Marching with the Moratorium
November 15, 1969. This was it. the big one. On the front page of The Washington Post, Nicholas Von Hoffman (who would later be fired for calling Richard Nixon a "dead mouse on the kitchen floor," published a column advising residents of D.C. that they had nothing to fear from the protesters, that they were peaceful and were coming to the city to assert their legal right to protest openly. This was in the days before the Metro made it possible to get into and out of Washington easily and Linda and I, with the twins, used my deep blue VW to get to the Mall. It was exciting, electric. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young people were walking everywhere, looking for the start point for the march.
On November 9th, a week before the Moratorium, The New York Times had published a petition signed by 1,365 active-duty servicemen calling for the end of the war. If you've been reading this blog for a whole, you'll recall that Don and I signed it when we were down in Fayetteville, NC, to participate in a march sponsored by GI's United Against the War. In a small chapbook of my essays published almost 25 years after that advertisement appeared, I wrote that having my name on that list of active-duty servicemen was one of the times my name had been in print that I am most proud of. That remains true.
The march on November 15th was one of the last times I was able to see Linda and the kids (more about that later). We all held hands and marched in the middle of a very peaceful half a million person throng, right down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. When we got to the White House, the people on the stage were relatively irrelevant: big names associating themselves with the march. BFD. Who cares that they were there. They simply were not needed. The 500,000 of us would have been there with or without them. I would have preferred that they simply walk along with us, but some people cannot resist a photo-op.
As we walked past the White House, Linda and I each lifted one of the kids onto our shoulders so they could see. Nixon would say, later that day, something to the effect that it was good to see young Americans exercising their right but that it would not matter in his pursuit of the war.
Damn that was fun! For those of you who think protesting against wars or against injustice should be a deadly serious thing to do, I would ask why they do it in the first place. When you put yourself out there, even in a crowd of half a million, you should really enjoy what you’re doing. I hope all those Egyptians out in Tahrir Square had a hell of a good time as they brought Mubarak down. I saw photos of smiling laughing Czechs during the Velvet Revolution and even during the Prague Spring before it was crushed. I’ll bet the Chinese in Tien An Men Square were mostly happy. That’s just how it ought to be. People sacrificed beach balls and Frisbees, sang and shouted. Acting on your convictions should not cause frowns, only laughs!
Not too long ago, I wrote an appreciation of the work of Elena Poniatowska in writing about the student strikes in Mexico City in 1968. Here’s what she said:
[The novelist] Luis Gonzalez de Alba remembered how the halls of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters were crammed full; how buses were used as improvised pulpits; the return of the [student] brigades after the protest marches, when boys and girls would set themselves to folding banners like sheets, storing placards…then climbing aboard their already crowded school buses to return to guard duty on the rooftops; the sandwich at three or four in the morning, the tacos at a taqueria on Insurgentes Avenue, the hot coffee, the laughter, the happiness that brings triumph…
That’s how it is. People who think protesters should be deadly serious, poker-faced, “boring,” don’t bother me. I just think they should re-examine what they are doing and why.
The down side of all that for me was that the National Security Agency finally read the petition in The Times. It was organized to help them locate those of us who signed. Why? To confirm that the signatures were valid. There’s been a petition, fairly recently, apparently signed by active-duty soldiers to oppose the wars in the Middle East, but they are not transparent enough and people don’t really believe active-duty servicemen signed it. Our petition was neatly organized, just to avoid that kind of uncertainty, into the posts and bases where we served. Under "Fort Meade, Maryland," home of NSA: "Henry P. Hall."
What happened as a result of that will wait for the next blog post. But on that day, I was deliriously happy, still in love, surrounded by people who agreed with me. There may have been a VC flag around, but I didn’t see it. There were people with various causes marching, but all of those people were also against the war, and I pretty much supported their causes. It was fun! I was happy! Linda was happy! And we by damn marched against that war.
Whether we accomplished anything or not is irrelevant.
Showing posts with label peace movement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peace movement. Show all posts
Friday, April 15, 2011
Thursday, April 14, 2011
A Few Notes about Vietnam, Part 41
Linda and Washington. Peace marches, protests. Rock concerts and art museums. My VW convertible, my 250CC Suzuki, my MX-5. So much time. A bicycle in South Vietnam. A hitched ride in a deuce and a half. It all becomes mixed up somehow—time out of sequence. There is an old saying that life is motion, that when you stop moving, you finish dying. In my dissertation, written on the Vietnam War novels back in 1984, I wrote, and again this was many years ago, about the helicopters in Vietnam:
Helicopters were used for almost as many purposes as there were missions in the war. They were observers, searching for the Viet Cong; destroyers, raining bullets from the sky; saviors, transporting the wounded to hospitals; hearses, carrying the dead to military morgues; status symbols, cadillacing for every field grade office in the American Army.
I used them to travel from place to place, most notably to and from Dak To in 1967. And, God help me, I loved them. I loved half standing and leaning out the side of the olive drab bird, hanging onto the strap a door gunner used, looking down on a green land that we were destroying, loved the almost vertical take-off and the slow, sometimes spiraling landings. Motion, movement! Hardly anything else matters, it’s reality and it’s a metaphor…if you think about it in grand enough terms. This is why Emily Dickinson has death come as a coachman to give us a ride across the fields and across a lifetime.
In another essay, published years later in Tattoo Highway, I wrote about a dream trip through Milwaukee, a city I have still never been in:
The bumper sticker on the car ahead says MY KID CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT and vanishes with its car heading down an off ramp to somewhere...or not. I am almost always happy when I’m driving even when I have no destination in mind, just wheeling off down a road that, with luck, I’ve never driven before. Like driving through Milwaukee on this particular afternoon when nothing happens except a few old friends appear, vanish, reappear. I am in the house on Nueces Street and I am in Milwaukee and I am sitting in an old chair. Laura, who never lived there, is on the floor, her cheek against my knee, her long dark hair flows down my leg as I drive past an exit sign that says Khe Sanh—20Km. We were never lovers, Laura and I, for some reason neither of us has ever figured out, but it’s right somehow that she is here in Milwaukee as the world is coming to an end.
I begin to relive a drive I took almost 40 years ago, nonstop from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. I was engaged to Linda and with the passing days and weeks had become more and more convinced that I had made a mistake, that I simply did not want to be married, not to anyone, not at this stage in my life. Austin had been nirvana for me in the few short months I had lived there.
When I was discharged from the Army back in December, 1969, I drove straight through, barely sleeping. The first two nights in Austin I rejoined Don and Allen and we crashed with Ann and her two room-mates. For a while the three of us would share a house near the University, and in those first months had a great time repainting the interior in black with day-glo highlights. As I said, a long time ago, almost alien to the way we all live now.
