Or at least I wouldn't if I weren't way, way too old to be drafted. Yes, I was a Viet Nam protester. And I believe that whether we want to or not, we are all still fighting that war.
I think it all began for me when I was a boy of eleven or twelve years of age. I had a cousin whom I was certain caused the sun to rise daily. To say I had a case of hero worship was a slight understatement. I remember this was during his senior year of high school. He used to tell me of his ambitions and I hung on every word. He wanted to be a paramedic. They weren't called paramedics in 1964 or at least Steve didn't know the term. But never the less, this was his ambition. One reason I admired him so, is that even at the tender age of eighteen, he knew himself well enough to understand that he wouldn't make it all the way through medical school. But he wanted to serve, and the only training he could find was in the Naval Reserve. He enlisted upon graduation, and became a paramedic. Steve was serving out his hitch working at a navy hospital here in California. What came at a complete surprise to this reservist, is that within three short days his life changed forever. And so did mine. He was transferred from reserve duty in the navy, into active duty as a marine medic and was walking patrol outside of Da Nang. He was wearing only an armband and a pistol.
To an completely naive pre-teen, this was absolutely unbelievable. That someone's freedom and will could mean so little. Before this time, I saw military service through the eyes of a child playing soldier. I had no concept what service really meant. That was the last time I was in contact with Steve. He didn't even get a chance to phone his parents until his plane was laid over in Okinawa.
Upon my seventeenth birthday my own draft notice arrived in the mail. This was in 1970 and the war was still raging. So was I. Just like millions of my fellow countrymen, I wore my hair long and was then, as well as now, morally opposed to that war. I understood the commitment required to enlist. The depth of belief one must have in the ultimate correctness of his superior officers, and the politicians that gave them their marching orders. Yet I saw several of my classmates enlist without really giving it much thought. Not me. You see, I had been questioning authority since that day so long ago that Cousin Steve left my life.
Before Viet Nam there were dissenters. They are as old as our nation. They founded this nation. However, over time there numbers were relatively few. Only when our country found itself leaning too far to one side of the scales, the dissenters would appear and increase in number until our society righted itself. And I am not aware of any instance where this took more than one or maybe two election cycles. This all ended with Viet Nam. That war, along with the struggle for civil rights, tore a gaping wound between liberal and conservative. And to this day it has not healed.
Our administration was asking for our enlistment while at the same time shooting at us on the campus of Kent State. Several perceived this as asking us to die for the president's right to shoot at us. A position we could not reconcile. Some, read Bush, enlisted in the National Guard as a way to avoid making this hard decision. In those days the guard was almost never called to active duty. It was considered a safe haven. But the rest of us took a stand. We either said "hell no, we won't go" or we went unquestioningly as we were drafted, or enlisted out of a strong belief in patriotic duty and agreement with our government's actions. Most, however, were poor confused eighteen year old draftees, scared out of their minds by the unending gore and evil that was "in country."
Also in the sixties we were struggling with civil rights and our history as a divided nation of those who did, or did not believe in apartheid. The divisions in our society were as numerous as fault lines in California. The racial war created a kind of civil war that ultimately split the democratic party and redrew the forces of our conflict into what we call today, conservative and liberal.
And each political party has no real credo. Each is made up of a coalition of unlike groups. The republicans can boast everyone from fundamentalist evangelicals, to intellectual small government free market capitalists like George Will. The democrats, on the other hand, are made up of so many groups with differing ideologies that I can't even get a handle on it. To irresponsibly generalize, most republicans respond well to authority and most democrats don't. These are the resulting forces that the Viet Nam conflict and the race wars created. Many young folks probably do not know all this. To them, Viet Nam is only in the history books and they may not realize it's relevance in their lives. And maybe they represent the hope of healing. But until that day arrives they would do well to study how the fear of communism led to my father's generation finding comfort in the strong authority of our government.And my generation's questioning of that authority. And the bitter divide that exists today.
I hope that the election of Barack Obama can be a first step in healing that divide. How much better our lives could be if we could all work together and agree to disagree respectfully. But I hear the antagonism between parties, and I remain cynical. Perhaps like so many, I'm still fighting. Though I wish we had the wisdom to stop.