I turned away, my face in my hands, and found myself almost violently embraced by a man I’d never seen. He said, “It’s all right, brother. I understand.”
He held me for a long ten or fifteen seconds and then turned me loose. He was crying too.
As I quickly came back to myself, I was embarrassed to have been held by someone I didn’t know. He stepped away, then walked over and embraced someone else. He brought me comfort in that moment, and I wonder if he understood what I felt. He may have been full of pride that he’d fought in Southeast Asia. I don’t know. I wasn’t. And I’m not now.
Pride in my combat flying has dimmed as I have looked back on my nation’s role in Southeast Asia, yet the memories of my youthful excitement about learning to fly military aircraft are somehow still bright. That early seduction into war needs to be told.
Aeons ago when we had no tools of war beyond sticks and stones, the consequence of armed conflict was not usually massive death. The advent of manned flight, especially, has changed all that. And we don’t seem to mind selling our war technology and instruction to other nations. In my pilot training class was an Iranian student pilot.
A search of history—of ourselves—to find reason for hope in these matters is not comforting. As George Santayana said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
The life of an enemy civilian—mother, son, daughter, father—gets lost in the strategy of war and the viewing of war, whether through scopes, bomb sights, or television cameras. Real life, the feel of it, the skin, the blood, the hope to live, is lost in translation.
Will leaders holding the reins to war ever learn to listen well to the enemies’civilians? Put themselves in their places? Know how religion, culture, traditions, have shaped these civilians, their aspirations?
If an American Indian had interviewed me when I was eighteen, would I have been able to explain the fact that so much of my boyhood—playtime, reading time, movie-viewing time—was spent killing pretend Indians or reading about their being killed or seeing them killed because they were all bad, and not worth much? And my enjoyment in killing pretend Indians was not because they were a threat—we’d already killed God knows how many of them over a couple of hundred years. Part of my enjoyment came from the fact that I had a young, impressionable human heart in my time (the 1950s and 1960s) and place (an America where non-Caucasians were often considered inferior and were advertised as such).
The need of soldiers to depersonalize the enemy (gook, gomer) is as old as war. And why is that? Because humans sometimes find it hard to live with what they do—killing people, other soldiers, even—as they do it.
War machines have killed millions of young men, women, old people, and babies during the last century. Every major industrialized nation has a machine. Certain moving parts of the machine, young men and women, are no braver, no better, no worse, generally, than the youngsters in the camp of the enemy. Leaders with power mistrust one another, manufacture slogans, taunt and mislead, and instigate battles they will not have to fight in—alongside youngsters who die dreaming of home and heroism.
Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine recruitment commercials touch on the need for little boys, and now girls, to be heroes. They do not advertise the killing of other human beings.
FOR MY PART in the failed attempt to rescue Jingo 2-Alpha and 2-Bravo, I won a Distinguished Flying Cross. In that way I became a hero. After the mission that day, I was asked by our awards officer if I wanted to be written up for a Silver Star (a few steps below the Medal of Honor). I doubted that I deserved a Silver Star, and I liked the way a Distinguished Flying Cross looked. It was shaped like an airplane propeller. I said, “No, I’ll take a DFC. I think they’re neat.”
“Well,” he said, “write down what happened.”
In 2003, my second child, a son, was born. My wife, Kristina, and I took care of him during his first month while I took a break from teaching and writing, and at one point we were also in charge, for a day, of our two-year-old nephew. For a while I was in charge of both the toddler and the infant. This experience, the details and demands, made me think of all the women worldwide who, alone, care for children, and it made me consider how we tend to define courage.
A man with an airplane flies into the air, into physical danger. Let’s say his mission is a combat mission. The chances are he will return, and when he does, he will have enjoyed the flight—probably in direct proportion to the danger he faced and evaded during the flight. And even if he didn’t “enjoy” it, he will enjoy discussing it, reliving it, owning the experience forever. And he will have been trained, back in the States with friends, in ways that are generally enjoyable. He will have been thoroughly trained to handle most of the situations he confronts. He will work with men who normally think and act as he does. He may win medals, as I did, that proclaim his courage.
And while there is no doubt about the bravery of many soldiers, sailors, and airmen under far more trying conditions than I’ve ever faced—especially the bravery of those facing death, of POWs—what about the woman with two kids, who doesn’t have the means to take care of them, but who does so, day after day and night after night for years? Without training, sometimes without friendship, and without hope of help or of a Distinguished Flying Cross?
We tend to think of courage only as something shown by men in battle over a relatively short time.
It didn’t take a lot of courage for me to do what I did in the war, and given the conveniences in my life, it’ll probably take far less courage to raise my son than the courage shown by so many mothers and fathers in my country and around the world, in places our nation and other nations will not venture to give aid but will venture to make war.
When the combat flying is over for the young pilots—in any nation—who have followed me down my path, many will feel courageous, some with good reason perhaps, but only a few will grow to feel about their experience as I do now, that the pull of the flying machine, the dream of flying, seduced me.
Late in the war, I wrote in my journal a quote from somewhere: “There is no country but the heart.”
A FRIEND OF MINE who lived in Vietnam after our war there wants to read this book because, having heard so much about the point of view of Vietnamese on the ground during the war, she wants to know the point of view of the pilots in the air. I’ve not asked her what she knows about the point of view of those on the ground. I know it’s varied and complicated. But I do know that plenty of North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao troops on the ground in Laos were looking up at my airplane and thinking, I’d like to kill him. I never thought the same about them, nor do I think most of my fellow pilots were intent on killing people. Most of us were decent, good individuals who did not want to kill innocent human beings. Is an enemy soldier following his own conscience, his own family, culture, peers, and country, not innocent? Was I innocent? It’s not so simple. In some ways I was, but I fear that in some ways I wasn’t.
Clearly, civilians are innocent. Killing them should be seen as an unjust act—always—rather than as an “accident.” And unjust acts must be, before anything else can happen, called unjust.
WHAT SOLDIER in the field of battle is going to admit that what he or she is doing isn’t worth it? Very few, for by doing so, the soldier would have to face and admit an extraordinary stupidness in himself or herself, and as human beings we’d rather avoid that more than almost anything. And besides, no sane soldier believes that he or she will be the one to die, else enlistment would stop. It’s the other guy who is going to die.
Are military people brainwashed? Is the military a cult? How is it not a cult? So overwhelming is a soldier’s inclination to believe what his leaders believe that the possibility that their war might have been wrong is still incomprehensible to most veterans of Vietnam—or of any other war, anywhere. If you run the risk of dying for a cause, it may not be easy to examine the cause.
So we immunize ourselves against the deaths of innocent people—civilians and soldie
rs.
I hear the voices of old soldiers, old friends even, speaking to me: You’re a softy. People die. War is hell.
It was never hell for me except for a short while here and there. I was just a pilot. And I loved to fly.
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