“Memorial Days”
May 1967, I wrote a poem.
I said, No, you are not dead. You are not!
You are too young. I am too young. Death is not real.
I didn’t really know that I would never see you again,
that you would never come home to this place.
I thought, “No body equals no death,” so maybe you’ll
come back.
I said, “Now & forever, you are”—but you weren’t—here.
I said, “I can’t be sad”—but I was.
Now I’m 42. I am younger and wiser now.
My wiser soul knows that you are really gone,
that you won’t come home again.
And sometimes now I cry.
But inside my younger heart, and in my memories,
and in my dreams,
you are as alive & real as when you were my
young and living friend.
My heart knows that your spirit did come home.
Sometimes, especially in the spring, I feel the
presence of your spirit, and I know that you know
you were not forgotten.
—MARY E. DEFOE (April 1990)
In July 2017, I met with Mary Defoe to talk about the Vietnam War and about the two young men from her high school class who fought and died in it. We sat tucked in the shade of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post, angling the wrought iron patio chairs toward one another. Cars and trucks periodically whizzed by on Highway 13, part of the steady flow of summer traffic headed toward the Red Cliff Band Reservation casino or lakeshore property further up the Bayfield Peninsula. Though early afternoon, the post had already begun to fill up with members, and it seemed the best spot to avoid both the sun’s glare and the rising din of the conversations inside.
Mary and I hadn’t formally met before this day. In fact, I had only encountered her—on April 30, 2017—at the fiftieth remembrance ceremony held at the post for Duwayne “Wotsy” Soulier, still MIA / KIA. As his classmate and friend, Mary was among those who stood up and shared aloud memories of his life and his death, or in her case, the news of his death. At the time, I was struck by the clarity and poignancy of her remarks. She had come prepared that day, reading a poem she had written years before entitled “Memorial Days” and half-apologizing to the assembly for not being able to find the original verse she had penned when she first learned the terrible news.
So when I returned to Red Cliff three months later in July, I sought out Mary, hoping she might share the poem and tell me more about what her friend’s absence had meant to her over the years. Once again she came prepared. Balanced on her lap was a Bayfield High School Trollers 1965 yearbook, its pages filled with jottings and well-wishes from her classmates, among them Merl Allen and “Wotsy” Soulier. Wotsy teased her for having turned him down for a date—she had been too afraid her mother would find out (“mama’s girl”) if she said yes—and thought her destined to be a successful lawyer. One of thirteen children, Mary had grown up mostly in Bayfield and moved to Red Cliff later in life with her husband, Ken. Despite Wotsy’s predictions for a career in law, she started her college education in English and eventually turned to medicine, working as a registered nurse for over four decades.
The Vietnam War had indelibly marked her life—not simply for the classmates who served and those from her community who died, but also because of her husband’s own struggles with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As Mary put it in a letter she wrote to the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2015, two years after his death, she saw him “suffering more from his PTSD than his lung cancer.”1 In that same letter, she described their “good relationship” fueled by his steadfast, daily commitment to remain sober, alongside her love for “the person underlying the PTSD symptoms and the hope that this special man would be able to emerge, stay with me, and not go back to Vietnam.” This sense of metaphorical travel returns in the final lines of the letter, as Mary noted that even though her husband was “ ‘only’ ” in Vietnam from May 1967 to July 1969, “he spent more of his life there than anywhere else.”2
As we sat in the shade on that summer afternoon, Mary helped me appreciate the complicated notion of homecoming, as well as the wider circle of loss in which her community’s experiences of missing in action / killed in action / body not recovered were nested. She also helped paint a picture of Merl and Wotsy and their high school lives before they left for the war. We leafed through the yearbook’s pages, Mary pointing out Merl and Wotsy in various photographs, from sports teams and extracurriculars to their formal class pictures and senior quotations: “Ruff and tuff and all that stuff” (Merl) and “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education” (Wotsy). I asked her how people in Bayfield and Red Cliff had thought about the war at that time, what the prospect of serving in Vietnam meant to the boys in her class. “We were the baby boomers, it was all U-Rah-Rah. We won wars and saved the world. Like the movies. But it came out good. And of course with President Kennedy, ‘Ask not what …’ They thought they were doing the right thing to go into the service. And it turned out different.”3 Later, I would ask the same question of Butch, the VFW post commander. “I joined in ’66 because I wasn’t gettin’ nowhere in Bayfield,” he explained. “There was nothing here, so me and another friend of mine, we just joined up.… I wasn’t really scared of being drafted, I never thought about it that much.”4
I paused on the yearbook’s “Athletics” page. Superimposed on a photograph of the iconic Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, was a quotation by Adlai E. Stevenson: “If we win men’s hearts throughout the world it will not be because we are a big country but because we are a great country. Bigness is imposing. But greatness is enduring.”5 A friend had written classmates’ names over the six figures struggling to hoist the flag. In 1965, in the Bayfield High School yearbook, these were the words and images shaping their view of service, honor, and sacrifice—abstractions to the youthful and invincible.
