Memories of Memorial Day

My next newspaper column:

Monday, Memorial Day, a friend shared a Facebook meme: “Only two defining forces have offered to die for you. Jesus Christ, and the American Soldier. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom...”  

And I thought, those who served in Vietnam as I did, before and after, killed there, didn’t die for our freedom. They died because they were poor, mostly, couldn’t get student deferments, or have daddies who bought them a pair of invisible bone spurs. They died not knowing or caring why they were there. Quoting another veteran, they died for a mistake. Taking and returning fire, they fought to protect themselves and their squadron, not anyone else. All they wanted was to ride those “freedom birds” back to the world with as many of their limbs as possible. The ones I evacuated mostly didn’t. Their Purple Hearts came at a much higher price than mine. And those who died were still dead three days later.  

I served in Danang, not far below the DMZ. “Rocket City,” we called it. When the rockets rained in and we dove for cover, it wasn’t for anyone’s freedom but our own. The beach there, China Beach, was beautiful, though; white sand, mild surf, and warm waters comparing favorably with the occasional nurse from the 95^th Evac stripping her combat fatigues down to a bikini, as choppers patrolled the shore, gunners sitting halfway out the doors, feet resting on the struts, protecting our freedom to swim.  

Just down the beach was the civilian MACV compound, fenced, guarded, green, quartering contractors making big money servicing the war. Someday, I figured, China Beach would be a destination spot, adorned with expensive hotels, win or lose. And so it is.  

Protecting America’s freedom had nothing to do with it. Especially not to the orchestrators. The Domino Theory was a useful selling point. Now our trading partner, Vietnam did fall. And it has hotels and McDonalds.   If the term makes sense, World War II was a good war. There was a definable cause, and undeniable need. It liberated people held in cages, terminating that practice and Nazism forever for a while. And it ended the Depression. 

Afghanistan was justifiable, might even have made us safer, had Rumsfeld not let Osama off the hook, had Bush not bailed to pursue unrevealed intentions. Iraq’s “Domino Theory” was “Bringing Democracy to the Middle East,” as bogus as the former, and as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It was never about protecting our freedom, even though more who fought there, and more people back home, believed it was; more than was the case with Vietnam. By then, propaganda had found a louder voice. Dick Cheney’s stock in Halliburton made out. Oil companies and defense contractors, too. Most everyone else paid dearly for the adventurism, and the bill still isn’t settled. 

It’s easier to believe our wars have been to defend freedom than to consider other reasons. No matter what, those who died deserve our veneration. And contrition, for the lives we’ve enjoyed since they lost theirs. And for our complicity in sending them, unquestioning, to fight wars instigated by old men whose kids rarely did, for reasons obscured beneath star-spangled bromides.  

It’s wrong, and lazy, to define patriotism only in terms of war; equate it only with those convinced to fight, for reasons they’re made to believe. It’s not their belief that needs questioning: it’s that of those who slap “Support Our Troops” stickers on their cars and trucks, fly flags that say “Behold my patriotism,” coal-roll, vote for tax cuts that deprive veterans of their rightful benefits, and call themselves patriots. 

After serving in Vietnam, Memorial Day makes me more angry than sad. Once a year the tears are real; the absence of those who died is eternal. Yet we remain at war, even as phony platitudes and intimations of future wars from a “president” who dodged the draft by fakery expose the day of remembrance as the manipulation it has always been. My friend, an honorable man who didn’t serve, believes with all his heart. I respect him for that. My anger may be overly self-righteous, but military members aren’t the only Americans protecting our freedom. So are teachers, nurses, housekeepers, factory workers, researchers, parents, climate protestors, plumbers, Social Democrats, the remaining actual conservatives, community organizers… 

But not those keeping us in a state of perpetual war, selling the myth that freedom is the reason.

[Image source]

War Memorial

[Re-posted from a couple of years ago.]

