Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
Army Green Beret Captain William Lyles III, a veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, on September 11 last year
At Fenway Park, long about the fourth or fifth inning of every Red Sox home game here, a member of the military in attendance is singled out, stood atop the Boston dugout, thrown across the huge screen in centerfield, and given a rousing ovation as one of the people who is fighting for our freedom. This is almost as raucous a moment as is the annoying recent tradition of singing "Sweet Caroline" in the middle of the eighth. My favorite moment this season came when everybody sang, "So good! So good! So good!" in the immediate aftermath of the Sox having blown an entire nine-run lead to the Yankees.
There are flyovers at every major sporting event. At the Super Bowl, we generally have the flyover, and the Anthem, and God Bless America. Our profane public ceremonies are now suffused with a kind of sacramental militarism.
On MSNBC, the kindly Doctor Maddow is happily agitating for Welcome Home Parades for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in our major cities, most notably New York. Every day these days, apparently, is Memorial Day.
By its public displays, the country is gripped by an immense, endless, and apparently unpayable debt to the men and women who have fought our wars for us, and this is true no matter how popular or unpopular those wars were at the time, or have become recently. The notion of this debt stretches back in time. In his capacity as Official Historian For White People, Tom Hanks agitated for a memorial to World War II veterans because we might "forget" what they'd done as they steadily died off.
An 'Honor Flight' for WWII Vets
The Lone Star Honor Flight took 111 WWII veterans from Houston to
Washington to see the war's memorial and thank them for their service
Not long before that, Tom Brokaw, the Man Who Invented World War II, began the cultish Greatest Generation phenomenon, even though, in our history, that generation is sorely taxed for the pole position by the powdered-wig set of the mid-18th Century, and by the generation that came of age in the years 1860-1865. Dozens of other books, Steven Spielberg movies, and HBO miniseries followed in Brokaw's wake. The implicit assumption was that the country that had passed the G.I. Bill had not yet "done enough" to honor the veterans of The Good War, which is why we now have an ungainly marble corral in Washington, a triumphantly Augustan plaza that is unspeakably gaudy next to the quiet majesty of the memorials to the Vietnam and Korean wars. The sins of the country that had abandoned many of the veterans of those two wars — a defeat and a bloody draw — were subconsciously expiated by the garish tribute paid 50 years later to the people who'd fought the last war America actually won. And, then, suddenly, there were two more wars, one of them unpopular and based on lies, and the other one seemingly oblique and endless. And there were The Troops. And, it seemed, for the rest of us, the twain did not meet.
It is marginally inapt to compare the two, but, as regards our cultural veneration of The Troops and our rising (and seemingly impotent) political opposition to the wars they've fought, we seem to have adapted the old right-wing formula of love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin to now read love-the-warrior-hate-the-wars. I think, in part, this is a function of us having gone to an all-volunteer military. Under the old system, despite all the loopholes and exemptions and Daddy's-got-a-pal trickeration involved in the draft, there was more political space in which to maneuver. Now, though, with all our fighting being done by people who (at least in a theoretical sense) willingly signed up to do it, the debt seems to have grown exponentially. Our methods of repayment, though, are curious, to say the least.
We let them get on planes ahead of us, with the elderly and the infirm and the toddlers, but we underfund hospital care and live quite comfortably with the notion that a lot of the functions of the military have been privatized. (Are we that long from Honor The Contractors ceremonies?) We pay tribute to them at ballgames, but send them into battle ill-prepared, and bring them home to decrepit facilities and heedless bureaucracies. We give them parades, but had to be blackjacked into giving them a "new G.I. Bill" that is but a pale shadow of the original one, which did no less than create the modern American middle class. When I first started writing politics, there was an ongoing argument of what were then called "veterans preference" programs, a vestige once again of what was done for the returning World War II vets. The fight was over whether it would be extended to include the veterans then recently returned from Vietnam.
It is Vietnam that hangs thickly over our ostentatious public displays of affection for The Troops. It is a determination to Get It Right This Time. However, there is at the heart of it a fundamental misunderstanding of what we got wrong. The returning Vietnam veteran was treated abominably. But, in fact, if you want to find the people who did the Vietnam generation the most damage, don't look to the hippies. Look to the institutions staffed and run by what the Vietnam guys used to call, contemptuously, "the Class of '45," the people who ran the VA, and the VFW posts, The Greatest Generation, who looked down on them as losers and who stiffed them on their country's obligations.
In actual fact, it was the remnants on the antiwar Left — the people who ran the G.I. coffeehouses and the like — who first took them seriously on issues like post-traumatic stress disorder and the lingering effects of Agent Orange. Those were the people who paid The Troops of that time the most basic tribute there is — taking their human problems seriously. The problem was not people shouting "babykiller" and those mythical expectorations that author Jerry Lembecke put paid to years ago.
- The problem was that the government abandoned them.
- The problem was that the community of other veterans abandoned them. And that went on for years.
- Ronald Reagan famously called their war "a noble cause" and then shut down all the out-patient psychiatric services that the VA finally put in place.
- What you did was noble, and now sleep on the sidewalk.
Then, in the popular culture, the crazed Vietnam vet became a staple of American entertainment until sensitive vet Jon Voight went down on Jane Fonda in Coming Home and, even there, we had Bruce Dern, the living embodiment of Crazy in American motion pictures for four decades now, playing Fonda's rigid, nutball husband.
Now, for the veterans of the two wars of the past decade, we're giving them all kinds of favors and goodies and public applause, and maybe even a parade or two, overcompensating our brains out, but, ultimately, what does all the applause mean at the end of the day? We are apparently fine with two more years of vets coming home from Afghanistan, from a war that 60 percent of us say we oppose. But we support The Troops.
- Will we become a more skeptical nation the next time a bunch of messianic fantasts concoct a war out of lies? Perhaps, but we support The Troops.
- Will we tax ourselves sufficiently to pay for what it costs to care for the people we send to one endless war and one war based on lies? Well, geez, we'll have to think about that, but we support The Troops.
On Memorial Day, when I visit the family plots in the old cemetery in Worcester when they've planted my forebears, I always wander over to one of the older sections where lie interred the veterans of the Grand Army Of The Republic, row after row of those round, generic tablets, each of them weathered and indistinguishable now from all the others. Memorial Day, after all, is a product of their war.
Abraham Lincoln presaged it in the peroration of his magnificent Second Inaugural Address:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right,
as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are
in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne
the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve
and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
After Lincoln's murder, the spirit of his remarks took hold in curious ways. On May 1, 1865, freed black slaves gathered to honor the Union prisoners who'd been buried in unmarked graves at the Charleston Race Course in South Carolina. Elsewhere, in the South, what was first known as Decoration Day became essential to the Lost Cause mythology that became so destructive to the descendants of those freedmen who'd honored the Union dead in Charleston. Supporting The Troops always has been a more complicated business than applauding at the ballpark.
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I'll be back on Tuesday with the usual business, with gobshites for your dining and dancing pleasure, so consider the comments open for business until then. Have a great weekend, y'all, and if you see any vets, shake their hands and vow to be a better citizen first, so you can really help them later on.
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