My generation was born too early to participate in the cultural reformation of the sixties, so I don’t consider myself a Baby B

Old Warrior’s Lament

Sally Drumm

During the late-1960s and early 1970s, Flower Power ran through my veins like a rat in a crazy maze that gave out at Gilligan’s Island. As the Vietnam War intensified, I moved from grade school to middle school to high school. My sense of powerlessness to change what was happening on the television intensified in direct proportion to intensification of the war in Vietnam and the war in American streets – I was a child whose observations and opinions held no weight. During those years, I listened to albums by the Beatles and Neil Young and to the soundtracks of Woodstock, the concert, and Easy Rider, the film. I wanted to head out on the highway to anywhere but where I was. Images of Kent State students lying dead and injured on the streets, images of My Lai women and children crumbled and bleeding in ditches, images of civil rights marches and riots, of gas shortages and massive power outages, nightmares of endless bombing runs over Vietnam – all this, my reality, spun hypnotically out-of-control in flickering strobes shooting at me from the screen of my family’s black and white rabbit-eared TV.

The 1970s of my adolescence was an off-the-air test pattern-decade, a gray-space decade for the nation and for me. My generation was born too early to participate in the cultural reformation of the sixties, so I don’t consider myself a Baby Boomer although culturists place me in that group. We fall shy of inclusion with Xers because we were born too late. We are the “Stifle it, Edit’,” Archie Bunker generation, come of age on the cusp of Boomers and Xers, come of age when personal computing was still binary code in Bill Gates’ brain, when M, T, and V were just letters of the alphabet, when Rap meant a knock on the door, when Mothers of Invention, the band, was better known than Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, the activists. Members of my generation are the pioneers of the single-parent family, the latchkey childhood, and the fast-food self-help cultural landscape. Most importantly, mine is the first generation to grow up under the influence of televised war.

Today, little has changed. Letters of the alphabet, rearranged, symbolize a new era, M.A.D. is all but forgotten, single parent families are the norm, televised violence still colors the cultural landscape, bands have new names like OutKast and Maroon5 but the boys and girls look and sound the same, and war still rages.

Yet, who am I to criticize my nation’s state of affairs? Who is this 50-year-old stranger, who, as a twelve-year-old, nearly burst with desire to march for peace alongside hippies dressed in patch worked blue jeans edged with grandmother’s lace, but who now cannot find the energy to protest? Who is this stranger who grew up believing that shoving a flower in the barrel of a rifle posed a solution to the problem of war, but who later served twenty years in the military? Who am I to still believe in peace as possibility for humanity?

Nothing seemed to be working out right for America in 1977 when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, and nothing much was working out for me. I’d grown up in a white wooden house built next to a dump. My dreams were filled with plans for escaping that small town. Enlisting in the Marine Corps proved the only way out. In 1977, I had a feeling that even the American Dream – the old reality that hard work led to equality and a quality life – was a lie. Thirty years after enlisting, I’m still asking Joe McDonald and the Fish’s infamous question posed in lyrics at the Woodstock Concert: What the hell are we fighting for? And I’m still asking myself, “What can I do?”

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Recently, during a pre-surgery screening appointment at the local Naval Hospital, I met a young woman officer, a nurse scheduled to leave the Navy in two days. Her hollow fawn-like eyes and brown hair did not match the picture ID pinned to her scrubs. In the picture ID, she is blonde, laughing, smiling. The laughing blonde is lost somewhere in the depths of this fawn’s eyes.

I’ve seen eyes like this before. The first time was during the mid-eighties, when I served as a drill instructor. Then, the Navy nurse’s eyes were the eyes of young Iranian woman, a recruit in my platoon at Woman Recruit Training Command. The Iranian woman soon left training after numerous run-ins with authority: locking herself in the gear locker armed with a can of Drano; shuffling along the street with others in her platoon before coming to a dead halt and refusing to budge because she’d seen Jesus waving from a passing van; refusing to wear a white T-shirt because Jesus wore a white T-shirt. I see those same eyes in men and women diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, like the woman who served as a mortuary worker in Iraq or the man who slit the throat of an old guy over in Nam and who now talks with that dead man, riding beside the old soldier in the cab of his truck.

I meet eyes like those each time I look in the mirror.

At the hospital, the Navy nurse and I talk about my upcoming surgical procedure, a procedure that requires I trust my body to Navy doctors once again, doctors and procedures I learned not to trust during my twenty-year experience with Army and Navy doctors. This will be my first surgery since leaving active duty ten years before.

