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The following was delivered Sunday, May 30, 1999 at North Congregational United Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio. It was intended to honor the memories of ALL Veterans of all of America's wars. However, as I was writing it, I realized that it was also part of the reconciliation process that continues to go on for all of us in this country who lived through the agony that was the VIETNAM WAR.
Remembering A War
By
Tom Murrell
It's the first weekend of the summer season, a time for picnics and family reunions, a time to get out and enjoy life. But Memorial Day weekend is also a time to remember. For the man or woman who served in a combat area during a war, it is a bittersweet time. On the one hand we can look back on lives that have been full and rich and rewarding. We can savor those lives and give thanks for our blessings. On the other hand, we remember that there were others who had just as much to look forward to as we did, who had just as much to live for, but who did not come back with us from that same war.
Then we look to our fathers' generation, our grandfathers' generation, or, now, even our children's generation, and we see that they have had their wars, too. "Vanity of vanities," said the writer of Ecclesiastes. "A generation goes, a generation comes, yet the earth stands firm for ever" (Eccl. 1:2 & 4). Every generation of Americans in the 20th Century has had its war; some have fought in more than one. Each generation has its story to tell, and I would not want to diminish one or exalt one at the expense of another. Each story is unique and has something to tell us.
However, I know only one war from personal experience, so I will limit myself to that war. I offer my story–or a small part of it, at any rate–not because it is in some way special or unique. I offer it, rather, because it is in most ways not unique at all. The particulars are my own, but the situations and the responses to those situations are probably shared with millions of others.
Much of this story isn't known to any of you; even my wife did not know the story until she started reading my drafts, for we did not meet and marry until years after my military experiences. They were truly a previous life from the one I now have. There is nothing fundamental that makes me different from the dead I ask that we remember here today. We were all young. We all had expectations of life after Vietnam, and most of us got to experience the differences between expectation and reality. In sharing these few memories, I have been forced to realize that the difference between the living and the dead is a slim one at best. Perhaps it is the difference between what has been and what might have been.
We came to the Vietnam War from all across America. Mostly we were too poor to attend college or too immature to stay there when we got there. While I grew up poor in a large family, I did attend college, and I flunked out twice. In the late Sixties, there was a draft of all men between the ages of 18 and 26. I don't know when that draft started, but it was one of the constants in the outside world as I was growing up. You'd think that the prospect of being drafted and sent to fight in a war would be enough incentive for even the most immature young man to stay in school, but in my case it wasn't. To say that I was young and foolish would be redundant.
It was thirty years ago, right about this time of year that I had to make some choices. I was now 1-A in the draft, a guaranteed call-up because I had been in and out of college for two years with nothing to show for the effort. I was also newly married, and we were expecting a child, our daughter who was born in September of 1969. I had no job and no prospect of a job because I was so draft eligible.
I had no strong opinion about the rightness or wrongness of the war in Vietnam. I had seen the demonstrations and protests on television, as had virtually everyone else in that time, but I could not tell that one side was more right than the other. I didn't know at the time that it is almost always unclear who is right or wrong in a war. I did believe that I didn't want to die in a war, that one, or any other for that matter. But I could not claim to be a conscientious objector. Nor could I even consider becoming a fugitive to avoid the war. Those were choices other did make, and I believe they made them out of sincere conviction rather than a desire to avoid the danger and unpleasantness of war.
No, the best I could do was choose the branch of service I would enter. I could do nothing and be drafted into the Army or the Marines, or I could enlist, for a term longer than the two years required of draftees. I considered all of this and chose the Air Force. I made this choice because I believed that I would not be flying, so I believed I wouldn't be sent to Vietnam. As I said, I was young. I didn't know that for airplanes to fly dozens of support personnel were needed on the ground.
The Air Force trained me as a Ground Radio Operator; that meant I didn't fly . . . much. In October of 1971, they sent me to Vietnam. I left behind a wife, a two-year-old daughter, and a 4-month-old son. As luck would have it, I was one of two Air Force Radio Operators assigned to an Army Advisory Team. Finally it became clear to me that I had been wrong on all counts. I hadn't even avoided the Army, much less Vietnam. It is said that "Man plans and God laughs." So it was with me.
