Reflecting on Vietnam

The picture of a wild-haired, bearded Howard Mechanic taken in his war protesting days in 1972 looks a lot like a guy I was dating at the time. As for me, I was a graduate student then. My hair hung down my back and I wore bell-bottoms, T-shirts and, from that same boyfriend, a hand-carved peace symbol, which I still have.

I’d marched on Washington in 1969 with Tom Specht and Paul Shaheen – we’d driven from Flint, Michigan, where I was a reporter in my first job after I’d received my undergraduate degree, and they worked for President Johnson’s “Great Society” poverty program.

I prayed daily for my brother, Duane, who was an Army Ranger stationed in Vietnam. I fought with my father every time the war came up. And in those days, the war in Vietnam was always on our lips.

All those thoughts came flooding back as I researched the profile on Howard Mechanic, which runs in this issue on page 78. And I found the revulsion I felt then boil up in my stomach all over again. I hadn’t expected that. I thought, like they always teach, that time would dull the pain.
But memories of Vietnam haven’t aged like old wine. Vietnam was vinegar when they forced it down our throats in the ’60s and ’70s, and it still tastes like vinegar today.

Only my closest North Dakota friends know the long journey I took on Vietnam. Friends I made later – first in Michigan and then in Arizona – would look at me like I was crazy when I’d admit that I started this journey solidly supporting the war in Vietnam.

I came by my unquestioning patriotism honestly. My father still has his Marine uniform from World War II hanging in the closet. One of the family pictures in all the homes of Leo and Rose Bommersbach’s progeny is a multiple portrait with each of their six sons in military uniform.

My father has long been active in the American Legion, and my mother has been, and still is, an active member of the Legion Auxiliary. (She recently had her picture in the local North Dakota newspaper for helping make the 450 yellow lapel ribbons the auxiliary sold to send care packages to the troops in Iraq.)
As the war in Vietnam escalated in the early-1960s, I was an undergraduate student at the University of North Dakota, and dating a military policeman from the Air Force Base outside Grand Forks. His name was Jim and I loved him like only an 18 year-old can love. When he was shipped out to serve a year in Thailand, I was devastated at the separation, but comforted with the thought that he wasn’t in Vietnam. (Only when he returned did I find out our government was secretly flying missions from “neutral” Thailand to Vietnam, and that Jim, indeed, was in harm’s way during much of his tour.)

With all of that, it wasn’t hard to say yes to the North Dakota chairmanship of a nationwide campus effort of “patriotic students” for a teach-in, which we called “Support our Commitment in Vietnam.”

This effort had the full and complete backing of the administration of the University of North Dakota. They gave us free access to their long-distance phones, so we could coordinate with other campuses. They let us use their copy machines and printing presses. We sat in their plush offices for our meetings. One night, they even treated us to pizza.

I spent hours in the Student Union debating Vietnam with fellow students who called me a “war monger,” a “right-wing nut” and a “dupe.” I still remember some of my favorite lines: “You never win at the negotiating table what you haven’t won on the battlefield.” “If we don’t stop the communists there, where? Here?”

I can’t tell you when the epiphany came and I changed my entire outlook. I do know my foes kept loading me up with papers and articles against the war, all of which I read – first, to bolster my own arguments in rebuttal, but then, when my points began sounding hollow and empty, to learn.
By the time I got to Flint, Michigan, in 1966 for my first job at The Flint Journal, I was rabidly against the war. But by now, it was no longer abstract for me. Jim had come home safely, but we broke up as I went off to pursue a career. And my first brother, just three years younger than I, was now an officer in Vietnam. Duane had refused to seek a student deferment, as I’d begged him to do. He wanted to go to Vietnam. He sent me photos showing him in his uniform, and gave me one of his medals.

Then one day I got a letter from Duane, confiding that he’d been wounded but was recovering, and instructing me to not tell Mom and Dad. His “proof of life” was a photo in an army hospital bed. His was smiling, with his hands resting on his legs. You had to look at the picture very, very closely to realize one hand rested far higher than the other. Something was terribly amiss with one of his legs.

