Archive: Opinions

It was forty five years ago this month that I returned home to Ithaca from what John Prine slyly called 'the conflict overseas'. VietNam was beginning to be relegated to backstory, not yet high school history books, and I found that Ithacans, for the most part, couldn't care less about another returnee from Southeast Asia. I'd spent my twelve months at several remote outposts and firebases serving up intelligence reports to higher-ups (and serving on an 81mm mortar team at night), while sharing with my peers the abiding concern that we did not wish to be the last killed in that forsaken wilderness (geographically and politically) called VietNam. I quickly shed the faded jungle shirts I brought home, stuffed the medals in a drawer, and the memories into an even deeper drawer.

Every October brings with it memories of that year, and the subsequent return. But this year I have been confronted with something that brings all of this back in a very strange and poignant way, with different colors and emotions.

Listening to an NPR program last week, I heard a story about a group of people who are objecting to the memorials (hundreds of them) that are scattered about the Gettysburg battlefield. This of course, an outgrowth to the reasonable objections to memorials to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate commander, among other demonstrations recently. This particular memorial (was it to Alabama soldiers at Little Round Top?) was cited by the gentleman who read the inscription (I paraphrase, I believe): "To our soldiers who gave their life for a glorious cause." He spoke to the NPR reporter in such terms as to question the validity of the inscribed words, and, more importantly, questioned the validity and honor of the soldiers themselves who lay not far away, and to this day remain mostly unnamed.

The serendipity of this moment for me is that I am in the midst of reading Shelby Foote's magnificent and unequaled Civil War Narrative, and specifically I had just finished the chapter on Gettysburg, the three days that cost both sides over fifty thousand casualties, killed, wounded and missing forever. I had the taste of blood, mud, and gore almost upon my tongue while reading of this most horrendous of events in Pennsylvania in July, 1863. Both sides fell back exhausted, both sides wondering whether they had 'won'. Fifty thousand men were one fourth of those who participated in the battle there on the fields of Pennsylvania, both sides being led by men who claimed that 'glory is yours'. Now there are people questioning the existence and validity of the monuments and memorials to those ghastly and tumultuous days, and the men who lived and died through those days and nights.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have stood foursquare with the strongest feelings against slavery, as well as against the apologists who called that war a 'battle for states' rights', the 'war against Yankee aggression' and continue to deny (waving the Stars and Bars, in some cases) that its root cause was human bondage, slavery. The cause of that war was years of efforts to continue slavery and extend it if possible, to newly formed western states. The southern politicians and plantation owners (one and the same in most cases) thought the Africans they kidnapped and enslaved were less than human and even backed up their claims Biblically. They seceded from the Union convinced that Lincoln would force them to abandon this 'peculiar institution', and wanted to set up a nation that permitted the extension and perpetuation of slavery to maintain their cotton profits.

And I can see and feel the pain of those who look upon statues and memorials to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, who wore general's stars and led the charge for the Confederate states. These statues and memorials to the leaders of that misbegotten 'cause' probably belong in museums with explanations of their history, not public parks (although there is a strong argument concerning countries that either forgot their history or had it stolen from them by totalitarian governments, witness Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, to name two in our own lifetimes).

But let's step away from the generals and the politicians; even in the Confederacy, there were many who said it was the poor and property-less who were fighting a rich man's war, and this was certainly true for both the Union and Confederacy. Most of the Confederate troops were certainly not slaveholders, not even property owners, and Union troops frequently (especially from 1863 on) were 'substitutes' bought for three or four hundred dollars, to fight for those who could afford the bounty and stayed home. When Lincoln needed 300,000 men in 1863 after a series of stinging military defeats (as well as political setbacks in Congressional elections of 1862), he resorted to a national conscription, or draft. This resulted in ill-famed 'draft riots' in several cities in the North, the most infamous in New York city.

What many do not know about the NYC riots is that the majority of those killed (murdered) were black, including a black orphanage set ablaze: black men burned, shot, and hung from city lamp posts. And to extend the issue of drafting the poor to fight a war, the South also had a draft which was strongly opposed and condemned by many in the Confederate Congress, feeling it was an unconstitutional overreach by a government which was purposely set up like the Articles of Confederation of the 18th century America. Resistance to the Confederate draft and its many exclusions/exemptions was as strong in the South as North. The privileged were exempt on both sides, not unlike Vietnam where, again, it was claimed accurately that draft exemptions kept the privileged from the steamy jungles and killing fields of VietNam.

It was the poor who most frequently in history donned the uniform, raised his right hand, swore the oath and frequently died in the battles led by the privileged officers and gentry, no matter whether it was in Gettysburg, the Central Highlands, Hue, or any other battlefield since time immemorial.

So, you see, wanting to move/remove the statues of generals and politicians (by the way, these statues also reside in the basement of the nation's Capitol) doesn't really bother this enlisted man. I came out of VietNam a Specialist five (pay rank equivalent of sergeant) but I certainly was no favorite of the powers that ran that war in my area of operations. Matter of fact, sergeants and officers had a strong dislike of guys like me: unmilitary in appearance and attitude, and minimum respect for the whole mess. I interviewed a trooper with the 173rd Airborne Brigade...they took a lot of casualties and had a hard-nosed reputation (no statues, there). One thing he said to me rang so true, so true: 'After your first fire fight, you realized you weren't fightin' for no flag.'

The soldier, the grunt, the guy who did the fighting and dying, wasn't too awfully concerned about glorious causes, statues or parades-- not slavery, not union, not communism or capitalism, not freedom, not flags. And I think this applies to either 'side' in any conflict. We fought because we were told to, and fought ferociously to stay alive and come home. There's no black or white, everyone is green in the jungle, and in the Civil War, if a Union trooper stared into the eyes of a Confederate 'johnny' they both were determined to live through the hell they found themselves in, and ideology had no place between their bayonets. Whenever two soldiers on opposing sides meet, eye to eye, there is no ideology, no flag. There is only the human, Darwinian, basic determination to live. And that 'other' was just as determined to live, regardless of ideology, as I was.

Denigrating the souls who fought and died on the battlefield, any battlefield, whatever the 'cause', is ignoring the fact that most of the men on that field did not want to be there. And saying 'I'm for the warrior, not the war' is a cheap way to honor those who, for whatever reason (so frequently not voluntarily) put on a uniform, knowing it would put them in harm's way. Not glory. Take down the general's statues, place them in a museum if you must, but the universal soldier needs to be honored regardless of your (or his/her) politics. He/she went where the majority of his/her peers would not.

Perhaps when you see a baseball cap that says 'VietNam Vet' you say 'thank you for your service'. I know you mean it, and please know I mean it when I say 'You're welcome'. But, please, let's not mix up the soldier with a 'cause', or 'glory'. As he lay dying, or as he came home with nightmares, that soldier was not concerned with a 'cause' or 'glory', not concerned with saving the union, perpetuating slavery, or bringing democracy to Asia. Leave the memorial to the common soldier alone--because we only wanted, in the end, to come home.

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