Order Arms

It is Veteran's Day for a couple more hours... and being a Vet, I've long ago expressed a desire that we not be celebrated with a "day" in our honor... but with a foreign policy that does not waste our blood and honor... that said, here are some random thoughts...

The other day while standing in line at the grocery store, I noticed a gentleman in full Vietnam Vet regalia...

Hat, vest, pins, unit insignia, hell, he was even wearing his jungle boots...

Intrigued, I struck up a conversation with him... He told me he was 101st, I was in the 82nd, so naturally there was kinship as well as rivalry...

He did two years... 1967-69... arguably the worst time to be in Nam... 101st were the guys who mounted the legendary and brutal assault upon Hamburger Hill...
I was in from 1983-89... the Reagan years... much posturing, overthrows and imperialism, a few skirmishes here and there, but not 1/1,000,000th of the violence and hell this gentleman had witnessed...

As I was speaking to him, what struck me was how different our military service had affected us...

Most people would never guess that I was ex-military... it isn't something I speak about freely, and quite frankly, some of the events that I witnessed and contributed to make me quite uncomfortable... Despite my love of the United States Army, I don't wear it on my sleeve...

And yet, the Vietnam War so profoundly affected this gentleman that it came to personify him... it is as if he went into a time capsule and never left... it is still 1968 to him... he wears all the trappings of that war with dismay over the buddies he'd lost... dismay over a country that betrayed him by sending him into a war they had no interest in winning... a country that rejected him when he returned... He is equally proud and in perpetual pain... He went there a boy and came home a caricature... so affected by what he'd seen that it became his very being... Can you imagine two years of your life forever defining who you are? Most of us cannot... It is more than tragic... go to any VA hospital and you'll see guys like that stacked up like chord wood...

I understand brotherhood, I get camaraderie... you don't really get the same feeling from being on a football team, or in a frat... you don't share the same level of love and sacrifice... I've been watching the miniseries "Generation Kill" on HBO lately... and while it may offend some of the liberal sensibilities I've developed in my later years, the series accurately portrayed what it is to be a soldier... at least how I remembered it... I highly recommend you check it out...

Generation Kill

Its all there... ill timed humor, endless boredom, epic exhaustion, fervent homophobia, latent racism, gross discomfort, disgusting food, stunning immaturity, public drunkenness... warrior poets, violent hicks, dangerously incompetant junior officers, blindly ambitious senior officers... all of these things... occasionally interrupted by bouts sheer terror combined with absolute chaos...

War isn't political when your boots are on the ground... war is about surviving day to day... staying alive, watching your ass, and your buddy's ass as well... it is about all the things they write about... duty, honor, love, sacrifice... And sadly, most of the time these wonderful and virtuous qualities are abused by the powers that be...

Back to the Vietnam Vet... After we parted it struck me that someday, maybe when I'm 60... I'll run into a 40-year-old in full Iraq War regalia... and he'll have that same thousand mile stare in his eyes...

GO ON... LEAVE YOUR THOUGHTS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION...