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Carlisle woman learns firsthand the healing power of time
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Charlotte Kinney, right, and Carla Fisher talk about Kinney’s trip to Vietnam. Jason Malmont/The Sentinel
There was just no way for Charlotte Kinney to comfort the grieving widow.
“I tried to console her, but she was extremely upset,” Kinney said. “She was angry at the Army. I was the one standing there.”
Officers tasked with notifying next of kin of Vietnam War dead were authorized to issue support checks to family members to help them cover expenses.
“She just threw it in my face,” said Kinney, recalling the sad moment from September 1967.
The woman’s husband, a sergeant in the Green Berets, was only two years shy of retirement when he was killed in action.
Kinney carried the agony of that moment through most of her 29 years of combined active and reserve service with the U.S. Army.
She could not help the widow, but she plans to use insight from a recent visit to Vietnam to help veterans of that highly divisive war.
Terrible memories
In 1967, Kinney was a young captain in southern California struggling with the emotional drain of helping the next of kin, disabled veterans and their dependents process the necessary paperwork to receive benefits.
“It was really tough,” said Kinney, of Carlisle. “We’re talking hundreds of cases for me and my staff. You had to keep calling people. You end up staying with families for months.”
The whole time, she supported friends deployed to Vietnam, constantly writing them letters and sending them care packages. Some never made it home.
Kinney found herself in Boston a few years later, walking down a street in uniform. A woman passing by paused long enough to spit at Kinney, an Army recruiter at the time.
The woman was angry at the war. Kinney happened to be standing there.
“It was very hard,” she recalls. “It got to the point where we didn’t wear uniforms off post. I really felt for the guys and nurses coming back from Vietnam.”
Moving forward
Fast forward almost 40 years, Kinney is now retired. She can look back on a career which took her all over the United States and into other countries as she raised her son alone.
Kinney has moved more than 100 times in her life, volunteering for active duty assignments between stints as a reservist and teacher of home economics and English as a Second Language.
Her travels include teaching jobs in Spain, England, Romania, China and Korea, where she retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 1993.
Throughout her career, Kinney befriended Vietnam veterans still coping with the nightmares and bad memories of that highly divisive war.
She heard how the Veterans Administration is trying to convince Vietnam veterans to return to that country as part of the healing process.
“It’s good therapy,” Kinney said. “It wipes out the terrible memories they have.”
Volunteering to heal
Kinney moved to Carlisle in January -- drawn to the area by the U.S. Army War College and its reputation as an institute of higher learning.
Always alert for new opportunities, she became part of Global Volunteers, a non-profit organization that recruits short-term volunteers to serve on long-term development programs abroad.
Global Volunteers pay a tax-deductible fee to participate in programs that include teaching conversational English and working closely with teenagers.
Kinney picked Vietnam to see for herself how that country has changed since the war. Her goal was to take photographs and gather insight to share with her friends.
Carla Fisher of Carlisle is a retired Army colonel and former instructor at the War College. She and Kinney met a few months ago after her arrival in town.
“I think it’s terrific,” Fisher said of Kinney’s mission. “It was a terrible war. Anything anyone can do to help people heal after that experience is good.”
Red Cross work
Fisher served as an American Red Cross volunteer in Vietnam from late 1968 to early 1969. Her experiences were far less traumatic than those of combat veterans.
“Our job was to run recreation centers in the rear areas,” Fisher explained. “We were very well protected.”
Occasionally, volunteers visited soldiers on the frontline, providing them with care packages and adaptations of quiz shows to boost morale and take their minds off the war.
“The impression which remains with me is how close you become,” Fisher said. “The shared deprivation, the common purpose, the teamwork. It really has a big impact.”
Fisher was curious over what Kinney found in Vietnam, so the two friends and former educators sat down and compared notes.
Bud Philbrook is co-founder and president of Global Volunteers. He said a lot of Vietnam War veterans have participated in the programs and have been embraced by the Vietnamese.
“Scripture says you always receive more than you give,” Philbrook said. “Giving is part of the forgiving process.”
No bitterness
Kinney arrived in Hanoi on Sept. 25 and returned to the U.S. on Oct. 12. While in Vietnam, she taught English pronunciation to 10th-grade students at a private school.
Vietnamese children are taught English from an early age on the assumption they will need the language skills to get good jobs upon graduating, Kinney said.
Kinney went to Vietnam expecting to encounter lingering bitterness towards Americans. She even asked people how they felt about the U.S. and its combat veterans. What she found surprised her.
“They were so forgiving of Americans,” Kinney said. “There was no bitterness at all. The war was gone. The caring was there.”
Much of their bitterness was towards France, she said, which once colonized Indochina. The first part of the Hanoi Hilton Museum tells the story of the French occupation. The second part is about U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
The Hanoi Hilton was the prisoner-of-war compound in which Republican presidential candidate John McCain was an inmate. Artifacts include his flight suit and a picture of him in 1998 telling a story of forgiveness.
Kinney said the Vietnamese are following the presidential election and think it is great that McCain is running for the office. She said the emotions the museum evokes may be too powerful for some Vietnam veterans to bear.
Her group of 14 teachers included a retired Army reserve general who visited some of his former duty stations.
Universal questions
“What impressed me the most about the Vietnamese is they are so happy,” Kinney said. “Hanoi has seven million people. No matter where I went, people were smiling.
“They’ve come so far,” she added. “They’re really into making money. You would never know Vietnam is communist.”
As for her students, they were typical teenagers.
“You could not hear anything when classes changed except chatter and laughter,” Kinney recalled. “They have gotten into our bad food habit of drinking soda and eating candy and potato chips.”
In one lesson, Kinney showed them photos of Amish working fields with no modern technology.
“They could not comprehend it,” she said. “They were just amazed the Amish would live that way.”
On a field trip to the countryside, Kinney learned there were still Vietnamese cutting rice by hand and using water buffalo as beasts of burden.
Kinney owns a Thunderbird convertible. She thought it was funny her students in Vietnam could not comprehend the idea of a car with a roof that slides off.
She was also amazed by how few accidents there were in a society where people ride around on bikes and motor scooters with no traffic lights or stop signs.
No matter what country Kinney teaches in, she said students have the same general questions for her:
“How old are you? How much money do you make? What is your job? How many are in your family?”
