The past is never dead. It’s not even past. -William Faulkner,* Requiem for a Nun, 1951

Of the 2.7 million US military personnel who served in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) during the US war, between 1 million and 1.6 million either fought in combat, provided close tactical support, or were regularly exposed to attack. Gene Simmers, a US Army medic from Ohio, was one of them.

If you read the bestselling book Kill Anything That Moves – The Real American War in Vietnam by investigative journalist Nick Turse, you’ll understand how it was possible for the US and its allies to kill 3.8 million Vietnamese, about half of whom were civilians. Killing that many people in a span of roughly seven years between 1965 and 1972 is akin to industrial-scale slaughter. (In case you’re wondering, that’s 8.75% of the population of a divided Vietnam in 1972. That’s the 2026 equivalent of 30,012,500 US Americans.)

You’ll also know why so many returned home suffering from PTSD for what they had done and witnessed being done to others and why so many committed suicide because they felt that was the only relief and exit from their psychic suffering.

In his 1995 study On Killing, Dave Grossman notes between distance and ease of aggression, there’s a direct relationship between empathy, physical proximity of the victim and the resultant difficulty and trauma of the kill. (Source: Vietnam veteran’s gravestone somber reminder of war’s toll, 13.4.26)

Gene Simmers passed away in November 2022 at the age of 75. One of his lasting and most painful wartime memories was of the elderly Vietnamese woman he killed, someone’s daughter, mother, grandmother, sister, and niece. He never explained the circumstances of her murder, only that he was the one who pulled the trigger. The indoctrination he received in basic training was not enough to convince him that all Vietnamese were “the other,” the “enemy,” whose lives were expendable.Because Gene had a conscience, that one act of taking an innocent life tormented him for the rest of his life. It’s safe to say that he had many sleepless nights and that the woman he killed visited him in his nightmares.

I give Gene Simmers credit for publicly and posthumously recognizing that he killed this woman. This was his way of acknowledging the war crime he committed. May he and she rest in peace.

I wish he had had the opportunity to return to a Vietnam at peace. For many veterans, that is the ultimate therapy, a place where they find the forgiveness they are so desperately seeking.

MAA

Postscript: Apropos of nothing, both Gene Simmers and William Faulkner are paternal cousins, the former much more distant than the latter.