PAGE 13
NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, OCTO/NOVO 2002
THE WALL OF NAMES
country She was the fifth of our group and like a conscience
— a rare blend of bluntness and compassion. She was Michael's
landlady in Portland during the antiwar movement. She waitres-
sed in a bar and hustled bail and rent money for Michael with
dauntless pleas to the bar’s regulars. When the FBI came
looking for Michael at home, Shay would not let them in the door
without checking their guns. They always refused and waited for
him outside. She spent much of her time in those years pouring
endless cups of coffee for Vietnam veterans in her kitchen,
absorbing the pain in their threaded tales, melting deep shards
of crystal chill. The vets called her Godmother of the WAW.
Why was I going? Why was I careening across the
country in a canopied pickup truck in a rush to spend two and
a half days in D C. and try to cram learning everything about the
Vietnam War while also visiting two close friends from college?
I suppose I wanted to be at the dedication to try and understand
about something with which I have had no connection. I really
knew nothing about war, and after I got to know Steven and
Michael I was aware of how ignorant I was. Not many others
of my age do either. Those of us who were just young enough
not to have any relatives or friends in Vietnam have grown up
in a world without war (although we have certainly lived in the
shadowy fear of it; we have spent our entire lives threatened
with nuclear holocaust). I know people who have been back and
forth to the Middle East, to Latin America, to Northern Ireland,
who grew up with street gangs and rising city crime rates, who
somehow experienced violence like a war — but it is not the
same. There is a vast group of middle class children who have
grown up without any idea of what war is, personally, socially,
politically or economically. All through the weekend in D C., I
listened to stories, talked to my friends and other veterans, and
searched my life for something comparable so that I would
understand what they were saying. There was nothing. Nothing
to understand the pain. Nothing to understand the warmth that
surprised and overwhelmed everyone there. I could not know
what they were thinking or feeling unless they told me. I could
not know how they got from there to here in life unless they
tried to explain. I felt like I was present at the Gettysburg
Address, and that I was there because I knew a few of the
soldiers President Abraham Lincoln commemorated.
A convenient myth says that people who have been
through war do not talk about it. It is more true that others
seldom want to listen to them, so they talk among themselves
where they find mutual respect for the vulnerability revealed
in the telling. By its condemnation at the end of the war the
American public silenced the tongues that would have spoken.
Ever since November 1982 when the Vietnam War Memorial
thrust darkness into light, the veterans repossessed the history
we had abandoned and have broken the silence with increasing
acceptance. The country, once obstinately wordless, now seems
to hunger for their words as war once hungered for their lives.
It was extremely important to me to be with Steven and
Michael, the hours I spent listening to them. I strained to make
connections between what they said and the world I knew. I went
to D C. to hear what Vietnam veterans had to say because I felt
that whatever they learned, if we listen to them carefully we may
never have to learn in the manner they did.
I asked Michael what he hoped fo’r in Washington. “That
we not be used as pawns in their military games,” he answered.
“They’re welcoming us back, but at what price? So they can pat
us on the back, enslave us to words like honor and duty and
yank another crop of grunts for the sacrificial slaughter? I don’t
accept those terms."
The deeply felt, political nature of his answer stunned
me. “But Michael, those are political things. Don’t you want
something personal, for yourself?"
He struck his words just like he hits his typewriter keys
with two jabbing fingers. “For me, the political is personal."”
We pulled into Washington, D C. Thursday morning,
November 11, about 10 o’clock, and nosed our way to Arlington
National Cemetery for the Veterans Day ceremony. People were
arriving from all over the country and from the 20th century's
every war. The amphitheater was crammed. I stood in the
curving walkway around the back, pressed up against a low wall.
Scattered among the crowd were the soldiers who would take
over the nation's capital, but in a gesture of reconciliation.
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, bolstered by
the U.S. Army Band playing “God of Our Fathers," recalled for
us the cost of peace, the sacrifice of heroes, and the necessity
of rebuilding a strong defense. His speech reached a climax:
“We learned one thing, we learned never again to send our
men and women to a war we don’t intend to win." Hypocrite, I
thought. As if we hadn't intended to win the Vietnam War; as if
a military ever fights a war intending upon a draw; as if in our
nuclear age there is such a thing as a winnable war.
