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True Believers

By Adam Adrian Crown

I was a true believer.

I was a Boy Scout. John Wayne. Audie Murphy. The sight of Old Glory made my chest swell. The "Star-Spangled Banner" put a tight knot in my throat. I cut out pictures of Marines, square-jawed, fearless young men in their stiletto-sharp dress blues, and tacked them up in my room. I fought hundreds of heroic backyard battles against imaginary enemies, winning the day against overwhelming odds, getting the girl in the last scene.

Once, when saying the pledge of allegiance, as we were required to do in school each morning, I accidentally said, "amen" at the end. The other kids laughed at me. But I didn't care. Any subtle indications to the contrary eluded me. I fervently believed that America was about freedom and justice. Justice for all. It's a hard thing to discover that all you were taught to believe in was a lie.

For me, that staggering moment came in 1970. I was enrolled in a junior college, waiting for the draft board to write me a love letter, wondering whether I should join the Navy first, or go in and go "all the way," Marines, Green Berets, something like that. I was a poor kid, running out of tuition money faster than guys running out of bullets shooting at Superman's chest, and the GI Bill would at least pay for school. I was resigned to the inevitable. Just waiting for the call.

It was very odd to walk into the student union at lunch time. Half of it was a carpeted area furnished with soft overstuffed sofas and chairs. The other half was tile, melamine tables and hard plastic chairs. The tiled area was populated by older students, by jocks, by short-haired button-down, squeaky-clean kids in computer programming and police science. Lots of off-duty cops, too, taking classes to further their careers. On the carpeted area were the long-hairs, the hippies, the "dopers," the "freaks," -- in short, those who had begun to ask embarrassing questions about the sociopolitical status quo. I wasn't quite sure where I belonged, but since I was a musician, I generally gravitated toward the carpet.

Quite a number of veterans attended the college, some only recently returned from Vietnam, and many of them members or supporters of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They could often be identified because they wore some remnant of their uniforms, maybe a jacket with their nametape over the pocket. Some had sewn the American flag on the sleeve upside down. Peace symbols were rampant. It seemed to me that only these vets were completely at ease in either area of the union.

When there were rallies against the war, vets were always in the forefront, as organizers and speakers. Their comments were not always met with universal approval. There were sometimes angry catcalls, usually from the denizens of the tiled floor, none of whom had been in Vietnam and who knew as little about it as I did.

I was too ignorant to be anything but innocent. I didn't even know where Vietnam was, not for certain. Oh sure, someplace in Southeast Asia. But what was happening and why? Not a glimmer of a clue. Except, of course, that we must be there carrying out some noble mission, spreading freedom and justice around the world.

Then two things happened that jarred my world apart.

The first was the My Lai Massacre. It had happened in 1968, but the story didn't break until later -- not until some vet, safely out of the Army's clutches, reported the incident to his congressman. Eventually the story broke, and with it, my heart. Murdering civilians? Women and children? Even infants? Surely this horrible atrocity was a fluke. It had to be. We were the good guys; we didn't do that kind of thing. After all, my dad had given kids chocolate bars in W.W.II and liberated Jews from death camps. That's what America was all about, right?

The second thing was a weekend gig as a vocalist with a rock-and-roll band. I was playing a lot of softer stuff then: Gordon Lightfoot, Jacques Brel, and my own songs. This was a Creedence Clearwater, Motown, rhythm-and-blues type band, and I almost passed up the invitation to sit in. I don't know why I accepted. Lucky for me I did.

The tenor sax player and the drummer were both vets, and outspokenly against the war. (This surprised me since I had not yet discovered that very few vets were outspokenly in favor of it.) We spent the weekend playing music, doing a lot of blues, smoking, and talking. After a while I shut up and just listened. These two young men, not particular friends of mine, were willing to relive the indescribable pain of the war -- what they had seen and what they had done. And they were doing it, I realized later, for my benefit. Twenty-seven years later, I still find my throat tightening as I remember their deep moral grief.

My Lai, it turned out, was nothing unusual. "A daily fucking occurrence," as Nick the drummer put it. And worse things, too. Inexcusable things. Rape. Torture. Mutilation.

In 1997, this is old news. We know now about CIA dope smuggling and American-sponsored atrocities around the globe: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala. But in 1970, it was news I didn't want to hear.

I didn't embrace enlightenment with anything like alacrity. I resisted with everything I had, like a cult member resisting deprogramming. Which is exactly what I was. I denied. I got angry. I got depressed. I denied some more. But gradually, the "preponderance of evidence" forced me to accept the truth in spite of myself.

The sense of betrayal was like a crushing weight on my chest. Overnight, it seemed, the nature of the world had changed, as if from flat to round. But all the historical pieces began to fall into place. Slavery. Centuries of genocide against Native Americans. The internment of Japanese-Americans during W.W.II. The Klan. The murders of the Kennedys and Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr. I realized that I had never learned any American history, only American mythology.

Lies, lies, lies.

I knew I would never again be able to feel the kind of "patriotism" I had felt before. I became a man and put away childish things.

The practical problem of the draft remained, my enlightenment notwithstanding. I didn't have the courage to just refuse induction, like the great Muhammad Ali, and take a chance on prison. Going to Canada didn't seem right. Why should I be the one to leave? I wasn't the liar. I finally managed to convince myself that the Coast Guard performed some worthwhile service and I spent two years sailing up and down the coast of Maine under the most incompetent skipper that ever held the unofficial record for ramming the dock at eight knots. But that's another story.

I will never forget the veterans who saved my life with their pain and their truth. Now it's become increasingly fashionable to soothe the grief of survivors, and to assuage the national guilt, by insisting that American boys who died in Vietnam gave their lives in some noble purpose. The truth is that they died -- and killed -- for no good reason whatsoever. No noble purpose. No crusade for democracy. They didn't give their lives; their lives were swindled from them. To pretend otherwise is the worst disservice to the dead that I can imagine.

Most of those lads, like me, were fundamentally decent boys who had the misfortune of believing in something that didn't exist, and their passion and patriotism, perhaps noble inclinations, were pressed into the most ignoble service by greedy and corrupt politicians. It wouldn't be the first time. But it's about time we make it the last time.

What's important now, is that the real truth of it be told. (The official truth just isn't good enough. Officially, Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK.) Maybe if we tell the truth, keep telling it, no matter what it costs, no matter how much it hurts, maybe, just maybe, we won't have any more kids coming home in plastic bags. Or with crippled bodies. Or crippled souls. So I will try to do that. It's a debt I owe.