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Date:         Thu, 12 Nov 1992 00:57:53 -0600
From:         "VALENTINE M. SMITH" <CDELL@UMKCVAX1.BITNET>
Subject:      "11 November"
Comments: To: val-l@ucf1vm.bitnet, jwales@iubvm.bitnet, olsenj@stolaf.edu,
              kousen@rayleigh.res.utc.com, klur@maristb.bitnet,
              writers@ndsuvm1.bitnet, Fi@grebyn.com, kruchio@epas.utoronto.ca,
              lhnelson@ukanvm.BITNET, 113355@doluni1.bitnet

"11 November"

(Dedicated to Liese Lorson, Toby Hughes, Mike McCarthy, Lydia Fish,
and all those who care)

This is a hard piece to write, 'cause I want to talk about hate,
Vietnam, war in general, Armistice/Veteran's Day, and what a couple
of folks mean to me.

Vietnam is "my" war, the war of my generation, the war that killed
58,000 + fine Americans, many of whom died without a bloody clue as
to why, too many of them poor, or black, or reluctant draftees of
every stripe, and it tore my generation apart. In the dark days of
the Sixties, and they were a lot darker than those who accuse us of
all manners of sins - drug use, permissive and public sex,
anti-government, anti-American, anti-everything - would have us to
believe it was.

Vietnam HURT! It hurt those of us who went, and fought, and died, and
it hurt those of us who couldn't (my fate) or wouldn't go, and who
got entangled in that complex web called "the anti-war movement."
Either way, many of us are still scarred a quarter-century later, and
still the polarizations exist.

Now, let me take to an aside here, about that grand and glorious
institution called "hatred." My friend Liese, over there on that list
POLITICS, asked an eloquent question at the end of her overwhelmingly
intellectual post today (and she's always one of my heroes, that
woman can write!), which was directed at the POLITICS rightists,
"What does it feel like to hate so much?" I thought to myself, "Ain't
a one of those guys that's going to admit to hating anybody" so I
thought I'd tell you about one person's battle with hate. That hate
kept me out of Vietnam, the Army decided I probably might kill damned
near anybody, I was that angry and hateful when they latched onto me
just before my 20th birthday in 1967, though it was the next year
before they actually caught me in Kansas City, and I volunteered to
go.

That hate was kindled in me by harsh parenting, too many beatings,
and six years of battling against 41 other young men just as angry
and pissed off about life as I was. When I was 15 and 16, hate burned
in me white hot, I'd soon as punch you as talk to you, and I was
crafty, fought dirty, fought to win, 'cause I was raised to always
fight, gamble, play to win, and even in hell, which I believed I had
descended into, I didn't want to lose. Losing meant being in that
shithole for life, and I KNEW it wasn't going to happen to me. Yet, I
kept on hatin' and fightin', and reading those damned books, always
reading something.

Now, I never read all that hifalutin' stuff Liese has read, which
probably makes me relatively culturally ignorant, but reading was my
anchor in that miasma called Northville State Hospital. That was one
of the things that finally cured me of that all-consuming hatred,
another gets back to Liese's question. Let me tell you something. It
feels shitty as you can imagine to be eaten up by hating folks - I
hated my Mom for fifteen years almost incandescently, and absolutely
all my waking hours were wrapped up that abiding, miserable state of
mind. I hated hating, 'cause it left no time to be young, or to fall
in love, or trust anyone, or just to be happy once in awhile. You
want to know what hate feels like when you hate that much? You want
to die every bloody minute you're alive, you know you're the lowest
son-of-a-bitch alive 'cause you hate your own mother, so bad that for
two years, you refused to see ANY of your family so you didn't have
to deal with hate. That's a lot of aloneness, isolation and anger for
a teen-aged boy to carry around, and I carried it pretty badly, let
me tell you. I was depressed a lot, and injured a lot, and I left a
trail of injuries behind me as my boiling rage roared out of my mind,
mouth, fists and feet.

