"The Making and Un-making of a Marine"

Truth and Citizenship

When I was a kid my father, my first teacher, taught me how to scream and yell at my brothers by screaming and yelling at me. My father also never used the blade guard on the table saw and neither did I until years later when I was making my living as carpenter and a piece of wood kicked back from the blade imbedding itself in my forehead right between my eyes.

All through my school days in New Paltz, NY, I was taught a lots of things by my teachers that I was to later find out were plain wrong. I can remember my history teacher, Mr. Fiore, saying as he wacked his pointer on the map of Asia so hard it sounded like a rifle shot, “Communists are who we’re killing right now in Vietnam.” He did not tell us that the main religion in Vietnam was Buddhism, whose premise is to seek spiritual self enlightenment. He did not mention that the Vietnamese educated almost all of their children. He also left out the fact that most of the people living in Vietnam were farmers who didn’t care about communism or democracy .  All they really wanted was to grow rice and live in peace. I didn’t find any of this out until I was there killing them. My point is not to illuminate all the wrong teachings I’ve received; but, to say that once you’ve learned how to do something wrong, it’s damn hard to stop doing it. You might even understand  that it is wrong, and have all the insights in place to explain why it’s wrong, but just go ahead believing it’s right anyway.

An unfortunate example of this oxymoronic behavior is how the American public talks the talk about glorious war and glorified warriors, but neglects and mistreats its veterans when they come home from war.

It seems reasonable that when soldiers come home from war, where they have risked their lives and their souls so that others might be free, they should be honored by each and every citizen every single day. Instead, from our teachers and our politicians and our movie stars and our friends we have learned that honor is not necessary; and worse, we have learned we don’t have to take responsibility for what our soldiers have done in our name. The real lesson is that the United States public has never matched sacrifice for sacrifice. Not now. Not before. This is reflected in how our veterans express the side effects of war with domestic violence, addiction, homelessness and suicide. Our response to these side effects is poor health care, lack of job security, and the demonization of soldiers for what they have been trained and ordered to do by the US military.

Now let me teach you something small and true that we, as US citizens, can do to help. What veterans need from the public they defended is a sincere recognition of their sacrifice. I believe the first order of business in every public gathering should be to honor all the veterans present by asking them to stand to be seen and venerated. Vets should stand and be praised in every church, synagogue, temple, mosque, ballgame, conference, etc., in short every public assembly that a veteran might attend. And let’s add to that by having every political officer in the country getting down on their knees once a month out of respect for what our vets have given them. If such a thing began to happen in our society then for the first time we’d see how many people have sacrificed for what we have and we’d know where our appreciation and honor needs to be directed and maybe we even ask questions about what war is really like.

Unfortunately, we all know that this isn’t going to happen any time soon. What we don’t know is that those who have protected and are protecting us are losing faith, feeling abandoned, and internalizing the conflicts they participated in. We can be sure they are bringing home from war a myriad of emotions and moral dilemmas that need our respect, attention, healing and honor.

If individuals, communities, states and our nation could learn the truth about their responsibility for our vets, then they might locate that important place of humility and discover where horror grows. Then we’d find out how to right this wrong and learn a thing or two about truth and citizenship.

Larry Winters