ONE BY ONE, the screen showed faces of American servicemen killed in Iraq. Name, rank, age, hometown—that was all. Different faces, so much the same. Smiling faces, saddest of all. One by one . . . in silence.
Beside each face was the silhouette of an American soldier walking toward a desert sunset. Toward a verdict of history, I suppose, that will determine whether all that sacrifice has been in vain. Events now march toward their seemingly grim fate. Was our greater error leaping in or rushing out? Neither the living nor the dead know fully at this hour. It will be a long wait.
The war in Iraq awakened memories of Vietnam. Perhaps history will always bracket the two conflicts. It would be a mistake. The Middle East is strategic; global terror is threatening in a way that Vietnam was not. Still, a president who had paid more attention to the lessons of that war would have been more attentive to the hubris of premature optimism and the dangers that protracted retail conflict in a faraway land can represent.
What we do know is how the war was waged. I’m relieved not with my son and daughter. They were both in law school at the time. Fighting that faraway war was the last thing on their minds or mine. That’s what a volunteer army brings, I guess: gratitude and detachment. A nagging sense that the defense of my country has become someone else’s business. So when those courageous faces flashed before me, I couldn’t help but feel guilt.
Every now and then, someone proposes bringing back the draft to spread things out, to equalize the burden. It won’t happen. Not just because war is too specialized or two-year commitments too inefficient. For a draft to work, the case for armed conflict would have to be airtight. And even then, it might not work. The spirit of patriotic sacrifice and universal service is not what it once was. The Sixties saw to that.
It was late at night—we had walked to the diner from a folk concert and sat slumped in our booth, with stale, late-night hamburgers. Betsy had enjoyed the music, and tried to convince John, but it hadn’t done much for him: “Just didn’t spin my wheels,” he liked to say. John was depressed, certainly not because of Betsy, he hastened to add, but because he had only just received an induction notice and here he brought out the paper and showed me. He had thought it over, he said, and he was going to Canada.
“Canada,” I blurted. “You know what you’re doing?”
He said he knew exactly what he was doing. He’d made up his mind not to serve, but to leave the country altogether. Things had been building up before this, he explained, but Vietnam was it.
“Your family, your friends, your whole life, that’s all. Man, the Army’s two years, after that you’ve got fifty.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think I’d care to spend them here.”
The United States had become too domineering for him. “Whenever anything at all happens in this world, you can be sure America is in the thick of it. Vietnam, the Middle East, Berlin, Taiwan, Korea, Cuba—America is sucked in.” He couldn’t stand to be a pawn in global chess, as he was afraid he always would be, as he was in Vietnam. War had too hallowed a place in our history, he thought. “You see, for America, war has worked.” We gained our independence through war, kept the country united through war, acquired Texas and California through war, kept the world “safe for democracy” in war, contained fascism and communism in war. “We’d never know when to stop fighting,” he said. Our whole history had given us an incurable addiction to conflict.
“And Canada is better?”
Why, yes, certainly he thought it would be. This country was turbulent; Canada was a more laid-back place, not part of the world’s polarities, though aligned with the West. “In Canada, you see, I can raise a family, work a job, enjoy my friends, and stay out of the fights. That’s all I ever wanted to do, Jay, be myself and help the people around me. Why won’t America let me do that, instead of dragging me across the world to kill?”
His point, more than any other, touched me. His plea was being yelled a thousand times over, in frustration, in anger, on the street corner, in the classroom, but always from the bottom of things, and the decisions were made by the deaf at the top.
“What you don’t realize,” he said, “is that you and I don’t count anymore. I tried the whole drill, signs, marches, strikes, everything, and then one night I came back and said, ‘What the hell, it’s not doing any good, another 20,000 sent over this week.’ I’ve never felt so helpless. So I thought it over, and I said Canada.”
“And your family?” I repeated.
“This country was founded on people deserting their roots. It’s a hard thing to do when parents love you. But like I said, we were founded by movers, when the Old World got bad. Now the U.S. is Old World in every sense, it’s pushed me all against my conscience, and like the Quakers and Puritans, I’m going to move. Funny thing. I feel more like an American this way, than by going along.”
Alienation was everywhere. The disillusionment of a generation with the Vietnam War ran so deep that it would take a lifetime to restore a semblance of faith in national leadership. Whether opposition to the war was a matter of idealism or fear for personal safety may be debated forever, but whatever it was, even time has found it hard to heal.
The memory of it all is fresh. It was the winter of my first year of law school, and the Johnson administration had abolished deferments for first-year graduate students. My draft board informed me that I was going around July or August. The situation called for heavy thinking soon.
