| Lessons of War a play that teaches the meaning of peace |
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It is essentially a series of letters, mostly to his parents about that
distant time and place that happened to America and her children
over a quarter of a century ago. It seems that no sooner has Brown
arrived in Vietnam than the North Vietnamese Army started their
costly and ill-fated 1968 Tet Offensive.It was a remarkable year “in-
country” and in the nation. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy
are assassinated. The mood of non-participant young people erupts
at the Democratic National Convention.
The most remarkable thing about these letters is the mixture of the
mundane and the moral. He wants a knife, he badgers for money,
then losses it during a battle and asks them to cancel the checks. He
thinks about coming back home incessantly. He mixes with his
buddies, they get patches from the family franchise chicken
business, but later he notes that after six months, he is the oldest and
most alone. He keeps calling for Kool-Aid, as if that child never grew
out of him, but after giving children balloons and playing with them, he
finds that it is too painful to kill their fathers and brothers and play
balloons with them.
We see him casually grow into manhood. It is not a pleasant initiation
to watch; letters are marked with little homilies, notes about his
officers, familial events, responses to letters from his parents. But it
changes. It ceases to be interesting, and grows serious. We watch
the speed of change; things that take years to experience happen
virtually overnight here. And the vacillation between moral points of
view of what he is doing and what is happening at home seems to
sweep like a great pendulum trying to find its moral resting place. At
one minute he is sympathetic to the Vietnamese, and a day later, he
feels the powerful urge of his Army training and the blood lust it
instills.
America has made a compromise about this war. What our movies,
our mythos, has suggested to us, is that we should not have fought
the war because our politicians let down our fighting men and
women, never clearly defining a mission.
distant time and place that happened to America and her children
over a quarter of a century ago. It seems that no sooner has Brown
arrived in Vietnam than the North Vietnamese Army started their
costly and ill-fated 1968 Tet Offensive.It was a remarkable year “in-
country” and in the nation. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy
are assassinated. The mood of non-participant young people erupts
at the Democratic National Convention.
The most remarkable thing about these letters is the mixture of the
mundane and the moral. He wants a knife, he badgers for money,
then losses it during a battle and asks them to cancel the checks. He
thinks about coming back home incessantly. He mixes with his
buddies, they get patches from the family franchise chicken
business, but later he notes that after six months, he is the oldest and
most alone. He keeps calling for Kool-Aid, as if that child never grew
out of him, but after giving children balloons and playing with them, he
finds that it is too painful to kill their fathers and brothers and play
balloons with them.
We see him casually grow into manhood. It is not a pleasant initiation
to watch; letters are marked with little homilies, notes about his
officers, familial events, responses to letters from his parents. But it
changes. It ceases to be interesting, and grows serious. We watch
the speed of change; things that take years to experience happen
virtually overnight here. And the vacillation between moral points of
view of what he is doing and what is happening at home seems to
sweep like a great pendulum trying to find its moral resting place. At
one minute he is sympathetic to the Vietnamese, and a day later, he
feels the powerful urge of his Army training and the blood lust it
instills.
America has made a compromise about this war. What our movies,
our mythos, has suggested to us, is that we should not have fought
the war because our politicians let down our fighting men and
women, never clearly defining a mission.
The nation had no right to ask such sacrifice from our personnel.
Thus the men and women come off in our popular culture as victims of
corrupted policymakers.
The Vietnamese War’s greatest effect might have been to poison our
political system, so that in invading Iraq, President Bush has to say
that we cleansed our nation of its Vietnam excursion, that we
somehow brought our honor back.But like all mythos, the truth is
difficult to reconcile with it. Fred Leo Brown’s book has the ring
of morality and compromise, the seeking of working class
people who fought the war. We see little of it, and as scholars
are beginning to try to understand the war, this kind of book,
filled with mundane existence and moral questioning is going to
be a most valuable resource.
Of course, the act of autobiography itself is difficult to interpret.
Here we have letters to his parents, and it is clear that he is
censoring every line, wondering how much he can tell about his
life and his feelings, about his actions. In a letter to his sister, we
are brought up short by how much self-censorship there was, but
we watch him give more extended glimpses of life at war as he
writes through the nights on guard duty. The war changes him,
as it changed the Vietnamese landscape. One can sense the
deep scars our young men felt, why they turned to drugs and
alcohol, the glimmers of the morals they grew up with challenged
by the facts of their existence. How much should one tell? There
is a story behind this one, messier, more painful. It is the story
that soldiers are beginning to tell now, and Fred Leo Brown in
publishing these letters has brought to light some of the
challenges that the myth has left out.
If ever a nation needs to get over something, our nation needs to
get over Vietnam. But we cannot get over it as long as we keep
it wrapped in mythic paper. Fred Leo Brown’s letters strip some
of the wrapping from the myth, and we are allowed glimpses into
what happened in the lives of the men who went out on patrols,
defended perimeters, and found no solace in their Rest and
Rehabilitation. It is often a painful story, filtered through the eyes
of a boy who came in relative innocence, but was delighted to
escape with his life. But is also captures something of the
nobility of people in a job that we had no right to ask them to
undertake, and how they survived that moral chaos.
—Gerald E. Forshey, Ph.D.
Professor Humanities and Philosophy
Thus the men and women come off in our popular culture as victims of
corrupted policymakers.
The Vietnamese War’s greatest effect might have been to poison our
political system, so that in invading Iraq, President Bush has to say
that we cleansed our nation of its Vietnam excursion, that we
somehow brought our honor back.But like all mythos, the truth is
difficult to reconcile with it. Fred Leo Brown’s book has the ring
of morality and compromise, the seeking of working class
people who fought the war. We see little of it, and as scholars
are beginning to try to understand the war, this kind of book,
filled with mundane existence and moral questioning is going to
be a most valuable resource.
Of course, the act of autobiography itself is difficult to interpret.
Here we have letters to his parents, and it is clear that he is
censoring every line, wondering how much he can tell about his
life and his feelings, about his actions. In a letter to his sister, we
are brought up short by how much self-censorship there was, but
we watch him give more extended glimpses of life at war as he
writes through the nights on guard duty. The war changes him,
as it changed the Vietnamese landscape. One can sense the
deep scars our young men felt, why they turned to drugs and
alcohol, the glimmers of the morals they grew up with challenged
by the facts of their existence. How much should one tell? There
is a story behind this one, messier, more painful. It is the story
that soldiers are beginning to tell now, and Fred Leo Brown in
publishing these letters has brought to light some of the
challenges that the myth has left out.
If ever a nation needs to get over something, our nation needs to
get over Vietnam. But we cannot get over it as long as we keep
it wrapped in mythic paper. Fred Leo Brown’s letters strip some
of the wrapping from the myth, and we are allowed glimpses into
what happened in the lives of the men who went out on patrols,
defended perimeters, and found no solace in their Rest and
Rehabilitation. It is often a painful story, filtered through the eyes
of a boy who came in relative innocence, but was delighted to
escape with his life. But is also captures something of the
nobility of people in a job that we had no right to ask them to
undertake, and how they survived that moral chaos.
—Gerald E. Forshey, Ph.D.
Professor Humanities and Philosophy
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