Every now and then, unbidden emotions rise within me that plunge me into a bittersweet melancholy of times gone by, and I get overwhelmed by a strange sadness. Today is just such a time, as I thought of looking up the name of one of my closest friends when I was in high school in the mid 60’s. I don’t remember how it happened, but I have forgotten quite how we grew apart, but perhaps it was because I lost half a decade in love with my high school sweetheart. It is almost as if I had blinked, and time dropped away into an unreachable abyss.
Many years ago, I heard from someone that my friend had gone into the meat grinder of Vietnam, then returned to own a pet store, then I heard he had killed himself. It was all unsubstantiated and I didn’t try to verify the information when I heard it. In fact, I filed it away in an invisible place in my mind…until today. Why today? I have no idea. I was sitting in my chair as the day was slowly dawning and my wife was getting ready for her work, and suddenly my friend’s name surfaced.
I did a brief, Duck-Duck search: ‘obit (his name and state)’ and popped up a photo of him posted on his obituary. He died in 2009, it didn’t say how or from what, and that he had been a Green Beret in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, then owned a pet shop. He was a small-arms expert, gunsmith and a collector of antique shotguns. He left behind several children and a wife, who had a Vietnamese-sounding name, and he passed in an adjacent suburb to where we had grown up. Reading all these details of a life I had missed, I became shocked and saddened that for 39 years I had had the opportunity to contact him while he was alive, and I did not. Instead, I had harbored the rumor of his passing all these years until it was too late. From ‘shocked’ I became plunged into a melancholy of shock that is only sloughing off me as I type. Perhaps that’s why I am typing.
In the later half of the 60’s I worked summers for a residential contractor in Saint Louis County, Missouri, and one of the other employees was a man named John Ravo (sp?). John had been gassed while fighting in the trenches of World War 1, and he was a memorable character! He was an old man when I knew him, but still good with a hammer and nails. He had a beat up old pickup truck which he only seemed to drive in second gear, and the front seat usually had two Pekinese dogs in it, waiting for John to take his lunch break.
John coughed a lot when he wasn’t swinging a hammer, and I’m sure he’s gone now too, although I’ve never been able to “obit” him successfully. But as John Ravo’s name entered my mind this morning I realized I am now as old as he was when I knew him, and the melancholy overflowed me in a fresh wave. Where was I when all the time passed? Why have I seen so much, but all from a distance detached, like an invisible Watcher? And why do I have a strange sense of being called to be an observer, a witness if you will, to an era gone by? I solace myself by thinking I can’t be the only person who feels the same bittersweet emotions.
America lost a critical part of her soul when she entered the Vietnam War. We sensed it at the time, but incorrectly diagnosed what we were sensing. Most of the people I had grown up with simply wanted the military to turn North Vietnam into a glass parking lot, destroy every last one of the “Gooks” and end it, but we didn’t see the reality, the sheer senseless madness and brutality that the men who fought it had to endure. We totally missed their perspective, or just didn’t want to see it. We thought they were being un-patriotic to come back and profess anti-war rhetoric. We didn’t see that at the time; we were blinded by our ignorance then, and sadly, I think this generation is too, just like we were.
We may never really know the truth of why we fought in Vietnam, but in my current perspective I bet it was not to defend liberty and defeat communism as much as it was to keep the cocaine fields in American hands. I believe that was what truly was our ‘vested interest’, and we wasted and destroyed an entire generation of our finest men and put a knife into the American national soul as we did it, and all for the money. As a much maligned black pastor recently and correctly prophesied, “America’s chickens have come home to roost.” We sowed the wind, and the whirlwind is now upon us.
How can we heal and restore such a nation as ours? Is it possible to bring healing to America by doubling down on the same military-industrial policies that threw us into the jungles of Asia in the 60’s and 70’s? Is it at all intelligent to again waste and destroy our best men, and now women, just to feed this tentacled machine? I’m not at all against being able to defend ourselves against encroaching tyranny or the attacking armies of our enemies, far from it, but I am firmly against the endless wars we have fought, and still fight, simply to feed the greedy monster of the rich, power-hungry elitists who consider our population to be their own herd of cattle, to cull and feed upon at will.
I do long for days gone by, I do, and I suppose that longing may validate the old saying, “Ignorance is bliss” to some degree, but those days are gone, and we are left alive here to be the “boots on the ground” for these times. The old days are gone, and will not pass by here again, but can we not hope against hope that we can be healed? While it may not be very rational to do so, it is all we have, and to live on in freedom we must do so and not give in, nor give up. But where can our true hope come from?
My “turn” in this dimension is coming to an end, of that I am sure, and while I sometimes get overwhelmed with a sad melancholy of lost time and the intrusion of the memory of years and friends who simply slipped by, the most positive cure can only be a re-discovery of the God Who inspired this nation at it’s beginning.
We do not own Time; only God is the owner and arbiter of Time, and only God can provide the healing this nation needs. It is not to be primarily found in men, although men are called to do His will, but only God can lead us to the freedom our national soul has lost, and only God can give America her soul back.
John Miltenberger
Photo: inspiringtips.com
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