Viet Nam was very real in our lives. We threw a wedding together in 1964 because the government stopped drafting married men. New Years Eve, 1965, the draft notice arrived and January 25 I put my new husband on a bus in San Bernardino, CA, headed to Ft Bliss in Texas. Two weeks later my 43 year-old father died one evening of a heart attack and my husband came home for the funeral, went to the doctor for treatment of pneumonia he had already contracted at Fort Carson, CO, Army base. It was winter and we were from sea level southern CA. Fort Carson was next to Colorado Springs and winter is brutal. Viet Nam was real. Nothing was abstract or consensual. He did was he was told to do, pneumonia or not. A month later he was in the hospital, unable to walk, the beginning of months of traction, talk of faking it, news of a guy he was drafted with being killed by lightning. Nothing abstract about any of this. Eventually he was moved to Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver, and Col. Brittis, a renowned surgeon, did a L4-5 laminectomy. My husband was 23. I had moved to the Springs as I had assumed he'd go to Viet Nam and probably die, so I wanted to be with him while I could. I visited him at Fitzsimmons and will never forget the huge orthopedic ward filled with wounded soldiers returning from Viet Nam. The soldier in the bed next to my husband had lost an eye and his face was badly scarred. Sixty years ago and the memory is clear.
A month ago I posted something in a neighborhood thread to those complaining about high gas prices, and though I didn't actually tell them to shut up, they got the message. Viet Nam cost us two years of unmeasurable events while we were utterly powerless to control anything. Suck it up and pay for the gas for a few more months and be grateful for a few thousand things. Memorial Day is today and I actually googled AI asking what the Viet Nam war accomplished other than nearly 59,000 fatalities and unfathomable damages physically and emotionally to millions of soldiers. AI basically said, 'not much." And yet, since we've lived long enough to be very old, we recognize the redemption of suffering, that God was indeed in the mix with us during that time. Husband got a cushy job in the Administration building due to a Sgt Major he met in the hospital, he never pulled KP and actually made E5 in two years. It was our initiation into the Scripture that declares that, " I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content." At least the seed for that maturation was planted then. I shed tears again today watching the ceremonies at Arlington, feel the pain of loss so many have suffered, losses much greater than ours. I think I will close with the truth that in 1966, the only option we had to avoid Viet Nam was going to Canada so compliance was the only choice. Wishing things would have been worth it doesn't matter, but I do wish it mattered. He's had a lifetime of back problems and two more surgeries as well, so there's that.
I've felt your same struggle my whole life. I can intellectualize the necessity of war. What I can't grasp is the reality of it. How it works. What would make someone sacrifice himself to an abstract as distant as a government that may only to a degree represent anything he actually believes -- much less sacrifice himself to the immediate cause of the conflict at hand?
I was lucky. I didn't have to decide. Aside from the simpler, but more damning question of personal courage, the way I was leaning back then, I would have divided my family.
But, I was one year too young for the draft. The very year I turned draft age, they stopped conscripting us. I didn't have to dodge.
Not so my brothers. All three were drafted. All three served. And the Vietnam vet of the three still suffers with the PTSD that the front lines of so long ago left him.
Oddly, I didn't personally know a single soldier to memorialize. Nobody I personally knew died. That's pretty remarkable given how many I know who served.
My one brother and I are both on the conservative side of the political spectrum. He, maybe moreso than me. Me, I'm more conflicted. I'm very bothered by those with whom I am forced to coalesce in order to hope my political views hold any sway in this republican democracy. Still, I realize that in the political world of the binary choice with which we are left, I have little problem comprehending what I am voting against. So I vote with a great number of fellow citizens with whom the only thing we agree on is that the opposite vote represents worse. I'm not alone. I think most of the people I know vote with the same resignation (And I hardly know anyone who has voted FOR a politician in the past 40 years. All votes have been an "against" vote. And we all stand in abject befuddlement that in a country of 300 million people we are left with the choices we are left with.)
Anyway, that brother and I were discussing our dawning realization that, though most would describe the political divide as one of collectivists vs individualists, that is not only a false dichotomy, it is an unnecessary confusion. Both sides are collectivists. And that reality is never more evident than when the "individualists" willingly sacrifice themselves at wartime for the collective.
The "individualists" are collectivists. We LOVE our constitution and marvel at the nearly miraculous wisdom therein. A wisdom that (in our view) finally grasped a heretofore unrealized possibility -- that just maybe a government should not be all powerful. And maybe all decisions for a diverse population, topography, and geography shouldn't be centrally planned.
And we are collectivists in our view of the unspoken social contract that understands that if we are going to determine our own governance, the government thus created is going to reflect who we are. We cannot expect the government of a democracy to be comprised of better people than the population from which it is derived. Each and every one of us owes it to the collective to be upright and moral.
But this is one individual who feels shamed by the unquestioning sacrifice of my fellow citizens. They did for me what I'm not sure I would have done for them. I can only hope to not squander the grace they afforded me.
I'm much older and I don't feel any off our wars were unnecessary. Many have been poorly managed (an understatement). If one decides to fight they must fight to win not play politics.
Today we have a new enemy. One that gets to hide under the cloak of religion when it is a political philosophy of conquest. Europe is nearly lost to it. We must awaken and respond.
War is horrible. But peace prosecuted by the peaceful unwilling to protect family and nation will be overrun by evil - from without our from within.
