GREENFIELD — Tenth-grader Cai Brocket stood in front of a packed classroom at Four Rivers Charter School Friday portraying an American soldier in a short skit about the Vietnam War.
“I can’t forgive myself,” Brocket said. Next to him, another student, Marcel Pattavina, who wore a sign that read “brother of U.S.A. soldier,” said, “I can’t forgive him.”
“It’s important to get across the sibling connection — that the brother didn’t want to kill, but he was forced to,” Pattavina said afterward. The two were participating in “Why War?” — a series of six short vignettes incorporating multiple perspectives as well as information about foreign policy and war.
The skits were held in conjunction with the Memorial Day holiday to honor the sacrifices of veterans and to educate students, said 10th-grade teacher Laura Tabachnick. This is the fifth year the school has hosted the event.
Next week, the 10th-grade class will go to Washington, D.C., and perform one of the six vignettes at war memorials. After that, they’ll meet with a Politico war correspondent.
In making the skits, students worked with theater teachers, interviewed war veterans, and read novels pertinent to the war experience they were focusing on, Tabachnick said.
One of those veterans interviewed by students was 73-year-old Vietnam Veteran Peter Rogers.
“Memorial Day should be a time of mourning, not celebrating. It’s mourning the ravages of war. It shouldn’t be exalting courage; it’s sadness,” Rogers said during the recent interview. At 24 years old in 1968, he served as an Army Intelligence Officer in Bong Son, an idyllic, beautiful part of Vietnam.
“My role was to get people to like me. We were collecting human intelligence,” Rogers said. At the time, he spoke fluent Vietnamese. “I was immersed in military culture and the unit I was with had a reputation for being vicious, for taking no prisoners.” While deployed, Rogers “was in denial about the things I was seeing” — war crimes committed by U.S. troops.
It wasn’t until about eight years ago that Rogers — who was born in Wenham and now lives in Amherst — for the first time began talking about his experiences at war.
Those experiences “opened my heart in a way it had never been opened. I felt tremendously compassionate toward the Vietnamese people. When I came back, I was ashamed about being in the military, and in Vietnam. What I saw changed me from a hawk to a dove. What I saw was folly.”
One particular scene Rogers said is “still burning in my mind’s eye: I happened to walk in on a sergeant who was sadistically water boarding a prisoner. It made my stomach wrench to see this sergeant enjoying the process.”
After, Rogers spoke with his commanding officer who “told me to forget about it. I carried guilt with me for not doing anything further for 40 years. I felt awful. I was a bystander,” Rogers said. Later, another sergeant reported the atrocities Rogers witnessed, many of which have been documented in “The War Behind Me,” a book by Pulitzer Prize winning author Deborah Nelson.
“It was a soul wound. That’s what I had. It wasn’t my mind, or my body, it was my soul that hurt,” Rogers said.
About four years ago, Rogers returned to Vietnam seeking answers. While walking back from a boat yard in Qui Nhon one sunny day, about 30 miles from Bong Son, a woman, also in her 70s, invited him into her home for tea.
“In talking to her, I started to weep,” Rogers said. “It was nothing she said, it was the experience of having this local woman invite me in, and be so kind. She started to comfort me, saying ‘it’s not the soldiers, it’s the government — we love Americans.’ That’s what she said.”
You can reach Andy Castillo
at: acastillo@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 263
On Twitter: @AndyCCastillo