Posted on 05/28/2004 6:38:55 AM PDT by SpinyNorman
A Vietnam war hero and anti-war activist, John Kerry can unite a divided nation. But he needs your help.
My generation was deeply divided by the Vietnam War. Those old divisions, those old wounds, have not entirely healed; if anything, they've recently been reopened by the war in Iraq and by the rising public sentiment against what many people view as this generation's Vietnam. Yet, the chance to finally heal those old wounds -- a healing that surely would serve us well in dealing with the war in Iraq -- seems suddenly close at hand, thanks to the candidacy for president of John Kerry
Senator Kerry and I share the defining generational experience of Vietnam from different perspectives. Some of my public high school buddies shipped out to the Southeast Asian country that would be their grave. Growing up in the military -- my father was a career Naval officer -- I would lose other friends over there, though not in the intimate, blood-soaked way that Kerry and other combat vets did. In 1964, I went on to the University of Virginia, where I would resign my Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps appointment in favor of full-time activism in the civil rights movement. Later, I joined the movement to end the Vietnam War and performed two years of alternative service as a conscientious objector.
I know some military veterans are sensitive about the term "vets" being loosely applied to all who experienced a war, even those working to end it, but I use it here in the general sense, while respecting important differences in how we went through that war. One thing, though, that I think many combat vets and "vets" of the anti-war movement shared was a promise to ourselves that when it was our generation's turn to govern, this nation would never again be led into unnecessary wars by presidential lies.
It didn't occur to us then that other members of our generation -- those who were on the margins of those great historical causes to which we dedicated our lives -- would, in fact, run the country when we came of age. Nor did we anticipate how long the divisions over our generation's multiple reactions to the Vietnam War would divide the American political landscape. With Kerry and Bush the presumptive nominees of their parties, those divisions already figure prominently in the 2004 presidential election.
We baby boomers have yet to overcome the divisions of the Vietnam era. In fact, we are often reluctant to talk about that period. I can feel that when I teach a unit on the Pentagon Papers case in my communications law class at Westfield State College. I often ask how many of my students -- mainly from middle and working class backgrounds -- had family members who were involved in the Vietnam War. Close to two-thirds raise their hands. When I ask how many of them have had extensive conversations about the war with those relatives who returned, typically only one or two hands go up. I know some had relatives who didn't return. I tread softly through this emotionally laden minefield of history, and I encourage them to ask their elders for their memories and perspectives on the war.
The difficulty in talking about that war at all, even within one's own family, may have something to do with why there has been too little dialogue between those of the Vietnam generation who actively opposed it, even resisted the draft, and those who donned uniforms and hit the rice paddies. The trauma runs deep and silent. But the wounds of division have other sources. The media culture then and now seeks to paint us into opposing corners. Dick Cheney, who had "other priorities" during the Vietnam war, was not the first politician who accused war opponents -- in this case, opponents of the war in Iraq -- of giving "aid and comfort to the enemy." Anti-war opponents in the Vietnam era were also accused of not "supporting our troops" by their opposition to the war, even while we reasoned that the best way to support the troops was to bring them home and end the war. There were some bridges built between protestors and troops in those days -- GI coffeehouses, support for conscientious objectors and resisters within the military, banners that read "Support our Troops, Bring them Home Now" for example.
Now, many of those in high office, appointed and elected, are of the Vietnam generation. The Bush administration, one of the most war-like in recent U.S. history, is thoroughly staffed at the top by what have come to be called the "chickenhawks" -- men who found ways to avoid the war in Vietnam but were happy for others to fight it. Now in power, they send others to fight their "forward strategy" wars. Bush and his men were not resisters who opposed the Vietnam war on conscience, but were the sons of privilege who supported the war. Their non-participation was more in the tradition of rich Unionists during the Civil War who paid poorer men to be their replacements in the bloody trenches. Kerry, on the other hand, decided that it was not right to avoid service, or essentially send a less fortunate substitute. He volunteered for service and came back a strong critic of the war.
