By Seraine Page

No one likes talking about war, especially Vietnam veterans. It’s too cold; it’s too painful. The images are too vivid.
But Vietnam veteran Gary Prisk wants to talk about it. He wants people to know the truth. He’s a dime a dozen, and he’ll tell you exactly how it was. In fact, he’s so in tune with telling the truth that he wrote a book, “Digger, Dogface, Brownjob, Grunt” so the public would have the truth right there in black and white, forever. Although the book is considered a fiction piece, the scenes are exactly what one would have found in the jungles of Vietnam during the war.
“I’ve always been able to write,” says the retired Army veteran. As someone with 29 and a half years experience between the Army and Army reserves, Prisk has had his fair share of real-life experiences. The hardest memory to re-live, though, is when he was dropped into Vietnam at age 24 and was told to fight the enemy.
For luck, Prisk wore his father’s dog tags.
He only spent a year in Vietnam, but, when in war, it feels like a lifetime. Every night, they “dug out” and placed themselves into fox holes in the ground. But, the Viet Cong would find them.
Prisk claims the food served to the infantry members was bland. Because of that, the men poured Tabasco sauce over their meals, covering it. When “jungle rot” started setting in, the scent of sweat mixed with Tabasco made the squatting Americans an easy target for the Viet Cong members.
The Viet Cong could smell the Tabasco sweat.
And when they found the Americans, they were brutal.
When discovered by the enemy, American soldiers were bound up, tied to a tree, and their throats were slit. However, they were not cut jugular to jugular. They were cut so they were still alive, still feeling everything that was happening to them as they drifted in and out of consciousness. Then their tongue was cut and pulled out. The genitals were next, snipped off and shoved into the throats of the captured soldiers. A rag was tied around their mouth to keep the contents in, and they were left to bleed out and die.
It took Prisk 22 years to get everything down just right. Every last detail mattered to him and to other Vietnam vets. Veterans are just that way, he’ll tell you.
With the help of book editor Laurie Rosin, Prisk was eventually able to cut out 36 events after three edits by Rosin. There were so many details in his mind he wanted to share that it was too much, Rosin would tell him. He was so detailed, in fact, that he used real names and even social security numbers. In his final copy, however, those details have vanished.
Rosin remarks that the process drained her, but that the purpose of fiction is to “evoke emotions in readers” as a responsible writer giving a realistic account of war. Prisk is as responsible as they come, she says.
“My first impression was that of a writer who was overloaded with the emotion of a terrible experience and his desire to unburden himself,” Rosin said of reading Prisk’s work for the very first time. “He wrung every bloody drop of truth from his year-long Vietnam combat tour of duty. The novel seemed to be the result of his opening his personal floodgates.”
The event that inspired Prisk to sit down and write was when a fellow Vietnam vet he knew made national news years after the war. Prisk had left Vietnam, but the memories still consumed him regularly, including one particularly haunting image of watching one of his buddies known as “Packrat” step onto a land mine. Prisk remembers thinking his friend was dead after he was pulled off of the trap, completely black, his legs “shredded.”
Because his group was in the middle of fighting, Prisk had to move on and didn’t know if his friend was alive or dead. In fact, he didn’t know until 20 years after the war that his friend was alive. In 1987, he received a letter from the Military Defense Council, requesting Prisk to attend the trial of his friend, Pack Rat, AKA Stanley Verketis.
Prisk couldn’t believe it.
Verketis, who Prisk proclaimed “nuts” after Vietnam, had foxholes dug out all over the yard of the home he lived in after the war. Prisk learned that Verketis had indeed survived, but his mind had not. He had heard Verketis mixed drugs with Vietnam memories, something that Prisk said he could never understand.
“I’ve never mixed drugs with my dreams,” he says, remarking that Verketis used heavy drugs. “Every time his VA check showed up, his drug dealers showed up.”
One day “Pack Rat” discharged his firearm through the roof of his home, summoning a local police officer, Sgt. Arthur Koch. Verketis shot the officer dead, and was promptly arrested and put on trial. The Military Defense Council wanted Prisk to testify that his friend was a “good soldier.”
Thinking about it, Prisk admits, “He was a good soldier, by the way.”
It was just that the Vietnam War demons got to him.
Prisk’s book has won quite a few awards since it was published in 2010. He won the USA Book News awards for Fiction & Literature: Literary Fiction, and Best New Fiction. He also swiped the International Book Award for the Best Fiction Book of 2010. But winning awards for telling the truth wasn’t what Prisk was after. He wrote the book as an honor to his father and brother, who both served, and for the men he fought beside.
Despite winning the fiction category, what Prisk wrote about was far from fiction. Prisk is now 70 years old, and he still has nightmares. His wife sometimes doesn’t know if he is breathing or not in the middle of the night, because his breathing is so shallow. His shallow sleeping is a result of never sleeping in Vietnam, he says.
Prisk spent six years as an active duty infantryman that took him through Vietnam as an army infantry officer where he was an experienced army paratrooper and ranger. Obviously brilliant, he obtained an engineering degree prior to neering degree prior to going into the military, but remarked he wasn’t quite that smart because he thought he was invincible enough to go over and fight a war and not be impacted for the rest of his life.
Upon coming back to the United States, Prisk says Vietnam veterans experienced a “different normality” compared to civilians. Despite attempts to assimilate, many, like his friend Verketis, found it difficult.
“They’re still carrying those experiences with them,” he says. “You can’t expect the other 95 percent of Americans to understand what you’ve been through. I’m thankful there’s not a whole hell of a lot of us (combat vets) running around.”
While in combat, soldiers were always looking over their shoulders. But that’s to be expected when carrying 48 magazine rounds to make sure a Viet Cong ambush wouldn’t be successful, Prisk says. He carried little hope with him that he’d make it out alive. He wore a strap on his helmet that read “Flowers are Forever” as a cheerful, yet somber reminder.
“(It was) the only thing left once the war was over,” Prisk says of flowers.
As for religion, Prisk prayed every morning. But he doesn’t believe God was in Vietnam during that year he was there. Or anytime during the Vietnam War, for that matter.
“I said the Lord’s Prayer every morning and then fought like hell to kill everybody,” he says.
From his unit alone, Prisk lost 54 comrades. According to the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files, there were 58,220 U.S. military casualties of the Vietnam War. It’s a number too much for many vets, especially vets like Prisk, to swallow. However, he wrote “Digger, Dogface, Brownjob, Grunt” as a final way to honor the fallen.
“It was done for the guys I fought with,” he says.
The 512-page book is an insight that not many outsiders get, because many veterans refuse to talk about their time in war. Even Prisk’s book editor has not been able to get her close, personal veteran friend to share his story.
After reading and editing Prisk’s very real book, she now understands why.
“Reading Gary’s book has given me insight as to my friend’s reluctance to revisit his tour of duty,” she says. Rosin also notes she understands that many of the armed forces during wartime didn’t have a choice when it came to joining the military.
But Prisk had a choice about re-enlisting, and he also had a choice of if he wanted to share his experiences. When he finally decided to, he wanted it just right, which is something Rosin remarks made working with a veteran a “stellar experience.”
“Gary has the talent, drive, and commitment that allows him to achieve excellence,” she says. “All the veterans I’ve worked with have a desire to do things just right, and they have the self-discipline to make it happen. Their wartime experiences set them apart from the general public because they faced extraordinary challenges most of us cannot grasp. Many of my clients who are veterans try to explain to their loved ones — and to themselves — what the war did to them and meant to them. Having a fictional character live those events is one way authors can distance themselves from what they endured.”
The author is currently writing a WWII story set in 1939.