Being there
Supporting the troops and opposing the war
BY MICHAEL BRONSKI
Illustration by Robert T. Davies
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It is the images of the loved ones at home that I have the hardest time
watching on television. The mothers, children, brothers, sisters, aunts, and
uncles of soldiers who've been wounded, killed, or taken prisoner in the war
against Iraq. As television cameras cram into living rooms made suddenly small
by the video equipment and lights, the intense grief of those left behind burns
into my consciousness, as it must for any viewer. Of course, this is the soft
side of news, the personal stories that "put a face on the war" and touch us in
ways that pyrotechnic images of the intense bombardment of Baghdad can't. There
is nothing sentimental about these images, nothing false, nothing insincere:
they are immediate, real, and true. But they also underscore the idea that we
must "support our troops."
How could you not support the troops? Regardless of your feelings about
the Bush administration and its war, surely no one wants to not support
our troops. Presumably, very few people in America want to see them hurt or
killed. Yet when I hear the phase "support our troops" -- whether it be from
Bill O'Reilly, Larry King, or the resolution passed by Congress last week
declaring "official" support of the troops -- I cringe. I can't help myself.
The phrase "support our troops," as it's currently used, is nothing more than
not-very-veiled code for supporting the war and the administration's
ill-considered policy in Iraq. In my most cynical moments, "support our troops"
sounds like "shut up."
Of course, it's more complicated than that. As are my own feelings about US
foreign policy, the military, and the soldiers -- both past and present, living
and dead. I spent most of the 1980s being emotionally and sexually involved
with two men who were Vietnam veterans. Both are now dead of AIDS. But during
that time I saw, repeatedly and vividly, the effects of war on them. How they
continued to suffer, how they were emotionally damaged, how they lived in pain,
and how the mantra "support our troops" -- even more ubiquitous during the late
1960s and the '70s than it is now -- was a pathetic lie in terms of its
application to soldiers' lives after the war. When I see grieving family
members on TV desperately struggling to make sense of their losses in Iraq in a
world spun out of control, I think of my lovers Jim and Derrick desperately
grappling to make sense of their time in Vietnam and their deeply conflicted
feelings of being American in a country that had all but deserted them.
I AM AN UNREPENTANT child of the 1960s and its counterculture. I was going on
civil-rights marches as early as 1964, when I was 15 years old. My politics
were fueled by the liberal Catholicism taught in my working-class, all-boys
parochial high school. By my last years in high school, I was speaking out and
writing articles against the Vietnam War. I was an unabashed hippie, and by
1967 I had come out as gay. I spent college protesting the war in Vietnam, and
as a member of Students for a Democratic Society I worked with social-change
groups in neighborhoods close to my inner-city college. When I was
called for my draft physical, I proudly told the induction doctor that I was a
homosexual -- I even verified it with a letter from my therapist -- and so
successfully avoided the draft. Far from wanting to serve, I was convinced the
war was illegal and immoral, and I was determined to resist it any way I could.
As far as I'm concerned, my resistance was a display of fierce patriotism. I
knew Jane Fonda was right even back then. I wanted to support the troops -- as
the bumper stickers said -- but I wanted to do it by bringing them home.
Far from alienating either Jim or Derrick, who did not know each other during
their time in Vietnam, my anti-war, anti-establishment history attracted them
to me. In each of these relationships -- the first, with Jim, lasted from 1979
to 1984; I was involved with Derrick from 1984 to 1986 -- my past was not the
issue; theirs was.
For both of them, their time "in country" was a nightmare. How they survived
the stresses of jungle warfare while living as closeted gay men is
unimaginable. Both men hated the military. Each had been drafted because
neither could find a way to dodge it. Jim was a just-out-of-med-school Marine.
Derrick was a college dropout who had no other options. Both men hated what
they did in Vietnam. They hated the policies they had been sent there to
enforce. They had, pretty much across the board, almost no respect left for the
US government after what they saw -- and did -- there. And these feelings were
unthinkable for them, since both had been raised devout, conservative Catholics
who, before Vietnam, saw themselves as intensely law-abiding and deeply
patriotic.
