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Candie Playing with Friends in Okinawa

Daddy's first day back in 'Nam, 1967

THE SILENT KNOWING: VIETNAM AND THE LOSS OF OUR FATHERS
Nonfiction by Candace Browning Moonshower

My father died twice. The first time, his helicopter exploded over Vietnam. The second time, and far less dramatic, he died because I refused to remember him. I was told that I didn't remember him—that I couldn't remember him—and so I stopped remembering him. For years, I pretended that the father I had loved had never existed, and that our relationship did not exist either. As I grew older and realized that my memories were not dreams, I broke my silence. I connected with other children of Vietnam and discovered that they, too, had lived for many years in silence. This silence was born of fear and shame and the bad taste that continues to linger decades after our involvement in Vietnam.

Why is it important for kids today to learn about this time in our history? Because the upheaval of the sixties and the resulting cultural revolution continue to affect and shape their lives. Kids today still feel the effects of those times, and most are woefully ignorant of that period of our nation's history, mainly because so few of us who experienced it firsthand have broken our silence. Many children today live in an absence of relationship with their fathers, a situation that has become the norm since Vietnam, a time unlike any we experienced before as a country. This absence of relationship will affect their futures in profound ways.

My father, a soldier with over twenty years of service in the United States Army, spent the better part of my life in and out of Vietnam. His experiences there—and ours at home—are typical and unique. The loss of my father in 1968, and the effects of that loss on my life, is archetypal of the lives of kids today, especially kids whose fathers have left them, or never claimed them at all. While illuminating a slice of history that is a continual source of controversy, I believe that the results of my exploration into my silent relationship with my missing father will be helpful to any young person at odds with his own past or uncertain future.

The Silent Knowing: Vietnam and the Loss of Our Fathers is a completed, nonfiction manuscript of approximately 65,000 words. Photographs are available, many taken in Vietnam by my father or other photographers. These photographs serve to illustrate the text in direct and often graphic ways. For many of the photographs, detailed captions will provide additional information that will serve as sidebars to the text itself. Actual letters written by my father serve as fillers between the chapters and add historical interest.

A nonfiction book of this size and style is attractive to kids in junior high and high school. While the information contained within the book is historically-based, the method of imparting the information—through short stories, essays, letters and photographs—is one that is easy to digest and understand. In The Silent Knowing, I chronicle what I have learned about finding meaning and making meaning through our memories and storytelling, against the backdrop of my family and our experience with Vietnam. I use the stories, essays and letters to impart a sense of place and times gone by. The result is a living document that is not limited to an individual sensibility, but is an accurate reflection of a greater cultural milieu, both then and now.

The Telegram

Chapter One: "Sir, Permission to Love, Sir"
"I don’t remember the sound of my father's voice except when I dream." So the story begins of learning that my dear father has died in a land far, far away. At home, life goes on. Mother remarries, the third grade begins, and so, too, begin the nightmares. Everyone insists that it's time to grow up and get over it all. And the shroud of silence drops over my life.

December 1963

Chapter Two: "Playing House"
Military life on a remote island throws diverse families into close proximity. Sharing a basement with another military family provides a friend, but also affords a glimpse into a family life very different in its ever-simmering anger. Gay and I play house as we wait out the typhoons. My pretend family is one in which Daddy Doll plays with his girl and teaches her to swim and dive. Gay's pretend family is one in which Daddy Doll is sent away, and the family is happy. "Each time that Gay put Daddy Doll behind the dollhouse and announced that he was 'on maneuvers,' her face softened a little."

Daddy in 1953

Chapter Three: "Pop Rhinehart's Dancing Band"
My mother tells the story of meeting Daddy and the beginnings of their new life together in the tranquil decade of the fifties, when marrying and starting a family were at the top of the list of things to do for young Americans. Mama meets Daddy on the dance floor of the Top Three Club at Fort Campbell, as her father's orchestra plays and couples swirl around them in a cloud of perfume and smoke.