For me the significance of Memorial Day is the recurring reminder that the story of war is -- or should be -- the story of the people who fight them and not of those that start them or support them from the safety of their homes. Wars begin because of the failures of leaders: their stupidity, their selfishness, their blindness, their need for power. For them, it's at a level far removed from those called upon to respond to their failures; with little if any personal pain, they make decisions for which people will die. Money will be spent. People will be mobilized with thoughts of patriotism, will find themselves chanting the name of their country, convinced that theirs is the just cause, that their survival depends on following those leaders who, by definition, have let them down. I think, particularly, of our succession of undeclared wars, most of which were for questionable or overtly phony purposes. Vietnam, Grenada (what a sick joke), Iraq, even Afghanistan, a message pitch, high and tight, abandoned early for a grand illusion.

My view of the Vietnam war was, comparatively, from the balcony, but I was there. I cared for the injured, I was (mildly) injured myself. I came to understand how easy it is to dehumanize the enemy, and, more importantly, how quickly the fight becomes about one's fellows and has little if anything to do with the supposed reasons for being there -- assuming the real reasons were ever stated, much less known.

It'll never change, of course. Because of issues about which soldiers likely won't know, and with a sense of patriotism so easily manipulated that both sides will feel it equally, off they will go, to the pain of their families and to the safe and comfortable pronouncements of heart-felt support of their nations, so easily conjured by the men in charge.

The almost unmentionable fact is that it seems we humans like war. For soldiers there's an intensity of relationships and of purpose, annealed by danger and the need for rising above oneself, that exists nowhere else. When I served, I believed the friendships I formed were the most profound I'd ever had. I was sure they'd last forever; and yet, after I was home, they disappeared nearly as quickly as they formed, and I'm not sure what that says about me. I'd like to think it's because I found something in my life more based in more durable things: family, being a good surgeon, the training for which immersed me so deeply that the rest of the world nearly disappeared; but I don't know. I do know that, rightly or wrongly, because of transcendence or giving in, for many there's nothing like those relationships ever again. To those that have gone through it, I give recognition; to those who died for it, and to their families, I owe much.

But to those who haven't, yet wave the flags, profess their love of country, especially whether "right or wrong," who get all teary-eyed at the passing parade and all hateful-eyed at those who don't, who define patriotism as saluting their flag and not much else, and who think "support our troops" is a bumper sticker -- about those people I'm not so sure. On Memorial Day we hear it said how wars have been our finest hours. For the soldiers, fighting to save themselves and to protect their buddies, with or without a sense of duty and honor, it may well have been. For many, it most certainly was. Called upon to perform heroic acts, to live in unimaginably horrifying conditions, they did. But was that the finest of what they might have been capable? Is that really our best? Shouldn't we hope to hell that it's not? Is life really so meaningless that in war we find our highest purpose?

As much as I honor and respect those who have fought in our wars, and as much as I am aware of the loss of those who died or whose lives were permanently damaged, that much and more am I disgusted by the smirking and secure, the rich and righteous hypocrites who foment the hatred, who prey upon human weakness and misery, who use the unspoken sense of purposelessness that so many people have and turn it, cynically, into faux patriotic pride. Over war. Over the threat of war. Manipulating the mistaken but nearly ubiquitous belief that war is good, that war is righteous, that war is who we are, they win elections, they revel in the spotlight, they spew untruths through the airwaves from their well-padded seats at the table of public opinion. It's shameful.

In having gone to war, dutifully, voluntarily or not, with high ideals or not, mistakenly or not, there's no shame. But at the thought of having been led there with deceit there's great sadness. For those leaders whose cynical recognition and manipulation of our over-arching human frailties, our desperate need for meaning; for those who, generation after generation, translate so easily our weaknesses into willingness to see war as greatness, and to define patriotism in terms of how we respond to that idea; for them I have mostly contempt.