That day I realized I didn't want to marry Linda, I agonized over how to tell her and was tempted to just call and break it off. But that seemed too easy, much too easy, for me after a relationship that had lasted two years, had seen us marching together against the war in the streets of Washington, making love almost every night, taking her twins out to the parks on the weekends, getting high together on life instead of on various chemical substances. Linda deserved better than a brief phone call and that time in my life, that time, deserved something more monumental to mark its passing. So, I decided to return to Washington.
At 9 a.m. the morning after I made that decision, I threw some clothes into a bag and filled my cooler with beer and cokes, left a note for Don and Allen and headed northeast from Austin to Washington in my 1966 VW convertible. The trip took 27 hours one-way, non-stop except for fueling the car every 250 miles or so. The first eight or nine hours were all in Texas: Austin to Dallas on I-35, Dallas to Texarkana on I-30. One problem with living in the heart of Texas is that you have to drive so far to really feel you've made progress. When I lived in Washington, I could drive through four to five states in the same time it took me to reach the Arkansas border. But the highways were good and the miles rolled under me.
Late that night, 2 or 3 a.m., I drove along the Blue Ridge in Virginia, top down, a million fireflies made the Shenandoah Valley glow out the driver's side window. The Milky Way was above and seemed, also, to be below me as I took steep turns, barely awake, zoning out, nodding off from time to time, jerking awake. But finally, I began to fall asleep, and my car drifted out of my lane towards the cliffs on the left side of the road. I suspect I would be dead now except for a truck driver who raced up on my tail and blinked his lights, blowing his air horn loudly, jolting me back to life. I was able to swing the car back into my lane, then stopped and got out, just standing there, almost drunk from exhaustion, watched the fireflies below me, winking in and out, and sat down under a tree for what seemed like hours. After a few minutes,I drove on down the highway and stopped at the first diner I came to.
This was the first real stop I had made and at the diner I drank cup after cup of coffee and I do not normally drink coffee, got strung out, tense, jittery, and headed back east and north, anxious to have the trip over, the trip almost becoming the meaning, the form pushing the substance, my split with Linda, back into the recesses of my mind. As I drove on, I began to see things along the road that were not really there, bushes became animals leaping onto the road in front of me, the shadows were alive, and slowly, slowly, the fireflies began to disappear.
As the sun rose that morning, I continued to fight sleep, continued to make the VW move as quickly as possible, the drive almost becoming the thing itself, punishment for what I was going to do, pushing guilt back and back. I irrationally began to get mad at Linda, blamed her for the whole thing, for my near accident on the Blue Ridge Skyline, for my driving to Washington, though I knew she was not to blame.
I took the beltway around Washington, exited at one of the Silver Spring exits, and pulled the VW into her parking space. It was 2 p.m. and Linda was still at work. I opened her door with my key and walked into the apartment, so familiar, like I still belonged there. I walked back to our bedroom, took my clothes off and fell asleep almost instantly.
Not until nine that evening did Linda wake me up. The whole thing would have been much easier if she had gotten mad at me, had kicked me out of her house when I told her, after we got up, after we went into the kitchen and had a beer, that I did not want to get married, that no, there was no one else, and there was not, that I simply was not ready for marriage, but she didn't. She was the very soul of reason, very controlled, very cool. She didn't cry, didn't scream at me, didn't try to get me to change my mind. When I told her I needed to leave right away, to get back to Austin for classes, she told me to spend the night, to rest. The next morning, she made breakfast for me after the kids had gone to school. And then she kissed me goodbye. I have not seen her again.
I'm glad I made the trip. It would not have been right to end things with a simple phone call. But I wish, somehow, she had been nasty. But if she had, it would have been just for me. I hope now that when I left she closed the door and laughed, howled, shook with joy that she had gotten out of a situation that she did not want. But I don't really believe that.
Just out of Washington, I picked up two hitchhikers headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and we smoked and talked. When I got tired, I turned the driving over to them and slept until we got to their place. Then, I drove back to Austin.
This was all part of the zeitgeist, part of the spirit of the age. Today, some people break up by texting; in those days, I felt I had to do the honorable thing and break up face to face. It’s not part of Vietnam, but it is part of what led me to do certain things: a sense, almost like Hemingway’s sense of “grace under pressure,” that here are things we must do to continue to be honorable people, to be able to continue living with ourselves.
The next blog entry will be about the great peace march of November 15, 1969, and we’ll be back in motion again.
Helicopters were used for almost as many purposes as there were missions in the war. They were observers, searching for the Viet Cong; destroyers, raining bullets from the sky; saviors, transporting the wounded to hospitals; hearses, carrying the dead to military morgues; status symbols, cadillacing for every field grade office in the American Army.
I used them to travel from place to place, most notably to and from Dak To in 1967. And, God help me, I loved them. I loved half standing and leaning out the side of the olive drab bird, hanging onto the strap a door gunner used, looking down on a green land that we were destroying, loved the almost vertical take-off and the slow, sometimes spiraling landings. Motion, movement! Hardly anything else matters, it’s reality and it’s a metaphor…if you think about it in grand enough terms. This is why Emily Dickinson has death come as a coachman to give us a ride across the fields and across a lifetime.
In another essay, published years later in Tattoo Highway, I wrote about a dream trip through Milwaukee, a city I have still never been in:
The bumper sticker on the car ahead says MY KID CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT and vanishes with its car heading down an off ramp to somewhere...or not. I am almost always happy when I’m driving even when I have no destination in mind, just wheeling off down a road that, with luck, I’ve never driven before. Like driving through Milwaukee on this particular afternoon when nothing happens except a few old friends appear, vanish, reappear. I am in the house on Nueces Street and I am in Milwaukee and I am sitting in an old chair. Laura, who never lived there, is on the floor, her cheek against my knee, her long dark hair flows down my leg as I drive past an exit sign that says Khe Sanh—20Km. We were never lovers, Laura and I, for some reason neither of us has ever figured out, but it’s right somehow that she is here in Milwaukee as the world is coming to an end.
I begin to relive a drive I took almost 40 years ago, nonstop from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. I was engaged to Linda and with the passing days and weeks had become more and more convinced that I had made a mistake, that I simply did not want to be married, not to anyone, not at this stage in my life. Austin had been nirvana for me in the few short months I had lived there.
When I was discharged from the Army back in December, 1969, I drove straight through, barely sleeping. The first two nights in Austin I rejoined Don and Allen and we crashed with Ann and her two room-mates. For a while the three of us would share a house near the University, and in those first months had a great time repainting the interior in black with day-glo highlights. As I said, a long time ago, almost alien to the way we all live now.
That day I realized I didn't want to marry Linda, I agonized over how to tell her and was tempted to just call and break it off. But that seemed too easy, much too easy, for me after a relationship that had lasted two years, had seen us marching together against the war in the streets of Washington, making love almost every night, taking her twins out to the parks on the weekends, getting high together on life instead of on various chemical substances. Linda deserved better than a brief phone call and that time in my life, that time, deserved something more monumental to mark its passing. So, I decided to return to Washington.
