The Vietnam War Memorial: An Apology
Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation
“The end of a poem should sound like the click when a box closes.”
Whose box?
Not mine.
I don’t even own a box that clicks.
Just one of the many lies we’ve been told, or tell each other—about this current war, for instance.
Or that we’ll live to be eighty without drooling all over ourselves.
What fools and liars—all of us at Woodstock, stoned on drugs and sex, when in fact we were home cutting the front lawn or enrolled in Kaplan courses.
All of us protesting the war when in fact we were stretched out on couches, hungover, watching reruns of I Love Lucy while well-paid doctors swore we had twelve toes and four testicles.
And free love?
Invented by men, for men.
Even my father knew that.
We’re the ones who won’t say boo! to our children, who listen to rock and roll sell SUVs, gold balls, tampons.
And let’s not forget my friend who dropped acid with his son, crooning “Yellow Submarine” into a camcorder.
Something meaningful to share while he’s dying of prostate cancer, saving up cash to freeze himself for the next century.
How’s that for The Big Chill. How’s that for t-t-t-t-talkin’ ’bout my generation…?
“Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation,” a reference to the Who song, is, among other things, a not-so-subtle takedown of the all the myths surrounding the 60s. Yeah, it was a cool, maybe even “groovy,” period at times, but it also was the most confusing and scary of years (especially 1968-70) that I have ever experienced, though 2022, with all the nutcases running around drunk on conspiracy theories and wielding automatic rifles, is almost as spooky. But what I really want to talk about is the Vietnam War allusion in this prose poem. More specifically, I want to riff on the Vietnam War Memorial. For being such an historic and formidable structure, this memorial doesn’t receive the attention it deserves, much like the veterans of that war, and, for that matter, all the wars that followed, which have been fought mostly by poor white kids or kids of color. It’s no secret that the Iraq War never would’ve happened if the sons and daughters of middle- and upper-class white people had made up most of the armed forces.
I remember taking my oldest son to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore’s disturbing documentary on how and why we got into Iraq—a movie that made us all realize yet again that when old, grey-haired white politicians in blue suits and red ties, with prostatitis and hemorrhoids, gather in a room and decide to unsheathe their gold pens, unnecessary wars often follow. Think of all the dumb wars that have been started by old guys who have never carried a gun or even suffered the indignities of a draft physical. My son was twenty at the time we saw Moore’s flick, and halfway through it, I noticed him wiping tears from his cheeks. “They were all my age, poor or black or Hispanic,” he said later. “Boy, did they get screwed.”
They surely did, not to mention the parents whose children came back in body bags.
Much of the same can be said about the soldiers who fought in Vietnam, even though back then there was supposedly an equal opportunity draft—a point I’ll dispute later. When the War Memorial was proposed, it was like a magnet drawing to it all the controversies that swirled around the War itself. It probably didn’t help that its architect was a twenty-one-year-old Asian woman named Maya Lin. A woman? An Asian? That alone blew people’s minds.
The monument itself, located not far from the Lincoln Memorial, is composed of two 246-foot-9-inch long black granite walls that seem to shimmer even on the darkest of days. Like a mirror, the panels on the walls and the 58,320 names etched on them reflect back the faces of visitors, the transitory clouds above, and the surrounding foliage, so that what’s living and what’s dead must pay respect to each other.
An extraordinary testament to the lives and bravery of the fallen soldiers, you might say.
Yes, but I didn’t always feel that way.
When I was young, long-haired, and somewhat clueless, I had come to believe I could make sense of the world as no one had before me. I was reading existential books like The Divided Self by R. D. Laing, along with a lot of anthropology. In short, I was an ideologue with dopey opinions on just about everything, often shocked and outraged when others failed to recognize my brilliance. So when I first heard about the proposed wall, I was offended. How could so many men of my generation be memorialized on a slabs of black granite as cold and impersonal as a coffin. For the next fifteen years, whenever the Vietnam War Memorial was mentioned, I was quick to point out its stupidity, even though I had never visited it.
Truth be known, my motives for attacking the Memorial’s existence were based more on guilt than on my obsession to right what I perceived to be a grotesque wrong. You see, besides never actually visiting the monument, I didn’t serve in Vietnam, though I had had many experiences with veterans. One night I got into a confrontation at a bar with some rich hippies, whose dads had probably paid a hefty price to get them medical deferments. They were taunting a grunt who was on leave and sitting at the bar, just wanting to have his Carling Black Label in peace. The hippies called him a “baby killer,” and that was too crazy for me. There was some pushing, some shoving, until they eventually drove off in a cherry-red Corvette–no doubt an eighteenth birthday present from one of their dads.
I also had personally witnessed some of the human roadkill left behind by the war, which taught me that you could physically leave Vietnam behind but that it was much harder to exorcise its haunting images. For instance, there was the guy two years ahead of me in high school who’d get drunk every night at a bar called Brinks, then jump from the second floor onto a crowd so tightly packed it was hard to lift a drink to one’s lips. Inexplicably, the crowd would cheer him on, or sometimes create an open space and watch him crash onto the beer-soaked linoleum floor. This guy, with his long curly golden hair and angelic smile, eventually stumbled into a Catholic church one night and destroyed the chapel. I never saw him after that.
