Читать книгу My Country 'Tis of Thee - David Harris - Страница 11

LIKE A LOT OF US, I TOOK THE WAR personally in those days.

And I still do. I lived molded to the war’s shape for so long that, indeed, my person has retained the war’s bend in ways both petty and profound. I was a boy when it began and a man when it finally came to an end. It echoes in me to this day: when pacing nervously, I walk a nine-foot oval, as though I were still confined in my cell in maximum security; when I attend a black-tie affair, there is still part of me that looks around the room and flinches, convinced that if these people had any idea who I really am, I would be sent packing; when the Pledge of Allegiance is recited, I still take a deep breath and ask myself if I really want to repeat it along with everybody else.

I REMEMBER THE WAR as someone it obsessed and imprisoned. And, while it no longer preys on my mind, it is still a subject about which I find it difficult to summon disinterest or distance. I have never known the war at arm’s length. I remember it on my skin and in my bones; I remember it as a weight in the pit of my stomach and I remember it as a pain in my chest, late at night and alone.

Much has passed under my personal bridge since the war ended, and, as I have weathered further episodes of loss and helplessness, my heart has opened enough to reexamine long-standing wounds. Now fifty years old, I have come to yearn for something far more than remembrance.

What I seek is a Reckoning.

I first experienced the posture I have in mind in an intensive-care ward some three years ago, when Lacey, my wife of nineteen years, hopelessly comatose, was removed from artificial life supports. Then I held her as she died, a casualty of a desperate failed struggle with breast cancer. I knew her better than anyone, and I could tell from the calm in her heart as she passed that while she’d waited in unconsciousness, attached to a breathing machine, she had somehow taken responsibility for her life and prepared herself to leave it. I had read fictional and religious descriptions of such reckonings, in which lives are revisited in a summary accounting, and Lacey’s last moments seemed to confirm them.

Reckoning has been a word full of meaning for me ever since. Coming to terms with ourselves is what we do when we reckon, and reckon with our war is what we must do: stand outside our fears, revisit what we did so many years ago, and clear our souls of this perpetual shadow.

OUR RECKONING IS NOT TO be engaged in lightly or with less than the whole of our selves. At the very least, I expect that taking a good look at the war will be a painful and demanding process. Hard things need to be said, often in hard ways. And, as raw as my memory of the war is, I still do not come easily to that task. I am not a hard man. Quite the contrary. I am usually eager to get along, am reluctant to express personal disapproval, and tend to swallow my complaints in the normal course of life. I like to please and put people at ease. But there are subjects about which there is no easiness, and this war is one of them. I cannot avoid its ugliness, nor do I think such avoidance useful.

So also with my anger. Some of it, too, is unavoidable, even necessary. Few have ever seen my temper, and while I make a point of speaking my mind, I mostly shy from enlarging confrontations, and in this instance I worry that my surviving outrage will sound bitter years after the fact. But I am outraged still. And I mean to say things that bother me deeply and that I know will disturb others, as unfortunate as that disturbance may be.

And I hope others will do likewise until we finally run out of things to say.

Last Thanksgiving I was back in Fresno, California, where I grew up, at my mom’s house. I told her that I was writing, once again, about the war. She said she hoped that the country could put all that stuff that happened over Vietnam behind us now, that we needed to move on. I told her that was not exactly what I had in mind.

We need to face up to it first. For me, this is not just about us and not just about now. It is an engagement in the sacred human ritual of studying our own tracks, an attempt at the consecration of those who have gone before through the contemplation of how and why their lives were spent. If healing what the war left behind is possible, I look for such healing in this therapy of honest self-examination and informed acceptance. I also find such a process the most fundamental form of respect. It obliges us to value one another’s passing and refuse to spend our lives without an accounting. So now, so much later, it is finally time to account.

