"The Making and Un-making of a Marine"

Where are all those peace symbols now when we need them?

When I try to visualize what happened to all those peace symbols of the 60s and 70s, I am reminded of those frightening photos of stacks of shoes and eye glasses at the German death camps during World War II. I imagine that there are millions of peace symbols stacked up to the ceiling of a remote barn somewhere. What happened to the peace movement? The only peace necklaces I’ve seen these days are around the necks of teenagers and they seem more of a fashion statement than a symbol of protest. As a Vietnam War vet, it’s hard for me to believe that all those protesters, some now in their sixties and seventies wouldn’t be wearing those symbols and raising their voices. After all, it’s their kids and grandkids who are in these two wars. For God’s sake, what better time?

I remember when my Marine squadron, HMH 361, flew off the deck of the Helicopter Landing Pad of the USS New Orleans on our first flight into Vietnam. I looked over the door gunner’s shoulder of the CH 53 helicopter and saw a huge peace symbol painted on a gigantic rock along the shore. Sorry to say it symbolized nothing of what my tour of duty in Nam was like, but it did help end that miserable war. I don’t know what’s so different about our lives today. Are all the old war protesters too tired to show up? Have our kids been brought up on so much daily violence and government corruption that any hope to change the system has been lost? I do know this: We Americans are more apt to help a starving child with flies crawling over its eyes in a third world country or save a whale than to help a whole generation of men and women who have risked their lives and sacrificed their lifelong peace so that others might be free. Is it that we no longer have a draft, so teenagers, parents and grandparents don’t have to worry about war being part of their future? Are these present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan somehow different, more just and more justifiable than the war in Vietnam?

I don’t have an answer to those questions. I reach down and grab the strap of my haversack and hoist it onto my shoulders. But I can feel the weight of the countless souls the two current wars have stuffed into it. It bulges with lost life from Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and civilians, men, women and children. I heard somewhere that there are five hundred thousand souls per pound and the straps are cutting into my shoulder muscles.

As I travel through my days as therapist and a veteran, I look around to see who else is carrying the responsibility for what we have asked our solders to sacrifice. How many of us carry our responsibility for what we ask our military to do? How many heft our packs full of shame? How many ask someone else to carry it for us? How many of us are like the good citizen who never kills the animals he eats. He goes to the supermarket and loads his cart with plastic wrapped meat, never seeing the blood, never hearing the last living struggle, never watching the light fade in the animal’s eyes.

There is no guilt left in this country. No honoring the sacrifice of the cow who nourishes us or the soldier who fights for us. We believe that if we did not vote to go to war we have no responsibility to stop it. If we do not agree with the policy of the prevailing party, there is no need for us to heft our packs of shame or take responsibility for those enemy and civilians that have been killed--or the US soldiers who have who have killed and are killed--for us. If we’re in the right party we don’t have to have anything to do with those lost human lives that have been wrapped in plastic for us, the animals entrails dumped on the pile with all the lost peace symbols.

Larry Winters