Stock tributes like these are nothing new. So much of contemporary media coverage of a successful instance of MIA accounting champions ideals of national sacrifice, of the “fallen hero” come home to flag-waving crowds. And there is truth in those scenes; as Bayfield itself demonstrated with Lance Corporal Merlin Raye Allen’s homecoming, the return of remains holds an extraordinary power to gather people in mourning and remembrance. In tending toward the celebratory, however, such stories of national sacrifice often eschew the unruly, complicated, and, most of all, local histories of loss. They offer happier endings instead, wrapped up in gauzy claims of “closure.” The impulse to silence or smooth over the raw experiences of war—Mary’s bitter, disbelieving rejection of Wotsy’s death, “You are not dead, You are not!”—may well be a twenty-first-century mode of effacing sorrow. But if nothing else, it is a partial one. What does it mean, to “give” one’s life for the nation, if that life was wrested from one’s family, friends, and fellow service members? How can one return home if home no longer exists? What if his remains will never be recovered?
When I first visited the VFW in Red Cliff, and Randy, the post’s quartermaster, told me of the three men who died in Vietnam—“one came home right away, one came home forty-six years later, one will never come home”—I was intrigued by the span of the community’s wartime and postwar experience, that such a small place had encountered the range of loss that it did.6 In some ways, I romanticized its capacity to reveal the Vietnam War MIA phenomenon. I know now that a community can only ever explain its own particular history of the war. But it is enough—and yet never enough—to try to make sense of that history for what it might teach us: that homecomings are never a single, bounded event, just as the individuals coming home are never merely emblems of a nation or a society, and that accounting for loss requires considering the effects of absence in the immediate and the long-term.
HOMECOMINGS INTIMATE AN END, but they necessarily have beginnings—stories that underwrite how and why young men went off to fight and die on behalf of something larger than their families, their communities, and their hometowns. The more I dug into the particular history of Merl Allen’s and Wotsy Soulier’s hometowns, the more I recognized a common theme that framed familial and communal experiences of wartime loss and that to this day colors how those losses are recalled and reconciled—dispossession.
To dispossess means to deprive of the possession of a thing; it’s usually used when talking about land or real estate. A person can lose possession of land or property and still have a sense of belonging to that place. But that kind of dispossession can come with a steep emotional price. In the case of Bayfield and Red Cliff, the Vietnam War MIA experience is imbricated with instances of dispossession, both on an individual level and a broader historical plane of tribal rights and federal decrees. Furthermore, dispossession is not limited to land or property alone.7 To have a child sent off to war is also a type of dispossession. To have that child (or brother or father or uncle) die and yet receive no remains or have no coffin to bury represents a deprivation of a categorically different nature. Layer those dispossessions, one atop the other, and you have a central thread in the particular history of service and sacrifice in Vietnam War–era Bayfield and Red Cliff.
