Friday, November 12, 2010

Autumn War

Monday morning’s in-box held an email message from an old school friend. It was a URL to YouTube, and a message: “October, 1969, and some wonderful film of a Vietnam War Moratorium march downtown, ending at Notre Dame.” One click and six minutes later I was forty-one years younger, playing my guitar and singing to a mixed-race, mixed-aged, mixed-clerical crowd of anti-war protestors on the steps of the St. Joe county courthouse. They were singing and clapping along, so I must have been leading something familiar, maybe

I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the river side
Gonna study . . . war no more.

Or maybe it was

If you love your Uncle Sam
Bring ‘em home, bring ‘em home!
Support our boys in Vietnam
Bring ‘em home, bring ‘em home!

The clapping rhythm was right, people’s lips were moving. But, like almost all handheld video gear from that time period, it was silent—they didn’t even use the word video; it was film, probably 8 millimeter. Sound was an expensive proposition involving high-quality portable reel-to-reel tape machines. Silence, but the cinematographer panned the faces, caught the spirit. I was able to recognize people I have not seen since that day.

I wonder what I sounded like, singing . . . confident enough to elicit ebullient response from those assembled. Or perhaps it wasn’t me at all, but the collective will of hundreds of people in this one little corner of the America: end the war now. We walked, enthusiastic on a beautiful day, chanting and waving, to the quadrangle in front of the library at Notre Dame. A bishop and three priests concelebrated Mass to an ocean of people, outdoors, and at the Offertory, instead of money, we put our draft cards and induction notices in the basket, to be mailed with conscientious testimonies to our local draft boards.

The urgency of the need to end the war was shocking the American people in so many ways. Fifty-three thousand eight hundred young American soldiers had died by then; many who made it home were psychologically and physically damaged by the horror and brutality of the conflict. There would be about 3 million civilian, 97,600 South Vietnamese troop casualties. Our national sovereignty was drawing away from the people into the hands of those whom we called “the generals”: real generals, such as William Westmoreland and Curtis, “bomb ‘em back to the stone age” LeMay; and industrial generals: General Dynamics, General Motors, General Electric. They were bombing cities, killing civilians in the millions . . . in our name.

Who were we? Kids, the ones expected to go pull the triggers, every day hearing of the older brothers of our friends, dead or wounded in Vietnam. We studied the history of Vietnam and found a desire for freedom not unlike in our own country, successful wars of liberation against the Japanese and the French. We studied the justice of the war in Vietnam, and found it wanting. So we did the best we could. We clogged the jails, went to prison, we marched, taught, witnessed, lost our future, sorrowed, sang.

It’s mighty quiet around town these days—you’d almost forget there was a war on. But from where I’m standing, the old war and the new ones don’t seem very different, and I wonder why nobody’s raising much of a fuss about it. We’re counting the dead by the thousands now, just like last time, and maybe we should get back out there and make our voices heard.

Last week I led a song at a rally. The last verse went like this:

“When the guns are still
All over the earth
And the nations blossom
In their new birth
When art and knowledge
Make the whole world kin
I open my arms and you come in.”

I wonder what I sounded like. I felt young again. See you at the courthouse. You still remember how to sing real loud?

Broadcast by David James on November 12, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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