At 9 a.m. the morning after I made that decision, I threw some clothes into a bag and filled my cooler with beer and cokes, left a note for Don and Allen and headed northeast from Austin to Washington in my 1966 VW convertible. The trip took 27 hours one-way, non-stop except for fueling the car every 250 miles or so. The first eight or nine hours were all in Texas: Austin to Dallas on I-35, Dallas to Texarkana on I-30. One problem with living in the heart of Texas is that you have to drive so far to really feel you've made progress. When I lived in Washington, I could drive through four to five states in the same time it took me to reach the Arkansas border. But the highways were good and the miles rolled under me.
Late that night, 2 or 3 a.m., I drove along the Blue Ridge in Virginia, top down, a million fireflies made the Shenandoah Valley glow out the driver's side window. The Milky Way was above and seemed, also, to be below me as I took steep turns, barely awake, zoning out, nodding off from time to time, jerking awake. But finally, I began to fall asleep, and my car drifted out of my lane towards the cliffs on the left side of the road. I suspect I would be dead now except for a truck driver who raced up on my tail and blinked his lights, blowing his air horn loudly, jolting me back to life. I was able to swing the car back into my lane, then stopped and got out, just standing there, almost drunk from exhaustion, watched the fireflies below me, winking in and out, and sat down under a tree for what seemed like hours. After a few minutes,I drove on down the highway and stopped at the first diner I came to.
This was the first real stop I had made and at the diner I drank cup after cup of coffee and I do not normally drink coffee, got strung out, tense, jittery, and headed back east and north, anxious to have the trip over, the trip almost becoming the meaning, the form pushing the substance, my split with Linda, back into the recesses of my mind. As I drove on, I began to see things along the road that were not really there, bushes became animals leaping onto the road in front of me, the shadows were alive, and slowly, slowly, the fireflies began to disappear.
As the sun rose that morning, I continued to fight sleep, continued to make the VW move as quickly as possible, the drive almost becoming the thing itself, punishment for what I was going to do, pushing guilt back and back. I irrationally began to get mad at Linda, blamed her for the whole thing, for my near accident on the Blue Ridge Skyline, for my driving to Washington, though I knew she was not to blame.
I took the beltway around Washington, exited at one of the Silver Spring exits, and pulled the VW into her parking space. It was 2 p.m. and Linda was still at work. I opened her door with my key and walked into the apartment, so familiar, like I still belonged there. I walked back to our bedroom, took my clothes off and fell asleep almost instantly.
Not until nine that evening did Linda wake me up. The whole thing would have been much easier if she had gotten mad at me, had kicked me out of her house when I told her, after we got up, after we went into the kitchen and had a beer, that I did not want to get married, that no, there was no one else, and there was not, that I simply was not ready for marriage, but she didn't. She was the very soul of reason, very controlled, very cool. She didn't cry, didn't scream at me, didn't try to get me to change my mind. When I told her I needed to leave right away, to get back to Austin for classes, she told me to spend the night, to rest. The next morning, she made breakfast for me after the kids had gone to school. And then she kissed me goodbye. I have not seen her again.
I'm glad I made the trip. It would not have been right to end things with a simple phone call. But I wish, somehow, she had been nasty. But if she had, it would have been just for me. I hope now that when I left she closed the door and laughed, howled, shook with joy that she had gotten out of a situation that she did not want. But I don't really believe that.
Just out of Washington, I picked up two hitchhikers headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and we smoked and talked. When I got tired, I turned the driving over to them and slept until we got to their place. Then, I drove back to Austin.
This was all part of the zeitgeist, part of the spirit of the age. Today, some people break up by texting; in those days, I felt I had to do the honorable thing and break up face to face. It’s not part of Vietnam, but it is part of what led me to do certain things: a sense, almost like Hemingway’s sense of “grace under pressure,” that here are things we must do to continue to be honorable people, to be able to continue living with ourselves.
The next blog entry will be about the great peace march of November 15, 1969, and we’ll be back in motion again.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam, Part 40
Moratoriums and Mobilizations
So, I drifted. Linda anchored me a bit, Linda and the twins. I suspect this would be a very different blog if she were writing it, but we can only always see things through our own eyes and even if two or more of us look at the same thing, we do not see the same thing. Thus, we get arguments about the massacres at Hue with some people not believing and others taking the killings as an article of faith. And how many different ways is it possible to lose a war and did we lose a war? Some people claim that because we left in 1973, before the war was over, that we did not lose the war, our allies, puppets, whatever…they lost the war. Those same people, at least some of them, claim the South Vietnamese would not have lost the war if we had continued to supply them and to provide at least aerial support.
By 1969, I just wanted the killing to stop. I wanted to pick up The Washington Post and read baseball scores and not body counts. That summer, 1969, I participated in a number of small demonstrations, usually outside the White House and always on weekends. It was illegal for me to wear my uniform while I was protesting against, but it was not illegal for certain officers to wear theirs while they were supporting, the war. Either both or neither should be illegal.
I remember quite clearly Linda and I walking with a few hundred people down Pennsylvania Avenue one Saturday morning. We were all holding hands and singing songs of peace. An older man walked up to me and said something to the effect that before I spoke out against the country’s war in Vietnam, I should go myself and see what was happening. I told him I had been there until a few months earlier, that I spoke Vietnamese, that I knew (with a conviction that comes only when you’re very young) that the war was wrong. He said that since I had been there, I should know better than to march in the streets.
A priori assumptions. We all grew up in some social milieu that shaped us, that, as we say in the Catholic Church, “formed” us and yet, somehow, we can break out of that formation, turn from what we absorbed in our formative years.
That was a very small demonstration and, afterwards, Linda and I went to the Freer Gallery where I liked to rub my hands over the belly of a small Buddha for luck and wander into the Peacock Room and admire Whistler’s art and very strange sense of style. I always preferred the small demonstrations in Washington and, later, in Austin; I have never much cared to be a small part of a huge crowd though huge crowds do get all the news.
And then, on October 15, 1969, Linda and I joined a few hundred thousand people for what was a truly historic peace march. Here’s how I wrote about it several years ago:
I marched in October and in November in Washington, but the October march, though smaller, is the one that has always burned most brightly in my memory. Picture 75,000 people, almost all of us carrying candles, walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, quiet, singing softly, serious, but deep down happy to be where we were. We passed the White House and turned to the Treasury Building. We let the candle wax drip down on the black, wrought-iron fence and left our candles there to burn. The sky around the building, lit up with the flames of thousands of candles, was liked the most magnificent Christmas tree you could ever dream of us and we, some of us, knelt down quietly and prayed for peace. [from From the Periphery: poems and essays]
That night was and remains holy, at least to me, and I suspect to a large number of those 75,000 people who marched. When you do something significant, something that marks what you believe, and do what those of us who were once Baptists call “giving testimony” or “testifying,” you quite simply feel good and feel a great rush of sheer joy. I do not claim that feeling just for the peace movement but for anyone who walks in company with people who believe as he believes and is willing to show that belief.
