At my 44th class reunion, I saw my boyfriend from the summer we were both sixteen. We didn't know anything about Vietnam then. We were in love. Kissing was everything then. We lost touch after school started and I learned he joined the Army the day he turned 18 and was sent to Vietnam. I wrote to him, as a friend, but we lost touch. I married. He survived Vietnam, physically, but as I was to learn later, not mentally or emotionally. He retired from the Army as a drill sergeant, training troops for Iraq and Afghanistan. He told me, at the reunion, that he didn't sleep much anymore. We were both 62 by the time we saw each other at the reunion. Later, he told me that The VA was finally having group meetings to help Vietnam Vets and that he hoped to find peace there and be able to close his eyes without seeing the young boys, all gone.
Vietnam was not called a war, but a conflict or peacekeeping mission. Whatever they called it, Vietnam sucked up the sweet boys of my graduating class and it licked up the young men in college --compliments of the draft. Its hunger knew no bounds so it sliced and burned the one and onely son of families --a cauterized end to the family name.
It took young, new fathers and pureed them into a million pieces too small to slurp up or scoop up. And it cultivated boys it found in the fields, growing them into misshapen men, preserving them in hot houses, by sprinkling them with water and torture.
The ones it didn't completely digest, it spit out, with bits of bone and cartilage gnawed and broken, still hanging on the frame of a boy whose own mother wouldn't recognize.
Vietnam made a whole generation angry. They set about bringing it to a halt.
But it didn't end with a ticker tape parade down Wall Street, the elation personified by a sailor kissing a girl, on the award-winning cover of Life magazine. Nor did it end with a meeting between two generals in a house near a battlefield, with painter and photographer poised to capture the moment to suspend forever in history books, and, oh yeah, the Internet.
No, it ended with a drawing down of troops. It ended because the angry, lonely and bereft American people marched on Washington. They not only threatened, but took, action against government policy.
Girls burned their bras, setting free their breasts from conventionality, a metaphor for killing their husbands, friends and brothers in undeclared war. Shoes grew mold in closets as bare feet stomped on American soil to the beat of music and lyrics born out of frustration and grief. Dylan's words, "Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door," painted painful images of too many boys too young to be knocking on heaven's door.
Blue jeans by Levi were worn and torn and left unwashed to protest anything and everything neat and tidy. And rules were broken because rules had become euphemisms for maiming and killing a generation.
And, a sitting president decided not to run for re-election because young people who had come of age made it clear that he should pack his bags and go on back to Texas, that godforsaken state that had killed their fair haired, fair minded knight of Camelot, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He, their only hope for a fairy tale come true.
When these boys/soldiers/men came home, America did not treat them as heroes, even though Americans fought to end the war. Why America did not treat them well is something I'm unable to fathom, even at the ripe old age of 63. That the VA is attending to it now is hopeful. In the meantime, we need to remember, we baby boomers, we hippies, that our efforts changed the course of that war and changed laws. We were successful in our rebellion. The draft, or conscription, cannot be instituted at the whim of a president who may have their own agenda to put forth.
If you agree with me that Vietnam, the '60's and all we did was worthwhile, please respond.