As hometowns go, these two places are linked in obvious and more subtle ways. Just three miles from one another, the village of Bayfield and the community of Red Cliff share a highway and a lakeshore. They bask in the natural beauty of Lake Superior and the backdrop of the northern woods. But they stand apart in certain essentials. Differences in wealth and demographics are easy to spot. While Red Cliff, as the seat of the Native American reservation on the peninsula, has largely missed out on the tourist boom of the past four decades, Bayfield developed in leaps and bounds with the establishment of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in 1970.8 Anointed by the Chicago Tribune as the Best Little Town in the Midwest in 1997 and by the Smithsonian Magazine as one of America’s Best Small Towns in 2015, Bayfield has become a favored getaway for tourists from the Twin Cities and throughout the Midwest.9 “How far away is Bayfield?” asks its Chamber of Commerce. “Far enough to let you escape from strip malls. And drive-thru meals. And 3pm budget meetings.”10
But the Bayfield of 1997 or 2017 is quite different from the close-knit community rocked by the news in the spring and early summer of 1967, of Wotsy Soulier and then Merl Allen—one on the heels of the other—as missing in action / killed in action. Far removed from the anti-war protests erupting on college campuses “down south” in Madison that same year, the town and its residents, along with members of the Red Cliff Band, were engaged in their own battle with the federal government.11 At stake—at least in the eyes of people like Merl Allen’s and Wotsy Soulier’s families—was the question of land rights. Of ownership and inheritance. Of home.
“I, Merl Allen, will my beach at Sand Bay to the future senior class for their swingers next summer.” In 1965, for his senior yearbook “Class Wills” section, Merl wrote about the place he loved, the strip of lakeshore where he and his siblings and their friends spent long summer days soaking up the sun, frolicking on the beach, and enjoying the water. Two years later while stationed in Vietnam, he penned a letter to the United States Congress, beseeching his elected officials not to take this land away from his family. He was writing to oppose the creation of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, which would force the Allen family to sell its property, York Island and lakeshore acreage along Sand Bay, to the federal government.
First imagined by landscape architect Harlan Kelsey in 1930 as a way to redress the scars of the timber and mining industries, the idea for adding the twenty-two islands and the lakeshore to the national park system was the brainchild of Wisconsin governor Gaylord Nelson (the founder of Earth Day) beginning in 1960.12 President John F. Kennedy lent support to the project after visiting the region in 1963 as part of a national conservation tour, flying over the islands in a presidential helicopter.13 By 1967, the first lakeshore bill was introduced before the Congress and a series of contentious hearings ensued.14 And so, from halfway around the globe, Merl Allen wrote to register his protest.
His sister Marilyn Neff read his words into the record during the Senate subcommittee hearing on S. 778, “A Bill to Provide for the Establishment of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in the State of Wisconsin, and for Other Purposes”:
I am a Marine in the 3d Reconnaissance Battalion. I understand that you will shortly hold hearings on a proposed bill to create an Apostle Islands National Lakeshore Recreation Area. I wish to go on record as being unalterably opposed to this bill. I am presently engaged in fighting a war not of my seeking because the leaders of my country tell me it is necessary that we combat Communism whenever and wherever it threatens a free people. Is the taking of private lands for uses other than those necessary for common safety or necessity very much different than the seizure of private lands by the state in a foreign land of a different ideology?
My parents made many sacrifices that they might acquire a part of our great country. As children I and my brothers and sisters had to forgo many things dear to a child’s heart in order that mortgage payments and tax payments might be met. Since I was a child my vacations were spent on our property on Lake Superior in Bayfield County. Later my parents built a home on this property and the family moved there, although for several years my father continued to work down state, spending only weekends with the family. Now he has managed to build up a small business and live in the area [he] has loved so many years.
It is ironic and unfair that we should now be forced to give up that which we all worked so hard to acquire. My personal plans had always been predicated on my living on our property on Lake Superior. Am I to be denied this right to further a vote getting plan of ambitious politicians? Why is it that people trying to push this bill have no property in the area? … Is this the reward for serving my country to be deprived of my inheritance and that of my brothers and sisters?
