IF JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME

                               

Last week, one of the young people in my life announced that he’s joined the United States Marine Corps and will be leaving for basic training in San Diego shortly before Christmas. The news hit me harder than anything in recent memory and the pervasiveness of a silent cyclone of emotions has colored my thinking in every other regards as well. Somehow, I sense I’m not alone in these regards. More precisely, I hope I’m not.

This young man has signed up for a full four year enlistment in the toughest branch of the American armed services. They’re generally first on the scene and they’ve traditionally taken the brunt of whatever action in which they’ve been called to engage. They have a justifiably proud and noble tradition. I’ve served alongside Marines; I’ve gotten drunk with them and I’ve gotten into bar brawls with them. I’m friends with several of them and the saying, "Once a Marine, always a Marine," is true. There are no EX-Marines.

There are a lot of them in Arlington, though, and in cemeteries in big cities and small towns from one end of this vast nation to the other. There are also thousands of them in VA Hospitals and private institutions and they span at least three generations. They are also continuing to kill themselves because they cannot live with the things they experienced in combat. I can relate. After 35 years, I still have bad dreams sometimes and Fourth of July is not my favorite holiday.

As things stand now, this young man will likely be rotated between Iraq and Afghanistan. If conditions continue to deteriorate in South America, a tour of duty down there is not out of the question either. His chances of making it home unscathed are slightly better than his chances of being killed. He’s a nice young man from a logging community. He hasn’t seen a lot of life yet but he loves his country and right now feels the call to duty. He figures that he can serve best with the best. There is absolutely no faulting either his motivesor his logic.

This young man isn’t just another number to me. He’s not some profile, some abstract concept, some rank and last name on a military table of organization. He’s a bright kid with a heart of gold and he’s got a lot to offer here at home. He loves horses and he loves logging and he’d like to try making a living using Morgans to haul out dead Douglas fir to sell to local mills or chop up into firewood and market to his neighbors. No, he hasn’t got the plan perfected, but he’s working on it. Hell, when it comes right down to it, he hasn’t lived long enough to have much perfected but his dreams. He’s shared some of those with me and they’re good, decent, wholesome, modest and do-able dreams. And they all go on hold the moment he boards his flight for San Diego in December.

He wanted to talk to me about what he’s facing and, as you can imagine, I dreaded that for the one question I was afraid he’d ask.

I told him that once he got to San Diego, forget everything in his life that came before and focus intensely on the moment. I told him to obey every order without question or without even thinking about it. I told him to ignore the grousing of his buddies or any of the things they might try to get away with as their way of coping with Marine discipline. I said to make friends with those who acted as he did. I told him to learn everything he could and to give 100%, whether he was polishing brass, peeling potatoes or learning how to survive after his last round was expended.

I told him as well to take the time between now and his December departure to spend with his girlfriend, his family, his friends and his community. These are the memories that make a difference. I grew up in a real dysfunctional family and I envied those of my buddies who had more of those kinds of memories than I did. I think in many cases, they came out of the experience better for them.

There were other things I could have told this young man but I’m not much for sharing war stories or even swapping them with other vets. When I was in college, I interviewed nearly a hundred of my generation’s veterans for a project the university had going. I got to be real good friends with one of them and was there when he killed himself because he just couldn’t forget what happened to all of his buddies but him on a hill in Vietnam.

I’m glad this young man didn’t ask me if I thought he was doing the right thing or more specifically, if I thought our country was doing the right thing. I don’t know anymore. The right thing for whom? Seems to me that the World Community doesn’t think it’s right for them or there’d be a lot more of them contributing militarily. Right for the Iraqis or Afghanis? Even a cursory examination of their history would suggest that they’ve been quarreling among themselves since time immemorial and no empire from the Egyptians on down has ever been able to change that. We’re not doing a very good job of it either. We’re spending a lot of money we don’t have and we’re losing a lot of young men and women who are a more vital resource than any we really have.

It also strikes me that the thing about making peace with guns is that you’ve got to maintain it with them too. Only in this case, the "guns" are our sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, husband and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, mothers and fathers. I live with these folks. I see them by the hundreds daily because my home is three blocks from the University of Washington. I’m starting to see some of them after they’ve come back from places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Now I understand why it was so hard for people to look me in the eye when I got back.

It just seems to me we’ve got to come up with a better way. How many more of these kids do we sacrifice before we accept that there is more than one way to make peace in this world?

Tags: US Marines, Seattle, Washington, Rusty Miller, Merritt Scott (Rusty) Miller, patriotism, McCain, Barack Obama, peace, World Community, Arlington, Semper Fidelis, veterans, Veterans Administration, Iraq, Afghanistan, University of Washington, Vietnam, war, peace

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