I called the Red Cross in Flint, asking for a welfare check on my brother, and a day later came a report that he was fine. Only later would I find out he’d bribed the Red Cross worker to tell me the lie, because he wasn’t fine at all. At that moment, he faced the possibility of losing his leg. But he fought with all his might to ward off the infection and the wounds and refused to let them amputate. I’m happy to report he didn’t lose that leg.

By the time my brother came home from Vietnam, I was committed to fighting with all my might to oppose that war. My editors at The Journal were well aware of my anti-war feelings. In fact, my zeal almost cost me my first job, and jeopardized my entire career.

One day I showed up wearing a black armband in protest of the war. My editor marched right up to my desk and told me to take it off. I refused. He said it wasn’t up for debate and I should go home and think it over. I went home and called my friends, Tom and Paul, asking for advice. They’d already gone through this in their own jobs. Take it off, they said, especially because you’re a reporter; you’re not supposed to be taking sides.

They were right, of course, and my editor was right. Reporters shouldn’t wear their feelings on their sleeves. I returned to work without the armband and asked my editor for a compromise: Don’t make me write any more obituaries on boys dying in Vietnam. He agreed. I kept my job.
That scene flashed in front of my eyes as I was working on the Howard Mechanic story. We were at a Peace and Justice meeting in Prescott, where he now lives with his girlfriend, Janet. As I write in the profile, he had to feel like he was in a time warp because the scene was so reminiscent of the anti-war meetings of our youth. I know, because I felt like I was in a time warp.

Everyone went around the room, voicing their feelings about the latest controversial war – this time in Iraq. They came to me. I demurred, saying I had nothing to add. “You can say how you feel if you want,” Howard said to me, gently. “I’d rather not,” I told him, and they passed me by.
So I listened to these people, young and old, express their anguish over Iraq, and the words sounded so familiar, so much like what we’d said decades ago about Vietnam. One man cried as he tried to explain his feelings. I wanted to cry with him.

I had always passed up going to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., because I thought it would be too painful. But last year I decided it was time that I walked along the black granite walls inscribed with the names of all those tens of thousands of my generation killed on that piece of real estate in Asia.

I was in Washington, D.C., with the Arizona 4-H delegation for a national conference. We’d been meeting for two days to develop a youth agenda for America, and now we had a free morning to tour our nation’s capital. We went to the Lincoln Memorial at the end of the mall, and I remembered that the last time I’d climbed those steps had been with Tom and Paul when we were there in 1969 for the infamous March on Washington.

As we drove through the streets of Washington, I remembered where we’d marched and how we’d watched the storm troopers emerge to guard the buildings from us. I remembered where then-Attorney General John Mitchell had stood on an upper floor, looking down on us as though we were America’s vermin. I long had a button from that march that mocked Mitchell’s oath against us. It read: “Hi, I’m an effete, impudent snob.”

I thought I was ready to face the Vietnam Memorial. The teenagers in our group quickly walked down the memorial and soon were out of sight. I started on one end and when I touched the wall, all the horrible fears and memories of Vietnam came rushing back. I walked the entire length of the wall, running my hands across the names, crying the whole time. I was glad the kids that I was chaperoning hadn’t hung with me. This was a private moment.

All those wasted lives. All that talent and potential that was cut down on a battlefield we should have never entered. All those kids who will always be just kids because their lives were cut short by a government that risked them for what, I still don’t know.

At least one of the students with me that day was also struck by the enormity of the Vietnam Memorial. Justin Newman was a Tucson student whose hobby was photography. He had his camera with him that day and wanted to capture the reflection of the American flag in the black granite.

As he was about to shoot the scene he’d been setting up, I walked into the frame. He didn’t know what he had until he developed the film later, back at home. His teacher encouraged Justin to enter the picture in the county fair. He did, and won a top prize.

He sent me the print that we’ve published with this column. It’s one of my most cherished mementos. It so clearly and stunningly captures all the ugly anguish I still feel about Vietnam – all the pain I will feel forever.

And then I’m struck with the thought that my pain is minor, compared with so many others. I didn’t lose a loved one like so many did. I didn’t go to prison like Howard Mechanic did. I didn’t come home a wreck like so many veterans did.
It has been a long and winding road I’ve traveled over that war that so marred America. It convinced me then, and continues to convince me today: War is never the answer.