many of the voices are those of children, and Sorenson’s sometimes slow and methodical rhythms are well-suited to mimic the voice of a child.
So maybe, given that, it’s good that this book is NOT a definitive piece of analysis but is instead a chronicle of what it was like for so many of us.
Whatever. I thoroughly enjoyed it, if “enjoyed” is a word that can be applied to a time of war and chaos and death. But it did make me feel like a kid again, but a kid with a community surrounding me, not just a kid trapped in an unfortunate household.
We were all in it together. And I’ll be forever grateful that I had a chance to grow up with true heroes on the TV set… to go with my beloved “Captain Kangaroo”…
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