Remembering Those Who Fought For Us
Davidson Loehr
November 11, 2001
We love war stories. We always have. We still make WWII movies, 56 years after the war ended. And one of them (Saving Private Ryan) won several Oscars a few years ago, and almost won Best Picture. The Rambo movies tried singlehandedly to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War, letting us win it.
I think there is a select group of war movies that should be required viewing for people in our society who have never been in a war, to get some small feel of the bloody and seductive power war has always had — at least for most men. On that list, I would include Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, as well as some powerful anti-war movies like The Americanization of Emily, Gallipoli and All Quiet on the Western Front.
The great combat general George Patton once famously remarked that next to war, all other human achievements shrink to insignificance. I’d hate to see history’s greatest artists, diplomats and geniuses dismissed by this modern incarnation of the god Ares, but for sheer power and excitement, Patton is probably right. Every veteran I have known still defines their war time as the defining experience of their life — as I also do. It isn’t kosher to say it, but I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for my 53 weeks in Vietnam — and almost every veteran of every war will understand.
We love war stories. The oldest story we have preserved in Western Civilization is a war story — Homer’s Iliad, probably written down 2800 years ago: the story of the Trojan war of three millennia ago.
Our notion of the hero goes back to those stories, too. For the Greeka, a ‘hero’ was half way between humans and gods: someone of nearly superhuman personal courage and skill in the service of some higher ideal the Greeks admired.
That’s the key. It isn’t just courage, it’s a selfless courage in the service of a higher ideal. Heroes fight for others. So do the soldiers we admire. When they fight for small or selfish ideals, we never think of them as heroic:
Mafia fights have often been bloody, and required some courage to pull off. But the slaughter was tribal, in the service of one family’s greed, usually involving profits from prostitution, drugs or gambling, nothing nobler. So we may be fascinated by stories of the Godfathers, but we don’t regard them as heroes. We don’t have holidays to celebrate them.
Mercenaries, soldiers for hire, also risk their lives. But we think of them as opportunists with way too much testosterone, not heroes.
And violent atrocities during war are never regarded as heroic. Many of us remember Lt. Calley and the Mai Lai massacres of the Viet Nam War, where his platoon slaughtered an entire Vietnamese village of men, women, children and babies. He was court-martialed, not given a ticker-tape parade.
We have similar reactions to the military violence of the Nazis, the Salvadoran death squads, the horrible acts of ‘the killing fields’ in Cambodia and so many others. Bullying, brutality and barbarism have never been admired, even though they continue to be imitated. We know the difference between barbarism and heroism, and it is a nearly sacred difference for us.
On Veterans’ Day, we try to remember the nobler, more selfless and heroic acts of men and women who put themselves at the service of orders they believed served the best parts of our country’s history and heritage. Few of our veterans were in actual combat. In the Vietnam War, about 90% of our soldiers were support troops, only about 10% saw actual fighting, and I imagine it’s still about the same. But every one of them made themselves available, and was there to do whatever was asked of them, the clerks and cooks just as much as the infantrymen.
There is something here that is striking and heroic. These are ordinary people who will do what they are told because they trust that their country would not ask them to risk their lives if it weren’t necessary. They trust their captains, their generals, their president. They trust us.
There is an unwritten, unspoken covenant that soldiers make with their countries. It’s a deceptively simple covenant. They say, ‘I’ll risk my life, maybe even lose it, in a cause I can’t fully grasp, in a battle that is part of a larger war I’ll never understand. I’ll do it for you because I am one of you and you have asked me to do it. In return, you must promise me two things. First, you must promise that you will do everything in your power to make sure it is a war that is worth my life. Second, you must promise never to forget. You must promise never to forget me, us, and what we did, because we did it for you. You must promise never to forget.’
Veterans’ Day is one of our annually scheduled times to try not to forget, to keep up our part of this holy, bloody, covenant. But in truth, we mostly do forget, don’t we?
It’s hard, almost contrived, to celebrate Veterans’ Day in a liberal church like this. I took part in a service with another Vietnam veteran in St. Paul a year and a half ago, and when all veterans were asked to stand, only six stood, including the two of us on the stage. Six out of about three hundred. Here in the South, the percentages are higher: we had 12-15 out of the 300 present at our second service. Still, it isn’t a big percentage. If you want to see a bigger percentage of veterans, you’ll probably have to travel east of I-35 to some of the black churches, or up the road to some of the big Catholic churches where there weren’t as many college deferments. But here, and in Episcopal churches and churches on the west side of Austin, we aren’t the warrior class. We get others to fight our wars for us.
And once the wars are over, the veterans become almost invisible — especially the broken ones, who are embarrassments in peacetime. Occasionally, you see a license plate on which a veteran wants to remind you that he or she served, and in which war. Once in awhile, we may be dimly aware that somewhere in almost every major city there is a Veterans’ Administration Hospital, where wounded, broken, disabled vets languish away out of our sight and out of our thoughts.
Even our good wars leave many veterans with wounds that will never completely heal. Our bad wars are much worse.
My veteran friend in St. Paul wrote a book about his experiences in Vietnam, and during his research he discovered that more Vietnam veterans have died of suicide than were killed in the entire war. That’s sixty thousand or more suicides. The fact that this is probably the first time you’ve heard this is one measure of just how invisible veterans are.
With the wisdom of hindsight, we can look back on Vietnam and realize that we didn’t keep our part of the covenant back then. The soldiers never promised it would be a good war, because that’s not their job. That’s the part we were supposed to guarantee. It is our responsibility to insure that it is the right war to be fought in that place at that time, just as it is our job to ask those questions in our present war. The soldiers only promised to serve, to risk and even lose their lives if necessary. We were also supposed to remember them for it. But after the humiliation of defeat in Vietnam, our society blamed the veterans for losing a war that should never have been fought, and many of them — tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans — were undone by it. The effects on their families, children and friends are incalculable.
People who attend liberal churches like this where over 90% of the members hold college degrees are never likely to be well represented in the warrior class. But Veterans’ Day still has a powerful message for us. In fact, it brings challenges which fall more directly to us than to almost any other sector of our society — especially since we are now getting drawn into a new war, whose effects may be with us for a long time.
Our favorite war stor (archive cut off – ed.)