It turned out the critics were right. Vietnam was a terrible mistake, costing some 58,000 U.S. dead, thousands more broken and wounded lives, and millions of Vietnamese deaths, wounded, and ongoing birth deformities from U.S. chemical and biological warfare. The world population turned against it. The American population ultimately turned against it. The Vietnamese made clear that, just as they had done for the previous 2,000 years, they would never stop fighting for their independence from foreign domination. So, it ended, and we now have friendly trade relations with that communist-led country.
But the memory of popular political culture is a strange thing -- strange because it operates through the filters of the mass media. That memory has always worked to marginalize the activists who brought about social change. We love the eight-hour day, but the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) and other labor activists who fought and died for that right are considered suspect. Most of us now see the Vietnam war as wrong, but the long-hairs and others who dared point out the mistake, dared to dissent from their government's wrong turn at the time, are painted into a corner of suspicion. We who fought against that war did so because we loved our country and its values as much as anyone who donned a uniform, (though a few protestors did stupid things and betrayed those values just as some soldiers did). Yet, the official keepers of cultural memory cannot permit dissent to be elevated to a level of acceptance that might threaten the population's readiness to go to war the next time. If Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, and resisters like Randall Kehler were right the last time, why were they not on Nightline, CNN, PBS and other media outlets leading up to the Iraq war instead of the military experts who inundated the airwaves? That marginalization of past and present dissenters keeps the populous from being reminded of past errors.
Breaking through the divisions of the past might just help us avoid future disasters and shorten present ones. But we need to talk -- the combat vets and the anti-war activists and the many in-between (including the many G Is who came to oppose the Vietnam war). The 2004 election could provide an opportunity for this long-overdue conversation, unless that opportunity is sacrificed to the shouting negativity of name-calling that some of the rhetoric has already foreshadowed. Yet, the division between the many camps of Vietnam-era "veterans" may find a profound new bridge for finally sitting down at the table together in the person of Sen. John Kerry and his presidential campaign.
I had the chance to sit down for lunch with John Kerry in Boston's Locke-Ober restaurant last October. In that natural conversational practice of searching for common ground, we referenced our different histories in relation to Vietnam. But there was no uneasy awkwardness about the roles we had played. John Kerry returned, decorated and wounded, from combat as a Navy officer in Vietnam to join the anti-war movement through the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I grew up in the Navy with plans to attend the Naval Academy, but became involved in efforts to end the Vietnam War.
John Kerry joined the men and women of our generation who slogged through the swamps of Vietnam, dodged the bullets or were crippled by punji sticks or mortar shells. They answered their nation's call regardless of their opinion or knowledge about Vietnam and the nature of the conflict. These Americans who either felt that it was their duty to serve, or could see no way out of the draft, deserve our respect. Many have gone on to great things in their lives and have healed from the wounds, both physical and psychic, of that war. Others are in the walking wounded category, still suffering from the traumas, the Agent Orange defoliants, the psychological damage of that war, still missing their buddies who didn't return alive. Enough respect can never be paid, especially since, in many ways, their government abandoned them after the war and continues to neglect them today.
But John Kerry also represents those of us who studied the war closely and came to the conclusion that the war was wrong. We felt that it was a tragically mistaken policy that was taking and ruining lives, not just of our classmates and friends and relatives in U.S. uniforms, but also those of Vietnamese who only wanted to run their own affairs. (An excellent collection of memoirs from all sides of that war, collected by Christian Appy, is aptly titled, Patriots .)
I had met Sen. Kerry briefly in the 1980s when I was communications director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, and he was one of our key allies in the Senate in trying to stop the Star Wars program. Our lunch in October, however, was a casual, getting-acquainted kind of lunch, just the two of us, although we were joined for part of it by Kerry's Chief of Staff, Drew O'Brien. (I had won the private lunch with the senator in a Kennedy School of Government alumni fundraising auction three years earlier.) Apart from the fact that my lunch mate was running for president, it became one of those kinds of lunches you have with someone you would like to know better. Of course, in this case, one of those people had just been the subject of an 8-part Boston Globe series on his life. So we weren't exactly starting off an equal footing. Kerry knew that and, thus, turned much of the conversation toward learning about my life.
