Word: martone
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...isolation of Harvard's Vietnam vets is real. Marton, who lives in a single at Currier House, admits that "because I got all the piss and vinegar out of me. I'm more sedate than most around here, and have only a narrow circle of friends." Another undergraduate, John Derho '75, also 26 and also a veteran of combat in Vietnam, moved out of Adams House last year and went incommunicadeo. "We have no way of reaching him except by mailing messages to Post Office Box 8995 in Boston," the Adams House secretary says. "I see him from time...
...never want to forget anything," Marton says. "After I was wounded and sent home to a base in Texas, I tried to write about. It, I tried, and I tried, but I couldn't put things into words. Others who fought in combat could read it and know what I was saying, but I don't think you can fill in the gaps between the words for those who haven't experienced war. The only two books I know that have done that are All's Quiet on the Western Front and The Red Badge of Courage...
...Marton joined the Army during Christmas 1968 after flunking out of Westehester State University in Pennsylvania because, he says. "I was looking for adventure." After four months of infantry duty--"mostly assaults on Viet Cong way stations along the Ho Chi Minh trail," he says--in Bin Ding province in the Central Highlands, Marton had a "bellyful of adventure" and began to develop an interest in the politics of the Vietnam...
...took a wounding and a midnight ambush where several of his buddies were killed to make that bellyful. At first, Marton says, he "kind of enjoyed the Army--not the combat part, but the idea of surviving basic training and the Central Highlands wilderness." And he senses that, oddly enough, when his Harvard peers encounter him, the respect they show him is "more out of this American male idea of proving your manhood" than out of any guilt feelings over Marton's fighting in their, or their brothers' stead. Marton says he hasn't met people here who feel they...
...Marton says he didn't think about the meaning of the war until he was in the hospital--he almost lost a leg when he stepped on a Pungi stick, a piece of bamboo reed sharpened on both ends and immersed in excrement as poison. After endless "nights when you'd hear guys sobbing in their beds--and I did it too--who were letting themselves feel the things they were repressing in combat," he began to think Vietnam was a mistake...