THAT, OF COURSE, IS NO small piece of work. Our experience in Vietnam is a lot for any of us to take on, especially after having spent much of the last two decades avoiding it as best we could. We should not kid ourselves, however. Holding to our denial will never allow us to escape the war. That avoidance means only that, rather than owning our experience, we will continue to be owned by it.

An extreme example of being owned by our experience is described by the psychiatric diagnosis post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, the Vietnam generation’s contribution to the study of mental health. The first patients diagnosed with PTSD were trying to grapple with leftovers from Southeast Asian combat. Their battlefield experience had been much too intense to be assimilated on the spot, so it was deferred and deferred until it began to recur spontaneously, usually at the instigation of familiar scenes or sounds: the whip of helicopter blades, backfires that crack like rounds from an AK-47, Caterpillar tracks that rumble and clank like an armored personnel carrier advancing over the red dirt, hard as concrete during those last weeks before the monsoons began. With that trigger, the patient would return to a firefight outside Chu Lai or a bunker near Marble Mountain or a paddy in the Delta or a ridge near the Rockpile, trapped in an endless repetition of the emotions surrounding the original unresolved trauma.

I never quite understood the power of the phenomenon until I was diagnosed with it myself. My PTSD emerged following Lacey’s death. Some eight months after I sat with her body, laid out in a Buddhist wake in the front room of our house, I was overwhelmed by a fog of unfocused anxiety that just descended and never left. To extricate myself I spent the next year sorting out all I had gone through over the three years of illness and treatments before her death, allowing myself to feel all the fear and pain that I had held at bay in the interest of supporting her battle. Slowly, my experience became my own again as terror ebbed out of all my internal nooks and crannies; loss, grief, and panic surfaced where I could become acquainted with them face-to-face; what had happened to me in real time now happened over and over again on replay, letting me accustom myself to all that had gone on, this time at a speed I could live with.

And so it may be for all of us: our body politic clogged with undigested experience, strung up on the very same dilemmas we never dealt with twenty-five years ago, when the killing was still going on. Our disorder is plain to see: having made lying an accepted government function, our government is now overrun with liars; having made our public posture heartless as a matter of policy, we are now unable to bring our heart to public affairs; having made killing a measure of our national efforts, we watch helplessly as killing has become one of our principal cultural currencies; having failed to look our transgressions straight in the face, we have not been straight with one another since; having refused to live up to our values, we are now increasingly without values; having made language into hype, we now have nothing believable to say. I may just be shell-shocked, but that sounds a lot like PTSD to me.

In truth, that disorder is our nation’s running thirty-year metaphor. And our emblem is those poor boys who grew old real quick, came home, and still live with that war every day.

When Lacey and I first set up housekeeping, we lived around the corner from a Veterans Administration hospital that specialized in outpatient psychiatric services. I often crossed paths with the patients at the neighborhood grocery store, where both they and I would stop to buy cigarettes. Occasionally one would bum a smoke off me instead. I got to know Leroy that way. He was at the store a lot. He had been a Spec 4 with the First Air Cavalry. He liked $1.50-a-quart burgundy and smoked Camels. We got so we would banter whenever we encountered each other, every day more or less the same way.

“What’s up, Leroy, my man?”

“Same old same old.”

“Sing me a few bars,” I said.

“Jes’ like always,” Leroy answered. “‘They’s somewhere out there in the trees and we’s stuck out here in the middle with no motherfuckin’ place to hide.’”

I suspect every American who remembers the war knows just how Leroy felt.

BACK WHEN THE WAR WAS still going on, lots of people I knew went to great lengths to find a political theory to explain the discrepancy between who America thought it was and who it acted like. And in that search, -isms eventually proliferated, turning the issue to ideology rather than behavior, and making the discussion a lot more complicated and a lot less clear. I kept pace for a while—I was once a Stanford honors student in Social Thought and Institutions—but eventually I lost all tolerance for such theories. I have retained only one in the years since.

