Veterans Day, 2005

I am totally non-partisan in my aggravation with presidents who get us into wars we a) shouldn’t be in, and b) don’t know how to win.

It was John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who stumbled us into Vietnam. That exercise was well under way when I received my draft notice in August, 1966. I didn’t protest. Many draftees in those days shot their big toes off, or ate a pound of sugar the night before their pre-induction physical, or took off for Canada. I was an American first and a foreign policy critic second, so for me, service was the only option.

I did game the system somewhat. By August, 1966, I knew enough about the Vietnam conflict to know I did not want to go there simply as an infantry grunt on the ground. When I got drafted, I looked around for alternatives. I asked an Air Force recruiter about officer training, but apparently there were thousands of guys who thought of that first.

Eventually I decided to enlist in the Army for officer training in artillery. The guns, I figured, were behind the lines. Not until I was in OCS at Fort Sill did I learn that a) in Vietnam there were no lines, and b) practically all artillery officers begin their combat service as FOs, or “forward observers.” The FO was actually in FRONT of the lines, spotting targets and coordinating fire with commands to the gun batterys, back there behind the lines.

Oh well. No one in the service ever actually believes he or she will get killed. At Fort Sill there was a joke that the life expectancy of an artillery second lieutenant in Vietnam was two-thirds of the way down the ramp getting off the airplane from the States. We laughed, and it was the tough, ironic laughter that young men learn who have been thrown together in a completely foreign and demanding environment whose ultimate lesson was survival. But get killed? No way.

Nevertheless, we were eager to learn what the instructors had to show us about doing our jobs, which included staying alive. If I had worked a tenth as hard in college as I did in OCS, I might actually have made the dean’s list.

When I was graduated and commissioned in June, 1967, there were 170 new lieutenants coming out of Artillery OCS every week. All but about 30 percent received assignments that ultimately would take them to Vietnam. I was one of the 30 percent. My assignment was to West Germany, where I spent two years guarding freedom’s European frontier with a big dinosaur of a weapon called an Honest John.

Men I knew went to Vietnam and died there, or served there, survived, and came home changed men, from shared sacrifice in behalf of flawed leadership and a futile mission. For a long time I felt guilty about that. Then in the mid-1980s, I visited the Vietnam Memorial, the “Wall,” in Washington. It was a transforming experience. The Wall took in the light, the day, the living, the whole life that a day has, at any moment, and me with it. The spirits for whom the Wall was erected were my hosts, and they were as much a part of the day, and the life of the day, as I. It was an astonishing memorial to the 55,000-odd names etched into the Wall. People were etching names onto papers flattened against the etchings, and the names appeared on the paper as if emerging from that life inside the Wall, where they lived.

I touched a few names with my own fingers. Before the day had ended, I realized I no longer felt guilty. I just felt lucky.

Today is Veteran’s Day, 2005, and again we are in a war we shouldn’t be in, and we don’t know how to win. This time the president is George W. Bush, and I am aggravated by him. Mainly I am aggravated by an image that is dominating my day, and it is an image of him interviewing soldiers via satellite television, a month or so ago. It was not a spontaneous, but a staged, event, to encourage public support of the war in Iraq. The soldiers had been coached in their answers.

It struck me as an amazing, and amazingly ignorant, betrayal of leadership principles, but the soldiers didn’t seem to mind. They were not in a position to mind, because a) the president is their commander-in-chief, b) they are Americans first and foreign policy critics second, and c) they are there to do a job, and part of that job is staying alive. Whatever else is going on, they understand, first and last, that they are living in a survival world, and it is their world alone to survive. Not much beyond that matters. If it occurred to them that they were being used by the president in this interview, it was in a way that was completely insignificant, compared to the other uses being made of them by him.

That may have been why the president seemed so uncomfortable in their presence. But that may be giving this president too much credit. If a commander-in-chief can’t speak to his soldiers off the cuff, it’s not likely he is interested in what they think, or feel, or say. George W. Bush has become positively creative, in his second term, in discovering ways to memorialize his aversion to leadership. Becoming so ill at ease, trying to appear a leader of fighting men and women, is not the image of a commander that I would prefer to dominate my thoughts, on Veteran’s Day 2005.