by Lucy S.
I sat tearfully stunned, watching this
Democracy Now segment this morning: “Memorial
Day Special: U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Return War Medals at NATO Summit.” In it, we see veterans stepping up before a
huge crowd in Chicago expressing what they did in the wars and why they are
throwing away their medals. Heartfelt
testimony can be so powerful.
The urge to commemorate the special labor
of people, sacrifices made, extraordinary care, lives lost in struggle,
momentous events – this is at least part of what is behind the idea of a
memorial day. Yes, it can be used to sentimentalize imperialism, mass murder in
wars, unquestioningly following orders connected to mystified causes, but for
the majority of common people, what it means is so bound to their feelings for
those who have suffered and died in these wars. I remember in the later 1980s,
during my first semester at the California community college in Lancaster, in
speech class I gave a speech on the background leading up to U.S. involvement
in Vietnam because I had recently learned it and had been stunned – and a guy in
his later 30s left as I began. After class, he politely told me that he was
sorry to have walked out, but that he was a Vietnam veteran and some of his
friends had died there, and he just couldn’t take hearing that the war was
futile or wrong. He said that he knew it might be, but it was too much for him
to bear hearing about. I have never forgotten that, and I have always wondered
how we are to delve into examinations which are bound to inflict awful pain on
people who have given so much to what they believed was worthwhile.
The answer can never be to pretend that
it was a good war after all. The U.S. war against Vietnam decimated the
country. What I had learned in a history class that semester were some basic facts
that were available in encyclopedias – not particularly contestable – not
easily dismissed as ‘leftist ideology’ – yet when I told my dad, he said that
he was sure that almost no Americans had been aware of that information during
the time of the war. I’d always thought
that there had been two nations – North Vietnam and South Vietnam – and that
North Vietnam had been a communist country with no freedoms while South Vietnam
had been a democracy like the U.S., and North Vietnam had attacked South
Vietnam to force them to become part of their country. My dad said this was how most Americans
imagined it. But there had been one
country, not two, and they ruled as a colony by France. They fought for their
independence and won. At the 1954 Geneva
conference, an agreement was made to temporarily divide the country into two
parts to allow troops to disperse and people to move if they wanted to. In 1956,
an election was supposed to be held throughout the whole country as it was put
back together. But the U.S. increasingly intervened and helped support the
regime of the dictatorial Ngo Dinh Diem in the South. Diem said that he would
not hold elections since his government had not signed the accords (because
they did not exist at the time). He and the U.S. were adamantly against
nationwide elections because they feared that Ho Chi Minh would win – the leader
of the North’s government and the national hero of the war for independence.
I can’t write the whole history of the
Vietnam War here, but what we see then and in wars since then is that the U.S.
government starts wars, and common people go to fight in these wars while
knowing almost nothing about the people and issues of the countries they are
invading. But it is not as simple as
saying that U.S. soldiers are reactionary and deluded. In Vietnam, soldiers
were drafted, and those soldiers were disproportionately low-income, people who
did not get college deferrals. Since then, with the so-called volunteer
military, class still plays a huge role. Economic issues may blend with
idealism and a desire to see more of the world and understand other realities
(sadly and somewhat ironically, in view of how that understanding takes place,
especially in times of war).
I married someone in the Air Force in
the late 1980s. The military’s mission as well as the domination it exercised
over so many facets of our lives were always sources of stress and arguments between
us. At the same time, however, I saw that many of the enlisted people in the
military were never cavalier in making brash statements about how “we oughta go
kick their ass” or “nuke them out of existence” as were some of the armchair warriors
I knew – the hawks who had never enlisted themselves. Those in the military
knew that they were the ones who would have to pay the price if those
easy-to-make statements amounted to real action. And after living in other
countries, they knew from relationships with people in those places that other lives
and communities were just as valid and real as American ones. That is one of the
sad ironies about insight gained by those in the military.
While we were in Germany, the U.S.
fought the first war against Iraq. I was against the war. I didn’t know a single other person there in
Germany (from the base) who was against it. Once the war was on, military
members and their families – those I knew, at least – supported it. I only
found out in recent years that massive amounts of depleted uranium were sent
into Iraq, starting with that war. DU will send out radiation there for 4.5
billion years. I have seen pictures of babies with only one eye, in the middle
of their foreheads, and babies with what should be internal organs outside of
their bodies because of this substance put there by the U.S. And I have read
about poisoned soldiers, even U.S. soldiers.
I keep wondering what would happen if
most of the military members went on strike, and if almost no one would join
anymore. I keep thinking we need to treat our Memorial Day the way the veterans
in the Democracy Now video do, as a day to learn the real lessons of these wars
and make common cause with one another so that the elite can stop using us
against one another.
A person for whom I have great respect
emailed me tonight, and he included these lines from W.H. Auden’s poem, “In
Time of War”: “Rally the lost and trembling forces of the will/Gather them up
and let them loose upon the Earth/'Til they construct at last a human justice.”
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