remembering is always a problem... i usually can't pull up many details from the day before yesterday... but here i am trying to remember not only what i did but what i felt.. about 36 years ago... 1968... where were you?

the aplit class is reading tim obrien's The Things They Carried... centered on the war in vietnam... last october i took part in a teacher's workshop on the novel... over at depaul university ... at the time i wrote

but today's session offered some useful lessons (i've finally got a hold of zeugma and polysyndeton), and it provoked... a feeling...

as we reviewed some websites with information about how the draft operated back then, i felt a feeling... a sadness... an anger... a confusion... that i hadn't felt in a long time... for a moment i was eighteen or nineteen again... staring down the barrel of some impending "reality" my blind young self hadn't counted on... the fact of the draft... the war... the man-made world. for a moment i felt 1968... 1969... 1970... and it was not a good feeling...

o'brien's wrenching "On the Rainy River" defines the features of the crisis better than anyone i've read... mine was not so clear, and chronic... not acute... quieter and more easily set aside... but from it i learned a kind of doubleness that has served me well all these years... i'm obscure, i know.

and i refer to "my journal of the time - suitably naive and mendacious"... i knew there was a war going on... but didn't want to believe that it could touch my world... demand something of me. like most of my generation, i had parents whose lives had been wrenched about by ww2... you know, "the good one"... the necessary one. they had done their duty. dad, in particular, waited for the draft to catch him but went on to serve with distinction... as they say... fifty missions... bomb runs... with folks trying to blow him out of the sky... and then there was the commie scare of the fifties and sixties... the civil rights movement and the peace movement were, at best, suspect... fearful changes in the works... me... i was getting it in bits and pieces... people i respected at school were scoring reasonable points with some lefty anti-war notions... people i loved at home were planted on the right... i was feeling the eighteenth birthday creeping up... i was watching the bodybags on tv... i wish i'd been able to record the details of those days more precisely... maybe i'd remember better now... but there's this passage from the journal... (you have no idea how humbling and embarassing it is for me to re-read this stuff... who was that kid?)

March 5, 1968

I've just had my face rubbed in a very messy conservative mess. Never again. I will die before I mention politics again in this house. It started with John Birchers and progressed erraticlly towards my defense of F.D.R. on the grounds that someone must defend him. The looks they gave me. It was a combination "get out of this house" and "you are no longer my son" type of stare. It really knocked me down.

The thing they can't see is that I'm only arguing for the sake of arguing. They don't see that I'm looking for the answers. I've had the conservative line beaten into me since first grade. Now that I'm older and can think for myself they think I'm a bloody communist. I simply try to keep my mind from straying into that old line that everything is either black or white. But at the same time I don't want to go to far left.

I'm not going to go marching with Dr. Spock. but I do think that we've got to get the hell out of Vietnam. I do think that some of what is said today is treason and it should be tried as such. I try to keep away from emotional issues, but I'm beginning to think that maybe all we have going for us is our emotions, what can the intellect do?

I've got a big mouth. I shouldn't have said anything because they're right; I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm trying to learn but everything is so mixed up. I try to keep in between the commies and the Birchers, but just because I'm looking for the truth I often find myself defending one or another. They would never guess after tonight that I have what they call 'awesome affection" towards America. I have to fall back on the arguement that I hate but is the truth; its given me everything I have. Funny, this "you owe everything you have to America" bit is just what they used to shut me up a minute ago.

I can't answer them because I don't have the answers and they don't know. Yeah, I'm the searcher, looking for an honest man in the world. Isn't that how it goes.

I have that affection towards the country, call it patriotism or loyalty whatever, but I also hate war (a worldwide concession I should hope.) No person has any right to kill another except in cases of self-defense. That "except" clause is what people use. "If we don't stop them here, where next?" A little game of dominoes. Right now the world is a pretty bad place, but this is only because Cain began a trend that has continued ever since his encounter with his brother. All war is civil war. The "except" clause is invalid because self-defense is murder. All men say it is moral, but all men are wrong. It wasn't as God intended. Or was it? If so then is there no immorality?

The communists are an evil faction with the destruction of democracy on their agenda. Capitalism is good. America is a nation of beauty, peace, and goodness. Uncle Sam has a white beard to prove it all.

I don't know. They are right though; I'll pull out of it with a little aging and maturing. I just want to know the simple truth. But there really isn't one. I know.

I swear that politics is a dead issue in this house. It brings out the animal in us. Before you can say "Eisenhower reeks," they're at your jugular.

I thought I was going to Florida over Easter, but we can't get tickets so thats the end.

misunderstood all the way round. goodnight.

i was writing for english class... fr. rock colosimo was my only audience... where was vietnam in the curiculum? nowhere. why did schools - especially high schools - not simply drop everything and teach the news... civil rights... the war? i knew nothing. i knew people were recognizing the war as madness and speaking out... but i didn't know that a month before i'd written this a thirty-three year old wendell berry had spoken at the university of kentucky:

Why am I against the war? I have two inescapable reasons. The first is that I am a teacher, the second that I am a father.

I am unable to teach on the assumption that it is part of my function to prepare young men to fit into the war machine-to invent weapons or manufacture them or use them, to write the oversimplified language of warfare or to believe it. As a teacher, I reject absolutely the notion that a man may best serve his country by serving in the army. As a teacher, I try to suggest to my students the possibility of a life that is full and conscious and responsible, and I am no longer able to believe that such a life can either lead to war or serve the ends of war.

As a father, I must look at my son, and I must ask if there is anything I possess - any right, any piece of property, any comfort, any joy - that I would ask him to die to permit me to keep. I must ask if I believe that it would be meaningful - after his mother and I have loved each other and begotten him and loved him - for him to die in a lump with a number hanging around his neck. I must ask if his life would have come to meaning or nobility or any usefulness if he should sit - with his human hands and head and eyes - in the cockpit of a bomber, dealing out pain and grief and death to people unknown to him. And my answer to all these questions is one that I must attempt to live by: No.

(from "A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" 2.10.68)

it was a rotten war from the start. back in january 68 i had read mary mccarthy's thin red and black book Vietnam... i didn't know it at the time, but she was a notorious lefty... i remember there was much in it that i just didn't understand... i didn't know enough about my own time... and nobody seemed especially eager to clue me/us in... but i knew she was making a reasonable argument for american withdrawal... arguing from facts, not feelings...

well... the war was a quagmire... as they say... and so is this entry... i will pause for a bit to regroup...

We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . . We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.

Ronald Reagan (10 Oct. 1965)

 

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