I would march only once again in Washington, a month later, in a march that was far larger and that would, the very next morning, see me under investigation by the CID and denied entry into the gray walls of the National Security Agency, more than the Army my employer for the past three and a half years.
So, I drifted. Linda anchored me a bit, Linda and the twins. I suspect this would be a very different blog if she were writing it, but we can only always see things through our own eyes and even if two or more of us look at the same thing, we do not see the same thing. Thus, we get arguments about the massacres at Hue with some people not believing and others taking the killings as an article of faith. And how many different ways is it possible to lose a war and did we lose a war? Some people claim that because we left in 1973, before the war was over, that we did not lose the war, our allies, puppets, whatever…they lost the war. Those same people, at least some of them, claim the South Vietnamese would not have lost the war if we had continued to supply them and to provide at least aerial support.
By 1969, I just wanted the killing to stop. I wanted to pick up The Washington Post and read baseball scores and not body counts. That summer, 1969, I participated in a number of small demonstrations, usually outside the White House and always on weekends. It was illegal for me to wear my uniform while I was protesting against, but it was not illegal for certain officers to wear theirs while they were supporting, the war. Either both or neither should be illegal.
I remember quite clearly Linda and I walking with a few hundred people down Pennsylvania Avenue one Saturday morning. We were all holding hands and singing songs of peace. An older man walked up to me and said something to the effect that before I spoke out against the country’s war in Vietnam, I should go myself and see what was happening. I told him I had been there until a few months earlier, that I spoke Vietnamese, that I knew (with a conviction that comes only when you’re very young) that the war was wrong. He said that since I had been there, I should know better than to march in the streets.
A priori assumptions. We all grew up in some social milieu that shaped us, that, as we say in the Catholic Church, “formed” us and yet, somehow, we can break out of that formation, turn from what we absorbed in our formative years.
That was a very small demonstration and, afterwards, Linda and I went to the Freer Gallery where I liked to rub my hands over the belly of a small Buddha for luck and wander into the Peacock Room and admire Whistler’s art and very strange sense of style. I always preferred the small demonstrations in Washington and, later, in Austin; I have never much cared to be a small part of a huge crowd though huge crowds do get all the news.
And then, on October 15, 1969, Linda and I joined a few hundred thousand people for what was a truly historic peace march. Here’s how I wrote about it several years ago:
I marched in October and in November in Washington, but the October march, though smaller, is the one that has always burned most brightly in my memory. Picture 75,000 people, almost all of us carrying candles, walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, quiet, singing softly, serious, but deep down happy to be where we were. We passed the White House and turned to the Treasury Building. We let the candle wax drip down on the black, wrought-iron fence and left our candles there to burn. The sky around the building, lit up with the flames of thousands of candles, was liked the most magnificent Christmas tree you could ever dream of us and we, some of us, knelt down quietly and prayed for peace. [from From the Periphery: poems and essays]
That night was and remains holy, at least to me, and I suspect to a large number of those 75,000 people who marched. When you do something significant, something that marks what you believe, and do what those of us who were once Baptists call “giving testimony” or “testifying,” you quite simply feel good and feel a great rush of sheer joy. I do not claim that feeling just for the peace movement but for anyone who walks in company with people who believe as he believes and is willing to show that belief.
I would march only once again in Washington, a month later, in a march that was far larger and that would, the very next morning, see me under investigation by the CID and denied entry into the gray walls of the National Security Agency, more than the Army my employer for the past three and a half years.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Washington, D.C.: Unreal City (Vietnam Notes 37)
Washington, D.C.: Unreal City
D.C. D.C. was wonderful…even in those days of assassinations and marches in the streets and people dying in Vietnam and going to jail for what they believed in or going to Canada or Sweden. Other people, most of whom also believed in what they were doing, were on patrol in Vietnam, pursuing elusive enemies, trying to win in a cause I believed was already doomed.
D.C. Washington: a beautiful city with a grimy, dirty underbelly that those of us who did not truly live there, who were involved with love and peace and national and international events, but were not involved with in its day-to-day life, could not or would not see. Janet Cook wrote about it; but she, too, did not take the time to truly discover what she thought she had found. Instead, she developed a composite of all the suffering children of Washington she could think of and, yes, this was some time after I spent my time in D.C., and publish it to the world. What Cook did was write truth while ignoring fact. Facts can sometime get in the way of truth. She’s been a bad example of ethical misbehavior in journalism classes since then, yet still, she wrote a truth bigger than her lies.
I’ve been a member of a Vietnam discussion group on the internet for almost twenty years and from time to time the discussion veers to the problem of spat upon Vietnam vets. You know the story: those hundreds of spitters just waiting for vets to return from Vietnam. There is no evidence that this ever happened though it may have happened, probably did happen, a very few times. But, fact that it happened often? No. Very few if any Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned to the United States from overseas duty. But, truth: for many of them it felt as if people had spat upon them even if they had not done in fact. I have no problem with that: The metaphor is important even if it is based upon something less factual than those vets believe.
Years after the war, many years, back when troops were returning from the first Persian Gulf War, there was some kind of effort made to reverse the lack of respect given to vets of the Vietnam War. We were, in many cases, invited to participate in the parades for the Iraq veterans. I found that extremely patronizing.
Some truths are simply more powerful than facts. Janet Cook had her Pulitzer stripped from her even though her stories in the Washington Post struck at a truth so powerful no one could deny them. The little boy she made up became a powerful metaphor for almost everything that was wrong in that grimy underbelly that was in the substructure of Washington, D.C. And, damn, the writing was good and the writing was true. It just wasn’t factual. That is also true of the stories of returning veterans from our war.
I am wandering here and I have wanted to write about Washington, D.C., as I experienced is in 1968 and 1969. But that Washington, D.C., was an unreal city. Those of us who lived there temporarily were our own city, separate from, co-existing with, something so real that we could not approach it without killing off what we had brought with us: that sense of idealism that managed to survive knowing, however superficially, where we were, the war we had fought in, those assassinations that had rocked the country. That’s why, many years ago, when some of this was starting to sink in, I wrote this:
Our Lady of the Metro
(originally published in Briar Cliff Review)
At the Metro Station in Dupont Circle
I ascend a steep escalator into a too bright
day, see a slender silhouette with hair flung
wild descend. It could, of course, be you, but
I cannot tell, only the form of an image dropping
downward into dark. A moving step ladder
carries me up, you down, until you develop
like those white sheets of paper in a darkroom,
like an x-ray reverting: meat firming,
packing onto bare bone, body budding
under sheer cloth, legs, waist, face, breasts
growing from dark outline to fleshy fullness
until I can know it is not you, not those lips,
long legs, careless hair. But for a moment
in a mandala of light, her body shaped
against the curve of sky, I longed for faith.
