Chance rules. Leaders lie. Deaths become statistics. The
parallels between the disease and the war are everywhere.
By David Gerstel
Mr. Gerstel is a Vietnam veteran.
May 9, 2020
SARNANO, Italy — A very long time ago, I was one of more
than two million American men and women who served their country in Vietnam. We
fought; too many of us became casualties and died. We were gone from home and
half forgotten, living and dying in an alternative reality.
It was chance that determined survival: which unit required
replacements, what transportation was available that day, where the fighting
was heaviest and needed support — as random as a typewriter keyboard strike,
the list of names carried in a sergeant’s shirt pocket, even a person’s height,
which might determine the weapon you carried and where you were placed in the
line on patrol.
Some of us felt friends would get you through; others knew
that being alone was safer, with less feeling and connection. In the end it was
chance. The numbers could be improved but not enough to offset random death.
The process of division created us and them, those who walked home and those
who were carried.
Now I live in a small hill town in Italy, constructed with
old walls to keep out strangers and the Black Death. The country, like the
United States, has been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak, and I cannot help
thinking how much the experience echoes Vietnam — a comparison brought sharply
into focus in recent days, as the number of Americans killed by Covid-19 shot
past the number killed in Southeast Asia, a half century ago.
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