We Get What We Do, nothing more. Especially when lives are on the line. We do not get what we mean to do: intention is meaningless. Nor do we get what we tell ourselves we do: appearance counts little and rhetoric even less. We get only the getting, never what we have identified to be got. All means are ends in motion, as ends are means in a static state. Acts that fail to embody their object also fail to realize it. I call this the Do Theory. The war taught it to me.

And, while I am unwilling to give the Do Theory the universal subscription of an ideology, I have consulted it in making decisions throughout my life, to largely positive effect. I have also found it has value in sorting the past. Translated into that tense, of course, the theory reads, We Got What We Did, both a cogent explanation and yet another compelling reason to seek out what happened so many years ago deep in the tall grass and reckon with it once and for all.

And, if the Do Theory is accurate, doing so will prove its own reward.

AS I RECKON, I HAVE TO remind myself that making scapegoats is not the way to proceed. There are indeed those among us more deserving of blame than the rest, and they must be held individually accountable, but the healing we need requires us to look to ourselves before we single anyone out. When we account for this war, we must begin by accounting for it all together. It was, after all, our war.

When a nation acts, all its citizens are joined insolubly in responsibility for the consequence of their national behavior, bound to that mutuality for as long as they remember their history, bound generation after generation, carrying its weight as part of their ancestral inheritance. And so it is with us and our war: as far as the fact of it is concerned, as far as all the implications of it having happened at all, as far as carrying the weight of those years and all that carnage, at the bottom line of our enterprise, each of us was the other and vice versa, a single moral organism that must now come to terms together with what we all have done in all of our names. The war’s dominant conjugation was first-person plural. We cannot lay it off on any one, any ten, any twenty, or any thirty thousand of us. We cannot exempt our individual selves, whatever we actually did while the war raged. When the question is asked, Who did this? we must all raise our hands.

And in that communion, we eventually redeem ourselves and all those who must follow us and carry their own share of that national shame. And when we have finally declared ourselves, declared ourselves without withholding, with hearts open as though to our loved ones, our anguish will become simply memory and we will heal and grow strong. We were all truly in this together.

STOPPING THE WAR ONCE meant everything to me.

I left Stanford University after spending my senior year as student body president, ticketed to graduate with honors, winner of the Poetry Prize, and I gave up all thoughts of career and graduate school and lived out of my 1961 Rambler, traveling up and down the Pacific coast, searching for others who meant to throw their bodies on the cogs of the machine. I delivered at least a thousand speeches while America cut its swath through Southeast Asia. I spoke in auditoriums and on street corners, and in every speech I ever gave I said the war was a crime against everything America was meant to be and I urged any young man called to the draft to join me and refuse to go. Each such specific call to disobedience was technically a felony violation of the Selective Service Act, worth a maximum of five years in prison. After I accumulated some five thousand years’ worth of such potential violations, I stopped counting. Nor did I bother to calculate what I had coming for all the occasions when I called on soldiers to join us and refuse their orders as well. As long as the war was the law, I wanted to be an outlaw.

That, of course, meant I was watched by the FBI and military intelligence, interrogated at length, and arrested four times in ten years for acts of civil disobedience—all misdemeanors except for one felony violation of the Selective Service Act, charging me with refusing to go to the war when my name was called. For the felony, I spent twenty months of my life “in the custody of the Attorney General of the United States,” most of it shuttling between a maximum-security cellblock in a federal correctional institution on the Texas–New Mexico border and the punishment cellblock on the floor below. When they let me go, I had a parole officer to whom I reported for another sixteen months while continuing to organize against the war. I didn’t stop organizing until the 1973 Paris Peace Accords formalized American withdrawal from direct combat. I participated in my final demonstration against the war in 1975, just three months before Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City. By then, the war had consumed a decade of my life.

