A few months ago, I learned that an artist had been so moved by the
stories of Vietnam veterans throwing their medals over the White House fence in
protest of the war in which they had participated that he created a tile
representation of one of these vets and was sending these tiles to like minded
veterans. The purpose, as I
understood it was not merely to make and distribute his art, but to create a
community and achieve an understanding of these veterans. Well, as a veteran myself and former
veterans counselor, I was touched by what he was trying to do and wrote a blog
entry about it. [“Medals” June 15, 2008]
This past week, Alex Irvine, the artist, send me a tile. I am honored and appreciative. [Take a look at http://alexirvineceramics.blogspot.com/]
When I was in basic training, back in the hot summer of 1968, I
remember the company being seated in a Fort Jackson classroom. A drill sergeant stepped in front of us
and announced that he was going to surprise us. “You all want
to go to Vietnam.” There were no
shouts or applause. Vietnam was
the last place we wanted to find ourselves. He continued, “Think about it. Deep down, you all want to test yourselves, to see how you
will react. You want to know what
it is like.”
He hit on a major reason why young men go to war.
Another is that war is simple.
Consider this passage from John Steinbecks’ The Grapes of Wrath:
And
now the squatting men stood up angrily.
Grampa
took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. And Pa was bom here, and he killed
weeds and snakes. Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little
money. An' we was bom here. There in the door—our children born
here. And Pa had to borrow money.
The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we
raised.
We
know that—all that. [said the men who drove the bulldozers] It's not us, it's
the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or
an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the
monster.
Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We
measured it and broke it up. We
were bom on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, its still ours. That's what makes it ours—being bom on
it, working it, dying on it. That
makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
We're
sorry. It’s not us. It’ s the
monster. The bank isn't like a
man.
Yes,
but the bank is only made of men.
No,
you're wrong there—quite wrong there.
The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank
does, and yet the bank does it.
The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.
War gives a man someone to shoot. It may not fix any of the ills of the
world, but it solves the immediate problem of survival.
I tried to be a pacifist back in my pre-draft youth. I could not understand killing somebody
half a world away whose only interest in killing me was because I was in his
country uninvited. After much soul
searching, I failed the test for pacifism. I don’t believe in killing strangers, and that’s not
enough. If someone tries to do
violence in my presence, that makes it personal and its enough of an
introduction for me do whatever harm it takes to stop him. I just don’t believe in seeking out
these opportunities.
Even in the days when my profession was pursuing bad
guys, there was risk, but deadly force situations did not come up. Life is more complex.
I remember being an MP at an anti-war demonstration when
a Vietnam vet, still in the service, looked out at the hundreds of
demonstrators and moaned that “We killed women and children in Vietnam, why
can’t we do it here? Just shoot
‘em down.” The tear in his voice
told me that he didn’t want to kill anyone, but coming home had made his life
much more complicated.
This past week, figures were released that show the
number of suicides by active duty troops is at another record high.
Coincidentally, I just saw a documentary on the disaster
at Chernobyl in 1986. Soviet
soldiers, miners and firemen were sent to bury the radioactive mass. They had no protective suits and some
20,000 are estimated to have died.
But they saved millions.
The last time that American servicemen and women defended
the United States was in 1945. If
we had let North Korea overrun the south, would it have threatened anyone
here? What about Vietnam, Panama,
Grenada, Somalia, Kosovo…? I am
not passing judgements on any of the post-WWII conflicts, but they were
extentions of U.S. foreign policy, not defence of our freedom or our
lives. Yet, the toll on the
fighter is no less. They battle
fear and fatigue, bear the agony of their comrades falling, the helplessness of
being separated from family crises, while the rest of us watch the Superbowl
and complain about the economy.
Once upon a time, a handful of Vietnam vets returned the
medals they earned in combat.
Their gesture may not have changed anything, but at least they tried.