Vietnam in Owls Head

It was a shock the past couple of nights, seeing in episodes two and three of Ken Burns' "The Vietnam War", the face and voice of our neighbor down the shore, Bob Rheault. (I should say former neighbor, as he died four years ago.) We had met him a couple of times, but it was a bit awkward since we knew that he had been famous (or infamous) as head of Special Forces in Vietnam during the war.

Bob's humble words on screen were much more powerful than the mealy-mouthed non-statements, obfuscations, and even lies of the politicians and generals - Kennedy, McNamara, Johnson, Westmoreland - of the time. They were shocking in how terribly they brought back the events of more than 50 years ago. Then as now, public words seem to mean nothing. Private words, as captured by the journalists and the novelists and the film-makers, mean volumes.

I would have liked to have known Bob better. He was a man who perhaps came to the coast of Maine to clear away the awful memories of military service in Vietnam, and certainly a man who devoted himself in Maine to service of another kind: outdoors education at Outward Bound, and land conservation at Georges River Land Trust. Ridiculously, his obituary in The New York Times spends 99% of its words on his few months in Vietnam, i,e., almost nothing on his 44 years in Maine. Is war really so much more interesting than peace?