And then there was another veteran named Muny, who I met in Hermosa Beach, California in 1970. A slight Jewish guy with a mischievous smile and long, black curly hair, he’d been part of an elite Navy jet fighter squadron. The rumor was that he’d gotten a psych Section 8 discharge, though from what I could see, he wasn’t crazy–just an incredibly gentle soul. When we’d get drunk, he’d put his index finger to his lips as if silencing the world, and say, “Peter, listen.” I never knew what sound his antennae was picking up (the crackling of gunfire, the screams of Vietnamese children running through rice paddies aflame from napalm dropped on them by air-borne engines of death), or maybe, back home and safe now, he had been transfigured. Maybe it was the music of the spheres he was privileged to now, because he certainly looked as if he had seen the face of God. Rather than ask him, I just listened, which wasn’t easy to do with “Honky-Tonk Woman” blaring from the bar’s overhead speakers. I did see him cry once, though, when someone stole his leather flight jacket. That night my friends and I went on patrol to every bar in Hermosa, hoping the find the jerk who ripped it off.
I learned the most about Vietnam veterans when I was attending graduate school in the late 1970s and teaching a night school course at Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, NH. I had one student, a quiet, freckled, red-headed guy named Rusty, originally from Oklahoma, who seemed to struggle to sit still and concentrate. Another guy, Craig, was a medic who was as laid-back as Buddha. Because I had frequent conferences with students, I got to know both of them. One night, I asked the medic why the redhead was barely hanging on, while he, who had seen carnage up close, seemed almost unfazed by the War. “Hey, man, I’ve got my demons,” he said, “but Rusty’s problem is that he has one morality, and you gotta have two go to Vietnam and be able to tie your shoes when you come back. What I’m saying is that what happened there, what I saw and did, has nothing to do with my life here. Rusty can’t separate the two lives, and if he doesn’t learn how to, he’s fucked.” Later, when I got home, I wondered who was better off. Practically, Craig of course, but wasn’t this kind of compartmentalization also, in a way, unhealthy?
How did I fit into all of this in 1969 when I was eighteen?
After graduation, I took a job at the steel plants in Buffalo, NY, where I became friendly with a number of black veterans, who gladly shared their Vietnam stories, and, sometimes, their drugs. I wasn’t dodging the draft. In fact, by the time I left my prestigious Jesuit high school where 99% of the student body went to premier colleges, I was so confused and self-destructive that I decided to forgo college and take my chances with the draft. I thought Vietnam would be an “experience,” and back then, that was my reason for getting up in the morning. I wasn’t going to enlist, but if I got drafted, then so be it.
Sitting here today, I’m holding my draft card and notices of classification. Peter Martin Johnson, Selective Service Number 308951273, classified 1-A on October 29, 1969, which meant I was a healthy All-American boy ready and even willing to carry a rifle for Uncle Sam. To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to the classification. Everything at that time was a blur of assassinations, rock star deaths, and manual labor jobs that usually ended each evening with me closing a local bar. Oh, how I envied the ability of my peers to tune out the noise and confusion of 1969 and 1970 and somehow get through four years of college. How could they concentrate, even for a nanosecond, on preparing themselves for law school while the world was going up in flames?
What baffles me is why I wasn’t drafted. Another notice of classification I have designates me 1-H on January 31, 1972 because I had pulled the number 271 in the draft lottery. It’s signed by someone named J.L. Nicely. 1-H means, “Registrant not currently subject to processing for induction or alternative service.” I used to stupidly joke that it was certainly “nice” of Mr. Nicely to spare me a possible one-way trip to Vietnam. But it wasn’t nice for the other kids who’d been drafted during that two-to-three-year period after I had turned eighteen. Although I have no proof, I’ve always thought that certain groups, especially blacks, were targeted by the Selective Service Commission. Perhaps just another conspiracy theory, but the fact is, I should have been drafted, and my name could have easily appeared on one of the panels of the Memorial.
I was thinking about all this on an overcast, cool, March day in 1997 when my wife and I made our way to the Memorial. I was about to break into my usual diatribe about the stupidity of the monument when the sight of the two walls of polished granite meeting at a 125-degree angle in the shape of an inverted V stopped me in my tracks. An overwhelming sense of dread came over me—my legs suddenly heavy as I trudged forward, everything but the wall seeming to disappear around me. I plodded on, trying not to step on memorabilia that people had left behind that day: flowers, a few medals, a can of beer, even an old toy truck. On the ground in front of a 1968 panel and eating from a can of beans was a full-bearded guy in dirty tan shorts and beat-up work boots. He wore an old Army jacket and had an American flag bandanna that kept his long greasy locks in place. There was also an old woman in a wheelchair staring blankly at one of the 1967 panels. But I had come for the panels of 1969, and it was taking too long to get there, the accumulation of names, starting on the first panel of 1956, beginning to take its toll.
Finally, I reached the 1969 panels. There were so many names you could spend half the day tracing them. I had always thought that etching the names of fallen soldiers on an impersonal black wall objectified and diminished those soldiers, so I was surprised by what followed. As I read the names it was impossible not to imagine what each soldier looked like, where they came from, and what the circumstances of their deaths were. I was proud of these guys, but also angry because by 1997 I knew how we had ended up in Vietnam, and how pointless that war had been. But most of all, I felt guilt, as if I had betrayed every one of them by not enlisting. I wanted to touch their names, run my finger slowly down the curves and spines of letters as if they were ancient runes. But I couldn’t. That was cowardly, I know, but, in fairness, this was my first visit, so all I could do was go to one knee and sob, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop.
It felt good.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is Old Man Howling at the Moon
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories