War Without Choice

In September 2005, I participated in a peace march in DC, protesting the wars in Afghanistan and, particularly, Iraq (one I consider a “war of choice” – one I believe to be based on ideology, not sound intelligence and just cause). It was a most interesting day, particularly in terms of coincidence and observation, well beyond the event I traveled three and a half hours to attend. For example, I left my home in Pennsylvania in the wee hours and drove directly to Washington; while en route and seeking to feed my ears, I chanced upon a radio station that was partway into a retrospective of Bob Dylan due to an upcoming PBS special on the cultural icon. I came into the broadcast just in time for the songs “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Masters of War” – both quite suitable to my frame of mind, since I was recalling a previous era thirty-some years earlier.

I hated the war in Vietnam, “my generation’s war” – it, too, seemed to be a war of choice, based on the “domino theory” that if the United States of America, bastion of democracy, didn’t intervene, evil communism would overspread the continent of Asia like a plague and before you know it we’d all be wearing identical clothing and quoting Mao. Seems now, from a position of historical hindsight, about as preposterous a notion as Iraq being the hotbed center of Al Qaeda and global terrorism in general.

When I arrived in DC, I parked my car across the Potomac from the Capitol area, a mile or so away from Arlington National Cemetery, walked across a bridge over that historic river and around the Kennedy Center, and decided I’d like to find some decent coffee and a bite. I spotted a cafe nearby, and as I approached I was amused to note that the building housing the shop was the Watergate complex. Mark that as Ironic Coincidence Number Two, given that edifice’s role in bringing down the first US President I ever loathed, a president who was as compromised by Vietnam as any soldier of the day.

I’d already decided that I wanted to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial while in Washington, given its significance to my generation and the infrequency of my visits to DC (I think the only other time I was anywhere near downtown Washington was nearly three decades earlier, when I was between Amtrak trains and stuck my head outside Union Station for five minutes). Coincidentally, given my starting location and that of the gathering place for the pre-march rally, it was a cinch to walk by the Memorial.

When you approach the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as I did – from the back – it doesn’t seem impressive. All I saw was the end of a walkway, and the concrete tops of two long walls sticking up out of the grass, only a few inches high (the Memorial is cut into the landscape). As I came around the end of the wall and onto the walkway, however, I stopped in my tracks when the enormity of the monument struck me. The sight of those two stark black adjoining walls, each nearly 250 feet long and etched with the names of 58,261 members of my generation, all either killed in action or missing, was overpowering.

I walked the length of those reflective, solemn walls very slowly, misty-eyed, caught up in thoughts of the people represented in those etchings. People who had other plans – college, a family, a career whether military or civilian, or simply teenagers or twentysomethings starting their adult lives while enjoying being young and relatively free of responsibility – all cut short in the horror occurring in the jungles of Vietnam. I thought about a first-year teacher I had in high school, a few years older than I, who was drafted and forced to leave his chosen profession to serve; I have no idea how he fared. I thought about a work colleague from the 1980s, who’d been a supply sergeant in Vietnam and came back a changed and cynical man due to corruption in the military (and, in all likelihood, PTSD – though the phenomenon didn’t have that name at the time).

I thought about my own fortune, too. I turned eighteen in 1971, the second year of the “Selective Service Lottery,” when my birthdate dropped into the “unlikely to be drafted” segment of the results; but for that fluke, I would have stood as good a chance as any other young man to be conscripted, issued a uniform and equipment, sent to southeast Asia and possibly be yet another name on that wall. I can’t imagine I’m the only male of my age who has visited the Memorial and experienced a bit of survivor’s guilt. Why I was lucky, why I’m alive, why those other 58,261 aren’t – there is no reasonable way to determine. “As fate would have it” seems so trite, so insufficient, so negligible an answer in the face of so many lost.

After the march and on into the evening, I visited other historical monuments around The National Mall – the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the National World War II Memorial, and ended back where I began, again walking the length of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. No other majestic polished stone tribute to our nation’s history on the Mall had the same effect on me. The stark difference is in the details: other monuments enshrine glowing phrases of honor, bravery, sacrifice, military might and victory, phrases credited to politicians, presidents, chancellors, military leaders; in contrast, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial simply honors, name by name, the men and women who gave their lives in service to their country.

No matter how any of us feels about any armed conflict that our country enters, whether by choice or in self-defense, the point of Memorial Day is to remember the fallen. Rare is the soldier who goes into battle intending to die – though the bravest are those who sacrifice themselves for the sake of their comrades at arms. On this day, I salute all those who served our country and who made the “ultimate sacrifice” – especially those 58,261 of my generation.