I didn't serve in Vietnam, and thankfully I didn't lose any of those close to me that did. I sent others to that war; no matter how far down the line of diminishing responsibility I worked, that is what I did. My part was small but veterans tell me, "You were there," and some say "Welcome home."
Veterans give me a place to be, but there is no forgetting the enlistees and draftees whose entry into the military and the nightmare of war I was a part of. I am writing to illustrate how widespread and long-lasting the damage of war is, even for someone who was never in danger, never saw any of it first-hand.
At 20, newly married, I took a job with the U.S. Army to support myself and my college student husband. I had no idea what an AFEES was (Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station) when I started at the Albuquerque AFEES in 1966. At first I was very comfortable. I grew up in a military family in the few years after WWII when its veterans were highly honored, and the war seemed somehow clean, and brave.
My father was a WWII, and by 1966 a Korean War veteran. He looked upon his military career as a calling and so I did, too. Working for the military was okay by me.
At first I only did Navy volunteer enlistments. I did them so well that I received a commendation from the Navy Department, delivered in person by an officer from the Pentagon. That commendation stayed at the bottom of a box until I ran across it and ripped it to pieces many years later.
When the draft picked up I did that paperwork, too. After their physicals and qualification test the men came to my end of the building. I was one of the people who completed their enlistment forms, assigned a group leader, and gave them their meal chits and assignments to the buses that took them to their basic training at Ft. Bliss, Texas.
Political science courses I had taken at University of New Mexico had affected me more than I realized, but the real changes in my world view had started in high school with a very good history teacher, and my awareness of the inequities that the Latino students had to deal with. They were punished for speaking their native language on the school grounds, for example. But the worst was that when it all became too much, and they didn't return to school one day forever, nobody cared.
This was terribly important because the AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test) administered at the AFEES decided who was assigned technical duties that required months of training, and who ended up in the infantry and on the ground in Vietnam after a matter of weeks.
The AFQT was written without any deference to cultural or language barriers--it was a white, Anglo, English-as-a-native-language test. The boys from northern New Mexico especially did poorly on the AFQT because they still had problems with English. The Native American boys had language problems, and even stronger cultural differences than the Latinos.
When this got through to me, I would sit at my desk each morning feeling for a while as if I would throw up. Then the work started and I stopped feeling badly for myself. There were too many who were going into a nightmare because I typed up their paperwork.
The brother of a coworker was killed, then the Marine husband of the woman Marine recruiter. A high school friend died, and my husband's friends.
One of my husband's UNM classmates was given a deferment for the distant possibility that he would develop diabetes in his middle age as his father, a Navy reserve officer, had done. He was making very good money a few weeks later in a real estate development company.
Two Navajo boys were yelled at when they reported a day late. Their "Dear Gentlemen" letter had been delivered to a post office box in Gallup, picked up at some point and carried to their families' homes far to the west in the Nation, then taken by horseback to the mesa where they were caring for their sheep. They rode for three days to get to a highway where they had waited almost 24 hours for the Greyhound to pick them up and take them to Albuquerque. Then they were verbally abused. Then put into the infantry. There are enough Navajo names on the Wall that they could be there; I've checked. I don't remember their names, but I remember their faces.
The son of a land-grant protest leader decided to go for a psychiatric deferment. He turned over desks and threw chairs and had the deferment before he even had his physical.
There were so many, and they were all so young. I started to feel centuries old when I looked at them. After I had to write my husband's orders to basic training, I couldn't do any more. I went to work at the Air Force base, then followed my husband to Ft. Knox where I spent a few months in Military Personnel.
My assignment there was to look at all records for young men in the Armor School over 18 who had finished high school. They all received a letter that began "You too can be an officer in the U.S. Army," because the Army was running out of lieutenants who were usually young and inexperienced, and on point.
When my husband's Vietnam orders arrived, and my father left for his Vietnam assignment, I returned to Albuquerque and spent another year watching television news film for faces I knew--the faces I had seen in the AFEES, for my husband's face, and my father's face.
I had a baby. They both returned. My husband had learned new ways to be cruel and we divorced. The Gulf War started and I was hospitalized for depression. I worked hard to prevent the Iraq war and then to protest it. I was hospitalized for depression.
Robert McNamara wrote a book saying he was sorry. We'll probably be subjected to a book like that about Iraq. I think Robert McNamara should be required to visit every family, American and Vietnamese, who lost someone in that war and apologize personally. I think the people who thought up the fiction of the Gulf of Tonkin incident should be in prison.
This Iraq war was produced by people whose names we know right now. They are committing murder, and murder is a crime. If there is any justice anywhere, they will pay for their crimes. We have to make sure of that, so this never happens again. And again. And again.