The Weekly Screed (#544)

Louie Velazquez, we hardly knew ye
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — It was probably appropriate that yesterday, Memorial Day,
the Times’ “Names of the Dead” box, listing U.S. GI’s killed in
Afghanistan, was unusually lengthy. Ten men joined America’s long,
long parade of the honored dead while, elsewhere, in towns all over
the U.S., Memorial Day was commemorated by small bands of aged
American Legionnaires and VFW geezers in musty uniforms, saluting at
granite stones etched with the names of the mostly forgotten fallen.

In D.C., President Obama laid a wreath or two, and the wild hogs of
Rolling Thunder held their annual traffic jam in tribute to the
quintessential lost cause, the imaginary prison camps of North
Vietnam. A footnote to Rolling Thunder — one of America’s great
oddities — was Sarah Palin’s effort to horn in and cadge some street
cred from the biker constituency. She screwed up by trying to lead the
parade. Said Ted Shpak, Rolling Thunder’s “national legislative
director” (and probably the guy responsible for all those sad black
flags above every fire station and post office), “If she wanted to
come on the ride, she should have come in the back.”

Or, as Lloyd Bentsen might have said, “Governor, you’re no Rosa Parks.”

None of this political theater offered much succor to those of us
reading those ten names in the Times. The one who stayed with me even
after I hurriedly turned the page was Sgt. Louie A. Ramos Velazquez,
from Camuy, Puerto Rico. He had served in the glory-soaked 101st
Airborne. Sgt. Velazquez was 39 years old.

I first paid heed to lists of the honored dead when the grizzled
gearheads of Rolling Thunder were my pink-cheeked contemporaries and
the Pentagon’s great threshing machine of cannon fodder was Vietnam.
In those days, they didn’t issue names in the daily press, just
numbers — “body counts.” For example, as recorded by Rick Perlstein in
his book, Nixonland, 44 kids were killed in ‘Nam on 12 March 1968.
The next day, 53 kids won an eventual spot on Maya Lin’s black wall in
Washington; the next day, 62; 41 the day after. On 16 March, 48 died —
“five of them shy of their nineteenth birthday.”

Kids.

Mostly, we killed kids in Vietnam, a long black line of boys
sacrificing their lives before they ever got to vote. In a way, it’s
better, easier, to kill kid soldiers, still in their teens, because
the brevity of their lives has given them little notion of how long
and rich and surprising life can be. Kill an 18-year-old and, as his
blood spills into the mud and his final breath hisses from his throat,
he hardly imagines what he’s missing out on.

I guess that’s why I turned back to Sgt. Velazquez’ page-bottom,
agate-type death-blurb. Here was no kid. Louie Velazquez had been in
the U.S. Army long enough to make full sergeant, which takes quite a
while. He was a “lifer.” Almost 40, he knew all the secrets that it
takes forty years to discover and all the answers it takes forty years
to figure out. Sgt. Velazquez was probably married — which more than
doubles his tragedy. He probably had children, another doubling. And
he was old enough that if he’d started early, there might even be an
infant in the world who now will never call him “Grandpa,” or “Papi.”

Sgt. Velazquez had enough years in the service that he could start
thinking about mustering out, collecting his GI pension and starting a
new career, maybe including a few years of long-delayed higher
learning — an education appreciated by few school-weary 18-year-olds
but cherished by anybody as old as Louie Velazquez.

The Sarge, at 39, had probably seen many friends die, most of them
kids, and with each fallen comrade, he had to feel a deeper
appreciation that he was still alive — and not just alive. He wasn’t
yet forty. He still had half a life to live. To so many of his troops,
he was the “old man,” but in the world beyond Afghanistan, the Army
and the blood brotherhood of his particular combat hell, he was in his
youthful prime.

Until they killed him. And sent his name in to the Pentagon, to be
passed on to the Times as soon as his family was told that he’d be
coming home in a box.

It occurred to me yesterday, Memorial Day, that a real tribute to
Louie Velazquez — and all his brothers — rather than an obit in the
Times or an etching on a polished slab, would be a new law. The Sgt.
Velazquez Law would require that no one is eligible for the United
States armed forces until at least the age of 39 years.

Louie’s Law would stipulate that we no longer kill kids who’ve never
really lived, who have little idea of what they’ll miss if they die,
who believe the crap they hear from politicians and recruiters about
flag and country but truly have no idea why they’re out in
God-knows-where killing strangers and shoveling up the remains of
their buddies.

I understand the consequences. If our generals can only go after men
with wives and families, homes and mortgages, careers in progress and
dreams yet unfulfilled, with grandkids on the way and vacation plans
in July — well, they won’t get many recruits. And the ones they get
will probably need rehab before basic training.

We might not even get enough bodies to wage even one half-decent war.
And we might have to fight it locally — like in Rhode Island.

Which is, of course, the point. We have history’s largest armed force,
the world’s fattest military budget (by a factor of six), and three
wars running — eating up the future of our children — because the
Pentagon is allowed to recruit our children. We dress our kids in
khaki, hand them deadly weapons and teach them how to kill before they
have — through life’s natural course — learned how to think. Before
they have any sense of the millions of choices life provides, we talk
them — we even bribe them now — into choosing death. Like their
favorite childhood villain, we suck them to the Dark Side.

Yes, many survive, learn skills and emerge from the armed forces
better prepared for life. Many of them grow up cleaner, stronger,
healthier in the service than they would have turned out if left to
their own devices in the disorderly civilian world.

It’s true that many soldiers — most, indeed — cheat death. Sgt. Louie
Velazquez of the heroic 101st, made an art of cheating death. He was a
lifer and a survivor.

Until last week.