But, when I was 17, the fools who held me "hostage" let me go to
"outside school," "real school," we called it, and I had to decide,
did I want to get out of this joint, and be the first "mental
patient" in Michigan history to graduate from "town school," or did I
want to be a "lifer," like those guys in the place who I knew would
be there twenty years later if they lived? I had to begin learning to
curb my hate, and focus on shining enough to "win" a route out of the
hellhole. I did, by the backdoor, so to speak. I ran off, and
manipulated (I frankly admit that's what I flt I had to do) the
hospital, my parents and my doctors into letting me go.

While I was there at the high school in town, (I went twice, I got
busted out for a semester for running off, that was a no-no - my
despair at ever beating all that anger got away from me, and I
scuttled away in the dark for a cold run in the rain, and
ignominiously surrendered, frozen)), I was allowed to read anything
our high school library had to read. My friend Mike McCarthy reminded
me today about a war I read a lot about as a boy, the war that
spawned Hitler, and Doug McArthur, and dozens of other intense heroes
and villains of my parent's day, World War I, the War to End All
Wars, they called it then.

When I was 17, I read Barbara Tuchman's _The Guns of August. She's
pooh-poohed some these days as a "popular" historian, but I like her
books. Anyway, though I cannot find the exact citation, lt me share
with you my impression of that fateful day of 11 November, 1918 -  At
the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918,
after four of the bloodiest years of war Europe had seen since the
Hundred Years War a few centuries before, the guns stopped firing. A
great hush fell over the torn and bruised land as silence reigned
supreme. The war was over, done, the combantants had agreed to an
armistice, the carnage stopped, a moment of time stood still.

My grandfather's generation believed that was the end of war -
Kaiser Bill had been beaten, that nasty Tsar was gone, as were all
that damned Kings and Emperors, many Americans said, now all we have
to worry about are the Reds. My folks worried about those Reds, and
we, my generation, were accused of BEING those nasty Reds 'cause we
thought the government was wrong, we smoked dope, and we liked
fornicating far too much.  I came out my hell, my well of hatred,
seared to the bone, beginning a lifelong steeping of self into all
kinds of history, spanning the four major wars fought through this
century by my country - World War I, II, Korea, and Vietnam - and all
the politics you could ever want to devour, plus a lot of strange
byways because I'm of a curious type of mind.

Somehow, by the time, I had married, in 1969, I had healed to the
point of half a functional human, and after
stepping back into the well of self-hatred for four years when I got
divorced in 1973, I almost lost all the ground I had gained since
graduating from that outside school back there in '65. I tried to
kill myself during an eclipse of the moon in May, 1975, and that was
the purgative of the last of the old hatred, and the beginning of the
end of the new self-hatred.

But, now I was meeting the more dysfunctional folks that served like
all those good men Toby sang with tonight on that show. THey did what
they thought was right, they paid a high price for it, and they have
all my respect and honor, be it that they survived relatively intact,
as Toby and his wife Sher appear to be, or in the pain a few Vietnam
AND World War II vets are still in, or worse, in the void all those
who didn't come back fell into! It hurt me to the core in the late
Sixties and early Seventies to hear about flying in copters and
planes with body bags holding flesh that had been your buddies, being
in the jungle for weeks with gung-ho ninety day wonders that
everybody disliked, trying to get by doing whatever your job was,
some shirking, some being superb, like all armies before and since. I
was agony to understand those guys thought we were cowards for being
against the war and the government. It was exhilarating to lose a
primary against a sitting President, and "win" when he packed it in.
LBJ was the "enemy," but he, too, helped me cure my hate. I
understood he thought he was doing the right thing, I just thought he
was wrong, I did not hate him like most folks did.