In wars there are countless acts of individual greatness. In some wars nations have responded to need and risen to greatness. But wars are not great; only the people who fight them. And the people who fight them, I remember this Memorial Day, are, mostly, doing so at the behest and consequence of people who are wrong more often than right, who have their own unspoken purposes, who have run out of ideas, and who are decidedly not great.

War And Reason

Nice words, from a guy who, according to the RWS™, hates the troops. Actions, though, are more important.

To those who consider the president's absence from Arlington this Monday a figurative middle finger raised to veterans (and I know they are many who see it exactly that way), I'd only ask, in relation to Barack Obama's words above, how they think his actions compare to those of our previous president, in terms of providing for the needs of vets and families.

And if I were predisposed to ranting, I'd also ask: how much better might their care be -- how much better off would our county be in countless ways -- had we all, including those teabaggers professing love of country while demanding an end to "outrageous" taxation (at its lowest point in decades), agreed to a war tax (a gas tax would have been perfect, in several ways, especially if there were a way to moderate it for low income people), starting when it all began and ending when it was over?

But that would have been, you know, reasonable and proper. And it would have required a bit of sacrifice. Not exactly their cup of tea, don't you know.

Press Release

OBAMA TO SPEAK AT ABRAHAM LINCOLN NATIONAL CEMETERY

Like Presidents Reagan and Bush before him, President Barack Obama will not attend ceremonies, on this one occasion, at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day. Rather, he will give honors at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, near Chicago.

"Abraham Lincoln presided over the most divisive time in our history," President Obama said. "In a time when our country's very existence was gravely threatened, he managed to overcome divisions of American against American, and to begin the healing process. I can only aspire to the greatness of President Lincoln, for few if any will achieve it. But in many ways, these are nearly equally perilous times. In attending events this Memorial Day at the national cemetery that bears his name, I honor his memory, the memory of those who fought so bravely in the Civil War, and that of all who have served our country, in all wars, in all times."

There was no such release, of course; no such statement. Had there been, I wonder if it would have made a difference to those who have risen to such anger over President Obama's impending absence from Arlington while ignoring those of our recent Republican (and therefore, by definition, patriotic) presidents.

No.

Memorial Day

Even though I served, and even though people I knew in Vietnam died there; even though I cared for many wounded GIs in the aftermath of rocket attacks or in my capacity as OIC of the medevac program; even though my dad was in the Army, my father-in-law in the Navy (both with scrambled eggs on their caps); even though I've always admired our military personnel whether draftees back then or volunteers now; I've never given much serious though to Memorial Day. Maybe it's because, like Mothers' Day, or Earth Day, or Nurses' Day, if you don't honor those things daily, then doing so on some single occasion seems like show with no tell.

But for no reason I can say, today I'm thinking of my friend JB, who, like me, served as a doc in Vietnam; but unlike me, he spent a year in charge of a surgical hospital operating on thousands of injured GIs and a few Vietnamese from both sides of the war. He saved lives, many of them. As did his now wife, Jeannie, a surgical nurse in the same unit.

JB and I couldn't be more different politically, religiously. We couldn't be more the same, surgical trainingly, patient devotionally. Unlike some who traverse these pages, JB and I can discuss matters on which we disagree, respectfully, well-informed, open-mindedly. We can find areas in which we agree. And, because we respect (and, dare I say, love) each other, these discussions are enriching for both of us.

Because he went deeper, literally (the link is to an impressive, and graphic, video) into the horrors of the war than I did, he bears a heavier burden now, I think. He might disagree. But in my mind JB, though he never fired a shot (as far as I know) when in Vietnam, is as much a hero as any who did. And they all are.

Maybe people who just did their jobs aren't, by some definition, heroes. Maybe I don't really know the meaning of the word. But today, Memorial Day, I just want to say, for no particular reason, and no differently than any other day:

JB, you are among my heroes, if there are any left in my mind. And I wish the people with whom I disagree on so much were like you. Were that so, our democracy would be safe indeed.

And not because of your guns.

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