Opinion/Editorial
IF YOU GO AWAY…
The country of the United States heads into a ground combat war in the desert, a desert portrayed in Hollywood style in the old Gary Cooper movie called Beau Geste. The setting will not be far off, sand and mountains, and viciously murderous enemies killing his fellow French Foreign Legionnaires with continuous violent and heartless abandon. In Vietnam, I was able to use the lyrics I gathered from the Armed Services network broadcasts in Vietnam to name my daily missions to try to stay alive for my U.S. Marine company and me down in a place called the A Shau Valley. The men loved the names of the daily missions more than they were even interested in the plans to stay alive. We are much more emotional in conducting our lives, even under such awful duress, than we are analytical, particularly when life and death are right there together in the foxhole or the muck of a monsoon jungle.
To that end, this day, I still listen to the old songs and some of the new for their brilliance and deep meaning, which the writers and players often portray. One such song called If You Go Away plays with these lyrics: ” If you go away, as I know you must, there’ll be nothing left in the world to trust, just an empty room full of empty space like the empty look I see on your face…”
I write about war in this article because the country is very much at war.
The population of the USA back in the late sixties was about 200,000,000. 3,700,000 men served in that old war. Of that number 375, 000 were all that experienced ground combat. Of that smaller number, the other veterans there serving to support the combatants and not going into open combat themselves, 351,794 Purple Hearts were awarded to those who were wounded or killed. This number does not count those who came back, as the Gunnery Sergeant of my company said about the ‘valley of no return’, A Shau, an uncounted number returned in body but not as what they were when they left.
When my wife came to get me at Travis Air Force Base in California, I was flown back on a gurney. Mary came down the line of patients to greet me. She looked down at me and then walked right on by. When the nurses brought her back and said I was her husband, she wanted to know where we met. The A Shau truly was at that time a valley of no return, as my wife proved to me that I was no longer ‘me’ when I returned, and life since has proved to me that this monstrous change that had come over me would always be mine, as well as evident to others who knew me before, Just over 300,000 returning vets from Vietnam have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress to the point of full disability (one does not have to be in direct combat to have the disorder, but to be close, to be around the bloody result, or to lose friends and combat brothers).
I write about this because, once again, as he did before he started the war with Iran, the leader of the country is forecasting what he’s going to do with the vast powers he’s incredibly taken from the U.S. Congress and the Senate. He is ordering combat troops to sit and wait off Iran’s shores to enter the U.S. into ground combat there. The nation is at 350,000,000 today. Will more be sent to this developing conflict or less by percentage? Will it matter to you if one of your boys or girls is sent and goes into actual combat? Are you ready for the body bags of loved ones? Are you ready for those who went but then came home, and you no longer know them, or quite possibly, them you? The movies, television series, mass media, and the military complex of services do not portray how combat really is. They will not, for fear that nobody will go.
Did you spend last night sitting up at two or three a.m. with night vision goggles looking for the enemy outside your home or apartment? I do. Do you avoid veterans and veteran organizations because the guys and gals who did not have to go into combat can’t understand or believe? I do. Do you keep your rewards, like my medals in a box in the basement, because other men don’t like the fact that you have such valor medals and they don’t”? I do. Do you have to avoid bars at night and Harley-Davidson riders and drivers of giant pickup trucks because so many are aggressively dominant, and I do not want to hurt them? I do. The country did this to me, mostly unknowingly, but there it is, and I have come to accommodate it. The Geneva Shore Report is published as a public service because I also live my life in redemption, for the things I cannot forgive myself for the things I did to stay alive and try to keep my Marines alive.
Your coming contributions to the war are on the water right now, and this is why I reveal these things. We survivors of such combat, if you consider being someone else other than who you were before you went, are very rare. If you meet me, I will probably be the only one you will ever meet who killed people, many of them, on purpose, and then was killed myself. I am writing this as I try to enlist you to attempt to change the leadership’s mind. The desert stuff and what might be true or made up about it is not worth the price you may likely be charged. If one of your kids want to go, and so many who have no clue want to, then think of these lyrics again, as you watch them depart for combat: “If you go away, as I know you must, there’ll be nothing left in the world to trust, just an empty room full of space like the empty look I see on your face.” I would so much prefer that you shed a tear now, reading these words, than at the service in Arlington. My brother is interred there, as he never made it home. In truth, I learned, instead of fighting, running. If you can’t run, hide. If you can’t hide, apologize. Only fight as a very last resort. You and your family are not living in a movie or television series.
Please stay alive, and despite my writing in this newspaper sometimes, I love all of you.
