Featured song:
“Janine”, written by Chuck Phalen.
Recorded live in 1971 in some dive nightclub, or maybe at a high school, by a country rock band I played drums for named Road Apple. Personnel: Chuck Phalen, Russ Pahl, Bill Jason and myself.
The verse starts out as a boy-loses-girl love song, but then the hook kicks in and takes it to another place altogether. A place that describes my state of mind in the late 1960s.
In the summer of 2024, I decided I would finally watch “Saving Private Ryan”.
I reached down for my backpack, still tucked under the seat in front of me, and fetched my earbuds. It would be five hours before we touched down in the Bay Area, so I figured now was as good a time as any to take a deep breath and finally watch the thing. It would round out my education, I thought, since I had never been to war.
Saving Private Ryan was touted by many veterans as the most realistic war movie made up to that time. No romance, just trauma. In that respect, I was not disappointed. I think I had a mild case of PTSD for a week afterward.
What I did not expect, however, was war depicted like a high pressure construction job, with your boss always nipping at your heels to do it yesterday, do it yesterday, DO-IT-YESTERDAY!!! Only, instead of being fired if you screw up, you die. Or spend the rest of your life being fed soup.
I graduated high school in the spring of 1970, when the Vietnam War was still in full swing. During my senior year, I used to walk home with a good friend who talked of nothing but how he was going to volunteer for the Marines and defend our country.
That July, after graduation, I started getting letters from him in Vietnam. “Don’t sign up!” he warned me, again and again. “We shouldn’t be here!” After he served his tour, he came home (thank God!) and became active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
I have nothing but respect and gratitude for the friend who dreamt of defending our country, and acted on it. I also have nothing but respect and gratitude for the friend who changed his mind about what we were doing, and acted on it. That’s not to say I have any less respect for those who did not change their minds, and continued to believe in the mission.
I’m probably the one I have the least respect for in the whole Vietnam era. I was the only one in my friend group, it seemed, who had an honest 4F. In those days, they wouldn’t accept you in any service if you had flat feet, and I had the flattest feet my podiatrist had ever seen. All through high school, I must admit, I didn’t try very hard to do my foot exercises.
It’s not that I didn’t feel a tug about serving. I had grown up on stories of Stalin’s purges, and how appeasing Hitler had turned what should have been a quick military show of strength into a full blown World War. In spite of being surrounded by a culture of war protesting, and longing to join it with all my heart, I still wasn’t sure that Communism wasn’t the new Fascism. What if all my hippie friends were wrong about Vietnam? What if I should be getting ready to face what my parents faced?
Today, I see that much of Communism, as practiced in the 20th century by guys like Stalin and Mao, was indeed the new Fascism, only different. But I have also come to see that when the USA sided with the French in their occupation of Vietnam after World War II, it was not only morally wrong, but the exact opposite of what the USA should have done to fight Stalinism and Maoism. If we had helped Ho Chi Minh in 1945 when he was waving an American flag and touting our founding documents, Vietnam would probably have matured into an independent social democracy, like Western Europe did after the Marshall Plan. I doubt if there would have been a Vietnam war. And I doubt if the new Vietnamese government would have persecuted its Catholic population, as I learned it did from a coworker whose parents escaped Vietnam in a small boat before he was born.
Why didn’t we do the right thing by Vietnam in 1945? Well, when I finally did some serious study, I learned that so much of the anti-communist fervor at the highest levels of our government was not about protecting freedom, nor the right to worship (or not) as one chose — it was about protecting corporate interests in countries where we should have been siding with the working people of those countries. To put it simply, a Marshall plan for all those people who didn’t live in Europe or Japan would have shortened the cold war by many years, and pulled the rug out from under the authoritarians in the Soviet Union and China without bringing everyone to the brink of world destruction.
And a true Marshall Plan for Russia after the cold war would have headed off the rise of Putin. Instead, when the Soviet Union so graciously ended hostilities, we followed in the footsteps of our post-Marshall Plan policy which began in 1953. That was when we overthrew a popular leader in Iran in favor of a brutal king. After that, we overthrew a popular leader in El Salvador, who was cut off just before he could implement reforms that would have made the bulk of Central Americans, not just the dictators, prosperous. Oh, and friendly to the US.
In a similar way, we pushed unfettered capitalism on Russia with no thought for how it would effect the common people there. It affected them very badly. Then Putin came along and reeled in the billionaires just enough (no more) to be able to get his people’s allegiance, so he could carry out his long range goal of restoring Russian dignity by invading Eastern Europe and killing people.
In the summer before my senior year, I woke up one morning and thought, you know, I would love to really study about Vietnam’s history, and figure out where I really stand on that war. That was in the days before the internet, even before computers were a household thing, when you had to go and talk to people, and walk around in a library all day hunting for information. I was so excited about the prospect.
I soon forgot all about that project, and suffered many more years of confusion.
To those who went to Vietnam, and to those who went to jail rather than go to Vietnam, I thank you for your service. And to all those who have died in all of our wars, I thank you for your service. I hope you have found healing, wherever you are.
Mostly, I pray that more people on planet Earth will follow through with conscientiously questioning what’s going on while it is going on, looking honestly at both sides of a debate, as I failed to do at the time of the Vietnam War.