Thoughts on War

Nearly a lifetime ago, at the height of another American war, a young man I knew was drafted. Despite his best efforts, going into hiding, going AWOL, leaving the country, and spending months in a brutal army stockade, eventually he went to Vietnam. He asked me to marry him so he would have someone to come home to, a reason to be sure he stayed alive. I did, and he did.

A coming of age

The years 1969 and ’70 were defined for me by my young husband’s months on the lam and in hiding, of incarceration at Fort Ord and in Kansas, his weeks of training in deep snow at Ft. Sill before being deployed to Southeast Asia, surreal days of “R&R” in Hawaii, and countless letters describing his year in and around Pleiku--the beauty of the people and the land, the friendships, the opium and acid, the bootleg music, the fear and filth and hunger, the hardship, the deaths, and eventually, his return.

With tens of thousands of other young women in those years, I lived out the strange and unwelcome role of an army wife, the significant others of those forced into war against their will.

The entire time my young husband was in Vietnam, I actively protested that war, radicalized by the times and the institutional brutality I witnessed first hand at Fort Ord, and by the appalling spectacle of American military madness on rampage in the distant fields and jungles of a tiny nation fighting a bitter occupation and civil war.

Veterans at home

Even after serving his full year in Vietnam, the military demanded six more months of my husband’s life when he came back to “the world.” He was stationed at Fort Lewis, outside Tacoma, and I joined him there. In our tiny rented house off-base in Spanaway, we hosted a stream of returning GIs on their way home—guys he had served with, and guys who knew guys he had served with in ‘Nam. Guys who couldn’t talk about what they had seen and done, guys who couldn’t stop talking about it, guys who were anxious and confused about going home, and a few who re-upped to go back because they knew they could never go home again.

For hundreds of thousands of young American men during that era, once your number was up, your options were very few. Not one of the young men whose paths crossed mine during those years labored under any illusions about the war, about American motives or morality. Some were overt “peace-niks” cast into the role of soldier by a system they could not overcome. A few were conscientious objectors and did time for their beliefs. Others, not enrolled in higher education or not dedicated and articulate enough to craft credible statements as conscientious objectors, were forced to become participants in war. Still others were not pacifists or objectors, but they saw right through the lies promulgated to justify that immoral war.

In this way, I am like countless other people coming of age in the Vietnam era: Some of my friends never came home. Kids I had known in grammar school and high school died a million miles away, in some faraway land called Vietnam. Others came home with shattered minds and bodies, semi-functional victims of that nightmare war. Countless others returned apparently whole, yet haunted by hidden wounds and silent demons that festered quietly, emerging slowly over years as they tried to piece back together a normal, balanced life.

I have privately felt for decades that I, too, am a Vietnam vet—with a different story than those who participated first-hand in the war, yet my life forever affected by my proximity to them. How many of us are there, whose lives were colored by the wounds of that war? How many shattered lives, ruined marriages, dysfunctional families? How much rage and racism fueled by the madness of war? How much violence and abuse and neglect played out at home? How much homelessness, addiction, alcoholism, and suicide?

Balancing the books

The price of American military action in Vietnam is far higher than the cost of the weapons, or even the blood of millions that was shed there. When do we as a nation get around to tallying the cost of that hellish war?

Will we ever get to where we can stand to consider those questions about Vietnam, and then about the next war, and the next war, and the next—El Salvador and Nicaragua, Grenada, and Panama, Mogadishu and the first Gulf war, to name just a few? And then the same questions about our sponsorship of the Palestinian occupation, and of dictators and tyrants around the globe? About the carnage and shame of our war against Iraq?

When we summon the courage and the heart to ask those questions, we face the truth that we as a people have never, in living memory at the very least, not been at war, most often engaged in wars of aggression. The tangled strands and painful threads of war after war after war are woven through the cloth of our history and society since the very beginning.

Maybe it is finally time to face the tallyman, and in doing so, find out who we really are.

Becoming fully alive

The impact of war on the warriors and those who love them have always lingered long after the last battles have been won or lost. Now we possess weapons capable of untold destruction, weapons whose physical and ecological as well as psychological damage extends generations into the future across borders and time. If we hope to mature as a people, indeed as a species, these unthinkable questions must finally be faced.

Like people everywhere, Americans demonstrate great love and intelligence in countless ways and circumstances, but those are only one aspect of our collective identity. That collective identity is shaped by the individual wounds and beauty, strengths and failings, of all of us. Is it possible for us to muster the necessary honesty to face the full picture of who we are? When we can summon the openness of heart needed to begin answering those questions, as a people and as a nation we will begin to heal.

The reasons for hope in facing these truths are many. If we humble ourselves enough to acknowledge that we are deeply scarred, an immense shift in our collective direction becomes very possible. The real wounds of war will heal only if we come to terms with their true dimensions. In doing so, we may well find that out of our damaged hearts we emerge whole, fully alive, and capable of shaping a future deeply rooted in peace.

Betsy Toll is Executive Director of Living Earth. This essay appeared in the February 2004 issue of Oregon Peaceworker. Contact her at Betsy@LivingEarthGatherings.Org