You see, for me, Washington was relief from daily work life at NSA where I continued the work I had been doing in Pleiku, Vietnam. The same old stuff kept happening, day after day, month after month, and, seemingly, year after year. But at 5 p.m. each day, I took off the war with my uniform when I went home to Chillum Heights. I would drive over to Linda’s home in my VW convertible and we would simply forget about the war or I would go into College Park and encase myself in Melville or some minor poet of Renaissance England.
But, some days, Linda and I would hold hands and march with tens of thousands of other people or, at night, we would light candles and walk slowly through the streets of that beautifully unreal yet somehow truthful city.
D.C. D.C. was wonderful…even in those days of assassinations and marches in the streets and people dying in Vietnam and going to jail for what they believed in or going to Canada or Sweden. Other people, most of whom also believed in what they were doing, were on patrol in Vietnam, pursuing elusive enemies, trying to win in a cause I believed was already doomed.
D.C. Washington: a beautiful city with a grimy, dirty underbelly that those of us who did not truly live there, who were involved with love and peace and national and international events, but were not involved with in its day-to-day life, could not or would not see. Janet Cook wrote about it; but she, too, did not take the time to truly discover what she thought she had found. Instead, she developed a composite of all the suffering children of Washington she could think of and, yes, this was some time after I spent my time in D.C., and publish it to the world. What Cook did was write truth while ignoring fact. Facts can sometime get in the way of truth. She’s been a bad example of ethical misbehavior in journalism classes since then, yet still, she wrote a truth bigger than her lies.
I’ve been a member of a Vietnam discussion group on the internet for almost twenty years and from time to time the discussion veers to the problem of spat upon Vietnam vets. You know the story: those hundreds of spitters just waiting for vets to return from Vietnam. There is no evidence that this ever happened though it may have happened, probably did happen, a very few times. But, fact that it happened often? No. Very few if any Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned to the United States from overseas duty. But, truth: for many of them it felt as if people had spat upon them even if they had not done in fact. I have no problem with that: The metaphor is important even if it is based upon something less factual than those vets believe.
Years after the war, many years, back when troops were returning from the first Persian Gulf War, there was some kind of effort made to reverse the lack of respect given to vets of the Vietnam War. We were, in many cases, invited to participate in the parades for the Iraq veterans. I found that extremely patronizing.
Some truths are simply more powerful than facts. Janet Cook had her Pulitzer stripped from her even though her stories in the Washington Post struck at a truth so powerful no one could deny them. The little boy she made up became a powerful metaphor for almost everything that was wrong in that grimy underbelly that was in the substructure of Washington, D.C. And, damn, the writing was good and the writing was true. It just wasn’t factual. That is also true of the stories of returning veterans from our war.
I am wandering here and I have wanted to write about Washington, D.C., as I experienced is in 1968 and 1969. But that Washington, D.C., was an unreal city. Those of us who lived there temporarily were our own city, separate from, co-existing with, something so real that we could not approach it without killing off what we had brought with us: that sense of idealism that managed to survive knowing, however superficially, where we were, the war we had fought in, those assassinations that had rocked the country. That’s why, many years ago, when some of this was starting to sink in, I wrote this:
Our Lady of the Metro
(originally published in Briar Cliff Review)
At the Metro Station in Dupont Circle
I ascend a steep escalator into a too bright
day, see a slender silhouette with hair flung
wild descend. It could, of course, be you, but
I cannot tell, only the form of an image dropping
downward into dark. A moving step ladder
carries me up, you down, until you develop
like those white sheets of paper in a darkroom,
like an x-ray reverting: meat firming,
packing onto bare bone, body budding
under sheer cloth, legs, waist, face, breasts
growing from dark outline to fleshy fullness
until I can know it is not you, not those lips,
long legs, careless hair. But for a moment
in a mandala of light, her body shaped
against the curve of sky, I longed for faith.
You see, for me, Washington was relief from daily work life at NSA where I continued the work I had been doing in Pleiku, Vietnam. The same old stuff kept happening, day after day, month after month, and, seemingly, year after year. But at 5 p.m. each day, I took off the war with my uniform when I went home to Chillum Heights. I would drive over to Linda’s home in my VW convertible and we would simply forget about the war or I would go into College Park and encase myself in Melville or some minor poet of Renaissance England.
But, some days, Linda and I would hold hands and march with tens of thousands of other people or, at night, we would light candles and walk slowly through the streets of that beautifully unreal yet somehow truthful city.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Part 36: Return to Normalcy, sort of
Who Killed Cock Robin?
That period between Vietnam and the peace marches, between Pleiku and D.C. and Austin? Basically, they were fairly ordinary for someone still wearing a uniform, commuting to work each morning, carpooling with my friend Don Mohr in his MGB (or was it an MGA?), top down when the weather permitted and both mags were firing. I eventually bought my own car, a not new, blue and shiny, Volkswagen convertible. I re-entered a world that included Vietnam only from 8 - 5, Monday through Friday.
Among the first things both Don and I did was enroll at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Not only was I planning to do what I had set out to do three years earlier (go to graduate school at UT-Austin) but I wanted to meet young, well-educated women. I know that sounds snotty but I did not want to hear again, not ever, “I love you so much, GI” and I did not want to "date" (quaint word these days) any of the mostly conservative women I met at the National Security Agency. Those were mostly women with a professional mission or clerk/typists with security clearances. I wanted to forget what we always called The Building (upper case letters implicit in the pronunciation) and immerse myself in being a college student again.
I took two classes at the University of Maryland: Renaissance literature and a course in Melville and Hawthorne. Damn that was wonderful. I decompressed, became totally human once again. I can hear combat vets now: “Puh-leeze!!!!!!! You were safe. No one pointed an AK at you. You got to talk with young women.” Yes, that’s all true. And I will repeat something I have said many times before: I mostly enjoyed my tour in Vietnam…from the ship ride over, to internment at Subic Bay with huge quantities of San Miguel beer, to the LSTs rocking down the coast of what was then South Vietnam while we sang Country Joe’s “Vietnam Rag,” to my strange last night in Nha Trang and the Pan American “Freedom Bird” home. But I wasn’t happy with myself for having, if not enjoyed it all, been separate from it while being in the middle of it and standing on the periphery while helping locate people who were going to be killed.
My first little book, about the war mostly, was called From the Periphery: poems and essays and that’s mostly how I felt: on the periphery of the war, not truly involved, marking time, doing something I had never questioned but had begun questioning while in the middle of it all. Dak To was a part of that questioning, the young P.O.W., an increasing feeling, after Tet, that the waste of life on both sides was futile. Those who did believe were correct in that we did not fight to win. Those who were opposed to the war were correct in that we should not have been there in the first place. I was, by the time I left, irrevocably on the side of those who felt we should never had been there in the first place.