Being close to the same age, we started talking about the paths we had both crossed. We had both been in the national leadership coalitions that had organized several mass mobilizations against the war, he as a leader in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and I as chairman of the Southern Student Organizing Committee and Southern field director for Vietnam Summer. We dropped some names from that period, people we both knew. He asked how and when I had come to oppose the war, and I told him my story. The people in my activist group at U.Va., formed to launch a civil rights project, started discussing the war. I started off supporting it, but after much debate, resistance, and study, I came to oppose the war. I sent my father some of the books I had read (he was then commanding officer of the 4th Dental Co. at Camp LeJeune, NC), and he came around to opposing the war as well. That was in 1965.
"Oh, so you were very early, then," the senator responded over his salad. The silent implication was one of respect.
I did not respond, "What took you so long?" That was a silent implication that I also respected those who had gone, even volunteered to go as he did, whether or not they later figured out what was wrong about that war. Instead, I took a bite of my chicken sandwich.
The lunch conversation ranged from Internet file sharing (I teach communication law), to Cuba policy, and then a subtle segue to a request I had planned to make. I am on the board of the Men's Resource Center of Western Massachusetts, which was organizing a Springfield-to-Greenfield walk against domestic violence the following week. I asked if he would like to be one of my sponsors in the walk. "How much are you asking?" replied the candidate who was about to mortgage his home to stay in the race. "Oh, about $50 a mile," I quickly ventured. "How far you walking?" "Just ten miles," I offered, "not sure which end." "The Greenfield end is the nicest scenery," he advised, adding, "Sure, I will sponsor you." And a month or so later, that check arrived at the MRC. I was impressed.
Of course, our conversation ultimately turned to the campaign (I also teach political communication). We tried to sort out the enthused response of many progressives to Howard Dean, given that Dean never claimed to be a progressive.
Kerry's theory was that Dean's anti-war talks had attracted progressives who then projected all of their own politics onto Dean, who was basically a blank slate. I agreed that Kerry's record was more progressive. But I added that I couldn't even get to that point with friends in Amherst, where I live, because of Kerry's vote authorizing President Bush to use military force in Iraq. He said he wanted to go to Amherst and confront that head-on. At that point his chief of staff had joined us and looked a little skeptical about spending time in Amherst with the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries looming. "Well," the senator reasoned, "maybe when we are over in the Keene area, we could just shoot down there one evening." As the strategy shifted to Iowa, that possibility disappeared.
Naturally, there were many things I wished later we had spent more time discussing. When I sorted through our talk on the drive back to Westfield, I reflected most on what his candidacy and presidency might mean for finally healing this painful divide that has both unified and separated so many of my generation, and by doing that, enable us to think more clearly about less destructive ways to address global issues and real threats.
When Daniel Ellsberg, the Marine Corps veteran and military analyst who helped turn the tide against the Vietnam war by releasing the Pentagon Papers to the media, spoke in Amherst last fall, he was preceded by a moving account from a local combat veteran active with the Veterans Education Project, Gordon Fletcher-Howe. Gordon first asked for all veterans in the crowd to stand. There weren't that many in the Amherst College chapel. I stirred my feet but didn't stand out of respect for the kind of veteran I knew he was referring to. Yet, I spent about nine years of my life engaged with that war, being arrested for breaking down speaker bans on Southern campuses to speak about it, organizing vigils and marches against it, draft counseling, facing death threats and violent assaults, confronting possible prison time for draft resistance in the process. Like combat vets, I lost close friends and classmates to that war, including guys I worked with on summer jobs at Camp LeJeune. Lance Cpl . Jack Hayes taught me about humanist philosophy while we worked as lifeguards at that Marine base. Then he volunteered for Vietnam and didn't come back.
Our experiences were very different. Our responses were different. For more than 30 years, members of my generation have done little to bridge the silent storehouse of strong feelings that surround and emanate from those differences.
