I have been to Washington D.C. several times over the years. I would like to say that I have seen all the sites like the National Zoo, Congress, and taken a White House tour. Nope, never got out of the Smithsonian. On the trip we took to visit Marty it was going to be different.
It was not a pretty day when we drove to the Metro station in Gaithersburg, MD. We left the car and rode the rail to the Capital Mall intent on visiting as many of the Museums as we could manage till the grandkids or grandparents gave out. In the end we managed to visit only the Air and Space Museum. Judy wanted to see the Lincoln memorial, so we rode a bus for a while, the wrong one as it turned out, and started walking in the memorial’s general direction. After walking for a few blocks, we came upon a small park with a swing and slide and abandoned our son to his fate with the grandkids and went on alone with Nikki as a guide. We cut across the seemingly endless park with grass still with its winter brown with only a few blooming cherry trees to add color to the grey of the day.
The Lincoln Memorial, through crowded with Spring break tourists, was magical. Judy cried at the awesome majesty of the place. I teared up as I read the words of the Gettysburg address, even though I have read then at least a hundred times before. We walked back down the steps where my son and his darlings rejoined us for the long walk back.
Although we had not planned to walk through the Vietnam Memorial, it was right there and well, why not? I had not served in the military, and while there were probably names on that wall that were friends of friends, I did not lose anybody of importance to me in that war, or the wars thereafter. Thirty-nine years before I had been 1A for a while but was cursed or blessed with a skin condition that flared up just at the right time to make me 1Y and then 4F when the 1Y deferments were ended. Yes, I was lucky, but I never totally rejoiced in it as others not so fortunate went in my place. Even after all these years, there still is a tinge of guilt. Perhaps this is why I was reluctant to walk beside that black wall of etched names, but as everyone else was going down into that pit, why should I defer once more?
As I descended the incline, I held a granddaughter’s hand, looking at the wall with the occasional bouquet of flowers placed here and there in remembrance of a lost son, husband, or father. Looking at the wall my eyes focused not on the names but on the muted refection of me holding my grandbaby’s hand and of my wife and son walking beside me. We were the ghosts of what those lost men and women could have had if fate had been kinder. They died and I lived.
They had done their duty, but it was a war that would have been better if left unfought. They had died for nothing despite the grand rhetoric of those who had sent them. There was no noble cause. The world was not made better by their valor or made worse by my cowardice.
My guilt that I had carried all these years left me to be replaced by anger. An anger that still seethes within me.
We have learned nothing. We keep fighting wars with highly questionable purposes. Johnson and McNamara knew in 1968 that Vietnam was a lost cause, yet it went on for years after claiming more American and countless Asian lives. They were more concerned about their image than the boys they sent off to die. I don’t blame them for starting that war, as many of us, including myself thought it justified in the beginning. We saw the world in black and white back then. Our hubris in Vietnam was summed in a line from the movie Full Metal Jacket, when a colonel justified the war to Mathew Modine, “don’t you know that inside every gook is an American trying to get out”. I had thought that we had moved on from that.
But then once we tried to change the face of two foreign nations into something resembling our own. But this time it is far worse than Vietnam. For those who lead us into these morasses are of my age. They cannot have forgotten the pain of that not-so-long-ago war for it was a defining moment in their lives. These latest wars should not have been. My generation was going to change the world. We had all the advantages. We should have learned. Yet here we were sending our sons and daughters into wars that were best left unfought and once again we continued to send them even though it is clear that it is wrong and lost. This time there is no excuse. Those that still believe we are doing the right thing are fools and those in power that continue to stay the course are far worse. This madness must end now. We do not need politicians who sacrifice soldier’s lives so that they can appear to be leaders. We do not need another black wall covered in names and etched with loved one’s tears.
Come this fall we maybe finally out of the longest war in our history. We have spent thousands of live and trillions in treasure to convert Afghanistan into our image. We do not understand their history or culture. We lost just as the British and Russians did before us. Signing off on this fiasco is the only thing Trump ever did that made sense. Biden has extended the deadline, lets hope that he does not back down like Obama did. I know that when the Taliban take control of the country once more, that terrible things as going to happen. It was that way before we invaded, and it will be so again. All we managed to do in 20 years is make a terrible situation even worse.
I wish I could write something funny here to make it all better. I can’t and I won’t. Sometimes the medicine needs to be bitter to make it work.
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