The nurse asks if I have any concerns. My laugh fills the room, echoes down the hall. She begins laughing, too. The light returns to her hair, her body, her eyes. She’s blonde again. She tells me she has served two tours in the Middle East during her war.

The first time wasn’t so bad. She was stationed on a hospital ship in the early days of the war. She could be more objective with the injured enemy’s wounds. She was more careful of her own security with the enemy. “We couldn’t wear belts,” she says, knowing I will understand.

I nod.

The second tour was worse. She worked in Kuwait, readying troops for movement in country. As the fawn speaks about her time in Kuwait, she stops short of belt-and-shoelace talk. “I can be tough,” she says. “Sometimes the marine liaison comes over here and asks me to get his recruits in line.”

I laugh knowingly. The men love pulling sweet young fawns into their game. The men know the recruits will not respond in any way except doing what they are told to do when a woman is doing the ordering. This dutiful respect paid to a woman makes a recruit feel more powerless than being punched in the gut.

It’s the sense of powerlessness to do anything else that gets the mission accomplished. Sort of like knowing you have to have a colonoscopy for your own good.

“In two days,” the fawn says, “I’ll be released from active duty. I’m going back to school.”

“Keep your military career to yourself,” I tell her.

She looks puzzled and knowing at the same time.

“Telling people you were in the military might help you get a job, but if you throw it around when you’re socializing, you become the freak. After the thank-yous are said, astonishment sets in, and if you’re a woman, the freak show begins. It’s the stereotype,” I tell the fawn, “– say you’re a woman in the military and you’re associated with the stereotype of the woman in the military: whore, slut, dyke, loser.”

The fawn laughs. “Yeah,” she says, “I was out on a date with a pilot. He took me to a party a married couple was having. I told the wives I’m a nurse. Oh, you work at the Memorial Hospital? No, the naval hospital. Oh, you’re a contractor. No, I’m in the Navy. And you know what—“

“That was the end of the conversation,” I interrupt her, looking straight into her eyes – we military people appreciate eye-to-eye contact. Someone planning to kill you won’t look you in the eyes. Death under fire doesn’t happen as portrayed in Old Westerns. “Or worse yet,” I say, “they want to ask how many people you’ve killed. You can see it in their eyes.”

“Do you want to know the truth?” the fawn asks.

“Sure…yeah.”

“It’s all a lie. Terrorism. It’s just not happening.”

“Yeah,” I answer. “They want to keep us scared,” I say, and looking steadily into her face, the face of a twelve-year-old girl, a wounded-by-experience twelve-year-old girl, I know how difficult moving back into civilian status will be for that twelve-year-old.

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If Homer – the Greek poet, not the head of the Simpson clan – can teach the present anything at all, it’s that most war lasts ten years as did the Trojan war, and that it will take the warrior at least ten years after the war ends to resume a balanced life, the amount of time required for Odysseus to journey home from the Trojan War. That means that the nurse who sat across her desk from me but who hugged me when I left, the nurse who looked like a wounded twelve-year-old, will be about thirty four-years-old before she feels at ease in the civilian world following her release from wartime active military duty. And everywhere she goes, she will see that horrible question in the eyes of those she meets: “How many people did you kill?”

I know the feeling. My seventh and eighth grade language arts students asked me that very question upon learning that I had spent twenty years in the Marine Corps. I refused to answer and thought to myself: “I’ve never killed anyone, but someone died in my arms. I’m certain the feeling must be the same – an inescapable embrace of responsibility and powerlessness. And I know my words will not put your questions to rest.”

I’m certain Odysseus felt like me, and I’m certain my fawn of a Navy nurse does, too – we are living the warrior’s archetype. Homer gives us the first record of the archetype set for war in The Iliad. In The Odyssey, we are given the first record of the archetype set for the warrior seeking to reach home, or rather, to balance the psyche inundated with and overshadowed by images of violence and death. The Odyssey’s mythic images conceal a first look by Homer into the journey that must be taken by all warriors returning home.

In his book, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay suggests Achilles is the first literary rendering of posttraumatic stress disorder. In his follow-on book, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, Shay compares the modern war veteran’s journey home to that of Odysseus and neatly connects each of the phases of Odysseus’s journey home to a phase of reincorporation in the modern veteran’s experience. Each of Odysseus’s encounters can be read as a metaphor for an archetype in the warrior set of primeval imagery.

