By the time I post this, it will be the day after Memorial Day.
I can’t post an essay on Memorial Day. I have trouble with Memorial Day. Not because the holiday isn’t a valid one; not because we shouldn’t set aside a day to remember those who have died in wars fought by our country.
My problem stems from my own uneasiness at having people thank me for my service.
I understand that they mean well; I appreciate the recognition that perhaps my role as a nurse might have helped bring comfort and care to other young citizens who were sent to Viet Nam as foot-soldiers. But when a well-wisher adds that we, the American military in Viet Nam, kept America safe and free…
That’s when I have trouble.
How should I react, when I know that the Viet Nam War did nothing to keep us safe or free?
This was the American war in Viet Nam: politicians sent a great many of the younger citizens of the US halfway around the world to wreak havoc upon a small Asian country for the flimsiest of political purposes. Then those politicians kept them–us–there for a very long time.
In that very long time, many of those young citizens were killed. They killed even more of the citizens of that small Asian country. They completely ruined its economy. They forced deadly us-or-them alliances on citizens there who needed some work, any work, to survive. They sowed mines and deadly herbicides.
They–we–did all this at the behest of those politicians. It was nothing personal.
I guess I don’t see how that kept us safe and free.
I do see that it left the US poorer by billions of dollars. Weaker in health, due to direct injury and the results of Agent Orange and PTSD. More unstable domestically, because of ambivalence to the war, but also because of the affects of the aforementioned health ills on the rest of the country’s citizens, among whom they lived, and live. It left the US shorter of young citizens–both those whose names are on the Wall, and those whose names probably should be. It left the country weaker in conscience–because to kill or to condone killing, for the flimsiest of political reasons, is a dehumanizing thing. And when this dehumanization is later twisted–knowingly, arrogantly, astonishingly–into a reason why we must not oppose sending current younger citizens into yet another senseless and unjust war…
Well.
So here we are, the day after Memorial Day, still struggling with the View Nam War, a burden inflicted upon the US 50 years ago by politicians.
And there is Viet Nam, the small Asian country, still struggling with the burden of the American War: the deaths we so cavalierly inflicted upon them, the disruption of lives, the yet-undetected mines and the birth defects and cancers and heart disease our chemicals still cause. It seems that we could leave after our war, since it wasn’t our country we’d defoliated and burned and left to fester, but they remained citizens of Viet Nam.
Are we safer for all this, and freer? Is Viet Nam?
Please.
And now we’ve got two other wars that politicians have sent, and send, young citizens into, halfway around the world in small Middle-Eastern countries.
Are we safer and freer yet?
Make no mistake: Our foot-soldiers are almost all good people with good intentions. As were we.
It is not the foot-soldiers’ fault that there are wars, and that they are sent into these wars for the flimsiest of political purposes. A veteran of Pearl Harbor, who many years later had an amiable dinner with the Japanese pilot who sank his ship, once told me that foot-soldiers on both sides of any war are just pawns in political games.
And that is what makes me the most angry, on Memorial Day: The politicians who start these wars, who direct them and blithely discuss starting new ones, do not bleed. They do not cry out in the night. Their families are not left to mourn, or to try to breach the walls that foot-soldiers build to deal with the battlefield. They do not have to fight for jobs, for education, and for healthcare.
They do not have to force their country to care for them.
Politicians merely play the game of war like a video game. They operate foot-soldiers as if by remote control to create the havoc they, the politicians, have masterminded. They tell the foot-soldiers they’re proud of their service. Then they refuse to give them what they need to live life fully and well after they have been so cruelly used for the flimsiest of political purposes.
One could say: We shouldn’t have elected the politicians. But who knows what he will get when he elects a politician? Perhaps they lie. Or perhaps they start out good men, but they get caught up in the game. Perhaps they forget that the young citizens they send to kill and die for the flimsiest of political purposes are human beings.
Perhaps they forget that their political purposes are flimsy. Perhaps they forget that they themselves are human beings.
Perhaps we, the people–we the citizens; we the foot-soldiers–must remind them.
Whenever a politician advocates war, we must insist he drop everything and go to that war. Not as a general, but as a foot-soldier. Not as a hypothetical question, but as an all-out obligation. With no regard to age, gender, affiliation, present employment or family situation:
If you will immediately enlist in the infantry as a foot-soldier, we will indeed go to war.
Because if you feel that the political purpose behind a war makes it too flimsy for you, yourself, to fight, what right do you have to send another human being in your place?
