Ponderings

With American support for the endless war in Iraq waning, President Bush played the Vietnam card this week. Likening the current dissenters to the fabled hippies of yore, President Bush warned that a withdrawal of troops in Iraq would unleash a torrent of violence reminiscent of the Cambodian nightmare of the late 1970s.

“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields’.”

Maybe so. And for a moment the prediction sucked the air from my dissent and I pondered the possible parallel. After all, children of ‘my generation’ have spent our entire lives being shamed by those before and after us for our ill treatment of the Vietnam Veterans. Our cross to bear is the legacy of returning soldiers who received taunts instead of cheers and death threats in lieu of a hero’s welcome. Time cannot erase the tragedy that the uniformed soldiers, many of them serving against their will, bore the bitter edge of the growing disdain for the Vietnam War in those coming of age years for my generation.

Neither can time erase the haunting memory of the crossroads faced by a generation of young adults, a crossroads in which the choices were to either accept the judgment of our elders that our protests were misguided, or to believe that our government had sacrificed us (and the Vietnamese people) to the mythic military industrial complex. In the rearview mirror we’ve made our bed with the unworthiness of our dissent rather than face the utter helplessness of a citizenry betrayed. We opted for the judgment and carry the shame.

Hooking into that shame and laying the Khmer Rouge on top is brilliant strategy for controlling the Iraq war dissent. Shame is a powerful controlling force. Shame hooks into us at the very core of our being at the pivotal crossroad where unworthiness is the alternative to despair. Shame is the undercurrent that sucks our self confidence and leaves us at the bar of self destruction asking for one more round.

My stay at the bar this week was interrupted by time spent with a WWII vet. My friend was reminiscing about the war years and his return as a veteran. He said, “back then we had respect for veterans.” I braced myself for the inevitable. But what came next wasn’t a call to bless the troops, to sing patriotic songs in church, or even to support the current war. What came next was the recollection of the GI bill and the way it enabled returning soldiers to go on to school. And then a remembrance of the healthcare afforded to veterans and access to jobs with sustainable wages. Respect for veterans had nothing to do with flag waving and everything to do with honoring our commitments.

Dissent is neither anti-American nor anti-Veteran, and it certainly is not anti-Iraqi. To be sure, when the United States soldiers leave Iraq there will be a tremendous shifting of power. Without the continued infusion of military might, the future for Iraq is uncertain and our vulnerability is palpable; so we clutch the familiar. Yet continued war making profits only the munitions makers, the grave diggers, and the poisonous well of our communal shame. Although this path of shame is studded with the fool’s gold of good intentions and smoothed from our many footsteps, I yearn for the bramble filled path of humility. Truth and Reconciliation commissions, Marshall Plans, and reparations may be signs of weakness and vulnerability, but they are the only real alternatives to the killing fields.