The journey home is gruesome. Some of us never make it home. Others, damaged by war experience, return home a hero only to experience alienation from society, from family, friends, and potential employers. The veteran is the feared Trojan Horse: the hero who has left the war but for whom the war never leaves.

We cannot find words to answer your question.

They all look so young these days, those wounded by war. Like my nurse, these young and war-scarred warriors come home to a hero’s welcome. Welcomed home, the warrior is quickly forgotten; his or her adjustment problems are buried. Those veterans without family support, or those abandoned by a family and a society that cannot understand them or their anguish, are often unable to keep a job and become homeless. They wander forever in a deep blue Aegean Sea, where the sense of not quite fitting in civilian life beats like sun upon battle worn shoulders, and hope is as difficult to remember as the taste of unsalted water.

We live in a reality that proposes the past teaches nothing except don’t look back and don’t draw attention to the truth. We present children with packs of playing cards marked with human beings we should kill. We place a terrorist’s head on an HDTV platter and expect children as young witnesses of death to feel secure and loved, to feel as if they have a future in a world that teaches by example that war is the final solution relied upon for resolution of social and political differences. Those who speak out for peace are labeled traitors. Peace is a back-talker, a terrorist, a decade or two’s worth of overdue taxes, a bogeyman under the bed. Our children are taught by example that what really matters is wealth, and that those who don’t have it will make good troops for the Desert Wars. Those who will die in war are prepared for their dance with death by playing gore-filled video games and by immersing themselves in the ever-increasing glut of filmed violence.

Yet who am I to criticize, I who risk nothing; I who have nothing left to risk?

Mine is a country intent on sending its young men and women to die for a cause that demands death before dishonor. Sometimes I think our national fear was born in the jungles of Vietnam, the first in our now ancestral line of acts of aggression against weaker countries, a pedigree that includes El Salvador, Granada, Panama, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Sometimes I think our national fear was born during the civil impasse of the 1960s, a time we still refuse to acknowledge as a time of civil war. Sometimes I feel as though my own fear was born yesterday, when I looked into the eyes of that young woman, a Navy nurse with the face of a twelve-year-old and the eyes of an old warrior.

During twenty years of active military duty, the period when the United States war-pedigree grew with invasions, conflicts, and wars, I, a trained warrior, was called a peacekeeper. How can I be a peacekeeper with a gun in my hand, with my finger on a button, with a war cry in my throat?

Yet, who am I to criticize?

Shall I look to government or statesman, corporacy or politician? Haven’t I gotten exactly what I sought? Haven’t I found the truth in the television screen, in its images of opposites: war and peace, have and have-not, black and white, this and that? Have I not found truth in my thirty-year journey from small-town flower child to old warrior meeting new warrior in the Naval Hospital?

Have I not found home?

Where I come from is as lost to me as where I will go.

As I grow older and look back upon my childhood, a childhood seasoned by the Vietnam War, as I look back upon my early adulthood, years lost to Cold War peacekeeping conflicts that no longer capture American attention, as I look into the future and sees the years of war to come, I feel a sense of fury because I live in a nation that has never been at peace during my lifetime.

When I come across Vietnam Veterans still suffering, weeping, still weeping over someone, friend or enemy, killed in Vietnam, I feel a sense of betrayal by and fury toward a government that demands the good fight of its lost youth, those choosing enlistment in a volunteer force over poverty in a white frame house built beside a dump.

As I come across more and more Veterans of the Desert Wars, of the War on Terror, veterans who are suffering, weeping, and hiding their wounds behind a masque of false bravado, I feel a sense of raw fury toward a government that continues to create warriors whose only reality is war, a reality that diverts the course home sometimes for years, sometimes forever.

As I consider my own warrior past, I feel a sense of powerlessness to change the fact that we as a people spend more resources and energy fighting wars than making and keeping peace, that we as a people know absolutely nothing about creating a lasting peace. My sense of powerlessness over the course of war, the course of history, and the course of human error, has grown beyond any conception for its potential that I might have intuited during the seventies, eighties, or nineties, but I suspect it is no less than that sense as experienced by Homer and recorded in his epic lament: that those who suffer most from war are the children who witness its ravages. The old soldier never forgets the goal of all war is to achieve peace, and to live in peace is the warrior’s reward.

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