Yet, John Kerry personally embodies and bridges those differences. He was a veteran of both the ground (and water) war in Vietnam and the battle for hearts and minds in Washington. He took fire and gave some in Vietnam, and he braved the political ambushes of the powerful at home in an effort to end the war. The media have captured a number of the embraces of combat veterans with Kerry, especially those who served with him on his Swift Boat crew -- his "band of brothers." But he has also likely gotten a few hugs from fellow "veterans" of the movement to end the Vietnam War. One can imagine a situation at one of his campaign stops of an aging antiwar protestor and combat veteran rubbing shoulders as they both step forward to hug their former comrade in arms. "He was one of us," the vet might say. "He was one of us," the peace activist might say. Fact is, he was with both of us.
The 2004 campaign will be a war of competing images. Photos of Kerry, the young, dashing Swift Boat Navy lieutenant in Vietnam will compete with Republican-circulated images of the long-haired Kerry being arrested in connection with a non-violent sleep-in at Lexington's Minuteman Park as part of a VVAW protest of the Vietnam war, the largest civil disobedience mass arrest in the state's history. One such arrest photo has already made it into Newsweek . The GOP is even more enamored of a doctored photo showing the young vet on the same speaker's platform with "Hanoi" Jane Fonda. When I asked Kerry about the likelihood of the GOP using those anti-war images, he said, "They would be crazy to do that; those images show leadership and courage in fighting for what I believe in."
There was a time this past spring when I thought he had been wrong. The Bush campaign was working hard to diminish his "street cred" as a wounded combat veteran by playing up his anti-war activities. They trotted out another Swift Boat captain who served after Kerry had left Vietnam, and who debated him at the behest of Nixon in the 1970s, to declare that there had been no atrocities committed by U.S. troops and that Kerry had besmirched the reputation of those who loyally served by suggesting that there were. They raised questions about whether Kerry had thrown his ribbons or metals at the Capital steps protest by VVAW, whether they were his medals, and even whether he was really wounded. Now, with the photos of U.S. atrocities in Iraq circulating around the world, Americans are being reminded that even some of their own will commit such crimes in war (in fact, reminded by the same journalist, Seymour Hersch, who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam). So, the high horse attack on Kerry for testifying to parallel events, and worse, in Vietnam, has lost its edge. In fact, it puts Kerry in the same, rather heroic, light of the young man who blew the whistle on the atrocities in the Iraq prisons. Defenders of American values, truthtellers -- not bad company.
Even with the GOP attack machine launching its first assault on his anti-war record, in fact, Kerry is not running from that record. After winning the Georgia primary and bumping John Edwards out of the race, Kerry began his remarks with the words, "When I led an anti-war march in Washington... ." We are seeing more of the combat vet imagery from his campaign, but he isn't ducking his anti-war leadership, either.
Those competing images reflect the poles of some of our generation's most trying hours, and they offer us a chance to come together after all these years, not just to embrace Kerry and his campaign, but to embrace, forgive, respect, and reach out to each other. More significantly, perhaps, consider what it would mean politically and symbolically, for someone attacked as an anti-war protestor to actually win the White House. Now, that's some healing. The marginalized activists would be brought in from the cold and have a better chance of being part of the conversation the next time the nation is led toward war.
John Kerry's campaign for president means a lot more for this country than providing a personal bridge for the coming together of these various classes of "veterans" from the Vietnam era. But that opportunity shouldn't be overlooked. There are many of us, and we still need a lot of healing from that traumatic time in our lives. The eagerness for war of the current reigning "Chickenhawk" regime in Washington has reopened much of that trauma. I now see my students, including those who signed up with the Guard to help pay for college, struggling with the same kinds of choices about an uncertain war that my classmates and I faced. My students have become even more attuned to Iraq as talk of activating the draft (including women) has caught their attention. That is painful. It wasn't supposed to be this way for our kids.