My first semester at the University of Maryland, I was besotted with being a student, fell in love a few times with young women not much younger than I was, met Linda and fell in love with her. When I got back from Vietnam, I started falling in love with everyone. I met Linda in that Renaissance lit. class that was a reintroduction to college classes. Dr. Spurgeon had assigned a poem by George Gascoigne called, quite ironically, “Lullaby.” Here’s the whole poem and it’s quite long for this medium:
Gascoigne's Lullaby
Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest;
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.
First, lullaby my youthful years,
It is now time to go to bed;
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby, then, youth, be still,
With lullaby content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.
Next, lullaby my gazing eyes
Which wonted were to glance apace.
For every glass may now suffice
To show the furrows in my face.
With lullaby, then, wink awhile,
With lullaby your looks beguile.
Let no fair face, nor beauty bright
Entice you eft with vain delight.
And lullaby, my wanton will:
Let reason's rule now reign thy thought,
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought.
With lullaby now take thine ease,
With lullaby thy doubts appease
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My body shall obey thy will.
Eke lullaby my loving boy,
My little Robin, take thy rest.
Since age is cold and nothing coy,
Keep close thy coin, for so is best.
With lullaby be thou content,
With lullaby thy lusts relent.
Let others pay which hath mo pence;
Thou art too poor for such expense.
Thus, lullaby my youth, mine eyes,
My will, my ware and all that was.
I can no mo delays devise,
But welcome pain, let pleasure pass.
With lullaby now take your leave,
With lullaby your dreams deceive,
And when you rise with waking eye,
Remember Gascoigne's lullaby.
That is not a difficult poem but the class was mixed: juniors and seniors mostly, a few older people. Some of them did see that the poem was all about sex; some did not. And, when we got to the “little Robin” stanza, no one was wiling to offer their reading on what Gascoigne was talking about. Spurgeon grew somewhat exercised over this and, finally, I raised my hand. “At last,” he said,” Mr. Hall, will you explain the stanza. I did. The whole poem is rather like Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech, about how raunchy we are when young, how we may sprinkle pollen and babies around the landscape in lust run amok…okay, okay, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but…
The stanza in question has got to remind us of the “Cock Robin” lullaby and that old reprobate and deflowerer of virgins, George Gascoigne, is saying goodbye to an active penis in an age when we had not yet invented Viagra. It was not that I knew more or was smarter than the other students but that they were unwilling to say out loud what needed to be said out loud (and there was no Viagra or Cialis in those days).
So, why am I telling you all this? Well, Spurgeon applauded. I figured I’d still be able to cut it in grad. school, and Linda asked me out for a drink after class. MORAL: When you’re amongst English majors, it always helps to read poetry well: you get the grade, the girl and everything.
Later, she was my constant companion at rock concerts in the parks and at the Corcoran and, more importantly, on peace marches. Her twin children often went with us. The way I left her is among the more shameful things I’ve done, but that’s a few blogs away still.
That period between Vietnam and the peace marches, between Pleiku and D.C. and Austin? Basically, they were fairly ordinary for someone still wearing a uniform, commuting to work each morning, carpooling with my friend Don Mohr in his MGB (or was it an MGA?), top down when the weather permitted and both mags were firing. I eventually bought my own car, a not new, blue and shiny, Volkswagen convertible. I re-entered a world that included Vietnam only from 8 - 5, Monday through Friday.
Among the first things both Don and I did was enroll at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Not only was I planning to do what I had set out to do three years earlier (go to graduate school at UT-Austin) but I wanted to meet young, well-educated women. I know that sounds snotty but I did not want to hear again, not ever, “I love you so much, GI” and I did not want to "date" (quaint word these days) any of the mostly conservative women I met at the National Security Agency. Those were mostly women with a professional mission or clerk/typists with security clearances. I wanted to forget what we always called The Building (upper case letters implicit in the pronunciation) and immerse myself in being a college student again.
I took two classes at the University of Maryland: Renaissance literature and a course in Melville and Hawthorne. Damn that was wonderful. I decompressed, became totally human once again. I can hear combat vets now: “Puh-leeze!!!!!!! You were safe. No one pointed an AK at you. You got to talk with young women.” Yes, that’s all true. And I will repeat something I have said many times before: I mostly enjoyed my tour in Vietnam…from the ship ride over, to internment at Subic Bay with huge quantities of San Miguel beer, to the LSTs rocking down the coast of what was then South Vietnam while we sang Country Joe’s “Vietnam Rag,” to my strange last night in Nha Trang and the Pan American “Freedom Bird” home. But I wasn’t happy with myself for having, if not enjoyed it all, been separate from it while being in the middle of it and standing on the periphery while helping locate people who were going to be killed.
My first little book, about the war mostly, was called From the Periphery: poems and essays and that’s mostly how I felt: on the periphery of the war, not truly involved, marking time, doing something I had never questioned but had begun questioning while in the middle of it all. Dak To was a part of that questioning, the young P.O.W., an increasing feeling, after Tet, that the waste of life on both sides was futile. Those who did believe were correct in that we did not fight to win. Those who were opposed to the war were correct in that we should not have been there in the first place. I was, by the time I left, irrevocably on the side of those who felt we should never had been there in the first place.
My first semester at the University of Maryland, I was besotted with being a student, fell in love a few times with young women not much younger than I was, met Linda and fell in love with her. When I got back from Vietnam, I started falling in love with everyone. I met Linda in that Renaissance lit. class that was a reintroduction to college classes. Dr. Spurgeon had assigned a poem by George Gascoigne called, quite ironically, “Lullaby.” Here’s the whole poem and it’s quite long for this medium:
Gascoigne's Lullaby
Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest;
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.
First, lullaby my youthful years,
It is now time to go to bed;
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby, then, youth, be still,
With lullaby content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.
Next, lullaby my gazing eyes
Which wonted were to glance apace.
For every glass may now suffice
To show the furrows in my face.
With lullaby, then, wink awhile,
With lullaby your looks beguile.
Let no fair face, nor beauty bright
Entice you eft with vain delight.
And lullaby, my wanton will:
Let reason's rule now reign thy thought,
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought.
With lullaby now take thine ease,
With lullaby thy doubts appease
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My body shall obey thy will.
Eke lullaby my loving boy,
My little Robin, take thy rest.
Since age is cold and nothing coy,
Keep close thy coin, for so is best.
With lullaby be thou content,
With lullaby thy lusts relent.
Let others pay which hath mo pence;
Thou art too poor for such expense.
Thus, lullaby my youth, mine eyes,
My will, my ware and all that was.
I can no mo delays devise,
But welcome pain, let pleasure pass.
With lullaby now take your leave,
With lullaby your dreams deceive,
And when you rise with waking eye,
Remember Gascoigne's lullaby.
