This week’s broadcast on PBS TV stations of the documentary produced by Ken Burns and Kim Novick, The Vietnam War, reminded me of some thoughts I shared seven years ago after a visit to Washington, DC. I reprint them here:
“Are you all right, Sir?” the woman asked, as she saw me crying. She had more than half a dozen middle-school youth with her in tow.
“I’m okay. Thank you,” I replied.
Becky and I were about half way through the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., one day this week [spring, 2010], as the tears streamed down my face. Becky remarked how the long, scar-like depression in the earth that is the monument was deepest at the point where it recorded names in the middle and high point of America’s engagement in that conflict, when the highest casualty numbers were coming in. Like the American death toll itself, the monument starts out shallow and narrow, and as it records the names of our war dead, it deepens before it turns and narrows again, to the point where someone indeed had to be the last American to die for a tragic mistake. Something about the shape and color of that scar in the earth mirrors the hole that the war left in ourselves and our country.
Why was I crying? I wondered. I had never served there. Though I got my regulation Selective Service card, like all my peers (that was before I even knew about Mennonites and conscientious objection), I missed the draft for Vietnam by two years. Nor did I know anyone personally who had served and died there. I have since met veterans of the war, but obviously their names will never be on that monument. War stories are written and recounted by survivors. Yet I did remember the times that some childhood peer had told me that their brother or father had died there. I either quickly changed the subject or found someone else to play with. The news was too monstrous for a child to face, let alone respond to adequately. Forty-five [now fifty] years later, I do not remember their names. Maybe it was for persons unknown or forgotten, deliberately perhaps, that the tears came. That also shows how, even with a draft, the war did not touch all segments of society equally. Then, as now, my scholarly, white-collar middle class family and friends had options unavailable to poorer, blue-collar folks and people of color. That’s worth lamenting, too.
Though I missed the draft, if anyone had told me, at the ripe old age of eight or ten, that I would likely be sent to war in Vietnam, I may well have believed them. From the nightly news and magazines like Time and Life, we got to know the names of Vietnamese cities like Quang Tri, Danang and Hue because our boys were always defeating the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese there. We were assured that we were winning, that there was “a light at the end of the tunnel,” because the body counts of their dead and missing were always higher than ours. Now we know that those figures were often invented and imaginary. But after so many years of defeating the VC and the North Vietnamese in places like Quang Tri, Danang and Hue, again and again, practically every other week, you couldn’t help wondering how many more years of victory this would require, how many more years of victory we could take, and whether you’d survive when it became your turn to go fight and win over there. Had Congress not begun de-funding the war on Nixon’s watch, and had Nixon not begun his process of “Vietnamisation,” (turning the war over to the South Vietnamese, with American weapons and training—basically how the war stated twelve years earlier), I would be much more surprised today that I, too, had not gone to Vietnam and become a name on that wall. Or someone who came to put those flowers and that card that I saw, in memory of a beloved comrade in arms, just below his name. Maybe it was the lifelong burden of his or her grief, more than forty years later, that started the tears flowing.
My third grade teacher, Mrs. Renkin, told me to expect as much. “Many boys like those in this class have grown up to serve their country, to fight and to die for our freedom,” she told us one day, “like boys I went to school with, who died in places like Anzio, Normandy, or Guadalcanal.” She added, “And when it comes your chance, all you boys should be proud and willing to do the same, like our boys now fighting and dying to defend our lives and liberty in Vietnam.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Mam,” I thought to myself. I knew better to say it out loud though, because I was already convinced that she had it in for boys, and gave girls preferential treatment. I’m not sure that my conduct in her class gave her much reason to change her preferences. But that got me to wondering when and why the willingness to kill and die became the price for life as a male. So, who decided, and when, that I was born to be expendable?