When I began dating Jim, I had absolutely no idea of the intensity of his
feelings about the war. On one of our first dates, we were at his apartment in
Boston's South End. I asked him about Vietnam, and as he began talking, he
started to cry. At first I thought some specific memory had been triggered, but
it soon became clear that he was overwhelmed with anger. He could barely talk,
although he began telling a few stories -- disconnected, but filled with vivid
images of wounded or dead soldiers upon whom he had operated. His grief was
overwhelming, not only for him, but also for me. I had no illusions about the
war, but I had never come this close to the pain it caused. Over the next five
years, Jim -- especially if he were drunk or stoned -- would describe, or
rather try to describe, his feelings about the war. Sometimes he would try to
tell ironic or even funny stories. Sometimes he would talk about the sex he'd
had with the mostly heterosexual soldiers. Sometimes he would tell gruesome
tales laced with black humor about medical procedures practiced in the jungle
brush. But whenever and however he talked about Vietnam, he would invariably
become consumed with rage.
Once he asked me if I thought of him as a murderer because of his actions in
Vietnam. I said I didn't -- what was I going to say? But there was an unspoken
chasm between us: he knew that I did consider the policies and actions
of the US government murderous, and he had implemented them. I later realized
that, in many ways, he considered himself a murderer and was looking to me for
some kind of validation. And it was true; during the war there were times when
I did think of "our" troops as the murderers of innocent Vietnamese, or of
people who were defending their homeland.
After we broke up, I began dating Derrick and discovered that he was a Vietnam
vet as well. I avoided the topic as much as possible. It was a much more casual
relationship and, frankly, I didn't need the drama. But it was, of course,
unavoidable. Derrick was far less troubled than Jim about his time in Vietnam.
He didn't experience the trauma of being a doctor who couldn't heal the wounded
and dying. He saw his time there as merely something to get through. But there
was damage. He would often describe his wartime experiences in caustic, funny
terms that would turn bitter and rancorous. His pain was just beneath the
surface. On some level, for him the entire experience was one of betrayal --
both of American ideals he once held dear, and of his own sense of well-being.
It became clear to me that sex for him was often some strange, disturbing
playing out of the erotic and emotional stresses he had experienced in Vietnam.
I asked him about this once and he became furious. He told me I had no idea
what he had been through. He said that he respected my actions during the war
and wished he had done the same -- or even fled to Canada, which at the time
didn't feel like an option. He said I really had no way of even beginning to
understand what he had experienced. His time in the war, again and again, rose
between us like a vaporous cloud that silenced his pain and obscured my ability
to understand it.
The pain Jim and Derrick carried with them -- as do many Vietnam veterans --
was central to their lives. It was formative and horrible, a spectral presence
that never completely manifested itself, but also never disappeared. They
didn't speak to their families about it. They showed me their anger because
there was no one else to give it to at the time. My anti-war history made me a
safe harbor, not an enemy.
But there was another reason these men could turn to me. So much of their
experience in Vietnam was wrapped up with their sexuality: they were -- by dire
necessity -- closeted in Vietnam. The anxiety surrounding their hidden
sexuality was completely entangled with having to control and manage the death,
the pain, the ripped-open, bleeding bodies they encountered. The men they were
attracted to, close to, even emotionally dependent on, were men who were dying
in their arms, on the operating table, at their sides felled by sniper bullets
in the jungle, or a few steps behind them decimated by exploding land mines.
In many ways I was smug in my politics. I knew I was right -- and still do --
but I was unprepared to deal with the hurt and pain caused by the war.
Especially in men I loved and cared about. I could hold them and comfort them
and have sex with them when they were upset. I could be a whole body that
replaced their haunting mental images of dismemberment and ripped-apart flesh,
but it was complicated, hard, and distressing.