In the darkest days, when just handfuls of us, young and scruffy, seemed to be bearing the brunt of bringing the most powerful nation in the world to its senses, I always believed that when we finally stopped the war, when the troops came home, when the bombing ceased, somehow Americans would come to a settling of accounts with ourselves, both taking responsibility for the irresponsible and doling out responsibility to those deserving it in larger measures than the rest. And in the process we would fashion a communal assessment of what we did and what doing so meant about us, who we really were, and who we really needed to be. I was young in those days and supposed that history would demand such an assessment and that we would automatically accede.

I am not young anymore, and I’m glad I didn’t hold my breath waiting for that reckoning to arrive.

The closest we have come to it over the intervening decades is an informal consensus among the American body politic that the war was a “mistake.” As a social construct, “mistake” was certainly a significant step out of the dispute that had surrounded our war almost since it started: “mistake” allowed the war to be mentioned in polite company with a reasonable chance of avoiding offense. Everybody agreed. The war was certainly a “mistake.” Some thought it was a mistake because we never completely leveled Hanoi, some because our strategy amounted to a crime punishable under the Nuremberg precedent, and most, of course, for reasons somewhere in between.

For all of us, “mistake” provided an emotional anonymity and, as such, a refuge from the pain of what we did.

Mistakes happen. They are somehow like the weather, part of life: it is a mistake to buy the wrong size dress, a mistake to leave loose lug nuts on the wheel of an automobile, a mistake to stick your finger in boiling water, a mistake not to check the pockets of your pants before you put them in the washer, a mistake to go camping in August without mosquito repellent, a mistake to wear brown shoes with a black suit, a mistake to invest public funds in exotic financial ventures, a mistake to leave home without making sure the stove is turned off. Mistakes are what the quality control division pulls off the assembly line; mistakes are what the retailer sells out the back door as seconds; mistakes are what the cook doesn’t want to let out of the kitchen and the customer will send back if he does. Mistakes earn an ass-chewing from the boss. Mistakes are apologized for or ignored, usually with little consequence. Everybody makes them.

While it may be an accurate conclusion, calling the war a mistake is the functional equivalent of calling water wet or dirt dirty. And it is now long since time that we moved on to an understanding considerably more profound.

Let us not lose sight of what actually happened.

In this particular “mistake,” at least three million people died, only fifty-eight thousand of whom were Americans. These three million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosives dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen; they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet in the throat, consumed by sizzling phosphorus, burned alive with jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumbs, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers. They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of someone who had even less idea than that. Some of the dead were sent home to their families, some were reduced to such indistinguishable pulp that they could not be recovered. All three million died in pain, often so intense that death was a relief. They all left someone behind. They all became markers visited by those who needed to remember and not forget. The loss was enormous, and “mistake” is no way to account for it. A course of behavior that kills three million people for no good reason cannot be passed off as something for which the generic response is Excuse Me.

WE CAN BEGIN OUR RECKONING by giving the war a different name.

Contrary to the childhood doggerel, names can make a huge difference. They are central to how we identify and perceive. Thus, I have come to prefer the name for the war the Vietnamese use. They call it the American War.

The first time I heard that formulation spoken aloud was with Vinh, a pedicab driver in Ho Chi Minh City. Vinh had been a draftee in the air force of the Republic of Vietnam and spent a brief internment in a reeducation camp after the war ended. Now he practiced his pedicab trade from a corner just down the block from the Saigon cathedral. “The American War” sounded unusual when it came out of his mouth, but it was immediately comfortable to my ear. I did not need to have it explained.

“Of course,” I said, “the American War.”

“Vietnam War same same?” he asked.

“Same same,” I answered. I guess I had known as much for a long time.

So many Vietnamese died and so much of Vietnam was devastated, but the heart of it all was not really about Vietnam or the Vietnamese. They were just in the intersection when our convertible rolled up.

This war was about us. We made it happen. It was ours.

And, even at this late date, any genuine reckoning on our part must include assuming the full responsibilities of that ownership. Nothing less will do.

