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They Were Not Supposed to Grow Old

By Don Libby

The promise was the same. The country wasn't.

They came home. That was supposed to be the good part.

There was a poem. There is always a poem.

In September 1914, six weeks into a war that would kill seventeen million people, a British poet named Laurence Binyon sat down and tried to make meaning out of slaughter. He was 45. Too old to serve. He watched a generation walk into the machine and he wrote this:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

It is a beautiful poem. He meant every word. A century later it is still recited at ceremonies across the English-speaking world. The words still move people. They moved me.

That's the problem.

I was at Da Nang in 1967. Cam Ranh Bay in 1969. I knew boys who didn't come home, and I knew more who did.

The ones who didn't come home got Binyon's promise, in a way. Frozen at nineteen, twenty, twenty-two. Remembered clean, before the country had a chance to change its mind about them.

The ones who came home got something else. We got to grow old. That was supposed to be the mercy. Nobody told us what growing old would cost.

They grew old in VA waiting rooms. They grew old carrying wounds the government spent decades refusing to connect to the war. Agent Orange moved through their bodies like a slow sentence. Diabetes. Neuropathy. Cancer. The VA called it unproven. The men called it dying.

They grew old homeless. On any given night in America thirty thousand veterans sleep outside. Many of them Vietnam era. They went with songs to the battle. They came back to parking lots and shelters and the underside of bridges.

They grew old alone. The numbers are not secret. They never were. Seventeen veterans a day don't make it home after they're already home. The country learned to say the number without feeling it. A statistic is easier to live with than a face.

They grew old waiting. For benefits. For acknowledgement. For someone in Washington to say plainly what was done to them and why. Most are still waiting. Some ran out of time.

Age wearied them. The years condemned them. Binyon never wrote that version. Nobody did.

There is a wall in Washington. Black granite. Five hundred and eighty four feet long. Fifty eight thousand three hundred and twenty names.

No words.

Binyon's fallen got words. Solemn drums. Proud thanksgiving. Glory that shines upon our tears. A nation's grief wrapped around them like a flag.

Ours got names. Just the names. As if the count itself was the only honest thing left to say.

I have stood at that wall. I have watched people find a name and press their hand flat against the stone. Some of them shake. Some of them don't make a sound. There is nothing to say that the wall hasn't already said better.

I have found names I knew. Boys I ate with. Boys I laughed with. Boys who were twenty years old and certain they were going to live forever because that is what twenty feels like. Their names are cold to the touch. The stone doesn't give anything back.

It has no promise in it. No consolation. No age shall not weary them.

Just the names. Going down into the earth.

I have never left that wall without leaving something of myself behind. I don't think I'm supposed to.

Binyon asked us to remember them at the going down of the sun and in the morning. We can do that. We have done that. But remembering is not enough and it never was.

Here is what I would write instead.

They grew old hard or they didn't grow old at all. They were wearied by the years and condemned by the country that sent them. They were not frozen in glory. They were worn down in silence. And we who are left carry that silence like a second wound.

We will remember them. Not as the nation wishes they were. As they actually were. That is the only tribute that costs anything. That is the only one worth making.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning.

We will remember them. On our terms. Not theirs.

Don Libby, served in the Air Force for 4 1/2 years as an Air Operations Specialist at Danang AB 1967 and then again at Cam Rahn Bay in 1969.