Living through history without realizing it

 

When visiting Vietnam last month, my family (including two teenage grandsons) visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Mihn City and Chu Chi Tunnels outside the city. There were some references to the Viet Cong in a lotus farm boat ride in the Mekong Delta. My friend Heidi and I also saw the memorial to John McCain in Hanoi and, of course, Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum.

While the remains of the long and bloody Vietnam War are still visible in the country, they seemed faint and more geared toward tourists than historians. To those of my grandson's (and perhaps son's) generation, the Vietnam War is ancient history.

What the visit to these sites did do, was inspire me to watch Burns' and Novick's The Vietnam War documentary series that aired on PBS in 2017. And made me wonder what I was doing during these turbulent times.

As with all of Burns' work (The West, The Civil War, etc), the documentary is, to my mind, incredibly comprehensive, sensitive, and balanced. All sides of the war were given voice through interviews with North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, combat troops, POWs, U.S. protesters  conscientious  objectors, and service members families. A former North Vietnamese soldier was particularly articulate and effective in describing the personal impact of the war on the North Vietnamese - an effort seen by the majority of the country, not as a Communist takeover, but a war of independence from colonial rule. The protests and political turmoil within the U.S. were powerfully documented. And as always, all the images were searing. 

One could say that I "came of age" during the final years of the war. I turned 19 in 1971 when the lottery determined whether I would be drafted or not. My number was 146; only those with numbers 95 or less were called up. (I remembered it being closer than that.) By 1971, Nixon was instituting a policy of "Vietnamization" of the war. U.S. troops were coming home. I lucked out.

I remember little about the war as a teenager involved in school work, farm chores, class plays, speech contest, Boy Scouts, and 4-H - along with having fun with friends and starting to date. Images on the NBC Nightly News with Huntley and Brinkley, photos of demonstrations in Life magazine, and the dramatic images of the naked burned girl running from a bombing and a Kent State student leaning over a killed classmate stand out from my exposure to the mass media. 

More personally, I remember seeing my father's signature on a petition at the local bank to end the war. (He was a Korean War veteran.) Now and then in high school, I would hear reports of a classmate's older brother or cousin being killed in the war or coming back physically or emotionally disabled. During my senior year, a congressman speaking to an assembly at our high school was heckled by students for his support of the war - and those students were quickly and roughly removed from the auditorium. I saw demonstrations in front of Old Capitol at the University of Iowa in the fall of 1970, and read the "countdown" to the closure of the university on the front page of the Daily Iowan newspaper. The local police the spring prior predicted the university would close within 30 days of its opening. I took no part in the demonstrations, more worried about getting to classes, living away from home, and adjusting to married life. I suppose I was one of Nixon's "silent majority."

I lived through one this countries most violent and disruptive eras without realizing it. And it makes me wonder how many of us are doing the same thing today.

While thankfully not experiencing the violence of the late 60s, we seem to be just as politically divided. We are fighting unpopular wars in the Middle East. Civil rights, women's rights, and LGBQ rights are yet to be fully realized. Climate change opens new avenues for disagreement. Gun right's advocates as well as those protesting police shootings march in our streets. Far left and far right groups exacerbate the divisiveness through social media. 

Am I once again living through history without realizing it? Or more importantly doing enough to shape it?