The war was the pits. It poisoned every conversation. It clouded every plan. It was the dreary story that monopolized the nightly news. Some of my classmates were incredulous at the outset: how was it that America was bullying little, faraway Vietnam? I wished later I could say I’d been a moral opponent of the war before my neck was on the line. But in the early years, I was contemptuous. It was hard even to take this war seriously. It was a dirty little war that I hoped would up and go away and leave me alone.
But it didn’t go away, and it didn’t leave me alone, and suddenly the suffering of the Vietnamese people seemed a matter of moral urgency. Self-interest was the great persuader. Sure, Johnson, Rusk, and McNamara had their reasons. What difference did that make? Nobody was listening to my reasons, why should I listen to their reasons? They would do what they wanted. I could throw my reasons at their reasons, but it’s me that’s going to die.
Lyndon Johnson’s “reason” was the Domino Theory. Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma were contiguous, and small enough to seem like dominos to him. The idea was that if one fell, it would topple the others in a chain reaction. The Domino Theory was hotly debated, but whether the dominos stood or fell didn’t make a bit of difference to anyone I knew. There were some things I hoped I might risk my life for, but distant dominos were not among them. I told myself that was selfish and unpatriotic. I reminded myself that some Americans were going to get killed. I asked myself why they should mostly be poor. I told myself all this and more, and then finally I told myself that one of those statistics wasn’t going to be me.
I thought about death. Not that it was imminent, but that it was possible:
One day, perhaps, a battle
Where life and death are more than musings,
And I no longer a small boy snowballing the sham fort,
But there exchange my martyred moment
(or ill luck)
For a pine box through eternity.
I’d be damned! They weren’t going to do that to me. Not over Vietnam. I’d a right to seventy years. And were the last fifty to be spent in eternity before my time? All because of one unlucky moment, after which nobody cared, because life was for the healthy and the mobile, men who laughed and carried their own weight.
I was going to emerge from this with body, mind, and life intact, and make my way from there. Thoughts came simply and clearly. I would not go to jail—it was painful in itself and a blot on the record. I would not be drafted, if that meant Vietnam. I would not go to Canada—I loved my country and had lived my life here. I could take the Army for a short time and with a safe job.
At law school that spring, panic hit everywhere. The great Maginot line of graduate deferments had crumbled. Suddenly we stood unshielded from the draft, the Army, the war, about which we had read, against which we had spoken, from which we were supposedly secure. The draft so dominated conversation that to speak of something else became irrelevant. Abruptly we were snatched from our futures—the degree, the profession, the potential unlimited. Life lay only beyond the great chasm of the Army, and the atmosphere that spring was tense with rumor.
It was everyone for himself. If the widely envied and sometimes deviously sought physical deferments were unavailable, then the next best thing was a “good program.” Good programs involved a minimum of time and a maximum of safety. Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard buildings were swamped, not because they were popular, but because they were not the Army or Marines. “I wouldn’t normally give these people the time of day,” someone said of the recruiters, “but now I find myself asking about their families, their hobbies, anything to up me another notch on their list.” And the recruiters were visibly feeling themselves important, so flattered and befriended by the young elites. The better military options—the Air Force and Navy Officer Candidate School (OCS)—headed for an unprecedented boom. In the coveted Navy Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) program, even a Rhodes Scholar might not get in.
What I really wanted was a slot in the Army Reserves. The Reserves involved only four to five months of active duty, plus one weekend meeting a month and two weeks of summer camp for the next six years. The advantages escaped no one. If you wanted to get on with life, you soon would. If you objected to the war, you probably wouldn’t participate. If you didn’t like jungles, you wouldn’t be shipped to them. So I scoured the countryside, signing waiting lists and asking my chances. No luck. Newly created units were stampeded; in some areas lines gathered for 36 to 48 hours just to get on a waiting list.
I spent as much time on military options that spring as on law. I applied for Army ROTC, which allowed me to finish law school with a two-year obligation as a second lieutenant afterward; for Navy JAG, which also allowed me to complete law school with a four-year tour as a Navy legal officer; for Navy OCS, which would mean an immediate three and one-half years starting as an ensign; and for every Reserve unit in the state of Virginia. Each program had endless pros and cons (the safest tours of duty were seldom short), and each completely befuddled my elders who inquired, politely, how I was doing, and shrank from the alphabet soup of ROTCOCSUSAR that met their inquiries. During the day I visited recruiting offices. At night I filled out applications. I learned by heart my Social Security Number, my Selective Service Number, my father’s business telephone, and my mother’s maiden name. Dutifully, I told the applications what a non-communist I was, and signed my name “James H.” instead of “J. Harvie” so as not to seem highbrow.
