The Weekly Screed (#761)

“I will bomb the shit out of ISIS…”
by David Benjamin

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.”
                                            — William Tecumseh Sherman

MADISON, Wis. — Hitchhiking in ’69 with my girlfriend Becky was easy, because she was gorgeous. We got rides, in minutes, all the way across America, always with men. Once, unintentionally, Becky got into an argument with one of these samaritans, a fierce, chiseled young guy who introduced himself as Danny. The topic, of course, was the war in Vietnam.

Becky was against it. Danny had been in it. Although barely past his 21st birthday, he’d spent more than two years at war. He’d been seriously wounded, once almost killed, three times. Becky shrugged off Danny’s ordeal. Infecting a conversation among strangers with an air of anger and tension that was all too commonplace in the Sixties, she dwelt relentlessly on the politics and morality of the war.

I tried to support Becky’s argument, but my heart wasn’t in it. Like so many kids I’d grown up with, Danny had plunged impetuously into a maelstrom of filth terror and death that neither Becky nor I could remotely imagine. We knew, rationally, that Danny’s war was, at best, a futile crusade. At worst, it was an atrocity that betrayed our country’s most cherished ideals. But Danny’s investment in that experience was too consuming and emotional to apply to it any sort of coherence or moral suasion.

All we could do — or should have done — was respect, even revere, the personal sacrifice that dominated Danny’s existence and would haunt him for all the rest of his life.

The lesson that I later gleaned from that encounter was never to allow myself to speak lightly, theoretically or ignorantly about the deepest and most visceral realities of humanity’s ugliest enterprise.

I recalled Danny a decade later when I was editing the weekly newspaper in a small Massachusetts town and learned that the chairman of our high school’s English department, Bob Tighe, had been invited to a Holocaust remembrance at Northeastern University. Bob, I discovered, was among the U.S. GIs who had liberated one of Hitler’s death camps. The next time I saw him, I asked for an interview about that experience. He declined, explaining that his contribution to the Northeastern forum was a singular exception to a personal rule: “I never talk about that.”

I didn’t press.

I came of age in the era of the Vietnam War. I did not go. Arduously, and at risk to my own freedom, I opposed the war, refused to go when summoned, and fought successfully for status as a conscientious objector (CO). As a Catholic school kid steeped in contrition, I felt guilty for dodging the Vietnam draft.

But not that guilty. No one who found a way to avoid that particular hell needs to regret his actions — whether they were relatively honorable and aboveboard, like performing “alternate service” as a CO, or simply expedient, like cheezing it to Montreal.

This is why I don’t begrudge presidential aspirant Donald Trump the alleged “bone spurs” that rendered him 4F during the war. Trump was richer than God, with a father who was connected to New York’s power elite. So, bone spurs or not, he was never going to ‘Nam.

If anything troubles me about Trump’s nifty Selective Service sidestep, it’s the fact that, unlike me and my high-school friend Barry — who spent years in exile in Canada — Donald ducked his “duty” without qualms. I’m convinced that Trump felt neither a momentary pang of guilt for his non-service, nor a twinge of empathy for the scarred, bitter vets like Danny who came back in badly-fitted pieces.

Unlike all the poor black kids and smalltown hayseeds who got fed into the meatgrinder, Donald Trump was entitled — by birth, by wealth and by sheer arrogance — to never dirty his tiny hands with the blood and slime of the quagmire in Indochina.

I know this because of the flippancy that Trump manifests when he talks about “bombing the shit out of ISIS,” and “making the military so strong” that “no one will mess with us.”

“Oh, yeah?” I ask that big pink face on TV. “How?” I ask because you don’t win wars with bombs. You win it with infantry. You win it by killing kids — yours and theirs.

If Trump had paid any attention to his war, in Vietnam, he’d know that the grunts who died there, who took his place — and mine — on that heartbreaking black wall in Washington (has he ever been to the Wall?), never knew, from day to day, from tour to tour, which of the people all around them were the so-called enemy. They could never be sure that innocent civilians were innocent civilians.

As Adrian Cronauer (portrayed by Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam) said, “It’s very difficult to find a Vietnamese man named Charlie. They’re all named Nyugen or Doh or things like that.”

As in Vietnam, an “enemy combatant” in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen or any other Middle Eastern nation looks pretty much like everyone else. He wears the same kaftan, turban, sandals, beard, pigmentation, language and religion as your typical storekeeper or cabdriver. He sports no stars, no bars, no stripes nor any other symbol of military rank. To blend in, an ISIS commando needs only to shuck his ammo belt and ditch his Kalashnikov. He’s Victor Charlie and he’s invisible.

Where do you drop the bombs? How do you beat the shit out of a phantom?

If Donald Trump can answer this, coherently and credibly, I’ll believe that he actually cares about all those damaged veterans who have been, to him — until he needed them as stage props in his preposterous presidential campaign — also invisible.