Distant Echoes of Vietnam-The Day I Lost My Innocence

[babylonsister]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19853.htm

Distant Echoes of Vietnam
The Day I Lost My Innocence

By William P. O'Connor

snip//

No, the generation of young men who fought the Viet Nam war trusted authority. We thought because people in authority are experienced, they usually know best. We were hopeful and idealistic, and the majority of us believed in our country. We were told that freedom has a price and we lived in a country that represented democracy and freedom around the globe. We also believed, as we know now erroneously, that our government was committed to this paradigm. Age has not blessed me with wisdom, but I do know old men make the wars, and I sincerely believe that they feel truth is just a game, a game for children and a game that must be played by young idealistic boys.

Old men make the wars, but they don’t fight the fight. The congressmen that declare war are too important to fight, too important and too busy. They are too busy lobbying, too busy collecting the lucrative pensions they have allocated themselves, and too busy assigning defense contracts to companies that will employ them after their tenure in congress. Combat is for the young, who have mountains of time and for whom the years mean nothing. A young man may feel immortal, but a body bag doesn’t have room for such a delusion. Reality registers quickly in combat and options must be weighed: he cannot desert, for all that’s out there is the enemy and the jungle. If he decides the stockade is preferable to death, he is abandoning his brothers and forfeiting his honor. The young hold both honor and the approval of their peers priceless, so once they get to the battlefield they commence to kill.

The perpetual conundrum of the old men who declare war is how to get the young boys to commit to the battle field. They have solved this conundrum by selling young boys on a counterfeit cause: freedom. War is somehow always about freedom, whether it is insuring it, or making the world safe for it; the men who spin these yarns preach that the only way to insure freedom is to liberate the villages, liberate the towns, and liberate the cities. We did that in Nam. We would send in mortars to soften up a village and then spray it with machine gun fire before occupying it and killing whoever we suspected might be the enemy. After the patrols, some of us would wash away the memories of such philanthropic antics with tumblers of Johnny Walker. We drank at the community lean-to back at the base, a lean-to which was appropriately christened, “Bombs for Peace.” I vividly recall guzzling a pitcher of Manhattans and looking up at the television set to see President Nixon making an urgent address to the nation. His words were clear, emphatic, concise, and complete bullshit. “We are not now, nor have we ever, bombed the country of Laos”(Sheehan 310). So I finished my drink, rolled a nice fat joint, and went outside to smoke it, because it was 8:45 now. The Air Force usually started the napalming of Laos about nine. I didn’t want to miss the show. After all, how many people get to see bombs that don’t exist?

I am old enough now to comb what little hair I have left with my hand, and age has replaced my innocence with cynicism. It has been six years now in Iraq, long past the six weeks or six months that the war makers predicted. The people whose country we have occupied did not have links to Al Qaeda and they were not responsible for blowing up the World Trade Center. We have long since given up finding the weapons that we were told they had. We have forced two million Iraqis to leave their country and have killed, by most accounts, a million more. We have obliterated their bridges, hospitals and schools. We have succeeded in getting four thousand brave Americans killed and we have managed to get seventy thousand more maimed at a cost of what could ultimately be three trillion dollars.

The Iraq War is a national travesty that brings to my mind a distant echo, an echo that reverberated in my brain much too often in Viet Nam. An echo which belonged to a voice heard more than half a century ago in another country in yet another war for freedom. An anonymous young soldier, just arrived in Normandy during WWII, look around him at the devastation wrought by the withdrawing forces and said, “Boy, we liberated the hell out of them.”

[HockeyMom]

1. I am very sorry you had to experience that,

but not all of us back then were so trustful.

[Dogtown]

2. Thanks, babylonsister

A lovely piece and speaks to many who were there.


BTW, my spousal unit loves the Dan. We're hoping to catch the concert in ATL again this year.