Talking Vietnam potluck blues - part two...

This afternoon I was a part of a discussion about the "moral values" of war... except no one really wanted to speak of morality: history and maintaining the American way of life, yes: reacting to aggression from those who are at war with our way of life, to be sure; but morality and ethics? Not so much...

+ Our panel took place after a stirring presentation of Tim Cole's play, "Medal of Honor Rag," a story of a young Black vet awarded the Medal of Honor by LBJ who is eventually hospitalized for PTS syndrome. In time, he goes AWOL and is killed in a grocery store hold-up. The actors were spot on - the dialogue was compelling - and the ambiguities of war and what often follows back on the home front was insightful. (A whole lot like Springsteen's song "Johnny 99.)

+ Then our panel - four Vietnam vets and me (the conscientious objector) - was asked to reflect on some of the moral concerns about war - but we don't have a common vocabulary for this task. We can honor one an other's experience and give each person room for their own opinions. But we have lost any semblance of a shared notion of morality.

So what happened is that everyone agreed that during the heat of battle people do what they must to stay alive - and you sort it out later. That is a given. There are moral guidelines you might bring into this hell, but all bets are off in the fight for survival. (It would have been good if we could have cut to Victor Frankl's insights about morality in the midst of the immoral death camps; and we certainly could have gone deeper exploring Martin Buber's wisdom that life only has meaning when it is built upon "I/Thou" relationships - but that was not to be.)

Instead, two very perplexing things happened that I a still trying to untangle: Most of the Vets spoke about their experience in combat as a morally ambiguous reality - survival is the name of the game - and "Sophie's Choice" not withstanding, mostly I think they are right. But there was no questioning of how these grunts got into this war in the first place. "Oh that's history - that's in the past - let's not go backwards." But no sooner were these words spoken than an appeal to history was made as to why wars are fought: war is necessary to protect our way of life - history shows us that wars have to be waged fully - otherwise all we'll get is Vietnam.

So, in the context of battle, these Vets appealed to human nature: belief structures all fall by the wayside in guerrilla warfare and morality is irrelevant. But when it came to wrestling with what types of war are moral, then belief - or maybe even ideology - became normative. A few guys put it like this: you have to do what you have to do to save our way of life because there are people out there that want to destroy us.

+ That is a statement of belief - maybe even faith - and faith and belief have a LOT to say about what type of behavior is morally acceptable during the horrors of war. But the American way of life was not at stake during Vietnam. Yes, there was fear of communism after the Chinese revolution in 1949 and the Korean War stand-off of the 1950s. And yes there was a sense that the West had to draw a line in the sand when France gave-up their colonial commitments after the fall of Dien ben phu. But it was not a moral necessity to fight that war - American commitment in Vietnam was an act of belief, not history - and that act needs to be evaluated.

Unfortunately, when such evaluation is suggested today the conversation fell back to onto experience: what would you want me to do in the heat of combat? Which obfuscates the challenge of exploring whether US intervention in the war was moral BEFORE we made a commitment. The same is true of Afghanistan and Iraq: now that we're there, as Thomas Friedman of the NY TIMES says - now that we've broken the country, we own it and have to fix it - that is a given. But the question remains: how do we evaluate going into the war in the first place? That is where we often mix apples and oranges - confuse historical inevitability with faith commitments and ideology - and create more death and destruction by ignorance than intention.

For me, the overt message of the day was: wars are inevitable - and once they start you have to do everything in your power to bring them to a just end. But, no, wars are not inevitable - and not all wars are equal. All wars may be hell when they are being fought, but some wars should never be started and Vietnam and Iraq fall into that category.

Then the moderator asked this question: what did you know about Vietnam when you first got involved? For me that meant listening to Dr. King at Riverside Church in 1967 when I was 15. The other guys said they didn't know anything about the war when they either enlisted or were drafted. Now I know I'm a church geek - and a wise-ass intellectual, too - but I had to wonder if I was thinking about this stuff at 15...? My church had open discussions about this war. We studied what was going on and why it mattered. My high school had a teach-in so that we would not be ignorant. We were wrestling with the moral and historical issues when I was 15...

So I guess what is so baffling to me is that after 35 years the war's is still wrought with such confusion. What's more, when it comes to exploring the moral dimensions of war and peace-making we don't have any common language. Still, there were a few bright lights:

+ One soldier spoke of finding meditation after years of PST and concluded: we have to find a better way of dealing with conflict than killing our children because the wars of today are identical to the wars of my generation.

+ Another officer spoke of the immorality of nuclear weapons and how that option must never be on the table for consideration.

Maybe there just wasn't time to go deeper, but I left the event with a gnawing sorrow that many still believe the lie that war is inevitable. Where is our ownership of American empire, greed or cultural arrogance? Where is the understanding of history that we have created much of the fear and hatred so many people have for America throughout the world? Where is the awareness that most of our opponents do NOT hate us for our values, they fear us because we are so ruthless and immoral?

The older I get the more I understand why Jesus told his disciples that peace-makers will be despised and hated as Utopian idiots. But I think of the good will Greg Mortenson is making turning stones into schools in Afghanistan. Or gentle Rick Steves of PBS who writes in his new book, Travel as Political Act:

Reducing the tragedy of terrorist casualties to statistics strikes some people as disrespectful and callous. But I believe that when we overreact to the threat of the terrorist, we empower them and become part of the problem. By setting emotion aside and being as logical as possible, we can weigh the relative risks and rewards or costs and benefits of various American behaviors. Every three days, a 747's worth of people die on our highways... but in the privacy of the voting booth, is the average American going to vote to drive 50 mph on our freeways to save thousands of lives? Hell, no. We've got places to go. Or consider handguns: 13,00 people die every year in our country because of handguns... yet year after year, we seem to agree that spending these lives is a reasonable trade-off for enjoying our Second Amendment rights...

We spend untold thousands of lives a year for the rights to drive fast and bear arms. Perhaps 300 million Americans being seen by the rest of the world as an empire is another stance that comes with unavoidable cost in human lives. I know this is wild, but imagine we downgraded our 'war on terror.' Fantasize for a moment about the money and energy we could save, and all the good will we could do with those resources if they were compassionately and wisely diverted to challenges like global warming or the plight or desperate people... whose suffering barely registers in the media. Imagine then the resulting American image abroad. We'd be tough for our terrorist enemies to demonize. And imagine the challenge that would present to terrorist recruiters.

To often this afternoon history was selectively chosen to confirm the status quo - and belief used to foster fear - and we still haven't found a way to have a moral conversation about the consequences of war. Perhaps that is for another day...