Like most ex-service members, I observed yesterday’s Veterans Day proceedings with mixed feelings.
I feel pride at being a member of a club that stretches back to Concord Bridge, where, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, “The embattled farmers stood and fired the Shot heard ’round the World.”
I also feel a form of survivor’s guilt, simply by being alive. When I visit our national capital, I invariably walk along that somber wall emblazoned with the names of 58,000 of my comrades in the Vietnam War who weren’t so lucky.
Vietnam was not a simple war, and those of us who served during it reflected the same mixed feelings that beset our countrymen. While I technically enlisted, I was anything but an eager warrior. Just a year earlier, I’d been editor of the student newspaper at the University of Colorado. We were loudly against the Vietnam War.
Because I had capped my CU journalism degree by working for United Press International before enlisting, I was assigned to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point where I eventually edited the post newspaper, The Pointer View.
I used to joke that going from editor of the raucously anti-war Colorado Daily to a mirror-image job at West Point was proof of the military maxim, “When you can type 80 words a minute, you go where your country needs you.”
Yet, in more reflective moments, I realized there was no conflict between my two editorships. Growing up in America involves many rights and freedoms. In my case, they included the right to a college education and the freedom to oppose a war that I saw as both unnecessary and counterproductive to America’s long-term interests in winning the Cold War.
But being born American enters you into a social contract that eventually requires you pay for the rights and privileges you enjoy. One duty is to pay taxes so the next generation is offered the same opportunities you received. And sometimes, you are asked to bear arms to extend the blessing of freedom to the next generation.
Even for those of us in uniform, the burden of service falls unequally. Eighty-five percent of American veterans, me included, never saw combat. The 15 percent for whom the war got up-close and personal form a kind of inner club. But even living combat veterans feel survivor’s guilt, wondering why they were spared while others died.
Except for the few who willingly sought combat assignments, chance played the greatest role in separating us into warriors and what were jokingly called REMFs. That acronym stands for Rear Echelon Support Personnel … or words to that effect.
In my case, I had originally received orders for artillery training at Fort Sill, Okla., before heading to Vietnam. Some clerk in the Pentagon noticed my UPI experience at the very moment when West Point needed a trained journalist, and I was given new orders to head for the Hudson River.
In the way of things, somebody took my place as an artilleryman in Vietnam. Did he, like me, live to feel mixed feelings on Veterans Day? There’s no way to tell. That’s why I can’t walk along that wall in Washington without choking up.
Today, America no longer drafts soldiers but is once again waging a complex and unpopular war. Some 2,000 young men and women have already given their lives in Iraq – a small total compared to earlier wars, but a sacrifice made all the more poignant in that it was truly voluntary.
America’s ambivalence over Vietnam and Iraq is more the rule than the exception, for nations have always viewed their wars and their soldiers with mixed feelings. As Rudyard Kipling wrote:
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country,” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
But Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!
Yes, our fallen heroes still see. Let us pledge that all our veterans, past, present and future, will see an America that honors their sacrifice not just by placing flowers on their graves but by making the promise in our Pledge of Allegiance of a nation “With liberty and justice for all” a vibrant and enduring reality in their honor.
Former Specialist Fifth Class Bob Ewegen is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