I took a battery of tests that spring, most relating to my military I.Q. and my military personality. “Did I have a sense of adventure?” My response was NO. “Did I like bands and parades?” NO. Would it be fun to salute? With each answer I kept thinking, “Now, why is it that these people want me?” Maybe we’d all figure out that this was a very bad match, and Uncle Sam, instead of pointing, would shake his head and say, “Sorry, son, not the best idea.”
My anatomy was a public product, poked at and over in the physical exams. The idea on the physicals was to do poorly or well; you were safer if you hit an extreme. If you were puny enough, you got out altogether; if you were robust, you might qualify to be an officer; but if your health was mediocre, only the draft would do. I tried to do well, because I had no real chance to fail. My knees and back were okay, and I had no asthma, allergies, flat feet, high blood pressure, or sugar or albumin in the urine. The physicals were mass assembly lines, pungent with B.O., the doctors at once bored and hurried, the shivering bodies jamming excuses from family doctors in their faces.
“You’re healthy, son. Move on. O.K. Let’s see, Wilkinson’s the name, right, what’s your problem?
“Tonsils and appendix out, measles, chicken pox, good, wetting the bed only a childhood ailment, I presume, minor travel sickness, feel O.K.?”
“O.K.”
“O.K., next. Get up here, son.”
Nothing was coming through. I called the draft board to discover how long I had. I grew sick of things, but then a new burst of adrenaline would come along and I would make my rounds anew.
“Sergeant, I was hoping by May you’d have some openings.”
“Thought I would.”
“And you don’t.”
“Nope.”
“Any reason?”
“Just didn’t.”
“Well, when?”
“Looks like maybe in a couple months.”
“Then I should come back in July?”
“Drop by then.”
It seemed like the only hope was for outside deliverance. For a moment in that spring of 1968 our spirits soared. The McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns were riding high, the press was becoming vocal, the campuses were getting mutinous, even Congress seemed less subservient, and the enemy, which supposedly was on its last legs, staged an offensive aimed at persuading the American public there was no end in sight. “He’s got to stop the war to save the country,” we all said to ourselves. But while the president of Columbia was lamenting how difficult it was even to keep a university running with a war on, General Westmoreland requested another 206,000 troops; Congressman Mendel Rivers called war opponents “vermin”; General Lewis Hershey inducted those who dared to protest; King, then Kennedy, was shot; summer came and the students departed; McCarthy fizzled; and hope faded, leaving only the draft.
I didn’t care to be near my friends in reserve units and hear them prattle on about their good luck. I just waited for the end. I became rude in line and behind the wheel. Waitresses must bear the full brunt of life’s troubles. Some vegetable soup one night was a little cold and late, and I jumped all over the poor lady who served it.
Late one afternoon the telephone rang. It was Captain Weldon, calling to speak with James Wilkinson. “Yes, this is he.”
Well, he just called to say there was an opening in his Reserve Unit, if I wanted to . . .
“You mean I’m in?”
“You’re in.”
“I’m in?”
“Yes.”
“Wow, then I guess I’m in then.” I ran off to tell somebody.
Several weeks later, I ran into John, my friend who was headed for Canada. The trip was now off.
“How come?”
“Got into Navy JAG.”
Navy JAG! Safe, and respectable to boot! It should have been an occasion for the greatest celebration ever. But after the fireworks, there had come a flatness, something we both needed to talk through. So we walked a while, trying to figure why our spirits were low when the dream of so many months had finally come true. I began to sense that John was quite despondent. He couldn’t believe, he said, the changes he had gone through.
When the war came, he had seen the chance to find himself. Right from the start, he had taken to the street. Protest was patriotic—it would help America find its way. He remembered one rally, when it began to rain and blow quite hard, but his commitment was such he didn’t mind getting soaked. “I went home thinking I’d done a little something to help those peasants find peace.”
Canada had been his moral statement. It left his personal integrity intact. “It was more than a dream, Jay. I read all about that country, and it came down to the maritime provinces or Vancouver. Somewhere near the water.”
He thought his strength was such he’d never bend. “I trusted who I was. That no one could make me lift a finger for that war.” Then the day grew closer and closer, and “What have I been doing? Scrambling to Navy JAG.”
So there remained for us the sight of a generation running for cover. The story was a rather sad one, but it assumed worse proportions in him.