Those of us on the progressive side of the spectrum have to come to grips with the danger this country and this world face from another four years of the Bush team in power. Roe v. Wade would be history. Cuba would be toast. And the Bill of Rights would be in shreds. How many thousands of lives would be lost in expansionist warfare? How long would it take for the economy and public sector to recover from the ravages of the insatiable war budget and its deadly deficit? What chance would we have to reverse or slow global warming and ozone destruction?
Unless there is a sharp turn in the opinion polls on Iraq, Kerry will not likely run as an anti-war, "withdraw now" candidate. He will not allow himself to be positioned as the appeasing Neville Chamberlain or, worse, the traitorous Benedict Arnold, of the "war on terror." He will not allow himself to be portrayed as the peacenik (in veteran's clothing) who would surrender to the "terrorists." And that is just how the Republicans will paint him with any hint from him of proposals to withdraw -- even without that hint. His campaign just won't go there, not unless the population takes a major turn against the war very soon. That is politics.
My certainty about supporting him comes from what I know of John Kerry's past, and my personal read of him in our meeting. I have no doubt that if he had been president, we would not have gone to war in Iraq. Nor would we have overthrown and kidnapped a democratically elected president in Haiti while no one, except Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now," was looking. In fact, when Kerry commented on the Haiti situation as it was unfolding he named it precisely for what it was -- the arming and returning to power of thugs and mass murderers. Instead of undermining and invading Cuba, he will join the majority in Congress and lift the embargo. That is the Kerry who exposed the Iran-Contra dealings and put the spotlight on brutal dictatorships the U.S. was supporting in Latin America. And, ultimately, he will find some way out of this terrible quagmire in Iraq and bring our soldiers home. I am sure of that. You either have to trust me or him on this one, or just swallow hard and recognize that he is the only one who can depose Bush. So, we have to make a choice, and then we have to order our Kerry buttons, bumper stickers, yard signs, etc. and campaign like we mean it. When the polls are even, and Ralph Nader is poised again to throw swing states to Bush, lukewarm support won't do it. It is time to get involved.
Beyond the healing opportunity that Kerry's candidacy might provide to us Vietnam-era "vets," a Kerry victory would open the possibilities of healing other wounds that too easily divide this nation. The Bush campaign team, led by his chief strategist Karl Rove, has already signaled that they intend to run their campaign on fear of terror, reopening of the old divisions over Vietnam, and prejudice against gays and lesbians. Kerry, aided by our continued vigilance and activism, offers an opportunity for the country to feel both secure and principled as well as respected in the world, not just feared, while he also provides an alternative to the politics of hate, prejudice, and division. A spirit of renewed national purpose and community may be within our reach -- if we will only take it. And on this march for a renewal of the best America we can be, expect to see some aging vets with faded combat ribbons marching shoulder-to-shoulder with peace-button-wearing gray hairs. We might even be talking with each other.
Tom Gardner wrote of his own response to the Vietnam war and the draft in We Won't Go, edited by Alice Lynd (Beacon Press,1968). He teaches communication at Westfield State College, and is a doctoral candidate in communication at U.Mass. Amherst. Healing Old Wounds
*************
I was appalled by the Kerry lovefest titled "Healing Old Wounds" by Tom Gardner. Among its glaring inaccuracies and partisan exaggerations (why didn't Mr. Gardner refer to President Clinton as a "chickenhawk?"), I did note one glaring omission: the testimony of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth (www.swiftvets.com). Here, literally hundreds of former commanders and military colleagues of presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry, including 19 of 23 officers who served with him and every commanding officer he ever had in Vietnam, declared in a signed letter that he is "unfit to be commander-in-chief." These are his true "band of brothers," the ones who knew him best in Vietnam. And they are quiet no more. Apparently, for the Advocate, the swooning, sympathetic opinion of a single author, obviously a contemporary and supporter of Kerry, easily trumps their first hand experience with, and informed opinion of, Kerry. SpinyNorman
Via email Editor's Note: The website to which SpinyNorman refers, www.swiftvets.com, offers a link to a letter, allegedly signed by men who served with Kerry, that castigates the Senator for his opposition to the Vietnam War; the letter also demands that Kerry release his full military record, for no specific reason. Neither the letter nor any other documents at the Web site level substantive accusations against Sen. Kerry.