AMERICANS DON’T LIKE TO LOSE, don’t like losers, and had never lost a war before. But we lost this one. There are lots of explanations, but the simple truth is that we ran into a group of people who brought considerably more seriousness to this fight than we did: they lived underground, they huddled in the jungle, they moved by foot and bicycle, they fought on a little rice and a little ammunition. They absorbed enormous punishment, bore great sacrifice, endured untold hardship, and fought us and all our war machines to a dead stop. If they survived, they fought until the whole thing was done, some for as long as a decade. They did not back off, and they held the field until we finally lost our stomach for the fight and went home.

And not only did we lose, but we were poor losers. When we finally left, we left like a whipped dog, pissing on one last bush as we fled down the street.

During the second week of May 1975, the final American military action of the war was announced. I was at the Oakland Coliseum that evening, watching a National Basketball Association playoff game between the Chicago Bulls and the hometown Golden State Warriors. Saigon had fallen days earlier, and the sight of Americans fleeing off the embassy roof was still fresh in everyone’s mind. During a break in the action, the Coliseum public-address system announced that the United States Marines, in response to the detention of the civilian cargo ship Mayaguez by Cambodia’s new Khmer Rouge government, had invaded an island off the Cambodian coast, fought a running gun battle with several Khmer Rouge units, freed the ship’s crew, and evacuated. This final note was Gerald Ford’s principal contribution to the history of our journey down the tunnel with no light at the end. In what would be recognized as the typical Ford fashion, the Mayaguez incident had a bumbling signature: the Khmer Rouge had released the ship’s crew before the raid was under way. Thirty-eight marines died pointlessly in the ensuing action.

At the Oakland Coliseum that night, the initial announcement was accompanied by the illumination of a huge American flag on the far wall. The crowd, some fifteen thousand, already hyped by the game, leapt to their feet and celebrated this final outburst of American testosterone with a wave of wild applause spurred on by the flashing scoreboard.

I kept my seat and hunched my shoulders against the noise, the rippling flag, the blinking lights. Few of the people cheering looked as though they had paid much of any price during the ten years that had preceded this final chest thumping, and the war was still a tender enough subject with me that I noticed such things. It had all been vicarious for them, all television and scorecards. I wondered if they would cheer so loudly if those thirty-eight wasted grunts had been dragged out on the court below, where they could get a good look at them, all mud and blood and time run out.

I had expected better, of course, but, like it or not, this was us. We went into the war blind to ourselves, and we left the same way.

THE SUMMER BEFORE LAST, I was driving south along US 101 with my friend John, the Pacific on one side of the road and the best forests in California on the other. We were dirty and overgrown after a four-day backpack trip along the Smith River. My kids—one twenty-five years old, the other twelve—were in my van’s rear seat, asleep. John and I had organized together in the old days. Oregon and Washington were his turf, and I came in every couple of months to help out during the last year before I entered the custody of the attorney general. John’s a county public defense attorney now and a better Buddhist than I. That day, almost three decades later, we were talking about the war neither of us could forget.

“I’ll tell you where we lost our way,” John said looking out at the ocean, then turning to face me and touching his hand to his chest. “We lost it in our hearts.”

I agreed. It was indeed all about heart.

When we needed ours, we could not find it and could not care enough to stop ourselves, could not value all we were about to lose, and, unable to value it, we could not save it when the time came.

I remember. We lost so much more than any of us ever imagined we would. We lost the legend of ourselves, we lost our heroism and our nobility, we lost all perspective. We lost the string-bean kid third row left in the third-grade photo, we lost the toes off a thousand feet, we lost the place we once called home. We also lost the allegiance of each of us to the other, the communion at the core of our national self. We lost our right to pretend we were much different from the people we had once so routinely dismissed as venal tinhorns and vicious thugs. We lost our innocence, our standing, our reputation, our faith in who we were, our dignity, the easy feeling when we looked at ourselves in the mirror. We lost the kid from down the block, the kid from across town, the kid from up the valley, the kid from over the creek, the kid from down by the bay, from up the state, from along the river, from downtown, from uptown, from the other side of the tracks, and from the very end of the road.