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Thank you so much for this.
Brilliant. Thank you for surviving to offer the world common sense which it is sorely lacking.
Brilliant.
What about President Obama´s wars? Libya and raising the stakes in Afghanistan? Has a “good man” gone wrong?
One can make a case against any war, my personal favorite is our Revolution. If we had not fought England for freedom we would have shared Canada´s fate and have become independent in 1867 without a shot being fired. And we would not have fought the Civil War since England abolished trading in slaves in 1813.
Following the withdrawal of the French from their colony in Southeast Asia some one million Vietnamese fled, mainly by foot, from what was set as “North Vietnam” to “South Vietnam.” Were we wrong to intefere on their behalf? Were we wrong to interfere in World War I? Were we wrong to interfere in Bosnia? And will it be wrong to interfere in today´s Syria? Without an actual attack on us, any war we get into is a dubious undertaking. And did England attack us or did they just try to control their own?
I guess by now you are mentally separating wars into “good wars” and “bad wars.” Good luck.
The Revolutionary War was fought to force out the Brits. “Freedom” as we think of it today had little to do with it. The big plantation owners down South and the rich merchants up North still expected to rule un-challenged. Our sense of “freedom” evolved over time. Nonetheless, your point is well taken. However, somehow I got the feeling you are disparaging Canada, and I see no reason for it. In any event, Ms O’Neill’s point is well-taken, as well. Note that the few who fled Iran after the fall of the Shah were his cronies and members of the Iranian “1%” who were fleeing more for political and economic reasons than for religious reasons. And as far as I know, nobody, or nearly nobody, fled Iraq until after our invasion. War is not good, and reasons for war can be specious. Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan…specious, fake reasons. The human tragedies in all wars are bad…even if the “reasons” for the war are not questionable.
I don’t pretend to know Obama’s motives for staying in Afghanistan and Iraq, any more than I understood Johnson’s acceleration of the Viet Nam War (if what I’ve heard and read of his comments on his tapes is true, I’m not sure HE understood it). I just think it’s a destructive, expensive mistake.
There are any number of good causes to support in the world, but when you support them with fire power, it’s using a black-and-white would-be solution for a nest of complexities, many of which we do not understand. We have no real cultural rapport with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq; as a nation and a military, we don’t understand how they live, don’t grasp their cultural or religious beliefs, don’t speak their languages. How, then, can we justify what we might see as sweeping in like Mighty Mouse to “save the day?” We’re setting our young soldiers up to be mis-perceived and misunderstood, no matter where their hearts truly are.
We were not perceived as saviors by the average Vietnamese whom we had been sent to “defend.” We were seen as big, loud hairy foreigners who touched down in their country for a brief time, with no real knowledge of who the Vietnamese were, and bombed their cities, ruined their farms, relocated them from ancestral villages to ugly little compounds surrounded with razor wire, impregnated their women… Sure, some were curious about us; some even seemed to like us, at least on a one-to-one basis. But all it took was one shift of the wind to re-route the napalm into the village, or one badly-aimed bomb falling on a movie theatre full of women and kids: then any faint hope of actual trust between us went out the window. And that sort of thing happened with alarming frequency, because war is not subtle and weapons are not discerning. I know; we got the casualties.
All this was not OUR fault, the peons on the ground, really. Our intentions were good, at least initially. We were young and dumb and didn’t want to do harm. But what it came down to was that we weren’t sent as ambassadors; we were the guys with guns.
If you find yourself dropped into a culture where you don’t have a clue, for reasons known only to those in the rarified air of the upper reaches of your government, and you’re the guys with the guns… It’s a recipe for disaster, and that disaster comes down to a very personal level.
As for Syria, I feel terrible for the people who are being killed by their own government. It’s beyond barbaric, and Assad should fry for it. BUT–arming the rebels? Lending boots on the ground? We don’t even really know who the rebels are; we’re making the massive assumption that they will magically manufacture a democratic government once they get into power with our assistance… And we probably believe we can then tiptoe off gracefully, to the applause of the grateful Syrian people.
Right. Mission Accomplished.
We don’t understand Syria any more than we understood Afghanistan when we helped arm the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation.
My point is, military intervention is no magic pill–except in the sense that it has side effects that can be deadly. And when it’s deadly, it’s not deadly to the politicians who throw young, idealistic US citizens under the great grinding bus of simplistic thinking and bad judgement.