The first few weeks I was in-country, as we called it, I experienced a lot of new things. I was issued a whole new set of uniforms, camouflaged jungle fatigues and jungle boots and a helmet. That was ominous in that it suggested that I might need to hide. I was issued an M-16 and a bandoleer of ammunition. There was no doubt that I wasn't in the world I was used to. Of course, it made some sense that I would have a weapon. After all, I was in a war zone. But it brought home to me that the rules of life were different here. There was no police force that I could assume would protect me. I was out beyond the place where the street lights shine at night, and the rules of civilization, as I had known them, did not always apply.
I had to learn a new language, too. I found out that I had not come from the U.S.; I had come from The World. That's what we called the States: The World. And I was in a new place that we called, simply, The Nam. "Where do you live in the World?" I was asked more than once. "What are you going to do when you get back to the World?" Language tells you a lot. For all of the differences between being in a war zone and being back home in the States, we might as well have been on another planet.
The Nam was its own universe. Nothing about the Nam was like the World. The Nam was Disneyland on bad drugs. It was an unreal place where you talked about body counts and carried weapons. There were no safe places in The Nam, no rear areas where you could relax secure in the knowledge that you could not be attacked. The Viet Cong had long since proven that they could strike any place, any time. The World, on the other hand, was this safe place with air conditioning and fast food and electricity that always worked and soft soap. The World was clean and bright. We had futures in the World. There was no future in the Nam.
In 1971, there was no longer any question that America was trying to win this war. We were trying to get out of it. Peace With Honor, it was called. We wanted our POWs back, and we wanted some assurance that the other side would wait a decent interval after we left before they collected their inevitable victory. There didn't seem to be anything worth dying for, if there ever had been. We made jokes about it: "Will the last American out of Vietnam please turn out the light at the end of the tunnel?" For good or ill, we were getting out, and those of us who were there, as hostages to a Byzantine peace process, simply hoped we would not be the last American to die in a war the World had long since tuned out as a bad television program.
So we did our jobs; we did our duty to our country. Nearly every day I worked with Army and Air Force aircraft. I coordinated air strikes on enemy locations. I passed along target requests, and every time I keyed my microphone and said, "This is Blackhawk Forward. You are cleared hot on target," someone died. The only weapon I fired in battle was a microphone, yet I am as responsible for over 1,500 deaths as if I had fired a weapon or released a bomb.
It is commonly said that everyone who serves in a war is a hero, and certainly everyone who dies in that war is a hero. That's the common wisdom. But I didn't see any heroes in Vietnam, not in the conventional sense anyway. I saw men and women, much like myself, doing the jobs assigned them in a hopeless situation. To me that is far more heroic than anything I have seen on television or in a movie. I was asked once if I thought the military had learned anything from Vietnam. I answered that I was more concerned about whether those who would be our political leaders had learned anything. I'm still concerned about that.
During my year in Vietnam, I lost three pilots. Each day, the Operations Officer told me what assets we would have for the day's missions. Those assets were my pilots. Part of my job was to help them get back safely if they were shot at, or help with the rescue if they were shot down. Though our jobs were different, as were our education levels and probably our backgrounds, we were more alike than we were different. Just being there, we risked our lives. And it didn't matter that I never saw the faces of the men I worked with. Each loss hurt. Each of them had a family and a life back in the World, just as I did. Each wanted to return to that life and that family, just as I did. But, as the writer of Ecclesiastes said, "...the race is not won by the speediest, nor the battle by the champions; it is not the wise who get food, nor the intelligent wealth, nor the learned favor; chance and mischance befall them all" (9:11). My three pilots were not as lucky as I was.
It was luck that the enemy didn't shell my base camp while I was there. It was luck that they didn't shoot down my helicopter the many times I flew. It was luck that they cut the road I traveled once a month between Chi Lang, where my Army unit was, and Saigon, where my Air Force unit was, the week after I made my last trip. It was luck that I wasn't sawed in half when a buddy accidentally fired an M-60 machine gun in my direction. "Chance and mischance." Pure luck.
