A Letter to Jean W., about the Vietnam War

Dear Jean,

     Thanks for your recommendation of Tim O'Brien, of whom I had never heard before, but whom I have googled and looked up the Wikipedia entry on--and now I think I understand what you mean when you say the Draft "got" to you, "and so did the bad treatment of the hapless returning vets...in the late 60's and early 70's."   Before I go further, I want to say that, in my opinion, those vets, being good soldiers, were bad Americans, and war criminals, and deserved all the bad treatment they got.  That, at least, is my official position and the tone I took in writing to my draft board.  In practise though, I never hung out at the airport, spitting and throwing dog turds, and yelling "baby killer" at the returning troops; and all I could ever think to say to one of them (and living in San Francisco when I did, I met, and had sex, with quite a few of them) was, "I'm sorry!"  And I'd really mean it--whether they'd been physically injured or not, they were always wounded and hurting inside.   No matter how much his own fault someone's unhappiness is, it doesn't help to tell him so; so I'd just say, "I'm sorry!"--and leave off the "but it's your own damned fault, you dumb son of a bitch."

     In the first place, they were usually no dumber than me.  In the second place, the pain they bore was tinged with sorrow which softened censure, rather than contumely which would have hardened my heart against them, because--their own stupid fault or not--they felt that they had been betrayed:  The society and the government, whose honor and honorable intentions they had believed it foul dishonor to doubt, had cynically and pitilessly used them up and thrown them away.  Even the brightest of them went into the bottomless sink of men and matériel of the Vietnam War believing, that the Cold War was somehow justified, and that a standing army in peacetime is at least a necessary evil.  The actual experience of the so-called war disabused most of them; but pitiful indeed, and contemptible, were the men, turned monsters, who went on believing those satanic lies.   

     We do not forgive the ordinary citizens of the Third Reich who became Nazis because it was their "duty."  "Following orders" was no excuse for the present Pope to have participated--even as a beardless youth--in the rounding up of Jews, aiming his rifle at women and children being herded into cattle cars to be sent to the death camps. Had Ratzinger been a "Mensch," a human being, rather than the cold little pseudopod of the established order that he is and always was, he'd have shot himself rather than bear arms against a child.  You'd think a pope would know that, but he still hasn't copped to it.

     So anyway, I'm going to email you this weblog-entry-in-the-guise-of-a-letter, along with three or four other relevant entries--and now you alone, of all the world, know "Anatole Nozière's" actual identity.  I feel quite a lot like the Lone Ranger with his mask off.  I don't care--yes, I care; but the truth of the matter--what the war was, what Amerika is, and how I deal/dealt with it--is still a pressing issue with me.  And, as you will see, always has been.

     In closing, I'd like to recommend a couple of books to you:  The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up, by Charles Nelson, and Desertion in a Time of Vietnam, by Jack Todd.  Both are good; the former, along with Nelson's other book, Men in the Skins of Panthers, is actually a great work of art.  Both also describe the War from the viewpoint of men of conscience, one gay, the other straight.  I fear I must say that Tim O'Brien was not, and is not, in the same sense a man of conscience, because he participated in the Vietnam War as a soldier.  I will not, therefore, read his books.  

Ciao for nao,

"Anatole"