Yours very truly,
Merlin R. Allen15
Marilyn finished and walked back to her seat to a standing ovation, after adding her own stinging line about the government being better off concentrating on winning the war in Vietnam rather than worrying about “playgrounds for the idle people.”16
A savvy letter for such a young man, Merl Allen’s argument drew on dovetailed notions of sacrifice and home, with his service in Vietnam—“fighting a war not of my seeking”—bookending his message. Just as his family sacrificed for their land—to acquire York Island and the beach he so loved at Sand Bay—so too, by enlisting in the marines, he sacrificed for—and only weeks later would be sacrificed to—the nation. “Is this the reward?” he asked with tragic prescience. Is the federal government, seeking to take ownership of business, residential, and, notably, tribal lands, so very different from North Vietnam (presumably what he meant by the “state in a foreign land of a different ideology” that seizes private lands)? It was a bold question to pose at the time. Two years into Rolling Thunder, the aerial bombardment campaign, by the spring of 1967, US troop levels in Vietnam were inching toward half a million. Increasingly, those numbers were drawn from working-class communities spread out across urban, suburban, small-town, and rural America, from places like Bayfield and Red Cliff.17 In the mid- to late 1960s, Bayfield High School, which included students from the Red Cliff Reservation and the nearby township of Russell, saw four or five young men, out of graduating classes of twenty-five to thirty students (half of them girls), shipped off to the war in Southeast Asia.
The hearings before the Subcommittee on Parks and Recreation of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, held on May 9 and June 1 and 2, 1967, touched on the war, but only tangentially. When it was invoked, alternately by both sides of the debate (as Marilyn, Merl’s sister, did), at issue were costs—either the park would divert federal funds from the war efforts, or, for the bill’s proponents, bring much needed public funds to an economically depressed region. A representative of the Wisconsin Farmers Union explained, “We do not deny that great spending on the forces of destruction is necessary in our present predicament, but let us not lose sight of the compelling needs to expend some of our great wealth on the forces of construction that are imperiled by delay.”18
Though their subject was the creation of a national park, the hearings focused largely on local lives and local benefits versus impacts. More than just lamenting the potential loss of land as an acquired or inherited good, many who gave testimony opposing the bill spoke of the lakeshore, the islands, and the lake itself, as a place of belonging.19 Among those convened—from elected officials, developers, and business owners to residents, conservationists, and outdoor enthusiasts—it was members of the local Native American population, including the Red Cliff Band and Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa, who viewed the plan to take over land and set up the national park within a broader sweep of time and a larger history of racial inequity. In that same 1967 subcommittee hearing, mother of ten children (“not one of them old enough to be on their own”) Jeanette Gordon cut to the chase:
I may be dead within the next twenty-five years. What will happen to my children? Will you turn them loose into the woods with wild game or will you use them for Indian totem poles in this so-called national park? I know one word in the Indian language, Gau-Wie, which means “No … I am not for the park.”
Let the Great White Father settle with the Indians first the treaty they made with great Grandfather, and let the Great White Father put more cream on the cake before I will say “Ave-Sau,” which means “Yes.”20
Another mother from the Red Cliff Band spoke that same day. Just as the Allen family (Merl’s sister Marilyn and their father, Alden Allen) traveled to Washington, DC, to voice their protest, so too did Duwayne “Wotsy” Soulier’s mother. Her statement was short; she did not dwell on her pain. But her son’s death—or, as she phrased it, his “loss”—stood at the heart of her stated opposition:
I am Caroline Newago of the Red Cliff Band, also a member of the council. I oppose this proposal as to selling my allotted land.… One son I have in Vietnam who I lost. This allotted land was willed to my children and myself. I think a vote should be taken [to assess] the [true] feelings of the Indian people.21
If Caroline Newago’s testimony was an exercise in understated grief, her sister-in-law, Mrs. Walter Newago, made no bones about her deep skepticism of the bill’s intended beneficiaries. Speaking right before Caroline and echoing Jeanette Gordon, she took aim at what she perceived to be yet another instance in a centuries-long pattern of betrayal:
I am Mrs. Walter Newago, a Chippewa Indian from the Red Cliff Reservation. From what I understand, we Indians are supposed to be your main concern, but it seems to me that all you people are giving us is a bunch of promises again, just as you did one hundred years ago. Why should we believe the promises you are making now will be kept, when the ones made one hundred years ago were never kept?
