Returning to Vietnam

by Mona Shaw

I’m old, and I remember things.

Today is August 30, 2018, the local news dovetails stories of the death of Senator John McCain and accolades given returning Vietnam veterans, part of a recent “Honor Flight” at the Moline, IL, airport.

I don’t react to this because I’m no longer in my living room. I’m dropped into the University of Iowa campus, Iowa City, IA, in May, 1972. I am 20.

I’m walking north on Madison Avenue. I’m almost at the Iowa Memorial Union. It’s a gorgeous May day. The thin clouds stretch like feathers against a bright blue sky. I’m not looking at the clouds. I’m looking at the National Guard solider standing on top of the IMU. His long gun follows me as I pass by.

I’m too befuddled to be frightened.

“How is it that armed soldiers are sprinkled over campus?”

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I know the answer, of course, but that doesn’t dent my astonishment at this. I was there the night before. I was one of the more than ten thousand who’d taken over the campus Pentacrest and downtown Iowa City.

The smell of smoke was omnipresent; though I didn’t know its source. I watched a large rock fly into one of the large plate glass windows of Iowa Book and Supply on the corner of Clinton Street and Iowa Avenue. The over-priced monopoly would eventually get a clue and replace the windows with small one surrounded by pebble stucco.

We were being chased. I didn’t know anyone around me, but people helped each other up if someone stumbled. And, though I didn’t get the brunt of it, my eyes were stinging from tear gas. My throat felt raw. I ran hard. I made it to the Burlington Street footbridge. Billy clubs licked my ankles and connected here and there. A group of us took refuge in Hillcrest dormitory and blocked a door for safety. My ankle hurt, but it wasn’t broken. A few were bleeding. We checked them to see how badly they were hurt. No one in my group was seriously injured.

We knew we could be injured demonstrating. Kent State taught us we could be killed. That knowledge grew our numbers. I was glad I was there. I had to be there.

Memories have memories and that feeling I’d had hadn’t left me. I worked for the Campus radio station. It was my job one night to read the draft lottery numbers. There was no way I could deny to my soul and my God that I was announcing a death sentence for some. It was unbearable. Afterward, I threw up. Everything in my being ached to stop the thing that caused that.

Like most people, becoming an antiwar activist was a gradual thing. I was a hawk as a young teen. I come from a military family. I had loved ones in Vietnam. We were fighting communism. Damn anyone who didn’t support that.

The war was on television. Seeing body after body every night dragged lifeless across the screen began to take a toll. I began to wonder if we were right. I realized how much I’d just accepted the word of others. I began to check things out.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. came out against the war, I knew why I was against it too. When King was murdered, his moral authority eventually gave me the courage to begin to say so. When Nixon escalated the bombing in Cambodia in 1970, against anything and everything moral and decent, it ignited a burning passion to end it. I was playing cards in a mobile classroom with newly-returned vets at Burlington’s Junior College. When we heard the news on the radio, a vet in a wheelchair threw his cards at the wall and wept.

The War in Vietnam was immoral and illegal. No historian denies that anymore. It cost more than 60 thousand American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. It wounded many, many more. It couldn’t be won, yet we kept fighting long after we knew that. It gave us Agent Orange, deadly accidents at ammunition plants, and countless orphans and families forever destroyed.

We ended that war. Even though our government did this in a shameful manner. It was ended. I wonder how many of those Vietnam vets being thanked today might not be alive, had we not done what we did. There is no question, we saved thousands of military lives. We ended the draft too.

You’re welcome. We’re not remembered lovingly these days. I don’t recall a time when we were. We’re discussed with pejorative and accused of things we didn’t do, like spitting on returning soldiers. But, I know that’s not about us. It’s about our national return to the glorification of war. People are afraid to be antiwar again. They tell anyone in a uniform “Thank you for your service." It's protection against public condemnation, while it guarantees public approval.

I know it’s not about the wars we’re fighting because you could throw a stink bomb at an NFL game and not hit three people who could name the nations where we’re fighting wars, let alone why exactly we’re fighting there. Few even know if the Taliban are our friends or enemies these days.
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I try to make eye contact with the soldier pointing his gun at me. He is about my age and handsome. I give him the peace sign. He points his gun down. Perhaps, I had a part in saving his life.