a semi-regular column of Truths, Half Truths, and Mostly Truths by Semi.
Volume I, Issue 23, Part I · posted October 5, 2001
It has been nearly two weeks since I've had the time and the stamina to return to this forum. I have been working on a column that will clearly take me more time to finish than I currently have on hand. To help ease the burden of my own self-imposed deadline, I have decided to "break up" that column and send it out in chunks.
What follows below is, for lack of a better term, a flashback, a deeply influential moment from my own personal history that has recently come back to me with a profound resonance. As we sit here just one year into the new century and look nervously ahead to a dim and scary future, I find myself thinking back to another time when our country faced deep divisions and uncertain prospects. Someone more objective than I will have to tell me why this scene keeps revisiting me.
As soon as I am able, I will return with more thoughts and letters.
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."—Douglas Adams
He looked around uncomfortably at the young men and women gathered to hear him speak. It mustn't have seemed that long ago when he was their age, yet he sensed that they eyed him with suspicion. His own teenage son would be eligible for the draft in just a few years, so he was very much on their side, but they were the ones fighting this war.
Still, as they lounged on the grass in their jeans and t-shirts and vests, he must have looked just like "the man" as he stepped up to the lectern in his suitcoat and tie .
Some in the crowd were listening, but many kept talking or laughing nervously. Too many speeches had already been given, and speeches had stirred action, and action had stirred violence, and so the time for speaking seemed past, yet nobody knew what action to take.
How had it come down to this? How had it become about right and might, peace and war, objectives and campaigns? How had people who looked like him — white men in suits with short hair — forgotten that they were sending young men who looked like them — young men of all colors with long hair — to a miserable spot halfway around the globe to fight a war against political forces that nobody really understood.
He knew that another speech about who might be right and who might be wrong in this conflict would accomplish nothing. He needed to make men who looked like him sit up and take notice, to comprehend the harm they were inflicting, and he needed young men who looked like them to realize that men in suits understood.
In his hand he held a stack of plain index cards, the kind you would find in any office. Once he knew what he had to do, the information had not been hard to gather. He was a newspaperman, after all, he made his living writing words, but he understood deeply the importance of images.
He held up a card for the crowd to see. Many of those who had been talking stopped and turned, the picture of this patient man in a dark suit holding a single white card catching their attention.
He read:
"William Stearns, Washington High School class of 1966, killed in action January 1968." Then, with a practiced flick of his hand, he sent the card sailing out into the crowd, watching it spin and flutter and finally nosedive into the grass just a few inches from a young man who picked it up curiously.
He held up another card. "Jeffrey Haines Jackson, Irvington High School class of 1965, killed in action November 1967". This card sailed out a little further, flying and twisting and settling gracefully down several feet away.
Another card. "Michael Klein, Hayward High class of 1966, missing in action in a fire fight, October 1967, body never recovered, presumed dead." A quick twist and the card flew away, causing someone in the crowd to duck as it sailed over their head.
Another card, another name, another death, another quick flick of the wrist. Then another. Then another. All young men from local schools, all shipped off to Vietnam, all killed or presumed dead, all coming to rest on the grass in front of the lectern.
Names, like rain, fell from the sky.
Some in the crowd picked up the cards, reading the names quietly to themselves, only to find another landing nearby. They hesitated, wondering whether to gather more, not wanting to let go of what they had. Others only stared, watching the cards sail down. Many wept.
Still they came. More names, more cards, more young men coming to rest. He was reading faster now, his quiet fury punctuating his words, his anger propelling the names into the air. Soon, the cards outnumbered the gathered crowd, cards landed on cards, small piles resting ingloriously upon each other. His arm started to get a little sore, but his voice never wavered. Another name, another name, another name...
There was mostly calm now, the crowd hushed by numbness, the weight of the cards too much to bear. At last he finished, one final card dropping fitfully down, the sudden silence awful in its finality. Without another word, the speaker strode away, and the people bowed their heads. Those assembled understood the terrible truth; that the speaker had not run out of names, he had only run out of cards.
(I was seven years old that late summer day when I saw the names fall from the sky. The man in the suit was my father. My brother never had to go to Vietnam.)