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‘Never again’ headlines the Sunday, October 16, 2016 Panama City News Herald front page article highlighting how Vietnam veterans were treated on arriving home and still reel from it today. I had a very, very minor piece of that. Warned never to wear the uniform in public. A Naval officer whom I worked with in WashDC cursed and spit on during lunchtime downtown, he should have known better than public in uniform but he was stunned, not merely offended, but deeply, deeply hurt. Another time me, spit on as I stood talking at a public phone booth in Alexandria, Virginia, after I retired but chilly weather and wearing my old khaki Navy raincoat.

Unlike WW2, the Vietnam War was hated in America. There was a sense that we had no right there, no business there, that it wasn’t an American issue: although that was a reasonable view, the Vietnam War was not the military's decision or choice. News coverage, never mind saying “media,” rightly damned our government’s foreign policy, but also terribly, viciously, unforgivably damaged our troops for carrying it out. Mantra that reviled the president and young soldiers and drove the president from office, “Hey, hey, LBJ, …” Horrifying nightly news coverage from the nonexistent Front. Songs, anger, condemnation, demonstrations. My Lai. “Good Morning, Vietnam.” Draft, draft lottery, a sense of hopelessness for those sent into the quagmire. Fleeing, escape to Canada. The, for me nearly as unforgivable as the German Holocaust, American citizens toward whom I'll hold contempt until “closed in the sod” as William Alexander Percy’s hymn has it, of blaming and mistreating drafted and bound military personnel for the foreign policy of the American government whom the people elected, both political parties. Military force, which should only be used when vital national interest is at stake, is an instrument of foreign policy of government elected by the people: those too thick to understand this and who condemn the military in their ignorance are so beneath contempt as to be unworthy of conversation, forgiveness, reconciliation, friendship, association. 

A most contemptible suggestion I have encountered is an escapist appropriation “Jesus was a pacifist.” What a crock. Jesus was a man of his era, an age of slavery that he accepted, of military conquest and occupation to which he obediently submitted and never objected: to say Jesus was a pacifist is to attach to him not himself but a modernist ignorance of distant ages. Especially does it happen as mainline Christian seminaries tilt into certitudinous leftist extremism: to be shunned, the lot. 

Repressed, last Sunday’s headline article stirred it all up again, brought it all back. Who was against the U S Government at the time, so was I, a military officer. Who was against us at the time, don’t come near, my scabbed and scarred over contempt is scraped raw. Finally and moreover, that what the nation ought have learned from the foreign policy that was the Vietnam War, America has learned nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.  

"Never again" is a dream, a myth, as we live it all again immeasurably, infinitely worse, longer, horrific, more costly.

T