VVA National Convention 2025, Keynote Speech

BY Bill Broyles

It’s great for this 80-year-old to be with so many of you young people. Where’s the afterparty tonight? Are any of you old enough to remember Howdy Doody? Buffalo Bob always started with “Hey Kids, what time is it?” And it was always Howdy Doody time.

But for those of you in the Air Force, it’s 10:00 a.m. For those of you in the Army, it’s 10 hundred. For the Navy, Four Bells. And for us Marines? Well, the big hand is on 12, and the little hand is on—I’ll get back to you.

Got my dog tags. We Marines called this can opener a John Wayne.

Seeing this got me thinking about those twilight times when we used it to open our ham and mothers before we heated them with C-4 explosive. We had dug our foxholes, set up our fields of fire. Wrote the last letter, sung “We Gotta Get Outta this Place,” set the watches, sent out the observation posts. Settled in to hopefully make it through the night.

Last thing was we put out the Claymores. I loved Claymores. They had a big inscription on the front that said, “THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY.” Wasn’t that just the most thoughtful thing? I figured that was written just for us Marines.

On one of those nights when I was on watch I saw a shooting star. That was me, I thought. A brief burst of light across the night sky and then—gone. I had been on the track to a successful life. Been accepted to law school, but then I got drafted. All my dreams of who and what I would be were going to come to an end here in the mud on a no-name hill in the jungle.

A few weeks later I went to the hospital outside Da Nang to visit my wounded men. I walked into a vast warehouse of maimed teenagers. I fainted. Broke my nose. That was my heroic war wound. The nurse who helped me did her best to undeviate my septum. I had no idea how she did what she did every day and why she would want to be there.

Our war is ancient history. LBJ, Nixon, Westmoreland, Kissinger, all of them, they’re long dead, faded into the history books. And look at us. Two million seven hundred thousand of us served in Vietnam. Two million are on the other side, on that farm I thought I was going to buy. Some of their names are on The Wall. Some died in pain, moral and physical, some by their own hands. Others just passed on. It was their time. And ours is coming. We’ve all got a new DEROS. We’re all short timers now.

So why are we here now?

Let’s start with this. Let’s take a moment—look at the men and women around you. Don’t you see something of yourself? Isn’t this what we want, finally—each other? We may not know anything about everyone else—their politics, their religion, their resume—but we know they were there then. And we are here now. There it is.

When I got home from Vietnam and got out of the Marines, I got on with my life. I was fine. I focused on me. I forgot about us. I didn’t know about us. I don’t think I saw another Vietnam vet for ten years.

I did thank Vietnam for saving me from being a lawyer. I worked on building a new career, on starting a family. Twelve years after I left Vietnam, I had worked my way to the top of my profession. I was in a position where I could coast comfortably for the rest of my life. But something was working through me, like a piece of shrapnel working its way to the surface.

When they announced that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was being dedicated in Washington in 1982, I left New York and went to see.

It rocked my world. There you all were, dressed in everything from old cammies to suits. Jeff Hiers, my radioman, was there. I hadn’t seen him since the war. When we saw each other, we couldn’t speak. We just hung on to each other for dear life. That’s kind of how I feel now, seeing you. Like the words don’t matter. The floodgates of tears opened up.

Late into the night, I helped read the names of the dead. Each name was like a prayer. I spent the rest of the night at The Wall. Someone showed up with a flag. We took turns holding it all night long. In the polished granite with all the names, I saw my own face reflected back at me. And then I saw faces I had known and hadn’t known, staring back at me from the other side. What would they have made with their lives? Why were they there and I out here and what would I make of mine?

That was it. I left my successful job. I went to see Hiers and other men in my platoon; I worked with homeless vets. I helped organize the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the parade in 1985 when 15,000 of us came over the Brooklyn Bridge singing “Born in the USA” and a million people turned out to welcome us home.

That nurse who helped me when I fainted? She was the inspiration for “China Beach”, the TV show I created about our war, with the women as the focus. That shooting star I thought was the sign of my death? It was Apollo 13 on its ill-fated journey to the moon—my first film. Vietnam is in much of my film work, from Jarhead to Flags of our Fathers to Cast Away, which I wrote as my coming-home-from-Vietnam movie.

Out of our darkest hour sometimes come our finest moments. Even if it sometimes takes years.

I have had so many times when I thought it was all behind me. Just this Christmas, my family was home. My wife, kids, grandkids. The tree was up, Motown Christmas was playing. I went to the fridge to get a bottle of Topo Chico, Mexican club soda. I pulled out the bottle and it exploded in my face, broken glass and spray like a mortar round kicking up mud.

Ken Williamson/The VVA Veteran

And there I was. Right back there. That feeling in the grocery store or putting your kids to bed or when a car backfires, and it’s right now. My father-in-law was a B-25 pilot in World War II, and one night they couldn’t reach the target so he dropped his bombs on what he thought was an Italian field. It was a town. He never got over it.