"Cuba would be toast."
If Gardner sees this as a problem, I have a very good idea where he is coming from.
you bet we are divided. and will remain so. As someone that came of age during this time. i find all of these 60-70's radicals dispicable and traitors.
IT WAS KERRY WHO HELPED CREATE THOSE WOUNDS AND TEAR THE NATION APART! NOW, HE IS THE ONE WHO CAN HEAL THOSE WOUNDS HE MADE?!?!?!?!
WHAT CLAPTRAP!...
Spiny,
The best thing about the Advocate is "Ask Isadora".
Looking at who edited his 68 book, one might wonder if there is some connection between Gardner, the past and current anti-war crowd and Kerry's Nam era peacenik cronies.
"Alice Niles Lynd and Staughton Lynd are Quaker activists who have been involved in the civil rights, labor and peace movements for many years."
Source: Lynd Papers In Swarthmore College Peace Collection,
I get it for "News of the Weird." I should just rip that page out and toss the rest. The "Xtremes" personals will make you fear for your children.....
"I know some military veterans are sensitive about the term "vets" being loosely applied to all who experienced a war, even those working to end it, but I use it here in the general sense, while respecting important differences in how we went through that war. One thing, though, that I think many combat vets and "vets" of the anti-war movement shared was a promise to ourselves that when it was our generation's turn to govern, this nation would never again be led into unnecessary wars by presidential lies."
I can't even begin to respond without being ousted from the internet.
NO, you sanctimonious little bastard, we are NOT all vets 'respecting importent differences...".
NO, you SLB, we did't promise anything about wars and presidential lies - and Kosovo proves the lie.
However, YES, you miserable little rodent, I'm sensitive based on loads of crap heaped on me between 66 and about 84 when the absolute FIRST person not related to me, ex-military, or refugee, actually said thanks in any manner.
Oh, and NO, you scabrous weasel, it is not "our generation" in power, it's yours; that's what we're trying to change!
It's trite, but I'd go back today if it'd do any good [I do know a tad about interrogation centers] and I'd love to meet mister Gardner somewhere en-route.
Yeah, forgot News of the Weird- that's good stuff.
The Xtreme personals are fun exactly because they are so deeply weird. It's kinda like reading Isadora, you know- you think YOU have problems, sheesh! So I admit to taking pleasure in what I regard the misfortune of freaky people.
I don't have children, so I never got a protective impulse over them. But, thinking about it, I don't think I'd be happy if my little girl were reading about couples looking for...um, adventure...in the Advocate's personals.
"We baby boomers have yet to overcome the divisions of the Vietnam era. "
Well, if Kerry is elected, we will have a non-stop rehash of all the old arguments. Divisions? You ain't seen nothing yet.
His 4153 words did not include 9/11.
To judge by this piece, he couldn't shut up ten minutes, on Vietnam or any other subject, if offered a million dollars.
norton,
I was 18 and on leave (Army) when I thanked a man who had served in Vietnam. This was ca 1989. We happened to be standing near each other waiting in line, he couldn't miss my cue-ball hairdo, and we got to chatting.
Admittedly, I was a little uncomfortable, as he started telling me stuff I was really not equipped to hear from a total stranger at that moment. Of course I respected his service, just thought it was weird he would share such personal stuff with some random kid like me. With hindsight, I later understood that he had probably held that stuff in for 20-odd years. Maybe in me he saw himself at that age?
Anyway, as we did our thing and started to part ways I told him that I was too young to remember the war, but I knew that he and his people had done well, and thanked him for it. I could see him getting misty by that point, and he looked quite taken aback. I threw him a smart salute, he returned it, and that was that.
I don't think alot of combat vets ask for the world. Just someone to listen for a change.
How a lefty celebrates Memorial Day: re-define "vet" to include pro-Hanoi activists.
"That's never going to heal if you don't quit picking at it..." </g_r's mother>
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