Cool with marine weather back up in the valley. We had a big picnic in our community. Veterans wore blue caps with the names of their ships or their Units where they served. Little flags lined the streets and the giant lawn in the center of our little village square. The temperature was about fifty-six degrees according to our phones and most of us wore coats to protect us from the chill. It is Memorial day and even though some little kids threw bean bags around or whacked at croquet balls, it seemed a somber occasion to me.
I turned eighteen in 1971 and was in the last of drafts. I signed up for the draft that summer. The war was still happening and I was not eager to go to Vietnam. I knew a kid named Roy who was a year ahead of me in school. He was not a big kid but was sort of short and chunky. Roys parents were Polish and they were virulently anti-communist. Roy was too and he wanted to go to Vietnam in the worst way, so he lied about his age and went through Basic training. He had quit school early so he came back to school wearing a silk jacket with the map of Vietnam embroidered on the back. He was fit now and tan, the rest of his unit helped get him through Basic training and he proudly told us he was going to “Go Airborne” and he couldn’t wait to go. He made in country and his very first time in the field, he rushed out of his helicopter and was shot by enemy fire and died in the long grass where he lay.
In 2020 our then president is reported to have told a former general and his chief of staff that he thought the soldiers who had served and died in battle were suckers. They had been reviewing a great European cemetery, with long rows of headstones for the people who had died in the later months of the First World War. “Why did they do it?, What was in it for them?”
I am ashamed to say that as the years went by and I thought of Roy I wondered the exact same thing about the dead Veterans of that war. I looked up his name on the Vietnam memorial and I cried. The question poses one of of the great moral conundrums of my life.
We never destroyed Communism of course. Putin (a powerful communist and an inveterate expansionist) is the great ally of that same man who was our President then. But Communism, simply changed form as the world changed with it. Ideology can flow and change through populations, Ideology in a sense is fungible.
I never had to make the hard choice. I signed up to be a conscientious objector but I suspect that I may have just been a coward. I don’t know. My draft number was 365. Fate let me off the hook. Unlike the way it treated Roy.
I knew many people in my life who have served. Some joined up voluntarily to try to avoid the worst of the assignments the draft could deliver. Some joined for the benefits. Some joined for the guns and the opportunity to use them. Some of them wanted to be heroes. Most I knew that ended up in combat were simply young and unsure of what to do with their lives which were difficult from the beginning. Some were just young and dumb, just as I was , thinking that I was really a conscientious objector when the truth was I didn’t know what it meant to die for a cause. I wasn’t Thomas Merton, I was just young and didn’t want to die for that war.
The best reason I have heard was from a new, young recent recruit who said words to the effect of, “We will always need soldiers to protect our nation’s interests. It’s naive to think otherwise. If I don’t go, who will? And what does it mean about me if I let him or her go and they and die in my place.
Most who serve are not moral philosophers. Most who go believe they are protecting their home territory. Maybe they were. But they can’t know the answer to that until the shifting face of history offers up its judgement.
So today, I cry again for Roy. He gave his life for his country and we need soldiers to do that. Maybe he didn’t in fact save his country in that tall grass of Vietnam but that was not his decision finally to decide. He just offered himself up and let fate do with him what it will.
Bless him. Bless them all.
Here is an old poem of mine.
