A Teachable Moment?
By Andrew Himes
I spent my high school years during the 1960s growing
more and more outraged by the war in Vietnam. Every day
I came home from school and watched Walter Cronkite on
the CBS Evening News reporting on yet another cycle of
death and horror, destruction and dismemberment. Every
day I heard about dozens or hundreds of new US
casualties and hundreds or thousands of new Vietnamese
casualties. I heard about atrocities like the killing of
Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, and the carpet-bombing
of the jungles by endless flights of B-52s, and
pointless slaughter at places with names like Khe Sanh
and Hue and Ia Drang. I was saddened by the killing. I
was angered by the lies told about why we went to war
and the fraudulent speeches by politicians like Lyndon
Johnson who spoke dignified phrases about democracy and
freedom while launching the most horrific bombardments
and assaults against human life and dignity. By the time
I was a junior in high school, I was sickened and
horrified by the war and deeply opposed to its
continuation.
In the fall of 1968 I went off to college at the
University of Wisconsin in Madison bearing an
extraordinary burden of self-righteousness. I lived in a
permanent sense of outrage combined with an
extraordinary feeling of freedom. I had escaped from the
narrow confines of my family and church and high school,
and the context of my escape was the ongoing war in
Vietnam. By the end of my first year in college I had
become a fulltime political activist. I gave up
attending all but a few of my classes, and devoted
myself to passing out leaflets, helping to organize
rallies, attending antiwar demonstrations, and running
the mimeograph machine in the Student Union to help
organize yet more demonstrations.
Not only was I against the war, I was also against
any soldier who had become part of the machinery of the
war, whether by volunteering or consenting to being
drafted, and then had gone off to take part in the war.
I was sure such an act was the result of a moral choice
made by an individual who was morally accountable. I
believed soldiers knew what they were getting themselves
into, that they were fighting an immoral war against
civilians on behalf of an invading and occupying force.
They were available for my sanctified disapproval, and I
condemned soldiers along with their actions.
By the fall of 1969, these frequent demonstrations
had become a source of irritation to the Regents of the
University of Wisconsin, and they passed a law
forbidding the use of loud speaking equipment on the
public college campuses of Wisconsin for any political
purpose. Antiwar activists on my campus at Madison held
a quick planning meeting and concluded this was an
egregious violation of our right to free speech as
enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution. Far from being outraged, we were actually
quite pleased, having been granted a perfect excuse for
a demonstration and a gift of the moral high ground in
our dispute with the Regents. We had the ideal occasion
in mind. October, 1969 would see a national
demonstration in Washington DC, supported by student
strikes and other demonstrations on hundreds of campuses
across the country. It was called the Vietnam
Moratorium, and over two million American would march
against the war in the largest political demonstrations
in US history.
In Madison, several thousand students gathered in the
square between the University Library and the Wisconsin
State Historical Association. We had prepared for a
dramatic yet peaceful demonstration. We selected four
volunteers to be speakers at the rally and targets for
arrest that day. Marge Tabankin was a vice president of
the student body, a woman of large presence and strong
ideas. Elrie Crite, a slim black man with a large round
Afro, was the first director of the brand new Black
Studies Center, which had been created in response to a
campus wide strike called by the black student union the
previous year. Billy Kaplan was an aggressive, eloquent,
and fearless speaker and chairman of Students for a
Democratic Society, the potpourri assemblage of radicals
on campus. And I was the fourth person selected for
arrest.
The other three speakers were set up on the steps of
the library surrounded by the largest physical display
of loud-speaking equipment we could muster, assembled
from rental equipment stores up to a hundred miles away.
We had gigantic amplifiers and massive microphones and
ten foot tall speakers designed for use in rock concerts
and political rallies.