You want our last remaining land we have. Then what will we have? Nothing but a lot of people we have no understanding for.…
I see no good for my people if this park did go through. The people who live here have no education that would qualify them for a job that would be available at the park, except maybe to pick up paper and such things, after the white people left. We can do that now without the park.22
The treaty “with great Grandfather” and the unfulfilled promises of a hundred years ago refer to an important chapter in the region’s history of dispossession—namely, the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe. The treaty arose in response to an 1850 removal order issued by President Zachary Taylor, which, in breach of 1837 and 1842 treaties guaranteeing hunting, fishing, and gathering rights, the US government threatened to remove—literally to displace and push west—the Lake Superior Chippewa villages to Sandy Lake, Minnesota.23 To understand the magnitude of that threat requires understanding the symbolic and cultural value of the lake and its islands to the Chippewa people. The Red Cliff Band is one of 154 Bands of the Anishinaabe, a larger nation whose people extend across the Great Lakes region of North America, both in the United States and Canada—or, more precisely, as the Red Cliff Band official “origins and history” notes, “as far east as the Atlantic Ocean, as far south as Iowa, as far west as Montana, and as far north as Hudson Bay.”24 Known as the “Hub of the Ojibwe,” Red Cliff sits at the geographic heart of the Anishinaabe nation, located just across from Madeline Island in Lake Superior: “The Anishinabe [sic] people know Madeline Island as the final stopping place of their migration from the Eastern sea. Moningwanikoning, Madeline Island, is the name that was given to this island by the people who saw this place as a spiritual center.”25 As Red Cliff Band member Andy Gokee explains, the Chippewa, led by Chief Buffalo, a “gifted diplomat and highly regarded orator” in his nineties, resisted Taylor’s order and, through the 1854 treaty, successfully negotiated for land to be set aside for himself and his band, including what would later become the Red Cliff Reservation.26
Over a century later, members of the Red Cliff Band, some of them direct descendants of the storied chief, faced another push by the federal government to cede their land. The lakeshore bill intersected with a complex history of tribal lands granted and ceded, leased and alienated, of treaty rights negotiated but often challenged and rescinded.27 Thus, many tribal members resisted it, seeing the initiative through the lens of the historic deprivation of Native American land and treaty rights. After two years of hearings and vigorous debate within their respective tribal councils, in 1969, the Red Cliff and Bad River Bands of the Lake Superior Chippewa decided to oppose the national park bill, Duwayne “Wotsy” Soulier’s mother included. She had lost one son on behalf of the United States—the nation that only forty-three years before had granted Native Americans citizenship—and was unwilling to give up the land allotted to her and her surviving children.28
The Allen family was left with no choice. As part of the National Park Service’s plan to acquire property from private landowners, the federal government exercised its power of eminent domain.29 In exchange for just compensation (what the government deemed a “fair price”), they were compelled to give up their island and lakeshore property, which included the family’s house and its two businesses, a bar and machine shop. But the takeover didn’t happen easily. As president of the South Shore Property Owners Association, Alden “Skip” Allen fought hard to hold on to his property—in Merl’s words, “what we all worked so hard to acquire.” Eventually, however, the government prevailed. It condemned the mainland property in order to seize it and establish park headquarters there. In the winter of 1978, a US Marshal appeared at the family home with a notice that they had ninety days plus a six-month extension to vacate the property. Mr. Allen was so incensed by the government’s forced takeover of his lakeshore property that he relocated the bar and shop, and having purchased his family’s house back from the government, he moved the entire structure, every last brick and board, to another plot within the nearby township of Russell.
Several years earlier, with his son missing in action in Vietnam, sacrificed to the nation but his remains unrecovered and unreturned, Skip Allen had already undertaken a symbolic act to defy the dispossession of his home and land and to honor his son’s question, “Is this the reward for serving my country?”: in 1970, before the federal government could assume full possession of the island property in 1974, he deeded a sliver of land on the southern-most tip of York Island to the township of Russell—with the guarantee that he and his wife, and possibly his son who fought and died in Vietnam, would someday be buried there. Little did he know the extraordinary journey his son’s remains would make to come home to the shores of Lake Superior and the beautiful beach Merl once willed to his high school friends.