Vets Day 2005
November 11, 2005, a Friday. Sunny,
windy, and cold.
Dear Sammy, Terry, Walter, Randall,
Frederick, Picardo, Rochester, John, Jesse, and Arlos:
This year in my annual letter to the
ten of you, I decided not to list your names in alphabetical order -
too institutional - so I've listed you instead in the order you
appear at lines 15 through 23, on Panel 7 East, at the Viet Nam
Memorial Wall, in Washington, DC. (I know, I know, the irony of it
all. I don't think any of you even ever got to Washington while you
were alive. Do you guys even know the meaning of that word, irony?
It's a big one back here where I'm working now.)
Anyway, how are you all doing? It
does get odder each year. Here I am 62 years old now, and you guys are all
still 19 or thereabouts, haven't aged a bit since we last saw each
other in the flesh: 39 years, 5 months, 178 days, and about 1 hour
ago. It sure was a lot warmer that day.
You're probably saner than I am, more
reconciled to your fate. Maybe in the end, death is the only sanity
we have; maybe that's what heaven is: saneness. We sure don't have much of it around
here, guys. What we have is chaos. Hell, sometimes. You remember the
hell part; it wasn't "down there" after all, was it. Remember our
song: "We gotta get outta' this place, if it's the last thing we
ever do?" Well we made it, at least you guys did, and for you it
was the last thing you ever did, here anyway. I'm just glad you and
I don't have to go there any more….
But, as I've told you before, somebody
else is going to that place now. Again. We've once again managed to
create hell on earth - along with our Muslim brothers. It's always
something. This one started just over 4 years ago. And our brothers, once again, are
right in the middle of it (2,057 since we invaded Mesopotamia -
that's the count as of this morning - and another 15,568 wounded,
and that's just us, of course): they're out there killing, getting
killed, maiming, getting maimed, coming back dead in boxes, coming
back dead men walking - the unlucky ones - walking that walk they’ll
walk the rest of their lives here, taking their loved ones down with
them. You know the story. I'm glad at least you guys are all
resting in peace. Requiescat in pacem.
"Don't mean nothin'," as we used to
say. Very Zen, though we didn't know that at the time.
Anyway, we're at it again. Those
2000+ who are already there with you, I'm sure they've caught you up
on what's going down. Now they can be sane again. Now they're safe. How could they not
be? They're with you, and you're the best. Thank God for
that.
Now you know each year I try to leave
you with something uplifting. I know; it's not you who need this -
you've already been lifted up, in every sense - it's actually me, and we the living
right here now, who need to hear something inspiring, who have a
need to make some meaning out of all of this. You already have
meaning: you're sane, you're with each other, you're dead. So this
is only partly for you, and mostly for the rest of us.
Now we've all heard of the
Declaration of Independence, right? What most people seem actually
to remember about the Declaration are those inspiring beginning
words, the ones about "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal, etc., etc." For people who get off on
words, those are indeed some pretty fine ones. But there's an
overlooked part of the Declaration that's my personal favorite, and
it's not the way its starts, it's the way it ends.
"And for the support of this
Declaration, and with a firm reliance on Divine Providence, we
mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our
sacred Honor." We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our
Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. 56 men put their John Hancock to
that pledge, a little more than a platoon's worth of patriots.
That pledge, mostly overlooked here in
academia, is not a high-falutin' concept - that pledge is not
really words at all, in the usual sense. It's an act…a promise real
men made, and gave, to each other, promising to risk real things,
things that included every single thing they had to lose. And if
you actually look into it, you find that those pledges were very
costly for the 56 men who made them, and for their families.
17 of those signers actually went off
to war, and several were killed, or had sons that joined up and were
killed. (Can you imagine that today - political leaders actually
going off to a war they started?) Several of them did lose their
fortunes.
So guys, this year I want you to
remember the pledges you once made, to one another. And how well
you then acted them out. Your pledges were fully redeemed, at face
value, and you are fully redeemed. You paid. Your honor is
established, for all time. Shakespeare put it into words better
than I can, in that now too-often-quoted play of his about "we happy
few, we band of brothers" - King Henry V (and Will, you'll have to
pardon my paraphrasing you a bit):
"A many of your bodies, no doubt
Found native graves; upon the which I trust,
Shall witness live…of your day's work:
And you who left your valiant bones in France…or French
Indochina
Dying like men, though buried in those nations' dunghills,
You shall be - you are - fam'd; for there the sun greets you,
And draws your honors reeking up to heaven,
Leaving your earthly parts to choke our clime…to choke our
voices."
Now that's inspiring, and that's for
you.
Just one more thing I want to tell you
before I close. The thing I tell you every year now; the thing I
never told you when we were that few, that "happy few," because we
just didn't talk that way back then. But I hope you always knew it
anyway. I think you did.
What I want to tell you is…I love you.
Bye for now,
Your Lieutenant