After Jim died, in 1987, his sister and her husband -- also a former Marine,
from a military family -- insisted that he be given a military funeral. They
were both proud of the fact that he had served in Vietnam. There was a five-gun
salute given by men in uniforms -- were they Marines? National Guard? -- and an
American flag draped his casket. I was sickened by it, as well as by the fact
that his sister and her husband asked Jim's new lover and his gay friends to
stand apart from the family. AIDS was never mentioned, and it was only on my
way home after the service that the hatefulness of this charade finally hit me:
in the two years Jim was dying, his sister never came to visit him. So much for
familial, as well as national, support.
WATCHING THE war in Iraq on television, I am reminded often of Jim and Derrick.
And all the "support the troops" rhetoric reminds me, particularly, of how much
support Jim and Derrick needed after the war, but didn't get. (Of course the
real "support" they needed was a swift end to the war.) It is now common
knowledge that after the homecoming parades were over, America treated Vietnam
veterans like the country's dirty little secret. They were a political and
cultural embarrassment. What we never really talk about here is that, aside
from the benefits given to returning soldiers after World War II, the US has
always treated its returning veterans horribly. (And even many World War II
vets suffered horrendous abuses: many lesbian and gay soldiers were
dishonorably discharged at the end of the war, a common ploy to avoid giving
them costly benefits. African-American soldiers, while covered under the GI
Bill, were routinely denied many of its benefits due to discriminatory banking
and housing polices.)
Let's review a few of the major wars. Men returning from the American
Revolution found they had lost their farms and homes to debt. (A situation
remedied, to some degree, by Daniel Shays's Rebellion in 1780.) Veterans of the
Civil War, who were meagerly compensated to begin with, left the service only
to be trapped in the economic crises of the Gilded Age, during which government
policy rewarded bankers and industrialists (many of whom were war profiteers),
and attacked the newly forming labor unions joined by many former soldiers.
After World War I, the plight of veterans was so bad that, in 1932, 20,000
veterans -- the "Bonus Army" -- marched on Washington, DC, to demand relief
from destitution and joblessness by insisting the government make good on the
"bonus certificates" it had issued after World War I. They camped out in
Washington with their wives and children because they had nowhere else to go.
While the House passed a bill to pay the bonuses, the Senate did not. President
Herbert Hoover decided this was lawless behavior, and called on the Army to
clear the men out. General Douglas MacArthur and his aide Major Dwight D.
Eisenhower (along with the future general George Patton in an important
position) led this "shock and awe" operation and the US Army burned the
temporary homes of the homeless veterans and tear-gassed them. Several thousand
veterans were injured by the gas; two were killed. And we know that thousands
and thousands of veterans are suffering from mysterious illnesses they
contracted during the Gulf War -- illnesses the US government, for the most
part, claims do not exist (shades, of course, of Vietnam's Agent Orange). Now,
as we enter the ill-conceived, illegal war on Iraq, the Republican-controlled
Congress is proposing massive cuts to veterans' benefits, among other things,
to support the sky-high cost of this war (along with Bush's tax cuts).
Again and again, America has valorized war -- sometimes with justification,
sometimes not -- and each time, US citizens are told it is their duty to
support the troops. Yet America, far more often than not, has betrayed these
men and women when they come back home. Indeed, "support the troops" is, for
the most part, empty rhetoric born of fear, anger, and an inability to really
consider the needs and realities of people's lives. I watch American families
on television holding back their tears because their loved ones are in Iraq --
possibly dead, actually dead, or missing -- and I think about holding Jim while
he cried in my arms about what happened in Vietnam. I think about Derrick's
inarticulate anger. I think about how they suffered in Vietnam -- and caused
the suffering and deaths of others. And I think about how little support they
had when they came home. I can't help but think it's happening all over again
as I watch the war on TV today.
Michael Bronski's latest book is Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden
Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin's Press, 2003). He can be reached
at mbronski@aol.com.
Issue Date: April 4 - 10, 2003
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