Meeting Angels Unaware

(Continued from Tuesday . . . )

By the spring of 1970, I’d sat in a classroom and witnessed two students protesting with guns. I’d also written letters to all the Minneapolis department stores, urging them to use black mannequins in their window and aisle displays. As well, I’d written to the two major newspapers, encouraging them to establish a policy of asking those who bought ads in their papers to employ black models.

            Now I was ready to slip quietly back into studying for my graduate degree. However, events intervened. Sharing a simple meal with a stranger led to the next step I took in working for social justice.

            One early spring day, while I was eating lunch in Coffman Center at the University of Minnesota, a young man sat down next to me. At the time, I was thirty-four. He was probably all of twenty-two. He diffidently revealed that he was a vet, had been home from Vietnam only a few short weeks, and now wanted to get his education. He spoke hesitantly of his time in that far away place.

            The wariness on his face told me he wasn’t sure how I’d respond to his being a vet. He’d met, as had I, a number of young men and women on campus who stridently disliked those who’d gone to Vietnam to fight. These other young people mocked the returning vets for letting themselves be misled. They accused them of being too stupid to realize that the government and the military had lied to them.

            As he spoke, I remembered the two protesters with the guns shouting that poor whites and poor blacks were fighting the war. To judge by his lunch, this young man clearly didn’t have much money. Perhaps he was one of the poor who had fought in Vietnam. Fortunately he hadn’t died there, but had returned home—possibly to poverty.

            What a return. To scorn and taunts. 

            I knew that some soldiers in Vietnam had been drafted. Of these, surely some weren't impoverished. I didn’t understand the ins and outs of all this, but I did know that this young man had been denounced for, as he said, “fighting for my country.”

            As we talked, I got more and more angry. I remembered the students I’d taught in the inner city. Would the war still be raging when those seventh grade boys turned eighteen? Would the poor of that school then become the ones fighting and dying?

         Four realizations, perhaps simplistic ones, struck me:

·      The Washington, D.C., policy makers were the ones who’s embroiled our country in the war. They’d sent young men away to fight.

·      Those who wanted to protest the war needed to protest the system and the entrenched belief in the domino theory, not the young men who’d gone off to fight. The angry—and fearful—youths were turning their backs, not on the old men who sent the young to Vietnam, but on the soldiers and vets themselves. This was unjust and wrongheaded.
·       Many young American men felt the call of patriotism and wanted to fight for their country when they thought it needed defending. They were willing to risk life and limb because of their beliefs. We needed to honor that, not ridicule it.

·      Unfortunately, going to war was a way to get a college education for someone who didn’t have money for tuition. We needed to fight poverty, not the North Vietnamese.

            In letters to the campus newspaper and to politicians in Washington I expressed my uninformed views. I also discussed my thoughts with classmates. I knew that I had no firm grasp of political science or the history of Southeast Asia. To counter this, I began to read a variety of newspapers, listen to the evening news, study the history of Vietnam. Finally, however, I, too, began to protest. I’ll share that story with you on Tuesday.

                                                            (Continued on Tuesday . . . )

Afterword:

More and more as I work on these postings, I feel the call to write for publication. I have several manuscripts ready to polish. All I need is time to do so. Given this, I’ve decided to post just twice a week from now on. My two posting days will normally be Tuesday and Saturday. This will mean that all of you will have one less posting to read a week in your busy schedules. I bet you find yourself grateful for that! 
          I'm also going to cut back to just two hours a day of reading other blogs, commenting, and responding to the comments on my blog. I know that this will mean I will miss some captivating postings, but I find myself longing to get serious about writing books: paper and/or e. I so hope I won't neglect any of your fine blogs. I'll try not to.

Both photographs from “The Vietnam War” in Wikipedia.