Our politicians very good at ignoring the limitations of military use. They’re downright arrogant about threatening to send in troops, drop bombs, and make the world safe for democracy. But, counter to one of my statements above, they probably do realize, at some level, that the political purposes for which they send these soldiers to war are unrealistic at best and possibly downright flimsy. Otherwise, we’d have a draft, rather than sending these same young fighters back again and again. They are misusing them, then they do nothing to make it easy for them to seek care for the trauma these repeated deployments create. It’s like they consider them disposable, contrary to their lip-service adoration.
Maybe the political powers-that-be don’t read their history books, in terms of what happens when you wage war on somebody else’s turf for flimsy reasons. But they evidently read the part about the burning of draft cards, migration to Canada, and protests in the streets.
Susan.
Our military is made up today of professionals who chose to join with full knowledge of the risks. In this respect they are like our police. The business of armies is defense and war is part of that defense. Contrary to popular belief the military is the last voice to call for war, since they know they will do the heavy lifting.
I too served in Vietnam, the “pacification” program. I still have several friends with whom I have had discussions about the war. Perhaps the most interesting friend is one with whom I worked closely on the beach of the South China Sea. Long after the war I tried to do some trade business with him with Vietnam. I told him that we would need a good representative in Vietnam (he was living in Germany). He said he had the best, his brother who had been the only Viet Cong soldier who had risen to the rank of general in the North Vietnamese Army. My friend had been essentially fighting his brother. He did not do this to please we Americans, he did it because he had real issues with Communist rule. Thankfully even the most grievous wounds can heal.
Leo, I’m sure people had major issues with communism. Although most of the folks I met in the line of duty–and there were a lot of them–just wanted to tend their farms and their kids and their lives, and weren’t politically active or interested in either side until the us-or-them choice was forced upon them. In many cases, to survive, they chose both sides, depending on who was holding the gun on them.
My question would be, does the fact that people had major issues with communism in Viet Nam justify our intervention?
As for those who join the military, sure–many of them do it out of the best of goal-directed motives. Many, many of them are looking for a job, though; I met a few on a bus ride I wrote about awhile back:
http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/off-the-matrix/2010/04/08/two-dog-night/
Why they join is irrelevant to the way they are used.
Clearly, you feel we were used well in Viet Nam, and that they are being used well in our current wars in the Middle East. Clearly, you feel that our, and their, use is worth the investment, chaos and grief because it somehow benefits/benefited the countries we have invaded and our own country.
I feel all three wars were/are a travesty and a grave misuse of our military power and our military members. In fact, I feel they were and are disastrous to us on more planes than I can fully describe. I feel we had no right to intervene with firepower in any of these undeclared “conflicts.”
We differ.
The last few paragraphs of this essay says it all. if politicians, even just family members of politicians had to serve while sending other Americans into harm’s way, war would be just a memory and not a reality. Thanks Susan.
To be fair, there appear to have been a few, and might be some presently (although I haven’t been able to find a current accounting). But the proportions over the years that have been reported–the latest being four years ago–have been woefully low.
The reason I propose it be the politician him/herself who must join is that one never knows how a parent feels about sending a child to war. Most of us would certainly be reluctant–I know I would!–but some folks don’t have a realistic picture of what war entails. The first guy I heard of from my hometown who was killed in Viet Nam was a Marine, a former “bad boy” whose family (and some friends) thought was “cleaning up his act” by joining. So, probably, did he.
I doubt his parents would’ve thought joining the Marines would’ve been a good experience for them, whatever they felt for him.
Vice President Biden’s son served or is still serving in Iraq.
Susan, you get me totally wrong. I find all wars to be dreadful wastes. As I said my favorite mistaken war was the Revolution. I find it even more dreadful when I hear people speak of “good” wars and “bad” wars which means the ones they support and do not support.
Frankly, I’d have a hard time finding a “good” war. Especially these days, as the interrelationships between people, tribes and countries become so globally complex and publicly contentious. When the power of our weapons can literally end life on the planet. When whatever one country uses against another can be distributed by arms dealers to anybody else who can raise the money. Let’s all get missiles. No, let’s all get bombs. No, let’s all get drones.
When we do, we might well find out we’re really not immortal.
Oops.
We have other, non-explosive tools in our arsenal, but using them takes more skill, more time, more mutual respect, and more, more, more repetition of effort. But we in US much prefer the idea of a pill that makes everything Right, Just and Proper.
IMHO, that’s neither Viagra nor war.
Which, come to think of it, might have a lot in common…