My son was in Special Ops in Iraq and Afghanistan; it’s right now for him too. And the men and women in Gaza and Ukraine and Africa. They are living it right now, laying down memories that will never leave them.

You hated the war and what it had done to you, and what you might have done when you got home to your family. But you loved it, too, for the love you shared with other men, how together you witnessed the darkness and the beauty and you knew that only they truly got the cosmic joke. There was no horror like that horror, no laughter like that laughter, no trust like that trust.

Out on patrol you were the most here now you ever were. Your present-moment awareness was maxed out, had to be, or you’d have no future. You bend over to stir your C-ration, the sniper bullet hits the guy behind you. You walk across the paddy dike and the fifth guy behind you steps on the mine. You miss the tripwire, you take the fork in the trail away from the ambush, you are off base when the sappers slide through the wire. You might not have any future anyway, and that was okay. Because the best way to make it through the war was to feel like you were already dead.

If your wife or girlfriend sent cookies or a Dear John letter, you’d share it. You’d share the last drop of water or the last bite of C-ration. You knew if you were wounded, they’d come out and get you. You’d give your life for them and they for you. Back in The World you missed knowing that every day what you did mattered, that every step you took was not just for yourself but for them.

Then suddenly you took that 707 back home and boom! It was all gone. They were all gone too, all the men who had supported you, who had been by your side, who you depended on and who depended on you. They had gone back to The World before you or were serving out their year after you.

Maybe you had serious wounds and carried those scars still. Maybe you weren’t wounded, but there were other wounds. Things you’d seen or done in the universe of death that no one should ever have to see or do. Spiritual wounds. Moral injuries.

Together you train, together you have your civilian lives and values stripped away along with your clothes and your hair, together you become part of a unit where you are trained to kill or die for its mission. But then, you get out and you are alone. All those resources devoted to turning you into a warrior, and none devoted to making you a civilian again. You were supposed to unlearn all that on your own.

So, you ended up back home with your family and they couldn’t help you. And maybe you got a job and went to work every day and looked out for yourself and your family but there was something missing, some sense of belonging to something bigger, of when you lived out beyond the narrow spectrum of normal life, and touched places of darkness and light that you rarely see back in The World.

What I’ve finally learned—it took me almost 50 years—is we don’t have two lives, our life there and our life back here in The World. Vietnam is our world; it lives in us. We don’t have to get outta this place if it’s the last thing we ever do. It’s who we are, the bad and the good, the dark and the light.

I’ve been digging into the mysteries of all this for years now. I’ve meditated and danced in ashrams. I’ve walked pilgrimages for hundreds of miles to Santiago de Compostela and from Assisi to Rome in the footsteps of Saint Francis.

He was a warrior. He went off to war with high ideals, but was captured and all his men killed. He was a POW in a dungeon. In Assisi there is a statue of him on his horse when he returned, utterly defeated, his life apparently over. But behind him rises the huge basilica in honor of the man he was to become, a warrior for peace. A saint for all creation.

I’ve been on a journey to find my own path. I’ve done psychedelic ceremonies with healers and shamans and Navy SEALs. I’ve gone deep into my own wounds and wounds I’ve caused others. I’ve experienced my death so many times I no longer fear it, and I don’t have to think I’m already dead.

I’ve learned that the best cure for the fear of dying is to live. To embrace life as it is and myself who I am. To love everyone and everything because the Kingdom of God is each of us and we are all one.

When I went back to Vietnam 40 years ago to meet my old enemies, I encountered a Viet Cong woman near my old base. Her husband had been killed there. As we talked, it became clear that he had been killed where I had patrolled with my platoon. I told her that we might have killed her husband. She looked at me and said, “But that was during the war. The war is over.”

She invited me to her home. There was a family altar with a photo of her husband. She served me tea. I felt so humbled, and so unsure I could have had that forgiveness.

But now I have forgiven so much, and forgiven myself. The war is over, even as it lives on in us. Peace is a beautiful thing.

We no longer have to search and destroy, we can seek and find. Our wounds of body, mind, and spirit may still be with us but so is the love we found there for each other. We can heal generational trauma; we can still make a difference.

Sin loi, there it is, don’t mean nothing. But it does. It means everything. Our packs I hope are lighter now, our burdens less, but we are still together, walking each other home until that last Freedom Bird picks us up.

It’s never too late. That’s the message my pilgrimages and the medicines have showed me. It really is always Howdy Doody time. The clock doesn’t matter. It’s now. It’s always now. And we are always here. Right here with each other where we belong.

Semper Fi. Bless you all.

Editor’s note: Bill Broyles’ full speech can be viewed online at https:..youtu.be/f7-9hmIbhQw?si=YZP8t63mFtPlOATq

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