Faces!
A few years ago, we gave away a book that we had owned for many years, This book was a pictorial history of the American revolutionary war that included an early photograph of the last known survivor of the continental army commanded by George Washington during the American war for independence. The picture was taken during the 1840’s and the man must have been at least ninety years old at the time. We looked into the eyes that stared out at us from the photograph and felt an immediate connection to all that had gone on during that so tumultuous period of time.
We have seen many veterans since that time and we are always drawn to their eyes, perhaps, in an attempt to know the unknowable for us since we never had the chance to serve, or, at least, a chance that we chose to take, anyway. Our time for service came during the Vietnam era and we chose, instead, to get an education in lieu of the experiences that we might have accumulated if we had allowed ourselves to be drafted and had most assuredly ended up in Vietnam. Over 55,000 Americans died in Vietnam and, after much anguish and trepidation, their names were quietly enshrined on “the wall” in Washington D.C. I knew, to some degree anyway, several Vietnam veterans and they told me more about their experiences coming home from the war when they were spat upon and had things thrown at them than they ever told me about what they experienced in South Vietnam. So many of those veterans are now dead long before their chronological longevity would have taken them and we can only attribute that to the difference that the long war in Asia made on them both physically and psychologically. Statistics are now coming out that show that an American veteran dies by suicide every eighty minutes in this nation. President Obama and this government are doing what they can to try to reverse those trends but they are fighting a battle just as great in trying to do so as those vets fought in the jungles of Vietnam, on the islands of the south Pacific, in the first cold war in Korea, and in the other actions that we have, as a nation, fought in the intervening years. Much attention is paid to the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan now, but, we know an over eighty year old man who attends our church who sees a psychiatrist regularly in an attempt to cope with what he saw and what he did on the peninsula of Korea sixty years ago. And, we remember what our uncle went through as he lived with us for a time in the late 1950’s before he returned to government care to live out the rest of his so very troubled life before committing suicide in the summer of 1979. He would, today, also be included in that eighty minute drum roll because he was a veteran.
Some wars are more popular at home than others are. However, for those on the front lines of those wars who see their diminishing number of buddies killed by an unforgiving enemy that causes them not to make friends and intimates very easily ever again, there is more of an air of reluctant acceptance than there is ever a popularity for war among those who have participated in those events. Our uncle was haunted and plagued by nightmares every night for the rest of his life over what he had seen and done in the Pacific and we are sure that, to some degree anyway, every veteran who has ever actually fought has their turn in the bucket of nightmares that are so real that, for a short time at least, they are once again returned to the situation that confronted them where it is literally kill or be killed.
No one who has ever been to war either wants or desires to try to describe to non combatants what they had to go through to secure that nebulous term liberty for the generations that they were spawned by and that who, today, so sweetly and nicely call them warrior heroes in a mainly vane attempt to try to heap some praise on souls who would rather never have done what they had to do. The last thing that so many of them want is any praise for killing fellow human beings who were being forced by the draft or a sense of honor or duty to try to do the same things to them. We look today at enemies that are guided by an almost fanatical allegiance to a religion that we can not begin to understand but, we have had to face those across trenches who carried Bibles written in languages that we could barely understand who were just as guided by the same source as we were to the idea of killing as many of us as they possibly could. They today, dream some of the same dreams as our veterans dream and may be dying in as great a number as our veterans are from the same placed and misplaced guilt that we suffer from. Our society and our government can try to do what it can to offer help to these tortured souls among us, however, they may be just a bridge too far away for us to be able to really offer them any real meaningful help. The past can be such a haunting thing and the monsters that confront those who must live with it can simply be too much for any rational soul to bear.
Among all of our wars, Vietnam may be the most ambiguous of them all with the exception of the ill advised foray into Iraq, and, its veterans, despite the attention paid to them by the wall in our nations capital, may still need the most attention if we are to call ourselves a truly compassionate nation. All who call themselves Americans, however, should never forget what these few have done for so many of us and have asked so little in return for what that they have endured. In the end, however, when a soldier sees the face of someone that they have killed, there is an individual responsibility there that so often, with time, becomes a thing that cannot be in itself reconciled or endured.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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