The spring of 1968 was intense. The escalating war in Vietnam dominated the nightly news. Though I was only 12, a seventh grader in Queens, New York, I wasn’t neutral. When school got out, I volunteered at the district office of anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy.
That same spring, Maurice, a 19-year-old Black man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, completed his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. He’d enlisted in the Army, hoping he’d have more options than he would when he was inevitably drafted.
In May, just weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Maurice landed in Vietnam with his transportation company. He made it through his tour. Discharged in August 1970, he returned to Milwaukee to assume the role of husband and father. His first son had been born while he was in Vietnam.
Fast forward to March 1983, to a karate school on the north side of Milwaukee. I was a second-shift worker at a printing plant, taking karate lessons by day. A doctor’s daughter turned would-be labor organizer, I’d met and learned from socialists and trade union activists during a stint at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I joined their migration to working-class Milwaukee, the great factory town.
At the dojo, I met a man with irresistible energy. He liked camping, running, and fishing. He was a sheet metal worker on his way to becoming a journeyman. Divorced with two sons. He wanted to start his own business one day, which seemed “bourgeois” to me, but we hit it off! Our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different, but the chemistry was real. I was 27. He was 34.
My new love was that Vietnam veteran. Telling my family about him, I marveled that he seemed to have left the war behind. He was full of plans and joy. He didn’t fit any popular stereotype of a Vietnam vet. Unscarred, I thought. Unscarred.
In the third month of our new relationship, I also had to tell my family that after Maurice spent a night with me in my upper flat, my white landlords asked me to move. They asked me if I was “running a cathouse up there.” Maurice had been over before and I’d introduced him, but that morning they told me, “We can’t have that. We have nice things here.”
That was Milwaukee. I was dating a war veteran and native son of a city where a white person introduced to a Black man—a man who had made eye contact, shook hands, and showed every courtesy—could view that man as a potential thief, a threat, because “you know.”
I moved and initiated a complaint with the state’s Department of Industry, Labor and Human Relations. The legal basis was discrimination due to “race association,” and I prevailed. You might say that early incident was a war story we shared. But not really. I was inconvenienced, but I’m not on the Black side of the “you know” equation. “Race association” (at least in housing and personal life) is voluntary. Being Black isn’t.
I’m not sure I knew the term “hypervigilance” those first years, but I observed it. When we went to restaurants, Maurice always wanted the seat facing the door. When we parked at a fishing spot, he asked me to back in so we could make a quick escape if needed. It was odd and irritating to me, but I learned to take it in stride.
And there was the .38 revolver he kept in the house and carried on every trip. An older man in his neighborhood told him he should never travel unarmed, and Maurice took that to heart. I learned to take the .38 in stride, too, because I never saw Maurice threaten anyone. He never even raised his voice with me.
Was that vigilance from combat-related PTSD? Maurice had spent much of his time in-country at Cu Chi in southern Vietnam. Many soldiers found night perimeter guard duty unsettling, but he felt safer there than lying in the bunkers, where mortar rounds hit most often. Sitting perfectly still all night in the jungle suited him. That experience honed a habit of watchfulness he valued and carried into civilian life.
When a veteran lives in a city where a landlord—imagining he must protect his “nice things”— might call the police on a Black visitor, where an encounter with police could turn deadly, when co-workers in the nearly all-white building trades think he’s making too much money, how do you tease out the vigilance needed to coexist safely in America from the vigilance acquired in a wartime combat zone?
I was a white woman virtually oblivious to cues of possible danger or confrontation, and traveling with me surely added a layer of stress. From the white side of the “you know” equation, I just couldn’t perceive the world we moved in as a perpetual war zone.
I’d heard my landlord make racist comments before. Did I share that information with my new boyfriend so he could decide whether it was a safe situation? No. That landlord was a busybody, but I assumed (for myself and Maurice) that he was harmless. Of course, Maurice knew better, though he didn’t chastise me. He looked out of every window in that upper flat and pulled the shades before settling.
We had some wonderful years nonetheless. We went camping with his 26-foot trailer, fished, and ran fun runs, even marathons. I moved into his house in 1990.
We had a spread of land in rural western Wisconsin. Maurice was a natural mentor. He tirelessly organized the neighborhood kids for cleanups and cookouts. We took groups of up to 15 kids for camping weekends summer after summer. Almost all of our campers were Black. In the 2000 census, Black people comprised less than 1% of the population of Vernon County. We stood out.
Things came up. A family bought land adjacent to ours and built their home. Then they asked us if we’d sell them a few acres where we pitched tents. They kept saying they needed space for a new garage. We declined. They let their dog run loose on our property. We put up a fence. They disputed the location. It went on.
Was it racism? Or just rural folks versus weekend warriors? No one physically threatened us. No one used racial epithets, though “you city people” comes close. I’m not proud to say that I retained my irrational trust in other white people. They’d never be our friends, but I reasoned the neighbors were “harmless.” But they made it hard for us to enjoy ourselves there. So, not harmless.
These events coincided with Maurice’s onset of type 2 diabetes and, later, cardiovascular problems, both linked to Agent Orange exposure. That wore on him. Many weekends, he found reasons to stay home. Other times, we’d make the four-hour trip west, spend a few hours, then he’d find a reason to head back to Milwaukee. It was infuriating.
We had other challenges in our relationship, as all couples do, but these situations frayed the bond between us. Maurice was not bitter but candid, assessing us as a team: “You don’t want to learn how to shoot. If we get in a situation, I know you’re not going to protect us. Even though you won’t go to jail.” It stung to hear that, but he wasn’t wrong. I didn’t want to learn how to shoot.
The thing was, he didn’t want to shoot anyone either. His capacity for joy and forgiveness, even under these pressures, effectively hid the rage he had to suppress. Why couldn’t we have “nice things”? Unfettered enjoyment of our property? If you’re on the Black side of that equation, “you know.”
I had moved out of our shared home along the way, though we didn’t break up. I watched hypervigilance narrow Maurice’s world. Watched him become obsessed with “gangsters” around his home. He discouraged me from coming around because he’d have to defend me. But in 2020, when it became clear that he was losing his memory, I moved back.
Fast forward one last time, to 2024. I was with him at a soulless office near the airport. Maurice had finally entered treatment for PTSD and filed a disability claim for it. On this day, he would see an examiner, who would determine if his claim had merit. I was allowed to sit in since Maurice had dementia now, and I was his caregiver. He was 75. He’d returned from Vietnam 55 years ago. The exam was meant to determine if the war was why he has PTSD. Because if something else caused it, a grateful nation shouldn’t pay.
The examiner ultimately decided that his service played a role. But as we awaited his decision, I thought about my harmless landlord from way back when, the Vernon County neighbors, and things Maurice told me happened on his job sites when he was a journeyman.
I’ll always wonder if combat in Vietnam caused his PTSD or was it caused by living in America? How can they measure the toll?
This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Rosemarie Ho, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Kim Vo wrote the headline.
