Walking and Carrying Banners

THE VIET NAM WAR was the dominant feature of my childhood, fortunately, from a distance. As I went through grade school and junior high, and through high school, it was always with me, at five thirty every day, via Walter Cronkite, though I preferred Huntley and Brinkley. I kept track of it, and the casualty numbers became something of a daily scoreboard. t seems the American dead per week averaged about two hundred, the south Vietnamese about a thousand, and the enemy dead about two thousand a week. The war had seemingly been ongoing my entire life, and seemingly would never end. Ten years is a long time for a child. For many years I harbored the thought that they would run out of people before we did, but when that hope was destroyed by the Tet offensive, and Walter Cronkite gave up, so did I, at the tender age of thirteen. At that point I began to favor the war protestors, who, among my family and friends, were the unpatriotic, unwashed bad people. I knew they were right then, and I know they were right now. In fact, by the time I was fifteen I wanted to become one of them, but that was beyond my capabilities; not with my conservative, patriotic parents. It was as impossible for me as Woodstock, which I only languidly wanted to attend. I finally got my chance to protest a war in 1991, when the United States, following the misleading of George Bush, fabricated an excuse to invade and conquer Iraq, then his son did likewise in Afghanistan. Let the record show that both these wars have proven as tragically fruitless as Viet Nam. the lesson is that even the greatest military superpower in the world cannot send half a million armed forces halfway around the word and impose its policy on weaker nations without disastrous consequences. We Americans did not learn our lesson from Viet Nam, have we learned it now? Marching down the street carrying a banner which read "no war for oil", I at least had the satisfaction of being, as they say, on the "right side of history", and being able to do something, however, small, about bout it. Now, another misguided president seeks to use threats and intimidation to rid an enemy of its nuclear weapons, and wishes to stir up trouble by abrogating a perfectly acceptable nuclear arms treaty with another enemy nuclear arms treaty with another enemy. Thus, two more potential wars of American aggression are in the green room, ready to take center stage. My only comfort is the thought that, at long last, our country may have learned its badly needed lesson. If not, my only comfort tis that I can still walk, and can still carry a banner.