For John, what had begun as an exercise in human empathy had ended, so he felt, in a catastrophic personal defeat. Like the rest of us, he believed he had cut his private deal. For the moment, it had crushed him. What was left to be proud of? he asked. There was no sense of doing one’s duty or serving one’s country. No sense of anything decent or humane, either. No sense of anything, really, beyond a shameless obsession with one’s own fate.
When the destructions of the Sixties are tallied, there will be a temptation to blame them all on the revolutionaries of the left. But it was never so simple. The “Establishment,” which responded admirably in many ways on civil rights, misjudged dreadfully on Vietnam. And the idealism that the struggle for civil rights inspired disintegrated. The moment was squandered.
The effect of the Vietnam War on the spirits of our generation was incalculable. A fifty-year remove does little to dull the remembrance of our anger and despair. We who did not fight were doubtless pampered and affluent and all the rest, but in the end we were given nothing—at least nothing discernible—to fight for. Those who did fight were more admirable, to be sure, but military service was by and large the lost desire of the decade, and that was hardly our sole fault.
I know the counterargument. So what if Vietnam was too remote or too much of an internal struggle to justify American intervention? One ought to enlist, even for combat, because one’s country says so. As a matter of theory, I know that to be right. But when your life is at stake, you start asking questions, like how do you both obey the law and stay alive?
At Lawrenceville, I had played on the soccer team with my friend Dick Pershing, who had come there for a postgraduate year after Exeter. Dick was a leader on the field, as you might expect the grandson of General John J. Per shing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, to be. Dick bore his family’s honor quietly and proudly, and there was no doubt in his mind or ours where, if war came, he would be. He went to Vietnam as a second lieutenant, and he died there. “Wounds received while on a combat mission when his unit came under hostile small-arms and rocket attack while searching for remains of a missing member of his unit,” read the telegram. A wonderful man; a terrible waste. I doubt Dick would have seen it that way, though; his grave now lies in Arlington National Cemetery beside that of his grandfather.
Pride in the few friends who went left a multitude of questions for the many who remained behind. Those questions still exact a cost. Even today I do not know if I am brave. I’d like to believe that if a different kind of war had come along, I would have been eager to sign up and go. But I don’t really know. I did not rush to enlist, and I have not since won a red badge for courage. Am I brave? Am I manly? Perhaps that shouldn’t matter in this very modern world, but it does, and I don’t know.
Self-preservation. That’s what John said it came down to with him. We were not true patriots. During the whole shouting match that was Vietnam, we could not recall one swell of emotion for the glory of the nation or the honor of the flag. We were not patriotic pacifists either. In the end, we were untethered souls, tied to no principle that was larger than our personal safety.
The Vietnam War left many with no profound commitment to the principles for which it was fought or to the principles for which it was resisted. Finding a respectable refuge from that war was not the same thing as finding self-respect. Our destination was a personally demilitarized zone—without feeling or allegiances. “I don’t ask anymore what anything should be,” John said. “Whether there should be peace or war. Whether we should ‘pull out’ or ‘stay in.’ Whether America is right or wrong. There seem only things as they are, and the days as they come and go.”
General Stanley McChrystal, the former head of American forces in Afghanistan, never talked to John. If he had, he might have had little enough use for him. For McChrystal is troubled by the fact that America has fought its recent wars “with less than 1 percent of the population serving in the military.” He proposes a national “service year” for all eighteen- to twenty-eight-year-old Americans. Every young adult would be expected to volunteer as “a tutor or mentor in one of our country’s 2.3 million classrooms, a conservation worker in one of our country’s national parks or wilderness areas, an aide to one of the 1.5 million Americans who require hospice care each year or in one of numerous other areas of high unmet need.”
The formidable practical problems aside, this is a noble concept. But would it be greeted today as an unfair and illegitimate imposition? “We need to support leaders who ask more of us and not those who simply promise us more,” argues McChrystal. Again a luminous thought, harkening back to Kennedy’s famous exhortation to “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” and to Lincoln’s tribute at Gettysburg to those who had given “the last full measure of devotion.” But modern leaders have not called upon Americans to sacrifice, even after the tragic events of 9/11; they seem unsure of what sacrifice entails, and they fear in their hearts the failure of a call unheeded and a sacrifice not forthcoming.
As for a year of national service, would young Americans respond? I have no taste for generation-bashing. The desire for service is not all lost. The spirit of the Peace Corps lives on in projects like Teach for America or AmeriCorps, where applications vastly exceed the number of positions. McChrystal should be commended for attempting to rekindle, post-Vietnam, the embers of American patriotism. I wish him luck. May he not find us a different and more disillusioned country. His proposal is taking head-on the Sixties and their residue. May he not find them, even more than the Taliban, the tougher adversary.