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.