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PORTSIDE CULTURE

GERALD MCCARTHY: HAUNTED MARINE, VVAW ACTIVIST, COLLEGE PROFESSOR  
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Jan Barry
May 27, 2024
Portside
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_ There were no words for what to say about the war for 19-year-old
combat vets coming home in 1967. Words like post-traumatic stress,
survivor guilt did not exist. This book reveals the inner world of
many war veterans that home folks haven’t a clue. _

Men of Troop B, 1st Battalion, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Infantry
Division, and their M-48 Patton tank move through the jungle in the
Central Highlands of Vietnam, June 1969., (Photo by U. S. Army
Military History Institute/AHEC.)

 

For more than 30 years, students at a small Catholic college in
upstate New York took composition and literature courses taught by a
quirky professor named Gerald McCarthy. Some were appalled to discover
that their English prof had gone AWOL from the Marines after a tour in
Vietnam and served time in jail. Others were delighted to find that
this acerbic vet—who propelled himself into the University of Iowa
Writers Workshop masters’ degree program—prodded students to
become better writers. 

“McCarthy has led a very interesting life,” one senior wrote on
ratemyprofessors.com. “He draws on his experiences in his writing
and encourages his students to do the same. When I was his student he
really pushed me to dig deeper and do something meaningful. He's
passionate about poetry and creative writing.” 

I got some insight into this dynamic while teaching journalism at the
same college for several years. Gerald McCarthy also enlightened his
students by bringing in as guest speakers avant-garde poets addressing
war and social issues. 

Retired now as professor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College,
McCarthy has dug deep into his past to produce an astounding volume of
literature. Hitchhiking Home from Danang: A Memoir of Vietnam, PTSD
and Reclamation (McFarland, 2024) reveals the inner world of many war
veterans that home folks haven’t a clue about. 

Hitchhiking Home from Danang
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A Memoir of Vietnam, PTSD and Reclamation
By Gerald McCarthy
McFarland Books; 249 pages
Paperback:  $29.95
December 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-4766-9284-5

 
McFarland Books
“You come home alone and no one knows what it’s like…the
aloneness would not let go of me, it clung like a mist or a shadow,
and I couldn’t shake it,” he writes. “I felt like there was a
stranger in the room, someone I hardly knew—and the stranger was me.
Alone, aloof, apart. It stayed and grew and became my ‘thing’ and
I could not shake it or find a way out of the despair and unrest it
brought.”

There were things that happened in Vietnam that he couldn’t talk
about. He couldn’t find words for what troubled him when he went
AWOL from a Marine base in Norfolk, Virginia. He couldn’t blurt it
out when he ended up in jail, in a military brig and in a Navy
hospital psychiatric ward. He couldn’t say, years later, when his
18-year-old son asked what happened. 

“I tell Nate, ‘Well, I just left, I’d had enough of it, you
know.’ And I think that’s close to the truth, but I’m leaving
things out on purpose,” he writes. “I’m leaving out the
nightmares, the waking sweats…I’m not telling him about the
flashbacks, about the dead, about the other stuff.”

There were no words for what to say about the war for 19-year-old
combat vets coming home in 1967. Words like post-traumatic stress,
survivor guilt did not yet exist. Grief was not in the lexicon of a
Marine. Even years later, he couldn’t tell his wife about the damn,
disturbing dreams that kept popping up. 

“My wife shakes me in the dark and asks, ‘Who are you talking to?
Why are you so restless?’” He couldn’t tell her that sometimes
he was intently talking with dead buddies, that he was suddenly
remembering a sergeant’s drunken screams about the horrendous
casualties in the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, the
explosions of the mortar attack shortly after he got to his field
unit, the mortar attack on the Danang airfield when he was about to
leave for the States, the airplane burning, men scrambling out of the
flames, and so many other ways Marines died in Vietnam. 

“And then the others too, after I came home, after I was discharged,
after all the ‘military madness’ had ebbed and I was drifting in a
cloud of stelazine and beer and regret,” he wrote. “Bill Shaw
crashing his old Corvette into a tree at night…Dennis Michaels…hug
himself in his parents’ home…two months back from his time with
the Army.”

McCarthy struggled through classes at a state college. He got into the
Iowa Writers Workshop, where professors told him the war was over and
to write about other things. He wrote poetry about the war to try to
describe it. War Story: Vietnam War Poems (The Crossing Press, 1977)
took a crack at it. It described the elements of PTSD before the
malady was named by the psychiatric establishment. 

That first poetry collection caught the attention of Gloria Emerson,
the fabled New York Times war correspondent, who became a mentor. She
got him an assignment to write an article about the dedication of the
new Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. “You have to go
down there and cover the dedication ceremony and then you’ll write a
poem about it later,” she told him in a telephone call. “First you
get paid to write about it and that will cover your expenses.” 

He reached out to other vets, joining Vietnam Veterans Against the
War. He offered writing workshops for vets, taught writing at Attica
prison, in migrant labor camps, county jails, schools. By the time he
became a college professor, he knew a lot about how to help other
people tell their stories. 

But he struggled to tell his own. This book is focused on revealing,
50-some years since his return from war, what he found so hard to talk
about. In retirement, he can no longer hide behind the sandbags he
erected as a college professor who took on extra work, including
teaching at the American Academy in Rome and at local schools. 

“Now they come back when I’m alone, and in the dusk those shadows
start to materialize. I can see them—glimpse their faces—this
legion,” he writes. “And they are there waiting. They know I have
had a life. And I have to join them at some point. I keep trying to
tell a few stories, push away from what is there… I think the
solution is to learn how to speak to people again, to try to
communicate, to keep forcing yourself to wake up. You can’t give in
to the ghosts, to the grief, to the overwhelming sadness.”

And he discovered another insight. “Now 50+ years later, and after
four years of therapy at the James A. Peters VA Hospital in Bronx, New
York, I have come to realize that the tranquilizers were a stumbling
block to my recovery,” he writes. “Now I know I needed therapy and
counseling. Now I know the tranquilizer led to other depressants like
alcohol…and drugs, to feeling depressed and full of
self-loathing.”

As a persistently creative poet and writer, Gerald McCarthy
demonstrates in this book how he helped forge a better way of dealing
with PTSD and survivor guilt: write it out.
 

* Vets
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* GIs
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* Veterans
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* ptsd
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* post-traumatic stress
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* survivor guilt
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* suicide
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* VVAW
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* Vietnam veterans
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* Vietnam Veterans Against the War
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* Vietnam Vets
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* Vietnam War
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* Anti-War Movement
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* peace movement
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