Three of our designated arrestees were surrounded by
a phalanx of the campus police, led by Chief Ralph
Hansen, a genial, balding, and somewhat portly gentleman
with a liberal disposition and a desire to keep the
peace in a civilized sort of way. Ralph knew me well
enough as a burgeoning troublemaker on campus, and I had
acquired the permit for the demonstration in his office
the day before. A large round fountain occupied the
middle of the yard in front of the Library where we held
the rally. During the summertime the fountain was
uncovered and active, but in October it was covered by a
metal sheathe that protected the fountain from the ice
and snow of the coming winter. By 10 AM that morning, I
was perched high above the rest of the crowd atop the
metal sheath, which made a perfect speaker’s platform.
As the rally began, Marge, Billy, and Elrie each
stepped up to the microphone in turn and began to speak.
As they did so, each was arrested and carted off to the
Madison City Jail, leaving no one on the platform except
for the police. The crowd then began to stir, with no
immediate focus for their attention except for the cops,
who were doubtless worried about what might come next,
given the history of violent protests in Madison. At
that point, I opened the cardboard box I had brought
with me to the top of the fountain cover and pulled out
my portable bullhorn to carry on with the rally. As soon
as I started speaking, the crowd recognized what was
happening. They turned their backs on the police and
began chanting and shouting. Several cops led by Ralph
Hansen started shoving their way through the crowd in my
direction. And the crowd, while offering no active
resistance, also provided no assistance to Ralph and his
cohorts. When Ralph reached the bottom of the fountain,
he looked up at me, waggled his finger in my direction,
and shouted, "Andy, you come down from there right this
minute!" To the delighted cheers and catcalls of
thousands, I hollered back, "Ralph, come up and get me!"
That moment was one of the supremely glorious moments
of my life. Two cops clambered up the slanted metal
sides of the fountain cover and hauled me down, placing
me in handcuffs at the bottom of the fountain where
Ralph waited impatiently. I was hustled into a squad car
and taken to jail, where I was charged with "illegal use
of a bullhorn." I spent no more than twenty minutes
behind bars before our lawyers got me bailed out, a
newly-minted minor hero of the peace movement. The next
day in the New York Times, I read a small article
about our arrests in Madison. The case itself was thrown
out a few months later by Federal Judge Frank Johnson,
who declared the law unconstitutional.
35 years passed and I grew up a bit. I was opposed to
the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as I had been opposed to
the war in Vietnam. But I was looking for how we could
create a dialogue that transcended political arguments
and led to an exploration of the human cost of war. I
helped produce a film called Voices in Wartime
that included an interview with Jonathan Shay, a
psychologist who has treated hundreds of veterans with
posttraumatic stress disorder. One afternoon in the
spring of 2004 I sat in front of a television with my
laptop, transcribing the raw footage of Jonathan’s
interview as he talked about how soldiers experienced
war. Jonathan said, "We are talking about a clicking in
of some very deep emotional mechanisms that bond
soldiers to each other. The grief that a soldier feels
when a comrade is killed or severely maimed is akin to
the grief of a mother whose child has just been killed."
That last phrase of Jonathan Shay’s hit me hard. At a
deep emotional level, I understood as never before the
personal cost of war for soldiers.
In August of 2006, I was a speaker at a veterans’
conference in Seattle. I told the story of my first
arrest, in October of 1969, to those present, an
audience of some 50 or 60 veterans, many of them from
the Vietnam War. I looked back and remembered myself as
a nineteen year old kid, full of self-righteous energy
and disdain for anybody who disagreed with me, contempt
for Ralph Hanson and Lyndon Johnson and my own parents,
full of righteous anger directed at anyone who was in
the military or in any way a part of the political
superstructure that justified, supported, or funded the
war. It would have been far from my consciousness on
that long ago October morning, I said, to consider what
might be going through a soldier’s mind, or what the
sufferings of any soldier might amount to or how they
might matter. I was sure I was right and that anybody
who made any choice contrary to my own was morally
wrong. I was a fool, I said, full of my own sanctified
disapproval of soldiers and disdain for their
sufferings. I had been right to oppose the war. But I
was wrong to oppose the warrior. I had failed to
understand that soldiers themselves were victims of the
war. I knew nothing of the sorrows of soldiers, of the
fear and pain that attended their service and the
nightmares that followed it. I was ignorant of their
motivations and of the terrible cost they had borne and
continued to bear. I had refused to grant them humanity,
and in my refusal I had diminished my own humanity.
