Reflections On Veteran’s Day: Making Amends For My Military Service

Veteran's Day For An American Soldier

Author’s Note: Four generations of men in my family, including me, have served in this country’s military during wartime. I’ve earned the right to my opinion.

**********

I want to make amends for what I did. Lending my energy to the military and the forces behind it qualifies as the least conscionable albeit, in my defense, most uninformed decision of my life. My only consideration was my own financial well-being, and the rest of humanity be damned.

My soon-to-be wife was pregnant, and I needed to pay for the delivery. My father, uncles and grandfather had all served in the military, and I decided I would make the Air Force a career. I gave no thought to what it stood for, nor what they did; my decision was based solely on my personal financial needs. I was shocked at the new environment in which I found myself.

I’d been raised not to follow the group. My mother’s favorite question was, “If Bobby jumped off the Empire State building, would you jump off the Empire State building?” Her message was clear, and it was that I should think for myself and not do anything simply because others were doing it. To my surprise I found myself surrounded by people anxious to do exactly what they were told because of the stripes on someone’s sleeves or the oak clusters on their collars.

As a result of my mother’s admonitions, I naturally recoiled at unquestioning obedience, choosing to stake out my own territory and conduct my own forms of protest. Bucking the system made me wildly popular with some of my peers, but persona non grata with others. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t just go along to get along. Fortunately for me, Vietnam was winding down, or my superiors would have surely transferred me there to get rid of me and teach me a lesson. Having never been to Vietnam, I didn’t understand the consequences of such group servility until I met my neighbor, Jim, and that’s when I learned there was good reason for non-compliance with the powers that be.

I wrote about him in a piece called Our Ride to Vietnam in Jim’s Porsche, but that wasn’t our only encounter. Jim had spent 19 years in the Marines, doing three tours in Vietnam, before being involuntarily transferred to the Air Force because of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and multiple scrapes with the law, both civil and military. In an attempt to get him his 20 years and his pension, they transferred him to the Air Force in hopes that he would be able to stay out of trouble long enough to reach retirement. I think he made it.

It wasn’t unusual on Saturday afternoons for Jim and I to get drunk, and the stories about Vietnam would come out. Tales about how they entered villages and killed everything that moved were the most heart wrenching, but Jim would tell them with a blank expression on his face. He told of one tour of duty where mostly he escorted oil company executives around the country. That’s right, oil company executives.

They were everywhere, according to Jim. What we were fighting for, despite the official narrative, was American oil companies’ hegemony over South China Sea oil. Only when they discovered that the oil was unrecoverable was the war was allowed to end. It was my introduction to the realities of America’s ostensible versus actual reasons for warfare.

**********

When finally I extricated myself from the clutches of the military, I remember feeling very dirty for a long time. I didn’t know why, I just knew I had associated myself with something undesirable, and nobody was talking about it. Actually they were, it’s just that the rest of us weren’t included in the discussion.

On every street corner there was a young man missing an arm, a leg or both, and they had plenty to say about the war in Vietnam. Problem was, they’d only talk to each other about it, so many years went by before we got the real story about what we’d done to that country. However, the truth only opened my eyes a tiny bit, and it would be many more years before I came to understand to what I’d made myself an accomplice.

In 1992, I suffered a debilitating bout with PTSD (not service related) and was finally able to empathize with the soldiers who’d been so carelessly tossed aside in the years subsequent to Vietnam. Knowing my experience, it made me sympathetic to what they must have experienced in Nam, though it was only part of the journey.

After 9/11 and in the run-up to the war in Iraq, I started reading. I read Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, General Smedley Butler’s War Is a Racket and Dwight D Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation, where he implicated the Military-Industrial Complex as the primary threat to America. Then I thought about all the mutilated bodies I’d seen at Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center and Charleston Naval Station, and the burn victims at Wilford Hall. Could it be all these wars had nothing to do with truth, justice and the American way, and in reality were only intended to forward American corporate interests? Did we really use all these young men as cannon fodder? It appeared we’d been deceived, and because of my participation I believed myself responsible.

For a time I projected my self-loathing onto all in the military, but then I realized they’d been deceived, just like me. I’d swallowed the meme that we were protecting America’s freedoms, and it wasn’t until I’d been roused from my somnolence that I ever considered otherwise. Today, I figure most of these guys joined to create a brighter financial future for their families, just the same as me.