Now I embrace the expendability of this life for the kingdom of God, and even find freedom in that, but with the promise that, in losing this life, I get an even greater one. And I am much more assured of the worth of God’s kingdom, than I am of the cause we were supposed to be defending in Vietnam. We now know that all three presidents who prosecuted the war (Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), plus at least one of their Secretaries of Defense (Robert McNamara) knew that the war could not be won. They simply did not want to be the first American president to lose a war, nor did they want their party to be accused of being soft on Communism and “losing Vietnam” the way the Democrats in the late 1940’s had been accused of “losing” China. As though any other country were ours to lose. So they kept sending in boys, either escalating or de-escalating the deadly assembly line, to stay in power and to postpone the day of reckoning until the next administration came into office. In effect, so many of the names on that dark scar of a wall were there to protect someone’s political hide.
We didn’t just realize that now. It was dawning on us as the war progressed, with word of each new victory in the same old places. More died, then, in Vietnam, than soldiers and civilians. Our trust in our leaders, our government, even our nation itself, began to die a long, slow death.
Another casualty of the Vietnam War was hope. With major Civil Rights legislation and Great Society programs signed into law by President Johnson, the 1960’s were a heady time of hope for progress toward social justice, equality and opportunity for all. But the hope soon faded, like the last note of a bugle playing taps. Like a cowbird in a robin’s nest, the war was eating up more and more of our nation’s energies and resources. In his address to the New York chapter of Clergy and Laity Concerned, at the famous Riverside Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., drew this parallel between Vietnam and the abortive War on Poverty:
“A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
(Read the text of the entire speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html).
In the late ’60’s and early ’70’s, what social investments military budgets did not defund, politics and war-driven inflation killed. Common wisdom says that we tried lifting people out of poverty, and poverty, and the poor, proved incorrigible. But it’s more evident to me that our short-lived social investments died in the fields and forests of Vietnam long before they could show any fruits. Whenever a nation sends soldiers off to war, it is unavoidably warring against its own citizens, directly, by putting them in harm’s way, and indirectly, by beating its needed plowshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears. Another monument is needed on which to list the names of all the Great Society programs that died in infancy, and all the people who were condemned to remain in, or fall into, poverty by the war. It should be within sight of the Vietnam War Memorial.
The social, spiritual and personal effects of this death of hope could be seen in the 1970’s, aptly called, “The Me Decade.” With trust and idealism dying agonizing deaths under war and the Watergate scandal, with poverty and inflation increasing, what was left but to tend one’s own garden, pursue pleasure, and “tune in, turn on and drop out?”
It was in this setting (1973), while trading in my dying youthful idealism for the mindless pleasures of “The Me Decade,” that I was stopped in my tracks by the Prince of Peace. He affirmed my anti-war and pro-Civil Rights beliefs and even intensified them, putting them on an entirely new footing, other than a secular humanism. My waning idealism he replaced with a loyalty and commitment to the visions of Israel’s prophets. I enlisted in the anti-violent War of the Lamb. That was in the course of “The Jesus Movement,” which rescued many of my generation from either burning out on hedonism, or selling out to “The System.”
Through Christ I entered that “Revolution of Values” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., urged on us toward the close of his speech on the Vietnam War. Read the following words and consider their import to today:
“A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Just to the south of the wall with the names of all the war dead is a statue to the women who served in Vietnam. It too is powerful and touching. The woman who had seen me crying, and the youth group she was chaperoning, got to it just ahead of me. By the time I arrived to contemplate it, with tears still fresh on my cheeks, some of these youth were climbing over the statue and joking about it. I surely would have done the same at their age. But their chaperone chewed them out, telling them, “It’s not that kind of statue [for climbing on], and besides, there are people here grieving the deaths of their family members and friends.” She also apologized to Becky for their conduct.
Technically, I was not grieving the loss of any “family members and friends.” I can’t claim to have known a single person whose name is on that wall. But a walk through the memorial reminded me that the world is such, and war is such, that no one is untouched by, or immune to, the effects of love or hate, life or death, war or peace, anywhere in this world. Bearing the names of all the war dead, each one representing an inter-connected web of still-grieving family members and friends, that long dark scar of a monument reminds us that we are all members of the same human household, with much left yet to mourn, to learn, to do, and to heal.