| I live to regret the war
In Korea, the Army put me in a contradictory, even schizophrenic, assignment. My primary duty was military intelligence (another great oxymoron, like army journalism). Working in the S2, the intelligence section of command headquarters, I found myself the custodian of hundreds of secret and top secret documents. As an additional duty, I supervised the production of the command's modest little newspaper and handled public relations. In other words, my job was simultaneously to keep secrets and to deliver the news. By then, Judy and I were engaged, and we corresponded almost every day, exchanging letters and taped conversations, because phone calls home from Korea were too expensive. Our relationship had unfolded almost entirely by mail, but even at that great distance, we had a deep disagreement. More immersed in the real world than I was, she had already sensed that the war in Vietnam was deeply wrong. But I had swallowed the propaganda of a film that the Army showed often during my training, called Why Vietnam? I should have listened to her, but I stubbornly refused and moped angrily. Still, I missed her and counted the days until we could develop our relationship in person, instead of on paper and on tape. To maintain my sanity during the thirteen months of my tour, I taught English at the radio station in Chunchon, bought a good camera, and learned to develop my own film in a crafts shop at Camp Page. On a military exercise, I took endless photos of the Honest John tactical missiles, rejoicing when one photo skillfully captured the exact moment when it roared off the launcher toward a distant target. It did not even occur to me to wonder what one of those thunderous missiles might do to a group of human beings at the other end. Nor did I give much thought to the targeting documents that we maintained in
our files. I worried about what would happen to me if failed to protect
the security of the documents, but I didn't worry about the lives that
they might someday enable my unit to snuff out, many miles away from the
launchers. Nor did I have moral qualms about being part of a unit that
could put tactical nuclear weapons on the tips of its rockets. But in its own manner, the Army did teach me something in Korea about the way the United States makes enemies, on a retail level. The Army understood from experience that the average seventeen-year-old American male can cause an astonishing amount of mischief when he leaves an American post and sets foot in "the economy" of the host nation. As a "Cold War officer," my job was to brief these teenagers about the hard-working people and the ancient culture of Korea before they were allowed off post for the first time, and to warn them about previous occasions when young Americans in foreign lands had created nasty incidents in other nations. By the end of my thirteen months at Camp Page, I had grown disillusioned with the Army. Even so, my disillusionment was pale and feeble, a reaction to the everyday stupidities of "the Army way," rather than an intelligent, principled response to the deeper questions of the U.S. presence in Korea. In a mild protest against the imperative to get soldiers to "re-up," or sign on for more years in the Army, I counseled friends on the benefits of leaving. Eventually, I even earned a minor reputation as "the command un-up officer." Far from seeing this attitude as a threat, my commanding officer was amused. He considered me a good officer. During my year in Korea--all of 1968 and the first month of 1969--I missed an immense amount of turmoil in the United States: the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, the turbulent Democratic national convention in Chicago. Somehow, I persuaded myself that Richard Nixon's experience as a vice president would make him a better president than Hubert Humphrey, and I voted for Nixon by absentee ballot. If I had remained on a college campus for those years between 1965 and 1968, I now like to think, the salutary virus of dissent might have infected me, jolting me from my lethargy and moving me to protest an immoral war. But it didn't happen. I got home from Korea, threw my expensive dress blue uniform in the garbage, and got on with my life. I resumed my interrupted career in journalism, and Judy and I got married a few months after my discharge. Through the 1970s and '80s, I paid little attention to what was going on overseas. I woke up about the Vietnam War in time to vote for George McGovern, the antiwar candidate, in 1972. But I devoted no real study to what had led to the war, nor to the broad sweep of American foreign policy that had made it almost inevitable. Instead, I kept my nose buried in my work (I was now a reporter at Newsday) and in my family. That, of course, is no excuse. There is no reason why I could not have raised my two daughters and my consciousness at the same time. Then in 1983, my brother Richie died, at age thirty-six. One of the hardest things I've ever had to do was to identify his body, horribly decomposed after he had lain, dead, for a day or more in his overheated apartment, where a friend eventually found him. He had been suffering from severe headaches for months, and he had odd symptoms, such as a total intolerance for alcohol. But the doctors couldn't give us a definitive cause of death. In the months after, as a way of coping with Richie's death, I decided to write a magazine piece about it for Newsday's Sunday magazine. In doing the reporting for that piece, I contacted some of the men who had served in his combat engineer battalion in Vietnam and discovered that some had displayed the same symptoms that had plagued Richie. We had no positive proof of it, but we suspected--and still suspect--that his combat exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange contributed to his death. Even before I did the reporting that led me to that conclusion, I had a visceral sense that the government was responsible for his death. It overtook me as I walked into a funeral parlor in Queens for his wake. His coffin was closed, and on top of it sat an American flag, folded crisply into a triangle. Without even thinking about it, I removed the flag and threw it on the floor of a closet. From that day to this, I do not take off my hat for the flag, pledge allegiance to it, or find comfort in its colors. React > PART ONE: Remembrances of another war to make the world safe for democracy. DECEMBER 17, 2001. PART TWO: Two lessons learned. JANUARY 7, 2002.
I live to regret the war |