One of the many things I learned as I was preparing this sermon was that I have a lot more to say about war and Vietnam than I can fit into a fifteen-minute sermon. Much to my surprise, the experience of writing this sermon has been, at times, heart-wrenching. I had to go back and dredge up memories long buried. Like every other veteran of Vietnam, I came back and put that experience behind me as quickly as I could. So to go into my mind and call all that back up was not easy. It didn't make things easier that part of that remembering included the memories of coming back to a country that was afraid of its Vietnam Veterans, a country that was ashamed of us. We have been left to mourn our dead without the solace that their deaths had any meaning, accomplished any purpose, righted any wrong. If we had any consolation, it was in knowing that at least the dead were spared the indignities we faced. But that is a talk for another time, and perhaps another place. Today we remember the dead.
I'd like to end by taking you with me to The Wall, the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It is so symbolic of that war. It does not celebrate war; it only remembers the dead. The Wall is polished black stones on which are engraved the names of the dead, arranged by year of death. The Wall's layout is such that you walk in from the year where they started counting the deaths (no one is sure exactly when the war in Vietnam started) to a mid-point. You turn at a right angle and walk out past the spot where the name of the last American to die is listed. Because we got into the war gradually, the names are few and the Wall is short in the beginning, but as you walk down the gradual slope, the names grow more numerous. The visitor gets the impression of the Wall growing as you walk along, but in truth it does not grow. Rather the visitor sinks along a gradual incline that represents our country's slow decent into the quagmire that was Vietnam. When you reach the bottom, where the two arms of the Wall meet, the black, polished stone towers above you.
You look back, and the names recede into a dim and distant past. You look forward and the black Wall recedes into the distance as the slope gradually rises, and you have the feeling of the time and place, a war with no discernable beginning and no clear-cut end. You look at the Wall. Do you recognize any of the names? There are so many that they begin to run together. Then you see, beyond yet intertwined with the names of the dead and their year of death, your own image reflected back at you "as through a glass darkly." And you realize that you are as much a part of that Wall as those names. Now that you have seen your reflection, you cannot look at the Wall, even in your mind's eye, without seeing yourself. "There but for the grace of God go I," you think. "There but for the grace of God go I."
I consider myself very fortunate to have experienced the Vets Journey Home weekend in Maryland. I was given information about the VJH "weekend" about four years ago by a few of my close friends. Let me tell you what led me there:
I was in the Army from 1966 through 1969. My last duty station was near Xuan Loc, Vietnam. I was an Army postal clerk. My unit was the 7th APU attached to the llth Armored Cavalry Regiment (Blackhorse Basecamp). In many ways my experience over there is hard for me to recall. Most of my tour was spent working seven days a week in the postal unit and drinking in the EM/club every night.
After I was discharged, I learned to keep my Vietnam experience to myself. I discovered both family and friends didn't want to talk about it. If they did, they were usually words of protest or shame to those of us who served there.
I continued to keep my real experience of the war buried inside of me. I was gradually becoming more dependent on Alcohol and of course my physical, mental, and emotional health was deteriorating. I finally hit bottom and started a long road to recovery in 1976. In short. I have received a great deal of help and support from many different places.
I went to the VJH weekend a little over two years ago after some gentle (sometimes not so gentle) prodding of some men who I am close to. I honestly have to say here what kept me from going until then. The stories in my head: "I was JUST a postal clerk over there"..."I am not worthy because I didn't go through much of what many of fellow combat veterans went through"...and on and on.
The Vets Journey Home experience was transforming for me. I came away knowing how important my job was over there. Ask any Veteran of any war about how important the mail was to him or her. I experienced not only watching but being part of the healing of those who went through the weekend with me. I was finally welcomed home in a way that only be can only described with two words I can think of: Love and Honor. At the end of the weekend, some of us went to THE WALL in Washington D.C. I had never been there before. I cannot describe here what that was like. To say I was moved would be too minimal of a word.
Here is another opportunity for me to thank the staff of VJH. I will always be indebted to all of you: Patricia, Gene, Kirk, Rick, Ed, Dena, Micheal, Ann,Sindee, Ellen, Gloria, Sam, Tom, Marianne,Dixie, and of course my friend Jason... Thank You for bringing me HOME.