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Weinberger got a standing ovation that lasted several
minutes. Where were the other vets who with Michael in the
spring of 1971 had thrown their war medals at Congress and
dumped a hundred pounds of chickenshit on the Pentagon
steps? Why this seemingly blatant militarism from the gener
ation the government had deceived?
“But that was the first acknowledgment from a high
government official to our faces that the government had failed
the fighting man and vice-versa,” Steven said later. “It was an
admission that it wasn’t our fault the war was lost, which has
weighed heavy on our minds We were blamed for losing the
war — but it wasn’t us.”
In spite of the speeches ringing with praise for the glory,
honor and duty of military sacrifice, in spite of President Ronald
Reagan’s announcement that Vietnam was an honorable war,
the government was not actually welcoming the veterans back.
The veterans themselves raised the money, built the Memorial
(designed by Maya Lin) and got themselves to Washington to
OPENING THE
BOOK OF THE DEAD
The names of the American dead occupy the black
marble wall of the Vietnam War Memorial chronologically by the
days of their deaths, arranged in daily sequence in alphabetical
order. I was at the Wall when it was dedicated in 1982, looking
for the names of a few friends I last saw wrapped in ponchos
and tossed aboard outgoing helicopters. I purchased a large
book the size of the phone directory of a small city. It contained
the names of the 55,000 dead engraved on the Wall and where
each was located.
I left Washington, D C. with my friends from Oregon.
We drove through Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nebraska,
Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Oregon, reaching home in Cannon
Beach five days later.
We stopped every night at motels or the homes of
friends or relatives, and each day we made several stops for
food, gas and just to get out and stretch. On the back window
of our small truck was a Vietnam Veterans of America sticker,
the group that built and dedicated the Wall. Everywhere we
stopped people noticed the sticker and almost everyone was
related to or had known men who were killed in Vietnam.
Everywhere we stopped I opened the book of the
American dead and found the names people wished to see.
Many of them ran their fingers across the written names as
had most of us the carved names of our friends on the Wall.
In this manner I crossed the continent. By the time
I reached the Pacific Coast the American book of the dead
was as well-thumbed as a phone book in a public booth Until
then I had not really understood the personal impact of Vietnam
on America's heart Each time I opened the book I felt I was
performing a ritual of immense unrecognized grief.
- michael M c C usker
dedicate it. “The government simply crashed the party and tried
to take over," Michael said
Steven was not bothered by the speeches or the flags.
He was reunited with his closest friend from Vietnam for the first
time in 13 years, and all they cared about was standing next to
each other in the cold air.
On Friday morning, the second day in D C., Michael
and I went to a panel discussion on Agent Orange, a chemical
defoliant used widely over Vietnam by U.S forces between
1965 and 1972. Birth defects, skin diseases and psychological
disorders are attributed to Agent Orange The Vietnam Veterans
in Congress and Vietnam Veterans of America sponsored the
symposium. The new lieutenant governor of Massachusetts,
now its junior Senator (and possible candidate for President in
2004), John Forbes Kerry, strode over and greeted Michael. In
1971, when the Vietnam Veterans Against the War marched to
Washington, Michael and John Kerry spoke to Congress. Kerry,
the former naval officer addressed the Senate (which Michael
described as ‘The House of Lords'); Michael the enlisted Marine
addressed the House (‘Commons’). On this particular occasion
both were spectators.
As we listened judgment weighed heavily on the
Veterans’ Administration. Speakers representing the General
Accounting Office and the two sponsoring organizations rose in
turn to denounce the VA for its callous treatment of Vietnam
veterans and the inept Agent Orange studies it had conducted.
What knocked me flat were poignant accounts of veteran after
veteran, men and women, who chronicled their own medical
histories — of their children with birth defects and chronic
medical problems, their wives’ successive miscarried
pregnancies — and who had been consistently ignored or
patronized. One ex-Marine asked, “What do I tell my kids?
What do I tell my wife? We don’t trust you," he said pointing at
a VA representative and received standing applause. “We want
(an admission) that those guys over there (at the Pentagon) did
this to us,” he continued. “We’re here together, we'll work
through the system, but you’ve got to answer for it."
CONTINUED ON PAGE 14
Cannon Beach, Oregon