Just About Us and About Justice
How can anyone do it justice? I mean the presence of so many millions of men and women shipped across a wide ocean to a small country most had never heard of just a few years earlier. I am reminded frequently of a series of questions the poet Marianne Poloskey asked me years ago: “How were you able to function as a soldier in the Vietnam War? What went through your mind then? Were you one of those who didn’t shoot? What did you have to do and how did you make yourself do it?” And I am reminded again of Green Day’s fine song called “21 Guns”: “Do you know what you’re fighting for? / Well, it’s not worth dying for.”
Finally, neither Marianne’s excellent questions nor Green Day’s poignant song apply. I went to Vietnam without very much thought concerning such questions. I went to Vietnam because I was young and did not really know where else I wanted to go. I don’t mean place so much as direction in time, a future I had not planned, things I had no idea that I wanted to do.
It would be glib and much too superficial to answer Marianne’s questions by saying that I rarely even carried my M-16, that even when I walked through the red dust streets to downtown Pleiku, I went in civilian clothes with no weapon in my hands, that I had no opportunity ever to point my rifle at someone and fire it, that I did not fly B-52s and rain bombs down on the waiting earth. All of that is factual and none of it is true…except for not knowing where I was going in time.
I had been teaching, yes, in a small high school in the Big Thicket. I had been to the World’s Fair the previous years where I had sold hotdogs and hung out in Times Square. I had had a girlfriend named Sharon. I had been admitted to the doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin. A brief past, a future laid out.
When I received my “Greeting:” in the mail, I gave only a brief thought toward going down to the Selective Service Board and arguing that I was between deferments. I did not even think very much about the war going on some thousands of miles away. Yes, I bargained with the recruiter not to go there and even signed up for two extra years to avoid doing so, but…honestly, even I knew not to trust recruiters. I had been drifting, fairly comfortably, for a few years, and the drifting led me, without my participating very much in the decision, into the Army, through language school and across the Pacific to a war I knew very little about.
And about not shooting at people. Yes, that’s factual, too. But it isn’t very truthful. Let me explain it this way:
For years, I have thought about the whole matter of responsibility. You see, among our jobs at the 330th RRC was locating concentrations of enemy troops. We did that fairly well and were even able to name the battalions and regiments and divisions we pinpointed on our maps of the Central Highlands. We put red pins in the maps for those units and made reports about where they were and, sometimes, what they were doing there. We pointed our fingers in their direction, some commander at 4th ID HQ coordinated attacks on those positions, air strikes were made there, infantry grunts in HU1As went out there and killed or were killed, Congress sanctioned the whole thing, the President bore some of the responsibility, tax payers bore some. But, ultimately, I suspect we’re the ones who aimed the weapons. We pointed the guns when we stuck pins in maps, the pilots and infantrymen were only the physical triggers, part of a much larger weapon. Anyone anywhere along that chain can take responsibility.
That’s true today, too. Jesus Christ! Some kid with a joystick is operating drones that fly into Pakistan and kill and maim people. Another one is setting out IEDs. Why? Because someone told them to. And both are responsible and neither is responsible. “Do we know what we’re fighting for?” Well…is it worth killing and dying for? We really ought to ask those questions, questions I did not ask when I let myself drift into that huge machine that we are, ultimately, all responsible for.
Sidebar: I suspect I am also responsible for what is going to happen once again some day soon when a man, perhaps with only one witness against him, perhaps who had an attorney who slept through much of the proceedings, perhaps who could be cleared with DNA tests since no other physical evidence convicts him, will have an IV inserted into one of his veins and will fall asleep and never wake up again.
I often thought, while marching in demonstrations against my war, almost as soon as I returned from Vietnam, that I was really marching for the people we killed as much as for the American soldiers who died and who continue to die in our wars. People, today, march frequently in Austin and in Huntsville, Texas, against another kind of government-sanctioned killing. I am not marching though I know I should. Perhaps it's age and cynicism, perhaps it's that there have been too many such demonstrations and too few results.
I came home from Vietnam in 1968, after the Tet Offensive had pretty much demonstrated that we were not going to win that little war and, only a short time later, a man running for president indicated that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. Fewer Americans, but more total people, died after he became president as had died before that date.
This is going nowhere. But it's what I'm thinking about, rambling though the thoughts may be on this day. The injections that take the lives of Texas death row inmates are not as spectacular as watching a whole hillside light up with deep red napalm blossoms to kill a single man, but the results will be identical. And next month, we will kill another man in Huntsville, Texas.
And yet, all this responsibility can be incapacitating. So, we push it to the backs of our minds, we move on, whether drifting or with some purpose in mind. We find a path and walk down it. Sometimes, we stand still, look out at whatever is in front of us, at a high hill in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, another in the Hill Country that Lyndon Johnson claimed to have loved, at waves washing ashore that remind us of ships lost at sea, at a highway sign showing the Huntsville exit or another pointing the way to Kent State, or we hear a song that haunts us and plays repeatedly in our minds and see red dust coating the edges of old books.
There it is. We continue. I taught a course on William Faulkner this past semester and I am struck by a description of Dilsey: “She endured.” Yes. That’s what we all do.
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