TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020491/0204640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 74

A Dove Faces Up to War


By Walter Shapiro


    In the Saturday afternoon sun of a somber January, the black
granite  walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial were warm,
almost animate  to the touch. A blond teenage girl with a paper
dove in her hair  from an antiwar rally stood near two fortyish
men talking softly  about a bungled mortar attack a generation
and half a world away.  Two helicopters whirred overhead, the
sound both jarring and fitting.  Odd how certain names leaped
to the eye and touched the heart. Irvin  W. Prosser Jr., Zygmunt
Kowalewski, Sherl K. Bonnett. Strangers all,  so there were no
images of them as soldiers or as high school classmates.
Instead the vision came of proud fathers, perhaps survivors of
World  War II combat, holding up their squawking boy babies and
announcing  to the world, "He'll have my name, Irvin." "I'll
call him Zygmunt."  "I'll name him Sherl after his grandfather.
He'll have a good life,  a long life, a life of peace."

    My father returned from World War II with these same hopes,
and for  the most part, they have been realized for his only
son. I was privileged.  Vietnam was my war, but only in the
sheltered, student-deferment  sense that I opposed it, marched
against it and denounced it as immoral.  Perhaps that explains
why I had in the past approached the Vietnam  Memorial with
trepidation, feeling I was intruding upon the grief  of others.
But on the first weekend of the air war against Iraq,  I found
myself impelled toward these sunken slabs on the Mall, as  if
this were the proper moment to seek communion with the wall of
names. My thoughts jumbled as I stood there: schoolboy
patriotism, the waste of war, the sands of time. Finally, I
murmured, "I hope we have learned the right lessons from
Vietnam. I hope I have."

    Those sentiments reflect how personally bound I feel in the
decision of my government to go to war. No lesson of Vietnam
has been more important than the respect for legality that
prompted George Bush to win the endorsement of the United
Nations and then, however belatedly, the U.S. Congress.
Watching the congressional debate, I felt compelled to make my
own decision on going to war as surely as if I had been elected
to the national legislature. My anguished rationale for
supporting the President -- oil, aggression and cynicism about
sanctions -- turned into a footnote once Congress voted; what
mattered was that at last proper constitutional norms had been
followed. How easy it had been during Vietnam (a war mounted
under the dubious fig leaf of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution)
to reject personal complicity in the carnage. Blame, as I do,
Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for the names
on the wailing wall in Washington. But today, for the first
time in my life, I freely accept, as an American citizen,
responsibility for a war and the terrible human suffering that
is its inevitable handmaiden.

    On the home front, there are ennobling signs that the nation
has transcended the bitter legacy of Vietnam. Aside from a few
ill-timed sneers by Dan Quayle, no major public figure has
maligned the patriotism of the antiwar protesters. Whatever
one's personal views on the wisdom of the war, there is a
collective sense of respect and obligation toward the men and
women in uniform. Yes, the volunteer army means that the
sacrifice of having a son, a relative, a friend in Saudi Arabia
is shared unevenly. My own burden is scant. But class and caste
also shielded people like me from the draft in the 1960s; for
much of the Vietnam War, such social inequities were the dirty
little secret of the upper middle class. This time, at least,
the topic was a major theme of the congressional debate. Such
honesty does not erase the unfairness of a volunteer army, but
it does suggest national maturity.

    Still, I brood about whether I am prepared for the horrors
of what will come next, either the carnage of a ground war or
the full revelation of civilian casualties within Iraq and
Kuwait. Despite my informed consent as a citizen, a wave of
queasiness hit me with the first air strikes against Baghdad.
But then the euphoric opening days of the war made it seem as
if America had perfected the neutron bomb in reverse: high-tech
weaponry that only destroyed buildings, while leaving people
miraculously unharmed. Even now, after more than a week of war,
the cameras have yet to show a dead soldier. There is something
tawdry about this Top Gun illusion of military action virtually
devoid of unpleasant consequences.

    How unnerving that we know so little about the realities of
this war. The partial news blackout, stage-managed by the U.S.
military, seems a never-again overreaction to Vietnam. The
longer the nation is safeguarded from the full truth, the more
jarring will be the recoil when the inevitable bad news hits.
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney warned, "A military operation of
this intensity and complexity cannot be scored every evening
like a college track meet or a basketball game." What other
choice do we have but to tot up the bombing sorties, mourn the
downed flyers and pray for the best?

    Technology is not fail-safe. Sooner or later a hospital, a
school or an apartment block will be reduced to flesh and
rubble by an errant U.S. bombing mission. How will I and the
nation react to pictures of, say, an Iraqi woman, her clothes
on fire, running, stumbling, screaming at the injustice of her
fate? Intellectually, I will accept responsibility, for the
saturation bombing of Iraq is part of a wrenching decision that
my country made openly and democratically with my full
complicity. But can I steel my emotions? A ground war in Kuwait
will only be worse. Can I bear to watch a TV clip of a
22-year-old sergeant, a former Oklahoma high school running
back, being ripped apart by an Iraqi mine? Turning away would
be cowardly, and a government that sanitized such gore to
soothe domestic sensibilities would be contemptible. For if I
cannot confront the true face of this war, if I cannot endure
the moral burden of the bleeding and dying, then -- so unlike
with Vietnam -- I will have no one to blame but myself.