He confronts me
Smiling shyly, head down
Embarrassed at the charade
Brother
I see by your jacket that you was in Nam
I was there too
Shows me the scar to prove it
How `bout a quarter for a fellow vet
To get some wine
He shuffles
Niggaring
Wincing at the expected blows of righteousness
I give him a dollar and say nothing
You see
We both have come
To the same
Conclusion

Today is Veterans Day. It used to be called Armistice Day, celebrating the end of World War I, the “war to end all wars”. Funny how these pronouncements can seem so foolish over time.

Veterans Day is a day that few seem to notice and fewer celebrate. It is usually left to the pigeon-breasted politicians looking to score a few patriotic brownie points, and to the veterans themselves, who typically use the occasion to play the traditional role that society assigns to them–that of cheerleaders for the next war. I, for one, have never deigned to pick up the pom-poms.

I have always had somewhat conflicted feelings about Veterans Day. My first Veterans Day back from Vietnam, I was arrested for the first time in my life, for trying to march in the Veterans Day parade under a banner that said Vietnam Veterans Against the War. This Veterans Day, they have cancelled the parade in my town, because they got wind that a group of ant-war veterans were planning to march. Perhaps you can see where my ambivalence towards the day derives.  

It has been a constant and — I would say — unresolved personal struggle for those of us who consider ourselves “anti-war veterans”.  It is no easy task to maintain a pride in one’s service when one feels compelled to reject the cause in which that service was rendered.   This ambivalence is compounded by others who seek to brand as “unpatriotic” those who question this country’s use of military might, as if it is somehow injurious to this nation for citizens to exercise those rights of which we are so justly proud, and for which so many have sacrificed so much to preserve.  Such attacks do not bother me as much as they did before.  I am a patriot.  In a democracy, dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Yet it has been a bitter, bitter pill for me to swallow to watch this country again march off to a senseless, foreign war, to see how easily, again, we believed our government’s lies, to watch, again, a country slowly wake to the nightmare we allowed our leaders to foist upon us.  And on this day, especially, I think of those who must bear the brunt of the consequences of these actions:  the men and women we have sent to Iraq.

There is a fundamental pact made between a nation and its soldiers.  The soldier commits to protect the rest of us – to give up all or a portion of his or her rights, his or her freedom, his or her life, so the rest of us can enjoy our rights, our freedoms, our lives.  In return for this, the nation should commit to two things.  First, if we ask our soldiers for the ultimate sacrifice, then we must guarantee that the sacrifice we ask of them is for something real, something important, something WORTH it. Second, when their service is completed, then we must take care of them and their families to the extent and for the duration that is necessary.  

We have already failed the soldiers in Iraq on the first score.  This country again finds itself engaged in a war that few now want, and fewer understand.  The rationales and justifications for the war in Iraq have come and gone, the lies exposed and replaced by others; the only constant is the unrelenting bloodshed that our presence in that country engenders.  We are mired in the same Catch-22 logic that was used in Vietnam.  We can’t leave because we’re there. The reason why we’re there is because … we’re there.    

I have said this before, I say it again.  I know some of you probably won’t agree with me now, but please remember my words in the future. Whether we pull out of Iraq now or ten years from now, the result will be the same: the Iraqis will decide their own fate. It may be brutal, it may not be what we want. But what we get by pulling out now will be the same thing we would get in ten years. The only difference will be the number of dead in the interim.  You cannot “honor” those who have died by piling more dead bodies on top of them.  

As to the second, the sad reality of fighting in a war is that many, if not most, of those who survive return home with substantial problems.  For some, those problems are physical — traumatic, life-altering wounds that will never heal, that will require ongoing treatment for a lifetime.  In Vietnam, the life-saving procedures of getting severely wounded men from the front line to the operating room were perfected, and have been reimplemented in Iraq.  Lives are saved, but men (and now women) who would have died on the battlefield in previous wars, are given the “opportunity” to live armless, legless, sightless, brainless lives.  Such lives are a blessing, I suppose, considering the alternative.  And then there’s the other “problems”: the PTSD, the lost jobs, failed marriages, broken lives.   As they say, in war, all wounds do not pierce the skin. They do, however, cost money.  Who will pay?  

Sure, we’ll all raise our hands now, and demand proper treatment for the returning veterans, but what about ten or twenty years from now, when the war, hopefully, is a distant, painful memory, and all those brightly colored back-trunk decals are but fading pieces of refuse in some land fill?  What will happen when there is real competition for where federal dollars will be spent, when some up-and-coming, budget-cutting politician frames the choice as your benefits or theirs?  What will happen then, to the invisible, powerless refuse from the long-forgotten war?  I know what will happen, because it happened to me.  The veterans will get fucked.  Whatever they get they will have to fight for.  

This Veterans Day, I will think of my friend Sasha. I first met Sasha when I went to the then Soviet Union in 1988 as part of a delegation of Vietnam veterans to meet with Soviet Afghanistan veterans–Afghantsi, they called themselves. I remember the first few moments when we met at the airport in Moscow. Everything was a bit awkward and formal, neither side knowing quite what to do. Then one Afghantsi–his eyes blazing with the look I knew all too well–suddenly pulled up his shirt to show several bullet wounds. “You see these,” he said fiercely, “These bullets were fired from an American-made M-16.” One of the Vietnam veterans who accompanied me quickly pulled up his shirt. “You see these,” he said, “These bullets were fired by a Soviet-made AK-47.” The two men stared at one another briefly, then fell in each other’s arms and wept.

I remember standing in a frigid wind-swept Moscow park, my arm around Sasha, in front of a peculiarly irregular boulder, standing on end with a plaque on it. This was the Afghantsi Memorial, put up by the Afghantsi themselves when the Soviet government failed to honor their request for a government sponsored memorial. There was a large group there — Afghantsi and Vietnamsi–and the former soldiers each took turns speaking from the heart. The message from all was the same: We must honor those who died, we must take care of those who survived. We must promise to each other that our sons will never go through what we did.

Empty words, it seems. The sons of the Afghantsi are now dying in Chechnya, and the children of the Vietnamsi are now Afghantsi and Iraqsi. Yet it is the one idea I still find worth fighting for.

So I will go out today with my children, and we will gather with a small group of veterans —  aged twenty-two to eighty-four.  And we will hold our anti-war signs, and suffer the abuse of passers-by, and remember those whom others wish to forget.  

We are your children, America.  When you awake from your long, self-induced nightmare, we will still be here.