When I finished speaking, the first person to stand
in the audience was a burly vet about my age. He was an
ex-marine named Michael Patrick Brewer wearing a
Veterans for Peace t-shirt. Michael was crying, and had
trouble talking. He said that my story had opened his
memory to a story of his own from that same time –
October, 1969. And he said he had never told his story
to anyone for 37 years. On that day he was a young
active duty soldier who had just returned from Vietnam
after a year’s tour. He was in Chicago that day, only
100 miles away from Madison where I was. And he was also
at an antiwar demonstration, part of the national
Vietnam Moratorium. He was wearing his Marine uniform,
and after much struggle and thought he had decided to
speak at the demonstration.
Michael told us how he’d gone to the rally and up
onto the platform where he had been invited. He knew
just what he would say. He planned to make a short
speech in which he would say that we needed to stop
three kinds of hatred. We needed to stop hating the
Vietnamese. We needed to stop hating each other. And we
needed to stop hating ourselves. As he was waiting for
his turn to speak, someone else on the platform saw his
uniform and attacked him, screamed that he was a baby
killer, and kicked him, driving him off the stage. He
said he had never before spoken of his shame at being so
treated.
"You know," he said, "that was more traumatic to me
than anything that happened to me in Vietnam in 1968 and
1969."
After the workshop, Michael said to me, "You used the
word ‘sanctified.’ You talked about your ‘sanctified
disapproval.’ I’ve never heard anybody use that word
before in that way. Nobody’s ever apologized to me for
what happened that day. And I never knew how much it
mattered to me. I’ve always known what I did the next
day – I walked into Hines Hospital in Chicago looking
for help for my sadness and depression, though I didn’t
stay because they were just looking for guinea pigs to
medicate. For some reason I never put those two events
together until right now. I didn’t go for help again
until October, 1997, the same month as the Moratorium.
28 years of repression. Ain't the brain amazing? When
repression is perfect you can't find it."
By giving me his forgiveness in so graceful and
compassionate a way, Michael helped me understand that I
was much in need of it. That day was important for both
of us. As Michael told me, it was a big emotional
"clear" for him, helping to close a chapter of his life
in which he had difficulty trusting others or committing
himself to being part of a community working for social
change. He needed to hear how I had learned I was wrong,
how much I wanted and needed to hear his story, and how
I had come to feel compassion for him and other
veterans. Michael needed to experience the liberation
that came from forgiving me.
A gulf of perception, personal experience,
expectation, and memory separates us from each other. On
one side is who I am, my relationships, my pangs of
hunger and desire, my terrifying loves and magnetic
fears. On the other side are those others, like Michael,
unknown and alien to me, whose emotions, experiences,
and deepest beliefs I can only view "as through a glass,
darkly." Even as I tell myself the story of my life, it
changes. The story finds new pathways, enters new
dominions. I discover new metaphors to filter and
explain my memories and reshape my learning. I discover
new connections and synchronicities between myself and
those whom I identified in the past as my opponents.
For my part, I needed help from Michael to reach
across that gap. I needed Michael to tell me his story,
and I needed him to hear mine without judging me. We
both needed to understand deeply the fear and sadness
that had motivated each of us. And then we could begin
our lives anew, having reconfigured the gap, having
changed each other and ourselves. We could become each
other’s salvation. We could become each other’s brother.
Now, five years after 9/11, we confront one of the
most critical moments in our nation’s history. With much
blood and treasure, we have paid for some powerful
lessons and deep wisdom. Out of the wreckage of this
war, might we come to a new understanding of the
terrible human cost of war, and the legacy of trauma
created by war? Are we nearing an historic "teachable
moment" when we may be open to new insight into how we
can live in a more sustainable and peaceful world? The
world is waiting.
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http://voicesinwartime.org/Home/Article/DisplayArticle.aspx?AuthorID=98039&TypeofContent=Article&ArticleType=2#369782
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