Many Memorial Days - May 30, 2011

Mónica Hutchens Tipton Every Thanksgiving for several years, my parents hosted enlisted Marines from Camp Pendleton for a day of food and family fun. The hope was to relieve the loneliness that may be overwhelming on a holiday that nearly everyone in the United States celebrated. For some of these boys, it was the last family meal they ever shared. I was a young, thoughtful, and immature teenager when this tradition began in our household. I remember the first year hoping that perhaps I’d meet some cute guy who’d hold my photo in his shirt pocket and return home a hero. What I found was that these were boys just two or three years older than me from far-off places like Nebraska, South Carolina, and Louisiana who had been forced into service on behalf of a country that I couldn’t even find mentioned in any of my social studies books. Most of these kids shared the bravado that six grueling weeks of basic training created in them. The first days were spent stripping the boys of their individual identities: same shaved head, same uniform, same underwear, same words spoken at the same time. Every aspect of their lives was focused on changing their perspective from “me” to “us,” and the process had a 99.9% success rate. The next weeks were spent on rigorous physical training as well as precision use of weaponry. Those boys from the hills and plains had no problem with that part. The guys from poverty-stricken neighborhoods in the inner cities reveled in the power and struggled with the discipline. After a remarkably short period of time, however, these recruits emerged as competent components of a war machine. Some of these guys stand out in my memory. One PFC from Arkansas began teaching us kids one of the semi-obscene marching chants that he had learned in basic. My dad quickly put a stop to that once he heard the chorus from the living room. Another young man hardly spoke, and it was hard to tell if he was enjoying his meal. He answered my parents’ queries, “More turkey?” “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am,” but otherwise spent the day on the sofa silently watching football on television. I thought that he was terribly shy, or perhaps slightly retarded, or maybe just very h homesick. Years later, as my adult self replayed that memory through the clarifying lens of an experienced high school teacher, I realized that what he was enduring was the numbing awareness of what was to come after that Thanksgiving dinner in the home of strangers. All of these young men went from Camp Pendleton to various stations in Vietnam to fight in once pristine jungles and on breath-taking beaches against an enemy that was difficult to identify and even more difficult to understand. While every red-blooded American child born since 1945 was well aware of the Threat of Communism to Our Democratic Way of Life, we really were only taught about the meaning of “threat” and very, very little about anything else. For me, that Threat became mixed up with the nighttime sounds of the training those boys were receiving over on the base. Concussions of the heavy artillery a few miles away rattled windows and my tender sensibilities. The thumping of Sea Stallion helicopters in formation like some terrifying flock of raptors seemed to take forever to fade into the distance. There was the constant presence of warships when we looked over the ocean, and the few days when those sounds and sights vanished signified the deployment of yet another thousand young men across that ocean, off to confront the Threat. I remember so very clearly the last of these Thanksgiving feasts. One of the guests that year was a dark-haired young man with black-rimmed glasses. I don’t remember his name or any other details about him, nor do I remember any of the other recruits from that meal or the preceding one. By that time I was a junior in high school and had for the last two years sat through anxious nights with friends waiting for birth dates to be pulled in the draft lottery. I had shared their agonizing decisions to enlist in a “less risky” branch of the service like the Navy or the Air Force, to wait to be drafted into the Army or Marine Corps, to quietly slip away to Canada or Europe, to register as a conscientious objector, to hope to God that the grade point average in college was high enough to qualify for a deferment. My own boyfriend’s birthday, December 4th, had come up fourth, a guarantee of a draft notice in the next few months. To refuse to serve was to embarrass one’s family and to be labeled a Communist; to earn a student deferment was a blessing or maybe a cop out; to be drafted was suicide. Later I learned that rich kids had other options, but ours was a working class town with an economy based at the time on the nearby military installation and on providing meals and lodging to those passing through on their way to Los Angeles or San Diego. The boys around our table had none of those draft avoidance options either. That particular dark-haired draftee with the glasses spent most of the day talking to my mother, a passionate patriot who wouldn’t let us watch “I Love Lucy” in the 1950’s because Ms. Ball had been brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee for questioning. Dark-haired Boy hung around the kitchen, not the television in the living room, so I paid little attention. I was my polite, plain, thoughtful self, making the expected small talk, relieved at the antics of my little brother and sister that took away the tension I felt in the presence of what I had come to dread as future ghosts. I could not understand why my parents didn’t see this. I did not understand how significant their generosity was. Mom corresponded regularly with the dark-haired young man for the next several months. I don’t remember if she told us the content of his letters and doubt that she ever shared her responses. What I do remember is the letter that arrived after an unusually long period of silence from the far side of the Pacific. “My son often wrote about how much he enjoyed having Thanksgiving with you and your family,” it read. “Thank you for giving him a taste of home before he shipped out.” Dark-Haired Boy had been killed in a firefight at a location they called Hill 937, better known later as Hamburger Hill. We were stunned. My thinly veiled anti-war sentiments burst forth, and I rebelled vociferously against the cause of what had been my great fear: someone I knew personally died over there for no good reason that I could determine. There would be others later whom I knew, blessedly few, but it didn’t matter if I knew them by their faces or their names. I knew them because they were of my generation of kids who had been raised in the dream of a perfect and painless world and had been duped. We didn’t host any more Marines after that. My mother tumbled into depression that lasted for years., I left home as soon as I could legally do so, and thereafter I met many young men who had returned alive but broken. I loved a 23 year old who had been a jungle survival trainer. He slept with a knife, and everyone had to speak clearly when approaching him from behind. I listened to the stories of a dear, dear woman who as a young Army nurse, dropped into battlefields by helicopter to triage the wounded and take away those who were most likely to survive. I worked in the theater with a couple of guys who didn’t say a word about their time in Southeast Asia, but were incredibly gifted comic actors. Years later I knew a man who described his week in “The Cage” kicking his heroin habit before he shipped home from Vietnam. Most of his unit had to do the same, he said, so his alcoholism was insignificant. Many of those sixtyish men now live under the bridges, along the highways, in the marshes, and in the concrete forests that resemble the places where they served their tours of duty, and that they later came to consider as their rightful homes. Their refusal to follow anyone’s rules is understandable in the context of the way they spent their late teens and early twenties. Today is Memorial Day according to the law and according to the calendar and according to all the flags flying and speeches being made and editorials being printed. Perhaps I am not alone, however, in feeling that there are many memorial days, official and unofficial, throughout the year. The one that hits me the hardest, that brings the most tears, that reopens the old wounds, and that reaffirms my commitment to a world without wars is Thanksgiving. To all who, like Dark-Haired Boy, never came home: I love you. To all who returned wounded physically, emotionally, spiritually: I love you. May the remainder of your lives be as painless as possible by whatever means necessary. To all who continue to send kids into battle for unknowable reasons and unwinnable causes in untenable circumstances for unethical gain: go to hell.