He didn’t die in Vietnam. But parts of him did. The young parts, the innocent parts, the carefree, confident football player with a little too much attitude. Those parts stayed behind in a strafed jungle that would, over decades, grow back thick and green over all that had been lost there.
Vietnam was the first war that entered our living rooms through our television screens. Now they all do in one way or another. Faraway wars, wars that we give names to. Enduring Freedom is this one. It doesn’t sound like a war with a title like that, but it is. And I think we don’t really grasp that until there are faces that haunt us, that remind us of the toll war takes, faces that will go on in photographs because they won’t go on in life. There are the faces of those left behind, too: widows, parents, people swept by tides of grief.
Vietnam was a dirty, messy war–undeclared, unfair, with so many sent to die. Sent to be slaughtered, really. But in a strange way, it was cleaner for those of us who were unwavering in our belief that it was wrong. It was a time of turmoil, yet it was a simpler time. There was right and wrong. There were hawks and doves. Clean battle lines, as strange as that sounds. Now, the generation who shouted, ‘No More War!’ is having to say, ‘There are no absolutes in life. We need to be in Afghanistan. Something terrible was done to us–an act of war–and war is the right response.’ How jagged the journey into adulthood is: when I was 16 I never could have conceived of supporting any kind of war effort. Things were so much simpler then. We plaited flowers in our hair and wore peace symbols around our necks. Now we fight back tears as we sing “God Bless America.”
But the constancy of war is in the faces. That’s when war becomes real to us. That’s when the miles shorten, the distance seems irrelevant. People who smiled for photographs are gone. We didn’t know them, yet we carry their images with us. They remind us of how complicated life can be, of how quickly death can come. They remind us that even though terrible things happen in the world–acts of evil, acts of terror–people can be brave, and big, and capable of greatness.
The truth about war is that wars are enmeshed in politics, and strategy, and top-secret decisions made in the Situation Room. But we only recall those things as history lessons. What stays with us, what endures, what changes us and trails us through the years are the faces. Long after a war ends, long after the guns are silent, and people in that country, that region, go back to their lives, we will remember a man’s eyes, a woman’s smile, the tilt of a head. We’ll be crossing the street, or buying vegetables, and the image will come to us. An image from a photograph. Someone we might never have met. And we’ll realize what they taught us: that none of us are really strangers, after all.