2 comments:
The following was delivered Sunday, May 30, 1999 at North Congregational United Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio. It was intended to honor the memories of ALL Veterans of all of America's wars. However, as I was writing it, I realized that it was also part of the reconciliation process that continues to go on for all of us in this country who lived through the agony that was the VIETNAM WAR.
Remembering A War
By
Tom Murrell
It's the first weekend of the summer season, a time for picnics and family reunions, a time to get out and enjoy life. But Memorial Day weekend is also a time to remember. For the man or woman who served in a combat area during a war, it is a bittersweet time. On the one hand we can look back on lives that have been full and rich and rewarding. We can savor those lives and give thanks for our blessings. On the other hand, we remember that there were others who had just as much to look forward to as we did, who had just as much to live for, but who did not come back with us from that same war.
Then we look to our fathers' generation, our grandfathers' generation, or, now, even our children's generation, and we see that they have had their wars, too. "Vanity of vanities," said the writer of Ecclesiastes. "A generation goes, a generation comes, yet the earth stands firm for ever" (Eccl. 1:2 & 4). Every generation of Americans in the 20th Century has had its war; some have fought in more than one. Each generation has its story to tell, and I would not want to diminish one or exalt one at the expense of another. Each story is unique and has something to tell us.
However, I know only one war from personal experience, so I will limit myself to that war. I offer my story–or a small part of it, at any rate–not because it is in some way special or unique. I offer it, rather, because it is in most ways not unique at all. The particulars are my own, but the situations and the responses to those situations are probably shared with millions of others.
Much of this story isn't known to any of you; even my wife did not know the story until she started reading my drafts, for we did not meet and marry until years after my military experiences. They were truly a previous life from the one I now have. There is nothing fundamental that makes me different from the dead I ask that we remember here today. We were all young. We all had expectations of life after Vietnam, and most of us got to experience the differences between expectation and reality. In sharing these few memories, I have been forced to realize that the difference between the living and the dead is a slim one at best. Perhaps it is the difference between what has been and what might have been.
We came to the Vietnam War from all across America. Mostly we were too poor to attend college or too immature to stay there when we got there. While I grew up poor in a large family, I did attend college, and I flunked out twice. In the late Sixties, there was a draft of all men between the ages of 18 and 26. I don't know when that draft started, but it was one of the constants in the outside world as I was growing up. You'd think that the prospect of being drafted and sent to fight in a war would be enough incentive for even the most immature young man to stay in school, but in my case it wasn't. To say that I was young and foolish would be redundant.
It was thirty years ago, right about this time of year that I had to make some choices. I was now 1-A in the draft, a guaranteed call-up because I had been in and out of college for two years with nothing to show for the effort. I was also newly married, and we were expecting a child, our daughter who was born in September of 1969. I had no job and no prospect of a job because I was so draft eligible.
I had no strong opinion about the rightness or wrongness of the war in Vietnam. I had seen the demonstrations and protests on television, as had virtually everyone else in that time, but I could not tell that one side was more right than the other. I didn't know at the time that it is almost always unclear who is right or wrong in a war. I did believe that I didn't want to die in a war, that one, or any other for that matter. But I could not claim to be a conscientious objector. Nor could I even consider becoming a fugitive to avoid the war. Those were choices other did make, and I believe they made them out of sincere conviction rather than a desire to avoid the danger and unpleasantness of war.
No, the best I could do was choose the branch of service I would enter. I could do nothing and be drafted into the Army or the Marines, or I could enlist, for a term longer than the two years required of draftees. I considered all of this and chose the Air Force. I made this choice because I believed that I would not be flying, so I believed I wouldn't be sent to Vietnam. As I said, I was young. I didn't know that for airplanes to fly dozens of support personnel were needed on the ground.
The Air Force trained me as a Ground Radio Operator; that meant I didn't fly . . . much. In October of 1971, they sent me to Vietnam. I left behind a wife, a two-year-old daughter, and a 4-month-old son. As luck would have it, I was one of two Air Force Radio Operators assigned to an Army Advisory Team. Finally it became clear to me that I had been wrong on all counts. I hadn't even avoided the Army, much less Vietnam. It is said that "Man plans and God laughs." So it was with me.