Candie in the 5th Grade

Chapter Four: "The Terms of Silence"
In the fall of the fifth grade, I learn a valuable lesson at the hands of my teacher, Mrs. Stillwell. In a rare fit of defiance, I refuse to answer the Weekly Reader questions dealing with the picture on the front cover of a swarm of Bell UH-1 helicopters. These choppers, Hueys, are the kind of bird that carried my father to his death. Instead of punishing me, Mrs. Stillwell reveals herself for one brief moment. She has a secret, too, about the war and its effects. And "she knew my secret. She had always known my secret, and now I knew hers, too."

November 1961

Chapter Five: "Living without Daddy"
On January 29, 1996, an F-14 Navy fighter jet slams into some houses on the street where my brother lives with his wife. People are believed to be dead. I try to reassure myself "that the likelihood of a jet falling out of the sky and killing my brother was nil. But a creepy feeling continued to crawl inside of me. My luck with military aircraft crashing out of the sky and taking my loved ones is worse than most." The crash of the jet, and the arrival of military personnel who camp on my brother's lawn for several days as they sort out what happened, opens up an opportunity for my brother and me to sort out our relationship and forge a tenuous new link.

Chapter Six: "The Strength of Women"
Mother's story of her courtship and marriage to Daddy continues. Daddy, a self-made man who believes that he can count on no one but himself, is amazed by the strong women in Mother's family: Grandmother Frances, Sweetmama, Auntie Ruth, Sister June, and especially Mother.

Chapter Seven: "The Legacy"
I never knew my mother was saving my father's letters for me until a thief broke into her basement storage and stole my father's medals and the American flag that had been draped over his casket. The thief ravaged the boxes containing the love letters written by my father during fifteen years of marriage. "I was filled with a sense of wonder at the sheer volume of words that my father had written. And I realized instinctively—and for the first time–that my own prolific writing was an inherited talent, a definable something that I could now qualify by saying: 'I get this from my father.'"

11 June 1968
Hue-Phu Bai, Vietnam

Chapter Eight: "Separate Shames"
While I never talked about my father when I was young, I had the freedom to do so, a freedom that many children today do not have, because it is not death that takes their fathers from them. Their fathers leave. They run off. They make babies with other women. Still, these kids miss their dads, just as my friend, Henry, missed his daddy every day—a father killed his own mother and then killed himself after a third tour in Vietnam. Henry took his own life when we were twenty-one years old. Henry's short life is one that parallels the mindset of many Americans since the Vietnam War.

Chapter Nine: "Money for Love"
Mother continues her story. Grandmother Frances had second thoughts about Mother and Daddy's engagement after a few months, and her way of dealing with it is to withhold the money for the wedding. This chapter explores the power struggle between two women, one entrenched in a life from which she cannot escape, and the other anxious to spread her young wings and fly.

Daddy with Robert McNamara

Chapter Ten: "Dear Mr. McNamara"
In a letter to Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam years, I call to task the man behind many of the machinations during what came to be known as "McNamara's War." Quoting from his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, I note the way McNamara uses euphemisms such as "never returned" to describe the deaths of almost 58,000 Americans. I admonish him for being a supercilious, arrogant elitist when he asks such as question as "Does the unwisdom of our intervention nullify their effort and their loss?" As a child of Vietnam, I remind the "Great Abdicator" that his "eleventh hour confessions have not helped us to 'leave the past behind.'" For many of us, he is—and always will be—the government that betrayed us in Vietnam.

The Desk in Daddy's Hooch

Daddy's Vietnam Diary

Chapter Eleven: "The Silent Knowing"
My father was killed twice: the first time as he was shot out of helicopter over Firebase Bastogne in the Republic of Vietnam; the second time, and far less dramatic, he was killed by my inability to remember him. The letters and mementos that are all that remains of my father's life fill three small boxes. And though I cannot remember the sound of my father's voice, these things have helped me to forge a map back to him and back to our relationship. Most importantly, I know now that "my relationship is one that I cannot expect to come from the outside. It will have to be my own creation. And while the knowing may be silent, it will be no less real. My mind may not hear, but my heart can."