No factor better reflects the change that has come over America in recent generations than the absence of Viet Nam veterans from three areas of activity where one could reasonably expect to find them in some numbers, and where one could have found their predecessors after World War II: in college, teaching in high school, and in politics.
Where are we? Why are we not in college? Grasping for education? Why are we not in high school, teaching American history? Why are we not in politics, giving America the wisdom we gained through sweat and blood?
There are answers that, while true, are yet not the truth: the G.I. bill benefits aren’t sufficient, teaching jobs are hard to find, you need connections to get into politics. The real answer is that we veterans cannot escape who we are.
What we are, first and foremost, is American, and to be American in this day and time is to be frustrated by a lack of faith.
Yes, we lost our faith somewhere in the swamps and jungles and then came home to find it had disappeared from America’s towns and cities. Perhaps we didn’t understand what was happening to us then, but we see it now.
Yet what we still don’t see—and America can’t come home from Viet Nam until we all see it—is that the faith we lost was an ephemeral belief grounded in the wrong source. It was a faith that others would define and create the American Dream for us, that someone would answer questions and solve problems for us.
What we had done was the most un-American thing of all: we had assigned responsibility for the American Dream to the faceless shadows who lurk behind that maliciously indefinite pronoun they.
So we—not they—made a mistake. But we will quadruple this mistake if we forget an essential point: the fact that we were wrong in our faith doesn’t mean that this quality doesn’t exist. The fact that we mourn its absence proves that it does.
Each of us must rekindle a faith in himself because, as we learned in the iron school of combat, a man must sometimes be an island unto himself; and we must all reclaim a belief in America because, as we learned when the combat was over, a man cannot live as an island unto himself.
And, although he would be the last to admit it, Fred wants to recapture his faith also. He’s not the hardass he makes himself out to be. Fred will call us “suckers” and “dummies” for believing our government and for getting caught in the web of that war, but he cried when the American hockey team upset the Russian in the Olympics (he doesn’t know I saw him, but I did).
A quick note before Fred comes back from the store (he always finds something to do when he knows I’m right): my more thoughtful non-veteran friends have often asked me about the conclusion of “The Deer Hunter,” the singing of “God Bless America.”
“Are veterans fools? Don’t they appreciate the scene’s consummate irony? Is it perhaps that they somehow see beyond the simple complexity of irony to a subtle wisdom that is hidden from those who have not been out there?”
I have no answer. We do love America and America is good. I knew this beyond question one day when I was 11,000 miles from home—tired, filthy, and miserable, with a loneliness that shriveled the heart—and I saw a tank roll by with a tiny American flag on it. I knew something then that I never truly comprehended as a child who watched the parades and listened to the speeches.
And so, although I don’t like to stand up for National Anthem, I’ll get up and sing “God Bless America.”
And…
…POP!…