The first few weeks I was in-country, as we called it, I experienced a lot of new things. I was issued a whole new set of uniforms, camouflaged jungle fatigues and jungle boots and a helmet. That was ominous in that it suggested that I might need to hide. I was issued an M-16 and a bandoleer of ammunition. There was no doubt that I wasn't in the world I was used to. Of course, it made some sense that I would have a weapon. After all, I was in a war zone. But it brought home to me that the rules of life were different here. There was no police force that I could assume would protect me. I was out beyond the place where the street lights shine at night, and the rules of civilization, as I had known them, did not always apply.
I had to learn a new language, too. I found out that I had not come from the U.S.; I had come from The World. That's what we called the States: The World. And I was in a new place that we called, simply, The Nam. "Where do you live in the World?" I was asked more than once. "What are you going to do when you get back to the World?" Language tells you a lot. For all of the differences between being in a war zone and being back home in the States, we might as well have been on another planet.
The Nam was its own universe. Nothing about the Nam was like the World. The Nam was Disneyland on bad drugs. It was an unreal place where you talked about body counts and carried weapons. There were no safe places in The Nam, no rear areas where you could relax secure in the knowledge that you could not be attacked. The Viet Cong had long since proven that they could strike any place, any time. The World, on the other hand, was this safe place with air conditioning and fast food and electricity that always worked and soft soap. The World was clean and bright. We had futures in the World. There was no future in the Nam.
In 1971, there was no longer any question that America was trying to win this war. We were trying to get out of it. Peace With Honor, it was called. We wanted our POWs back, and we wanted some assurance that the other side would wait a decent interval after we left before they collected their inevitable victory. There didn't seem to be anything worth dying for, if there ever had been. We made jokes about it: "Will the last American out of Vietnam please turn out the light at the end of the tunnel?" For good or ill, we were getting out, and those of us who were there, as hostages to a Byzantine peace process, simply hoped we would not be the last American to die in a war the World had long since tuned out as a bad television program.
So we did our jobs; we did our duty to our country. Nearly every day I worked with Army and Air Force aircraft. I coordinated air strikes on enemy locations. I passed along target requests, and every time I keyed my microphone and said, "This is Blackhawk Forward. You are cleared hot on target," someone died. The only weapon I fired in battle was a microphone, yet I am as responsible for over 1,500 deaths as if I had fired a weapon or released a bomb.
It is commonly said that everyone who serves in a war is a hero, and certainly everyone who dies in that war is a hero. That's the common wisdom. But I didn't see any heroes in Vietnam, not in the conventional sense anyway. I saw men and women, much like myself, doing the jobs assigned them in a hopeless situation. To me that is far more heroic than anything I have seen on television or in a movie. I was asked once if I thought the military had learned anything from Vietnam. I answered that I was more concerned about whether those who would be our political leaders had learned anything. I'm still concerned about that.
During my year in Vietnam, I lost three pilots. Each day, the Operations Officer told me what assets we would have for the day's missions. Those assets were my pilots. Part of my job was to help them get back safely if they were shot at, or help with the rescue if they were shot down. Though our jobs were different, as were our education levels and probably our backgrounds, we were more alike than we were different. Just being there, we risked our lives. And it didn't matter that I never saw the faces of the men I worked with. Each loss hurt. Each of them had a family and a life back in the World, just as I did. Each wanted to return to that life and that family, just as I did. But, as the writer of Ecclesiastes said, "...the race is not won by the speediest, nor the battle by the champions; it is not the wise who get food, nor the intelligent wealth, nor the learned favor; chance and mischance befall them all" (9:11). My three pilots were not as lucky as I was.
It was luck that the enemy didn't shell my base camp while I was there. It was luck that they didn't shoot down my helicopter the many times I flew. It was luck that they cut the road I traveled once a month between Chi Lang, where my Army unit was, and Saigon, where my Air Force unit was, the week after I made my last trip. It was luck that I wasn't sawed in half when a buddy accidentally fired an M-60 machine gun in my direction. "Chance and mischance." Pure luck.