I decided to fashion myself after General Butler, although I hold no illusion that I compare with the man. To make amends for having lent my energy to the war machine, I work to get the message out about why we have wars. My efforts may prove insufficient, and my karmic payback in future lives may prove to be a bitch, but all I can do is all I can do.

I recognize the need for a military, and I no longer blame the men and women who choose to serve, although I believe their service is misguided. I do blame our elected officials and corporate leaders who carelessly risk the lives of our military and slaughter millions of innocent civilians overseas solely for profits, and it’s for that reason I continue speaking out. The country is no safer because of my service, mainly because we were never in any danger in the first place, but our leaders knew that. I’ll just keep working and hope I can pay back all that bad karma in this lifetime so I can start anew the next time around.

My most profound wish is peace for all, especially those who fought our hegemonic wars and suffer the torment of PTSD. I hope you all find the way back.

**********

           

Larry Wohlgemuth was raised during the tumultuous 60s in the midst of sometimes violent civil rights and antiwar protests. After a stint in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, he earned a BBA degree from Washburn University. Wohlgemuth leans so far to the left he prefers to be called “Comrade”, and his book, “Capitalism’s Final Solution” is planned to be released in the spring, 2011. Larry is a contributor to Prose Before Hos and runs his own blog, It Begs the Question.

[tags]american military, veteran’s day, reflections of a soldier, air force, us military, vietnam, iraq, september 11th, war on terrorism, rethinking america, corporate interests, economic interests[/tags]

Email

0
From The PBH NetworkHot On The Web
  1. alec says:

    Great article. The only thing I find problematic is using ignorance as an excuse or a justification for why we potentially couldn’t find soldiers guilty of the greater crime of being a cog in a very destructive military machine. Does just listening to commands or being unable to connect the dots for the malevolent intentions of the US government ?

    • Larry says:

      I was handed a pocket version of the Geneva Conventions then told if I ever disobeyed an order I would be court martialed. I didn’t know who to follow. Unfortunately the war propagandists fill children’s heads with notion of duty, honor and glory. With no competing discussion it’s hard for an 18 year old to truly be informed. I used to feel differently, but with this war machine that feeds young minds with romantic notions, I came to believe we are asking more than their young minds are capable of. Maybe I am only using that to excuse myself, I don’t know.

  2. Pat says:

    You baby boomers make me sick. So you did four years in the Air Force. I hardly think you were a critical cog in the military war machine. But, in true baby boomer fashion, you’ve co-opted someone else’s guilt and now you’ve decided to bandy it about as if it were some sort of badge of honor among your pseudo-intellectual liberal friends. ‘Oh, I was a misguided youth whose innocence was stolen by the evil government…Even though I was a file clerk for me entire tour, I am just as culpable for the deaths of innocent civilians as if I pulled the trigger myself. I AM BECOME DEATH!’
    I bet you really relate to Apocalypse Now, right? Brings back all those painful memories of watching newsreel footage while you were safe at home in a stateside barracks?

    • Anonymous says:

      Pat, your anger is confusing. That you don’t understand how the universe works is dismaying. That you don’t understand that those who wave flags are as culpable as those who pull triggers is baffling. Yes, you loaned your energy to the effort, so you are responsible. If you don’t like it, well that’s too bad, but you enabled the biggest death machine on the planet to continue to kill, and all for corporate greed and profits.

      • Pat says:

        Slow down there, neckbeard. Here’s where you’re mistaken:
        1.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras vehicula cursus tincidunt. Sed hendrerit urna id lectus porta sollicitudin. Quisque in libero id augue fermentum scelerisque a eget urna. Nullam vestibulum cursus leo, a tristique est venenatis sit amet. Aliquam nec tortor felis. Ut quis semper diam. Duis vulputate ullamcorper dui, vitae euismod risus pellentesque vel. Nam diam risus, vulputate quis ornare et, suscipit a est. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Duis nec risus magna. Mauris non auctor elit. Aenean sit amet elementum enim. Praesent eu arcu nulla, vitae vehicula dui. Suspendisse rutrum convallis libero, vel laoreet turpis lobortis id. Fusce egestas aliquet eros at consequat.

        • James says:

          Pat,
          Swallow some of Andrew J. Bacevich’s material if you can only respect a man’s material who served more than 20 years.

  3. “Lending my energy to the military and the forces behind it qualifies as the least conscionable albeit, in my defense, most uninformed decision of my life.”

Hot On The Web