That is not a difficult poem but the class was mixed: juniors and seniors mostly, a few older people. Some of them did see that the poem was all about sex; some did not. And, when we got to the “little Robin” stanza, no one was wiling to offer their reading on what Gascoigne was talking about. Spurgeon grew somewhat exercised over this and, finally, I raised my hand. “At last,” he said,” Mr. Hall, will you explain the stanza. I did. The whole poem is rather like Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech, about how raunchy we are when young, how we may sprinkle pollen and babies around the landscape in lust run amok…okay, okay, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but…
The stanza in question has got to remind us of the “Cock Robin” lullaby and that old reprobate and deflowerer of virgins, George Gascoigne, is saying goodbye to an active penis in an age when we had not yet invented Viagra. It was not that I knew more or was smarter than the other students but that they were unwilling to say out loud what needed to be said out loud (and there was no Viagra or Cialis in those days).
So, why am I telling you all this? Well, Spurgeon applauded. I figured I’d still be able to cut it in grad. school, and Linda asked me out for a drink after class. MORAL: When you’re amongst English majors, it always helps to read poetry well: you get the grade, the girl and everything.
Later, she was my constant companion at rock concerts in the parks and at the Corcoran and, more importantly, on peace marches. Her twin children often went with us. The way I left her is among the more shameful things I’ve done, but that’s a few blogs away still.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 28)
Time for a Reassessment
When I started writing these “notes about Vietnam,” I suggested that changes in my own thoughts about the war sprang from the things I was writing about here. I think, now that I am past mid-year, through the Tet Offensive, having dealt with places I never went and never in my worst nightmares want to go: Hue, Lang Vei and Khe Sanh, that I ought to do some kind of self-assessment, see if I’ve really written about what caused my change.
Change? Where was I mentally and politically when I got my draft notice and decided to join up instead of let myself be dragged into the Army? Where was I a year and a half later when I boarded the USS Gordon and sailed from Oakland Bay to DaNang Harbor and then trans-shipped onto an LST to sail down the coast of what was then South Vietnam to the beaches of Chu Lai?
This I know: I was apolitical. I did not want to go to war, but I was neither for nor against that same war I did not want to participate in. I went because. . . ,well, because I went. I had no moral or political qualms about going; instead, like Dick Cheney, I would have preferred to be doing something else: skiing, fishing, whatever. But I did go.
Have you seen the film Go Tell the Spartans? It’s based upon a novel called Incident at Muc Wa by, if I remember correctly, Daniel Ford, and it was published back in March, 1967 (I looked that up and, yes, the author was Daniel Ford). That’s while I was already in the Army, stationed at Fort Hood with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, preparing to go to Vietnam. The central character in the novel is a lot like I was at that time (though he was, fictively, in Vietnam in 1964, before the big buildup that got me drafted in 1965). A lot like me? He didn’t have political views of the war, went because, well, because, why not? His commander claims he’s a “war tourist”—went to see what it was like.
Let me confess, that, even now, I am not sorry I went. I learned a lot and what I learned has made me a different person than I would have been had I not gone. I can’t help but wonder if I would have been so much opposed to the first of the Persian Gulf Wars had I not been in Vietnam or to the second Iraq War and to the travesty we now have going on in Afghanistan—that whole litany of unnecessary wars and killings we have been engaged in during and after Vietnam.
But why turn against the Vietnam War while I was active in the war itself? All of the earlier blog entries I’ve written (27 already!) speak, indirectly, to that. If some of us participate remotely in a killing machine, even when we do not pull triggers, and if we neither believe in nor fail to believe in what we are doing, we do start asking ourselves why. You witness the destruction, even if you do not see the body, of a young man on a hill over-looking your camp; you meet the “enemy”—a 15 or 16 year old boy with a head injury who you are expected to interrogate—and the face of the “enemy” becomes visible. You see wounded children in the streets, men and women with no legs, with horrible burns…you see legions of women who have become prostitutes to survive and sell themselves to people in your company...you see people you are supposed to be helping not really wanting to, not really, be helped, not caring one way or the other if the current regime controls their lives or another regime, even if it’s communist, people who just want to be left alone.
You start wondering why you and the military you are a part of are there in the first place. Is it to defend what seems to be a fairly corrupt regime? Is it because we really, truly, believe that if we don’t stop them here, they’ll be invading us through California’s beaches just as we rushed down from the LSTs onto their beaches at Chu Lai? Is it because we truly believed that if Vietnam fell, Cambodia and Laos and Thailand would fall, maybe the Philippines? Dominoes keep clicking in my head! People in the military really are not supposed to think for themselves. That’s knocked out of them in basic training. They are supposed to obey orders. . .straight on up the chain of command: the platoon commander, the company commander, the battalion commander, the regimental commander, the division commander, the army commander, the MACV commander, the joint chiefs, the president…. Well, no. You can't do that. That leads to My Lai. That leads to mindless killing. We should always think before we kill. . .given enough time to do so.
Some people did not have that problem, perhaps most people. They believed and still do, absolutely, that we should have been there. They were not troubled by why we went to war, but they might well have been troubled by why we got out of the war when it was still going on. That’s okay. I mean, they start with different assumptions, with different beliefs, and that’s their business. I don’t argue with them, not ever, because when two people start off with different a priori assumptions, there’s no common meeting ground, no room for discussion, only for shouting. In Vietnam, yes, in Vietnam, I started, naively, with no assumptions at all. Oh, I had a vague sense that my country would not send me to a war without having a good reason to do so. I think now and thought before my war year was over that that basic assumption was wrong.
So, why were we there anyway? A game with the Soviets? That seems to be the best guess. We were there because we did not one foot of soil to fall to communism. The soviets had beaten us into space with Sputnik. . .Barack Obama’s Sputnik Moment for the other side, the URsputnik moment. We had lost the Bay of Pigs. They had backed down on the Cuban Missile Crisis. A chess game: and I was one of the pawns. All of us who went, regardless of our assumptions, were caught up in a huge game of global politics, a game that ate us up and spat us out. Things that were, to me at least, ultimately merely games countries play.
What happened that had any relevant affect on the United States when we quit and went home? Nothing I can think of.
But really, I changed because of the people I met there and people I did not meet but saw in the streets of Pleiku. And people I didn’t see in person, but saw on television and read about in the newspaper. Not peace movement people in the United States, but people like Thích Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the war; people like General Loan, who put a pistol to the head of a prisoner and shot him; and so many people in Pleiku who were maimed, prostituted, desolate. It’s all so facile, so easy to say, but you think about things when you’re on guard duty, when you’re off work and town is closed down, when you’re squeezed into the back of a triLambretta with ten Vietnamese who are just people like you, when the Vietnamese woman who cleans your clothes and your hootch, works silently one day and the next and the next for a full year and then cries and, when you ask her why, just looks at you and then leaves.
I am not at all sure I can explain why I turned against a war I had been apathetic about, but when my friend Allen called me from Fort Bragg one day in the summer of 1969 and said “Come down to Fayetteville, we’re going to march against the war,” I packed my VW convertible and Don Mohr, my friend, joined me as we drove down to North Carolina to march with GIs United Against the War.