One of the many things I learned as I was preparing this sermon was that I have a lot more to say about war and Vietnam than I can fit into a fifteen-minute sermon. Much to my surprise, the experience of writing this sermon has been, at times, heart-wrenching. I had to go back and dredge up memories long buried. Like every other veteran of Vietnam, I came back and put that experience behind me as quickly as I could. So to go into my mind and call all that back up was not easy. It didn't make things easier that part of that remembering included the memories of coming back to a country that was afraid of its Vietnam Veterans, a country that was ashamed of us. We have been left to mourn our dead without the solace that their deaths had any meaning, accomplished any purpose, righted any wrong. If we had any consolation, it was in knowing that at least the dead were spared the indignities we faced. But that is a talk for another time, and perhaps another place. Today we remember the dead.
I'd like to end by taking you with me to The Wall, the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It is so symbolic of that war. It does not celebrate war; it only remembers the dead. The Wall is polished black stones on which are engraved the names of the dead, arranged by year of death. The Wall's layout is such that you walk in from the year where they started counting the deaths (no one is sure exactly when the war in Vietnam started) to a mid-point. You turn at a right angle and walk out past the spot where the name of the last American to die is listed. Because we got into the war gradually, the names are few and the Wall is short in the beginning, but as you walk down the gradual slope, the names grow more numerous. The visitor gets the impression of the Wall growing as you walk along, but in truth it does not grow. Rather the visitor sinks along a gradual incline that represents our country's slow decent into the quagmire that was Vietnam. When you reach the bottom, where the two arms of the Wall meet, the black, polished stone towers above you.
You look back, and the names recede into a dim and distant past. You look forward and the black Wall recedes into the distance as the slope gradually rises, and you have the feeling of the time and place, a war with no discernable beginning and no clear-cut end. You look at the Wall. Do you recognize any of the names? There are so many that they begin to run together. Then you see, beyond yet intertwined with the names of the dead and their year of death, your own image reflected back at you "as through a glass darkly." And you realize that you are as much a part of that Wall as those names. Now that you have seen your reflection, you cannot look at the Wall, even in your mind's eye, without seeing yourself. "There but for the grace of God go I," you think. "There but for the grace of God go I."
I consider myself very fortunate to have experienced the Vets Journey Home weekend in Maryland.
I was given information about the VJH "weekend" about four years ago
by a few of my close friends. Let me tell you what led me there:
I was in the Army from 1966 through 1969. My last duty station was near Xuan Loc, Vietnam. I was an Army postal clerk. My unit was the 7th APU attached to the llth Armored Cavalry Regiment (Blackhorse Basecamp). In many ways my experience over there is hard for me to recall. Most of my tour was spent working seven days a week in the postal unit and drinking in the EM/club every night.
After I was discharged, I learned to keep my Vietnam experience to myself. I discovered both family and friends didn't want to talk about it. If they did, they were usually words of protest or shame to those of us who served there.
I continued to keep my real experience of the war buried inside of me. I was gradually becoming more dependent on Alcohol and of course my physical, mental, and emotional health was deteriorating. I finally hit bottom and started a long road to recovery in 1976. In short. I have received a great deal of help and support from many different places.
I went to the VJH weekend a little over two years ago after some gentle (sometimes not so gentle) prodding of some men who I am close to. I honestly have to say here what kept me from going until then. The stories in my head: "I was JUST a postal clerk over there"..."I am not worthy because I didn't go through much of what many of fellow combat veterans went through"...and on and on.
The Vets Journey Home experience was transforming for me. I came away knowing how important my job was over there. Ask any Veteran of any war about how important the mail was to him or her. I experienced not only watching but being part of the healing of those who went through the weekend with me. I was finally welcomed home in a way that only be can only described with two words I can think of: Love and Honor. At the end of the weekend, some of us went to THE WALL in Washington D.C. I had never been there before.
I cannot describe here what that was like. To say I was moved would be too minimal of a word.
Here is another opportunity for me to thank the staff of VJH. I will always be indebted to all of you: Patricia, Gene, Kirk, Rick, Ed, Dena, Micheal, Ann,Sindee, Ellen, Gloria, Sam, Tom, Marianne,Dixie, and of course my friend Jason... Thank You for bringing me HOME.
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