Viet-Nam Again

A very good friend, who has known me for seventy years, recently surprized me by saying, “That war really affected you, didn't it?” She said this because I had just spoken of the Viet-Nam war as a matter of course, as I often do, but hadn't realized how often. She was right. It did affect me deeply and I think about it every day of my life.

I refused when I was a young man to participate in that war and did everything I could to stop it. That refusal was costly over the course of my life in many ways, but now, in my old age, I feel exactly the way Muhammad Ali did when he said, “The greatest thing I ever did was not go to Viet-Nam.”

There are many images of atrocities that come to mind whenever I think of that war, and of the “neckties,” the best and the brightest of the U.S., defending the war and dragging it on and on despite knowing that “we were wrong,” as Robert Macnamara put it. Right at this moment I think of one particular video among many others readily available on YouTube, of smiling U.S. soldiers burning down thatched huts while old people who lived there begged them not to do it. But here are three images that occur regularly to my mind which are of a different kind.

1. I am sitting in a restaurant in Central Square, Cambridge, MA, having lunch with a friend named Chris who has brought her ten-year-old niece along for the occasion. I am saying to Chris that I just can not understand how it is that the U. S. leaders just keep on with the war, dragging it on year after year, even though every one knows it is wrong and the costs are beyond all measure. The ten-year-old niece pipes up with these words: “It's because they're afraid of being called 'Chickin.'” Chris and I are silent, we look at each other, and we know that even a ten-year-old could see exactly what was going on.

2. I have received my “Greetings” letter, in which I was ordered to report to the Boston Army Depot for “induction,” and I am talking with a fellow teacher who had also just received his “Greetings” letter. He and I have a beer and knockwurst and red cabbage at the old Wursthaus in Harvard Square every Thursday night, and it is one of those nights. I explain how there is just no way that I am going to participate in this insanity and killing. Al is literate, informed, a graduate of a respected university, sensitive, able, interesting, a good math teacher. But this is exactly what he says in explanation of why he is going to go to Viet-Nam: “I know, but if I don't go I will have a black mark on my record for the rest of my life.” (Someone told me years later that Al died in Viet-Nam).

3. Here is one last image of this kind. I am teaching social psychology at a community college in Massachusetts and many of my students are damaged Viet-Nam veterans. One of these men comes frequently, for many hours, to my home and discusses in depth his experiences in the war. We tape-record most of these sessions with the idea that someday he may write them up and publish them. He was a Marine, had seen a lot of combat, and has serious soul-injury. I am sitting at my kitchen table one night, reflecting with him, and I say to him, “Why didn't you refuse to go?” He laughs and says: “If I had refused, my mother would have killed me!” I do remember that he later mentioned that “John Wayne movies” were a big part of his pre-war outlook.

These images might seem trivial in comparison with the actual battleground images, but I have been haunted, rightly or wrongly, by them almost constantly in the forty-five to fifty years since they happened. They were truths across my path, and it is only recently, in my old age and after countless hours of thought, that I have had a few glimpses of resolution.