We lost in the long run, in the short run, and in every run in between. We lost coming and going, on this side and that. We lost the fantasies I once chased home after watching Roy Rogers down at the Tower Theatre and the illusions we all nurtured in the bowels of the chain of command. We lost much blood and more than a few tears. We lost legs from Dayton, spleens from Rochester, lungs from Boise, and kneecaps from Duluth. We lost billions and billions of dollars.

And we lost more sleep than we can remember, more joy than we can forget. We lost faith in our government, faith in each other, faith that anything was what it seemed. We lost our bearings, we lost our discipline, we lost our expectations of ourselves. We lost hope, we lost sight, we lost touch, we lost our good sense, our good name, and most every other good we had. We lost the knack for looking each other in the eye. We lost our clean conscience, and we lost track of who we were and who we weren’t. We lost our capacity to tell real from unreal and true from false. We lost control and we never got it back.

WE ALSO LOST TRACK OF the difference between right and wrong.

This is not easy for anyone to admit, but it is an especially uneasy enterprise for us. We are, after all, Americans. It never occurred to us that this war would transform us into a case history in moral dyslexia. Most of us figured we were bred right, born right, raised right, and did not have to worry about that kind of thing anymore. I once did, and everybody I knew was the same way. We were Sunday school graduates, Captain Kangaroo alumni, the Duke’s people, keepers of the White Hat and the eternal flame. We told ourselves that America always righted wrongs and never wronged rights.

As it turned out, we got little of it right and almost all of it wrong, and our war was the proof.

It was the wrong fight, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, with the wrong strategy, the wrong tactics, and the wrong weapons. It was the wrong approach, to the wrong situation, betraying the wrong motives, from the wrong perspective, with the wrong attitude, to the wrong end, using the wrong means, effecting the wrong result. It was both the wrong twist and the wrong turn, arriving inexorably, of course, at just the wrong moment. It was the wrong choice, the wrong answer to the wrong question, altogether the wrong way to take care of business. And it wronged just about everybody it touched: it wronged the wrong and it wronged the rest of us as well.

And now, twenty years after we finally left the war behind, all that has not changed. What remains is for us to finally engage in the public arithmetic and admit we had no right to have been there and no right to have done what we did and no right to continue pretending otherwise.

THERE HAS BEEN NO ESCAPING the war for me.

It meant far too much, and I was in far too deep to just let it drop, so it has lingered nearby for the twenty-odd years since the last American caught the last chopper out of Saigon: lingered largely unaddressed, on the horizon one day, on my chest the next, a war that is over but nowhere near done.

I still cannot listen to the whump of helicopter rotors without recalling now middle-aged evening news footage of American boys, armed to the teeth, arrogant and terrified, leaping through the downdraft and into the tall grass, ten thousand miles from home. Most came back, many came back in pieces, and some did not come back at all. I remember and, like many who lived through the war, I remain suspicious of power and have never regained much respect for the exercise of force. I still have little use for patriotic displays and no use at all for military conscription. I close my eyes and see wire-service photos of peasants in black pajamas huddling together in the hope of simply making it through the afternoon without being shot or burned alive, and I am still haunted by how easily we defiled and abused, devoid of reflection, hidden from ourselves by a veneer of geopolitics and a parking lot full of denial. I still assume deceit and hypocrisy whenever politicians start dispatching youngsters around the world to kill and be killed. Most of the boys I grew up with learned that lesson the hard way. Leaders eager to talk the talk did their best to send us to the far side of the Pacific when it came time to walk the walk, and there things turned a lot uglier and a lot more evil than we ever imagined. Our America debased itself out in that tall grass ten thousand miles from home, sowing pain over all hell and gone for no good reason, no good reason at all.

It was wrong, and nothing has been quite right for us since.

[from Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us, 1996]