In which our Hero carefully Maps his Path through Lifeįor a long time I knew that I could determine my own future. I brought back from Vietnam a belief that ordinary routines may go very wrong for a vast variety of unexpected reasons as well as skepticism about the benevolence of some human intentions and actions.
To me, his thoughts were funny, sad and in some very odd way, quite true to my feelings. Kosinski’s comments resonated with some of my feelings after my Vietnam experience. “But,” Kosinski asked the technician, “what if some one else comes and replaces my specimen with his own?” “Oh, Mr. Kosinski was instructed to write his name and birth date on the cup’s label, go into a toilet and urinate into the cup, then come out and place the cup on a designated counter top. A laboratory technician handed him a little cup. His doctor ordered a urinalysis and Kosinski went to the lab to get this done. Kosinski told of an experience where he had gone to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center for a health problem.
The interviewer was asking Kosinski about his suspiciousness. Years later I heard an interview with Jerzy Kosinski, the as yet undiscovered plagiarist and psychopath, on public radio. I have seen evil, stupidity, cunning, and bureaucratic indifference up close and personal, and I came back as a very different person. I am still interested in making this a better place, but now I know that there are evils in this world that one must carefully circumnavigate. I trusted what others said and felt that my government, while not perfect, was really interested in making the world a better place. I was only two years out of medical school and was very much an innocent and an idealist. Vietnam changed me and many others irrevocably. This, from a personal point of view, is very painful stuff. Some come from others’ recollections and documents from that time. Some of the details have been recalled with the help of old, moldering, mimeographed and typed papers, as well as hand-written notes and many spools of reel-to-reel audio tapes I made during those times. One name has been intentionally altered-not to protect the individual, but because those facts were and are so hard for me to accept that I have repressed his name. All of the dialogue that follows is what I recall, granting the flaws of an aging mind and the passage of much time. There have been occasions in which years later I have clearly remembered something one way only to discover from an incontrovertible historic document that my memory must have been in error. I am aware that I am over 60 years old now and my memory, once almost flawless, is fading and sometimes even lying to me. I have tried to make this account as accurate as possible. However, this is actually written more broadly for my entire family. Should this be a work of fiction- to avoid possible litigation from named personages or should I try to detail this with everyone out in the open? Should this be written for the general public, or for a more narrow audience? Finally, Lisa said I should write this for her.Īnd so, in a sense, this is dedicated to Lisa-one who was not directly involved with Vietnam at all and who was not even born when these events took place, as well as to Paul, who lived through these times on the other side of the globe, but was too young to understand what was happening. My purpose was often muddled: I wanted to let some of the old ghosts out I wanted the world to know what it really was like I wanted to tell my family-especially Paul and Judy that it wasn’t entirely my fault that I was a curmudgeon I wanted to nail me to the wall the bastards that did this to by describing in detail every word they had uttered and every disaster they had caused! For over 30 years I was unable to start this work because of uncertainty about who would be my audience and what form this narrative would take. Often as I thought about my experiences in Vietnam during 19, I felt that I needed to write them down. If the Broken Man comes, I'll hang onto the fence and won't let him take me." Gregory Dunne
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