My views of Vietnam are kaliedescopic flashes of scenes on the tube,
fleshed out by the word pictures of the guys who lived to tell about
it. I can see those jungles pretty clearly, hear the thump-thump of
mortar fire, the thudding whirring of 'copter blades, the staccato of
machine gun bullets, the screaming, thundering warplanes roaring out
of DaNang or Saigon, hellbent to drop some crap on Uncle Ho. My view
also sees quiet, unsung dying, like all wars, with blood pumping out
too fast, horrible pain from a gaping wound that's going to cost a
hand or a leg, or the ability to walk, and for some, life itself. My
view sees a naked napalmed girl running down a road screaming, and of
desperate Vietnamese clinging to helicopter runners in the last hours
before the fall of Saigon, and a lot of unspoken vignettes in
between.

It felt shitty to hold all that hate and pain, it felt even crappier
to be pitted against folks you basically liked and respected because
you didn't go and they did, and yet out of that searing divide that
was MY coming of age, I beat "hating so much." I am not a Democrat or
Republican, Libertarian or Communist, I'm just me - a vagued tired
guy, who saw Toby Hughes and Lydia Fish tonight, singing and
enjoying, folks being in touch with a past both grim, and critically
alive. Folks who were just words on a screen now have dimension for
me, heft, a past and a face, personalities and lives instead f trying
to glean them through their words alone. I continually understand
"community" more wholly, "humanity" more fully as people take on
greater shape for me, the worn and wheezing writer just trrying to
stay even within, and move ahead some.

I don't condone the burning of flags, but I also cannot condone those
who would do violence to those who feel compelled to do such a thing.
Flag-burning unto itself isn't bad - when I was a boy, that was flag
ettiquette for worn, ripped, damaged or soiled flags - but what
people do in its wake often is. Toby's friends, and my father's
friends, and my grandfather's friends, all died to allow us to have
the freedoms our Constitution says we have, which includes "free
speech." What is spice for you might be shit for the next guy, both
of you are allowed to feel that, but neither of you are allowed to
IMPOSE what you believe on that other guy. I respect Toby, and all
those guys who sang with him tonight on "In Country: Songs of the
Vietnam War," but I'm glad I didn't go.

My hatred would have been fed by that place, I often feel its killing
resonance deep with my cleansed soul and its dark memories. I would
have been a LURP par excellent, a killer in the dark, acting out all
those rages in a politically, socially accepted way, and THEN I would
have come home even more screwed up than I had been. Legal killing. I
dreamed about it often in the dim, pained years I was locked away,
and many times after until the army bluntly told me one day in '68
they didn't want me, that I was "too erratic" to be in the service.
One Major put it to me straight, "Boy, we're not sure who you'd kill
if we gave you a gun!"

So, I was passed over, and I've been reviled often in the years since
for turning sharply "left" to war opposition, marching in the streets
and all that. The Quakers helped me find myself, and I was neither
left nor right, Communist or Fascist - I just believed, still
believe, that there is a better way than war. I don't see it
practiced, not sure humans really want a better path, but I believe
that path is there. I expunged my hate, walked away from fixed,
narrow beliefs, vowed to like myself and my world, to learn every
day, to care, to respect those pathes and people whose direction I
did not take, to understand we are all different, we all have
meaning, and no hatred can be as strong as love. I mean caring,
"real" love that transcends belief, ethnicity, gender, sex itself to
genuinely understanding we all live on this mudball, beauteous as it
is, befouled as it sometimes is, together. Our pasts are a chunk of
who we are, but in the end, all that pales against the straight fact
- we are in this world t o g e t h e r.

I remember the past on this 11 November, revel in the wondrous
friends I have and who are all over the place, and say, look forward
to tomorrow. If we can put the warring behind us, we really could
make this planet a pretty fine place to live. While I'm no paragon,
and I hope you don't EVER think I am, and I'm surely no optimist,
though often I can be, I see this from my past, that hatred leads to
killing that leads to war, of one kind or another. Who needs that? I
negate not those who've had to fight, but I deplore that such a
choice had to be made. "What does it feel like to hate so much?" So
bad I had to leave it behind.

Again, thanks special to Toby, Liese and Michael for inspiring me to
write this complicated mess. VMS
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