I’m not yet through with these blog entries, but needed to stop here for a moment, just to clarify some things in my own mind. My change was not Pauline (I did not get struck by a blinding light and hear God calling me out as Paul did); it was more Augustinian: the result of reading books from the small Air Force Library, of reading with open eyes the books I had taken to Vietnam with me, of seeing what we had done to a small country that had once been beautiful, of meeting our English students, of talking with prostitutes and children in the streets of Pleiku, of chatting over hot tea with an old woman who ran a tea shop, of coming to terms slowly and finding out, discovering, what I really believed and, yes, as corny as it sounds, who I really am.
When I started writing these “notes about Vietnam,” I suggested that changes in my own thoughts about the war sprang from the things I was writing about here. I think, now that I am past mid-year, through the Tet Offensive, having dealt with places I never went and never in my worst nightmares want to go: Hue, Lang Vei and Khe Sanh, that I ought to do some kind of self-assessment, see if I’ve really written about what caused my change.
Change? Where was I mentally and politically when I got my draft notice and decided to join up instead of let myself be dragged into the Army? Where was I a year and a half later when I boarded the USS Gordon and sailed from Oakland Bay to DaNang Harbor and then trans-shipped onto an LST to sail down the coast of what was then South Vietnam to the beaches of Chu Lai?
This I know: I was apolitical. I did not want to go to war, but I was neither for nor against that same war I did not want to participate in. I went because. . . ,well, because I went. I had no moral or political qualms about going; instead, like Dick Cheney, I would have preferred to be doing something else: skiing, fishing, whatever. But I did go.
Have you seen the film Go Tell the Spartans? It’s based upon a novel called Incident at Muc Wa by, if I remember correctly, Daniel Ford, and it was published back in March, 1967 (I looked that up and, yes, the author was Daniel Ford). That’s while I was already in the Army, stationed at Fort Hood with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, preparing to go to Vietnam. The central character in the novel is a lot like I was at that time (though he was, fictively, in Vietnam in 1964, before the big buildup that got me drafted in 1965). A lot like me? He didn’t have political views of the war, went because, well, because, why not? His commander claims he’s a “war tourist”—went to see what it was like.
Let me confess, that, even now, I am not sorry I went. I learned a lot and what I learned has made me a different person than I would have been had I not gone. I can’t help but wonder if I would have been so much opposed to the first of the Persian Gulf Wars had I not been in Vietnam or to the second Iraq War and to the travesty we now have going on in Afghanistan—that whole litany of unnecessary wars and killings we have been engaged in during and after Vietnam.
But why turn against the Vietnam War while I was active in the war itself? All of the earlier blog entries I’ve written (27 already!) speak, indirectly, to that. If some of us participate remotely in a killing machine, even when we do not pull triggers, and if we neither believe in nor fail to believe in what we are doing, we do start asking ourselves why. You witness the destruction, even if you do not see the body, of a young man on a hill over-looking your camp; you meet the “enemy”—a 15 or 16 year old boy with a head injury who you are expected to interrogate—and the face of the “enemy” becomes visible. You see wounded children in the streets, men and women with no legs, with horrible burns…you see legions of women who have become prostitutes to survive and sell themselves to people in your company...you see people you are supposed to be helping not really wanting to, not really, be helped, not caring one way or the other if the current regime controls their lives or another regime, even if it’s communist, people who just want to be left alone.
You start wondering why you and the military you are a part of are there in the first place. Is it to defend what seems to be a fairly corrupt regime? Is it because we really, truly, believe that if we don’t stop them here, they’ll be invading us through California’s beaches just as we rushed down from the LSTs onto their beaches at Chu Lai? Is it because we truly believed that if Vietnam fell, Cambodia and Laos and Thailand would fall, maybe the Philippines? Dominoes keep clicking in my head! People in the military really are not supposed to think for themselves. That’s knocked out of them in basic training. They are supposed to obey orders. . .straight on up the chain of command: the platoon commander, the company commander, the battalion commander, the regimental commander, the division commander, the army commander, the MACV commander, the joint chiefs, the president…. Well, no. You can't do that. That leads to My Lai. That leads to mindless killing. We should always think before we kill. . .given enough time to do so.
Some people did not have that problem, perhaps most people. They believed and still do, absolutely, that we should have been there. They were not troubled by why we went to war, but they might well have been troubled by why we got out of the war when it was still going on. That’s okay. I mean, they start with different assumptions, with different beliefs, and that’s their business. I don’t argue with them, not ever, because when two people start off with different a priori assumptions, there’s no common meeting ground, no room for discussion, only for shouting. In Vietnam, yes, in Vietnam, I started, naively, with no assumptions at all. Oh, I had a vague sense that my country would not send me to a war without having a good reason to do so. I think now and thought before my war year was over that that basic assumption was wrong.
So, why were we there anyway? A game with the Soviets? That seems to be the best guess. We were there because we did not one foot of soil to fall to communism. The soviets had beaten us into space with Sputnik. . .Barack Obama’s Sputnik Moment for the other side, the URsputnik moment. We had lost the Bay of Pigs. They had backed down on the Cuban Missile Crisis. A chess game: and I was one of the pawns. All of us who went, regardless of our assumptions, were caught up in a huge game of global politics, a game that ate us up and spat us out. Things that were, to me at least, ultimately merely games countries play.
What happened that had any relevant affect on the United States when we quit and went home? Nothing I can think of.
But really, I changed because of the people I met there and people I did not meet but saw in the streets of Pleiku. And people I didn’t see in person, but saw on television and read about in the newspaper. Not peace movement people in the United States, but people like Thích Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the war; people like General Loan, who put a pistol to the head of a prisoner and shot him; and so many people in Pleiku who were maimed, prostituted, desolate. It’s all so facile, so easy to say, but you think about things when you’re on guard duty, when you’re off work and town is closed down, when you’re squeezed into the back of a triLambretta with ten Vietnamese who are just people like you, when the Vietnamese woman who cleans your clothes and your hootch, works silently one day and the next and the next for a full year and then cries and, when you ask her why, just looks at you and then leaves.
I am not at all sure I can explain why I turned against a war I had been apathetic about, but when my friend Allen called me from Fort Bragg one day in the summer of 1969 and said “Come down to Fayetteville, we’re going to march against the war,” I packed my VW convertible and Don Mohr, my friend, joined me as we drove down to North Carolina to march with GIs United Against the War.
I’m not yet through with these blog entries, but needed to stop here for a moment, just to clarify some things in my own mind. My change was not Pauline (I did not get struck by a blinding light and hear God calling me out as Paul did); it was more Augustinian: the result of reading books from the small Air Force Library, of reading with open eyes the books I had taken to Vietnam with me, of seeing what we had done to a small country that had once been beautiful, of meeting our English students, of talking with prostitutes and children in the streets of Pleiku, of chatting over hot tea with an old woman who ran a tea shop, of coming to terms slowly and finding out, discovering, what I really believed and, yes, as corny as it sounds, who I really am.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)