Veterans' Day again, harrowing, the twisted knot of how to think and behave.
Who wants to diss the veterans, living and dead? They gave their all -- and sometimes their kids' all, and their spouse's. Or at least risked it all, and are very glad they didn't lose it, as I would be, as anyone would be. They wanted to believe in something beyond their ordinary selves. God knows we mostly do.
Well, a lot of them. Some wanted escape from the daily tedium, like most of us. Some, like most of us, signed up for something and didn't know how to decipher it and didn't feel good about backing out -- which deserves respect too. You do your duty, and the responsibility in the end belongs elsewhere. Not much different in the end from the legislators or house of lords or privy councilors or whoever endorsed the violence.
Unless you're there in the middle of it and the misery has entered your head. The legislators or house of lords or privy councilors or whoever were not witnesses.
But I digress.
My only purpose, here on Veteran's Day, was to acknowledge with respect the men of my family, who as far back as I know, not very far, have kept themselves out of war. Not cowards, I think, but men who had a clear sense of their immediate responsibilities to their families and themselves. Farmers, mostly, from Germany (somewhere), and Alsace-Lorraine, Frenchmen. My father's father and his brothers migrated to America as young men to escape the Kaiser's draft and the Franco-Prussian war, somewhere around the 1880's. Maybe, coming from Europe, they had a good intuition for the futility of it all.
My father was just narrowly too young for the Great War. He was in college in 1918, the first in his family, and a member of some student-army-training-corps when the war ended. He never went to an army base, but there's an old photo of him is his puttees. I'm sure he woud have gone if called -- should I think better of him for that? He contributed quite a lot to his community, quietly, during his life, as a journalist and editorialist -- and a gardener. Would his contribution have been greater as another of the honored and irrelevant dead in Flanders field? (And, damn, where would I be?)
By the time of Great War II, he had three kids and was too old for the draft. As far as I know, none of his six brothers from the Ohio farm went off to war. My mother's brother went off to the South Pacific, and came home OK, but she didn't like him any better for it. (He wasn't a bad sort. He wasn't special.)
I graduated from college in 1968, under the elms on a fine spring day in New England , wearing a black armband, like many of my classmates, for the Vietnam war. Our valedictorian spoke against the war, with some energy. There were a number of alumni from the class of 1918 there, for their 50th reunion, and there was booing and even cries of "Treason!". A classmate's father noted that the class of 1918 didn't have much of a case, since they were basically taking a bye in 1918, under the elms. My father noted, with his small smile, that I had come from a long line of draft dodgers. That's all the parental wisdom I'll ever need.
Within a month after my graduation I had the call from my draft board, and went for my physical, which, to my relief, I failed for various medical reasons (including, surprise, what I now guess was a moment of olive-drab hypertension). I was more or less prepared to not step over that line, to refuse the draft and serve my two years in prison. My notion was not that I just couldn't go over there and shoot small Asians, but that I COULD, and would, more or less easily, like anybody else. But, there were only bad reasons, and I should stay out of it. I did think, for myself, it was more appropriate to go to prison than to go to Canada. But I still admired lots of those who did go to Canada...overall it was probably a pretty good deal for Canada.
My brother, five years older, was never threatened by the draft, I guess, since he was in graduate school. He thus lived to do forty years' work in agricultural research in the third world, arguably contributing to the survival of some considerable number of people in the semi-arid tropics.
My rear view of the Vietnam war gelled around 1976, when I read of the construction of a Holiday Inn in Ho Chi Minh City...what then, after all, was the point? Why all the dead? Why? Did they die protecting our right to build a Holiday Inn for the Viet Cong? Why a Vietnam Memorial, and Rolling Thunder? Was there a point?
Maybe I would have fought in WWII. Maybe there's a reason sometimes. But how many wars could have just been avoided if there was no support? Sure, I know, another 60's joke, what if we gave a war and nobody came. Ah, but there's a good example: Switzerland. 193 years of neutrality, 193 years since their last war. No wars. Not even WWII. They just don't go. They're actually armed to the teeth, but they just stay home. And Switzerland is nobody's model, nobody cares about Switzerland. Why is that?
Happy Veteran's day.