Just wars (2) – Personal stories: my Vietnam, my Kyiv, my dad

Vietnam protest, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1969 (image by Gary Todd, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine in the latest conflict, it’s a stalemate.

On January 27, a week after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the Western alliance celebrated the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. It was a triumph made possible by American money, men and materiel. Just a year ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO, had celebrated its 75^th.

But the earth is moving. On February 28, the President of the United States undermined his Ukrainian counterpart and with it the territorial integrity of whatever is left of Ukraine. And worse. In that encounter in the Oval Office, he dug an undiplomatic hole underneath under the Western alliance, making the terra under that alliance much less firma. The event stirred some less than pleasant memories.

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Sixty years ago, I was a teenager watching and reading as the “conflict” in Vietnam started to dominate television coverage and newspaper reports. Fifty-five years ago, we had given up calling it a “conflict” and acknowledged it for what it was: a war. I was in my third year of university contemplating the likelihood, and before long the near certainty, of being drafted into the army. Vietnam was a war that seem remote – geographically, psychologically, morally – from what my father must have faced at the start of World War Two.

‘War, huh, what is it good for?’

… absolutely nothing. The song was a refrain of the anti-war movement in America. Written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Motown label in 1969, Whitfield first produced it with The Temptations the vocalists. After requests to release it as a single, Whitfield re-recorded the song with Edwin Starr singing. That’s the version I recall. I was at university in Illinois.

In 1968 I had worn lapel buttons to support Eugene McCarthy’s bid for the presidency. He was running what seemed a doomed primary campaign against the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson. However, he proved to be a strong enough candidate – and the anti-war sentiment was strong enough – that Johnson withdrew from the race. With the bogeyman out of contention, McCarthy’s campaign faded, but he nonetheless stopped Vice President Hubert Humphrey from gaining momentum. Richard Nixon moved into the White House in January 1969. From the volumes of analyses to the Ken Burns television films and a recent, sweeping history by Max Hastings (2019), plenty has been said about that war.

But not this, not once before, in public: I had applied for status as a conscientious objector. Dad was angry, under the surface:

He had been drafted into the Army in 1942. He was 27 years old. Why hadn’t he volunteered in 1941? He never said, not to me. He served in the Pacific theatre, Army Corps of Engineers, building temporary bridges in New Guinea and the Philippines, so the fighting forces could cross the rivers and engage the enemy.

When I was in high school, we sometimes watched World War Two movies together on television. On one occasion, seeing the actors under the Hollywood version of heavy fire crossing one of those bridges, he remarked: “Heavy fire? Those guys were sitting back in camp while we were out there, unarmed, being shot at, putting that bridge together.” He never mentioned it again.

He was proud of his military service, invalided out of combat in 1944. A leg injury, he told me. Decades later, long after he had died, I saw evidence suggesting that the reason was something more like shell-shock, or what we now call PTSD. Other people called it cowardice. Which it wasn’t.

When I told him about my decision, he never once raised his voice, cursed, or even urged me to withdraw my application. He never tried to force his will on me. But he said this: “You only get one war in your lifetime, one time to serve your country. This is your war.”

My application was accompanied by a letter from the minister of the church I then attended, a kind man, from the South. He had moved to Chicago in part because he could no longer abide the legacy of slavery evident in the churches he had served in Tennessee. In the late 1960s, the civil rights movement and Vietnam had conflated. Yes, he said, he was happy to vouch for my good conscience and the conscientiousness of my pacifism.

Except I wasn’t a pacifist, and I said so in the application. The “conscientious” basis of my “objection” was to the coercion involved in the draft and the unconscionable nature of that war, my war, not of war in general, not of Dad’s war. Had I faced the war that Dad had fought in, I told myself, I would have volunteered. But maybe that was bravado speaking. Or guilt.

I never found out what happened with that application. I drew a low number in the draft lottery, meaning a high probability of winning a one-way ticket to Saigon. But my student exemption lasted just long enough for the Nixon administration to suspend the draft and then drop it altogether. I’ll never even know whether I was sincere about my application, engaging in bravado, or feeling guilty. I wonder: Was mine an act of cowardice? Dad and I never spoke about it again.

War and virtue

In the soft light of old age, out of the firing line, that story nags in the back of my mind. The Vietnam war was a turning point for me, especially when conflated with the legacy of slavery. It made me sceptical of the virtue of the American story, and wary of how that mythology might stop us, stop me, from seeing the role power plays alongside virtue. And how power often trumps virtue. Are we seeing that again, now?

In 2013, I received an invitation to visit what we still called Kiev, the Russian name for the capital city Ukrainians call Kyiv. I was part of a programme to help journalists there understand Western capital markets, preparing them for a career change, for writing about economics, corporations, and financial regulation. The participants were all good journalists, with lots of experience, but more accustomed to analysing superpower rivalries, the legacy of the Cold War, and the ideological divide between nationalist populism in the east of their country and westward-facing economic and political liberalism evident in Kyiv and further to the west.

The training session took place about a year before the Maidan demonstrations – the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” – an uprising, but not a war. Shortly thereafter, however, Russia seized Crimea, and three years ago, Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, an evasion of the word invasion.

The rest isn’t history. It’s unfolding before us. I think daily about where, in warfare, we find virtue. I hope my students there didn’t unlearn their former skills.

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Next time, and I’m not quite sure when, let’s look together at what makes a war just. And at the ways that fighting a just war might be unjust.

In this series:
Just wars (1) - Civility on the battlefield and in the Oval Office

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Hastings, M. (2019). Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. New York: Harper Perennial.