Viet Nam was very real in our lives. We threw a wedding together in 1964 because the government stopped drafting married men. New Years Eve, 1965, the draft notice arrived and January 25 I put my new husband on a bus in San Bernardino, CA, headed to Ft Bliss in Texas. Two weeks later my 43 year-old father died one evening of a heart attack and my husband came home for the funeral, went to the doctor for treatment of pneumonia he had already contracted at Fort Carson, CO, Army base. It was winter and we were from sea level southern CA. Fort Carson was next to Colorado Springs and winter is brutal. Viet Nam was real. Nothing was abstract or consensual. He did was he was told to do, pneumonia or not. A month later he was in the hospital, unable to walk, the beginning of months of traction, talk of faking it, news of a guy he was drafted with being killed by lightning. Nothing abstract about any of this. Eventually he was moved to Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver, and Col. Brittis, a renowned surgeon, did a L4-5 laminectomy. My husband was 23. I had moved to the Springs as I had assumed he'd go to Viet Nam and probably die, so I wanted to be with him while I could. I visited him at Fitzsimmons and will never forget the huge orthopedic ward filled with wounded soldiers returning from Viet Nam. The soldier in the bed next to my husband had lost an eye and his face was badly scarred. Sixty years ago and the memory is clear.
A month ago I posted something in a neighborhood thread to those complaining about high gas prices, and though I didn't actually tell them to shut up, they got the message. Viet Nam cost us two years of unmeasurable events while we were utterly powerless to control anything. Suck it up and pay for the gas for a few more months and be grateful for a few thousand things. Memorial Day is today and I actually googled AI asking what the Viet Nam war accomplished other than nearly 59,000 fatalities and unfathomable damages physically and emotionally to millions of soldiers. AI basically said, 'not much." And yet, since we've lived long enough to be very old, we recognize the redemption of suffering, that God was indeed in the mix with us during that time. Husband got a cushy job in the Administration building due to a Sgt Major he met in the hospital, he never pulled KP and actually made E5 in two years. It was our initiation into the Scripture that declares that, " I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content." At least the seed for that maturation was planted then. I shed tears again today watching the ceremonies at Arlington, feel the pain of loss so many have suffered, losses much greater than ours. I think I will close with the truth that in 1966, the only option we had to avoid Viet Nam was going to Canada so compliance was the only choice. Wishing things would have been worth it doesn't matter, but I do wish it mattered. He's had a lifetime of back problems and two more surgeries as well, so there's that.
I've felt your same struggle my whole life. I can intellectualize the necessity of war. What I can't grasp is the reality of it. How it works. What would make someone sacrifice himself to an abstract as distant as a government that may only to a degree represent anything he actually believes -- much less sacrifice himself to the immediate cause of the conflict at hand?
I was lucky. I didn't have to decide. Aside from the simpler, but more damning question of personal courage, the way I was leaning back then, I would have divided my family.
But, I was one year too young for the draft. The very year I turned draft age, they stopped conscripting us. I didn't have to dodge.
Not so my brothers. All three were drafted. All three served. And the Vietnam vet of the three still suffers with the PTSD that the front lines of so long ago left him.
Oddly, I didn't personally know a single soldier to memorialize. Nobody I personally knew died. That's pretty remarkable given how many I know who served.
My one brother and I are both on the conservative side of the political spectrum. He, maybe moreso than me. Me, I'm more conflicted. I'm very bothered by those with whom I am forced to coalesce in order to hope my political views hold any sway in this republican democracy. Still, I realize that in the political world of the binary choice with which we are left, I have little problem comprehending what I am voting against. So I vote with a great number of fellow citizens with whom the only thing we agree on is that the opposite vote represents worse. I'm not alone. I think most of the people I know vote with the same resignation (And I hardly know anyone who has voted FOR a politician in the past 40 years. All votes have been an "against" vote. And we all stand in abject befuddlement that in a country of 300 million people we are left with the choices we are left with.)
Anyway, that brother and I were discussing our dawning realization that, though most would describe the political divide as one of collectivists vs individualists, that is not only a false dichotomy, it is an unnecessary confusion. Both sides are collectivists. And that reality is never more evident than when the "individualists" willingly sacrifice themselves at wartime for the collective.
The "individualists" are collectivists. We LOVE our constitution and marvel at the nearly miraculous wisdom therein. A wisdom that (in our view) finally grasped a heretofore unrealized possibility -- that just maybe a government should not be all powerful. And maybe all decisions for a diverse population, topography, and geography shouldn't be centrally planned.
And we are collectivists in our view of the unspoken social contract that understands that if we are going to determine our own governance, the government thus created is going to reflect who we are. We cannot expect the government of a democracy to be comprised of better people than the population from which it is derived. Each and every one of us owes it to the collective to be upright and moral.
But this is one individual who feels shamed by the unquestioning sacrifice of my fellow citizens. They did for me what I'm not sure I would have done for them. I can only hope to not squander the grace they afforded me.
I'm much older and I don't feel any off our wars were unnecessary. Many have been poorly managed (an understatement). If one decides to fight they must fight to win not play politics.
Today we have a new enemy. One that gets to hide under the cloak of religion when it is a political philosophy of conquest. Europe is nearly lost to it. We must awaken and respond.
War is horrible. But peace prosecuted by the peaceful unwilling to protect family and nation will be overrun by evil - from without our from within.