On a bright Sunday afternoon, Harley Melton sits at a café table with a smile and a smoke. Melton is a husband, father, former-Marine, Vietnam vet and a history major at The University of Memphis.
He has almost completed his book, “Touch Not the Wall,” his tale of Vietnam. But his is not a typical war story. There is no blood or gore or stories of heroic young men. Melton bares his soul in a touching and enlightening story about realities during and after the war.
It is a story written for those who had to deal with Vietnam vets after they came home. A story written to those, Melton said in the forward of his book, who tried so hard to be there for “someone who forever shut you out of the most important part of our lives and the most important part of ourselves-our love.”
“My purpose is to tell the Vietnam story in a slightly different way to show how a young man wasn’t dragged to Vietnam but volunteered, begged to go and they let him go and then how he went a little crazy, a lot crazy,” Melton said. “I felt America had no guts and it had no knowledge that war is absolutely inevitable. That is the message I want to get across in a sometimes sad, sometimes funny way.”
Melton is only five chapters away from completing his book. Writing has become an obsession for Melton now. He always wrote humorous stories about his children and never considered writing about Vietnam. Then he visited the Vietnam Memorial and he touched the name of the only person he cared about on that wall: his best friend, whom he calls Bru throughout his book. Melton said this book has unlocked passions within him and has made him a better writer.
When asked if writing the book has been therapeutic, Melton responds, “It reinforced the two things I learned while I was in Vietnam. The first thing is war in and of itself is probably the stupidest endeavor mankind does. But it is also the only inevitable endeavor we choose to do. There will always be war.”
Melton was open and candid about how his experiences in Vietnam affected him.
“I lost my faith in God after Vietnam, and I didn’t get it back until I held my baby boy.”
When asked if there was a piece of him left in Vietnam, he said no. “I think I was given more than I lost,” Melton said. “I lost probably the best friend I’ll ever have and in many ways I lost the ability to make friends with men. But I gained this zest for life that I never really had. When you come back from something like that, flowers, children and laughter, especially children’s laughter means so much to you.”
The last thing Melton wants to do is appear to be a victim because he made the choice to be a Marine. Melton also made it very clear that he does not want to be painted as a hero.
“I did no different than any other of the 3 million boys that went to Vietnam,” he said. “I did my duty.”
When asked about the terrorist attacks, Melton talked of his initial observation and reaction.
“I was shook on Sept. 11 not because it happened, but because of the way everybody in America acted and on campus especially,” Melton said. “They let classes out the next day, and I was thinking no, you’ve got to get on with life.
“God forgive me, but my first thought when I heard about the terrorist attack, my first thought was at least now some of the American people know what it’s like to be in a war,” Melton said. “That’s sad that was my first response.”
Melton said his son wanted to drop out of college and join the Marine Corps to go fight in the Gulf War but he convinced him to hold off until the end of the semester.
“I actually considered taking a sledge hammer down to his college and breaking his legs so he couldn’t go,” Melton said.
It was not that Melton did not fear for his son’s life, because he did. He did not want his son to have to see what he saw in Vietnam.
Melton is back in college with the goal of being a public high school history teacher. It is something he has always wanted to do.
“I can teach history because history is funny,” Melton said. “To me the worst thing you could do is to write on the board in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. After 1492 the statement should be ‘who cares’.”
