By Lloyd A. Conway
With 27 years of Army and National Guard service coming to an end this November 11th, I’ve had time to reflect on a number of things related to military service. Such as, why would anyone want (or be willing) to go to Iraq to fight in an unpopular war? (In my case, add to that grave misgivings dating back to the infamous “16 words” about the reason for our going to war, in Iraq, in the first place.) The reasons are as doubtless as varied as the patterns of their digital camouflage. For me, the decision to deploy to Iraq was made 26 years ago, when I volunteered to join the Army during the time of America’s confrontation with Iran’s neighbor and archrival, Iran. Everything else flows from that decision. What made me join then was patriotism. What would have impelled me to join, sooner or later, was economics. Detroit in 1980 was not bursting with opportunities, as the reader may recall. I have to believe that 20% unemployment would have been a great motivator had patriotism failed. Patriotism wouldn’t have failed, however. Or perhaps I use the wrong word.
I’ll explain: My father, older brother, and all four uncles served. On my mother’s side, the line goes back to the 42nd Highlanders, a.k.a. the Black Watch. Two uncles saw action in France, and never spoke about it. But, I knew that they’d been over there. I knew about Dad’s Korean War service, and heard the stories over and over, growing up. (It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that almost none of then concerned what he saw in his MASH unit; they were usually about funny incidents in basic training or the like.) My older brother joined straight out of high school, as did I, and I would be followed by our younger brother, before he even finished school. You could say that wearing the uniform was the family business; I knew something of the trade before leaving grade school; not from handling weapons (our household had none), but in a more cultural way: The Army-Navy Game, how to tell what rank an insignia stood for, all grades and services, from memory, who the heroes were, what battles they fought, and all the other things that furnish the mind of a future soldier. Without consciously doing it, I’d been training for a career in uniform from earliest childhood. The Army even has a term for this type of enculturation; veterans, who, mostly unwittingly, induce their younger relations to enlist through repetition of war stories and the like, are termed “invisible recruiters.” (There is even concern that bad experiences at the VA may cause a reverse effect, by giving invisible recruiters the wrong sort of stories to tell about their experiences, in and out of uniform.) And that “invisible recruiter” thing works – my oldest daughter enlisted in 2005, right out of high school, without my campaigning for it. She told me that she wanted to because I did. In my case, she knows that the Army is the reason for my having gone to college, for being physically fit after an often misspent youth, and that being in uniform kept me from ending up on the street, literally, as my family briefly did during the depression of the early ‘80s. (If I had to do it all over again, I’d still join, because of the many good things that have happened to me because of that decision.) After staying in this long, for a variety of factors, my decision, when the mobilization order came down to my National Guard unit, was made for me. Not, however, before fate intervened to keep me in uniform one year longer than expected. “Good.” That’s the last word I ever heard my father speak, before a trach tube and a final downward spiral took first his voice and then the rest of him from us. He said it when I told him, while visiting him at hospital bedside after a National Guard drill, that I’d put in for retirement. This was the second time I’d done so; the first ended abortively when my retirement request arrived the same day as our last mobilization order. The Battalion Commander offered to push my request through, since I’d send it in ignorance of the order to mobilize. I declined. As it turned out, the manning requirement for that mission was reduced, and I was dropped from the roster of those to be sent overseas. This time, with the detachment we’d deployed to Iraq home, minus one of our company who’d bid us farewell but would never see his homecoming, my wife and I talked it over and decided that this was the time. So, once again I drafted my retirement request and mailed it in. My father never saw me in uniform again. That time, by his bedside, in camouflage, on my home from drill, was the last his eyes beheld his second son so attired. But I was in uniform again, dress uniform, to bid him farewell two months after. My unit sent a funeral detail to do his memory full military honors, as was his right as a Korean War veteran. They performed with the crisp flawlessness of long practice, in a moving ceremony. Each of them, known to me, in some instances for over a decade, expressed condolences in a heartfelt but subdued manner, fit for our friendships as for the occasion. After they finished folding the flag, SSG G. stood in front of my older brother, himself a 100% disabled veteran, and intoned, in a voice reedy from smoking too many Marlboros, the closing words, “On behalf of a grateful nation…” Outside, three rounds of gunfire, the seven individual shots sounding like one each time, and it was done. I invited the detail to the reception; they declined, as their next funeral was a ways away. It was for the first cousin of one of the marksmen, and a 19 year old widow was waiting for her flag.Without being able to put it into a more rational form, I’ll just say that there was no way in hell that I could leave, not just then. So, four days short of being officially retired, I had them tear up the paperwork. Soldiers go for many reasons.
In Dr. Zhivago, it is said (in the movie, at least; I don’t remember it from the book) that soldiers go off to war because they are unhappy with something: their job, their wife, et cetera. War, it is implied, is an escape to another reality, one that will be unpleasant in different ways than the current one. Antipov, alias Strelnikov, fled his unhappy marriage to Lara by volunteering for the Imperial Army, even though he was no friend of the Tsarist government. In Achilles In Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay, a Boston VA psychiatrist, explores and parallels the experiences of American Vietnam vets with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Achilles before the walls of Troy. He concludes that Homer composed his lays to retell actual combat experience, because his emotions so closely resemble those of his patients. From wanting to frag his CO over an act of betrayal to berserk rage over the death of his closest buddy, Achilles’ experiences and those of our veterans with long exposure to close combat are the same, physiologically, emotionally and morally. One outcome of his work is an understanding of how a veteran’s world shrinks to his platoon, his squad, or whatever size unit is within the scope of his daily experience. Some of my comrades who went last time volunteered this time to go with men they’d bonded with in close, daily contact, friendships cemented by immanent danger, a debt of honor they think they owe to each other, and to those who are going for the first time, as well. Some of them, I know, have good jobs and I have no reason to suspect bad marriages in any instance. It’s for their comrades that they stay and for them that they go.
James Webb, in Fields of Fire, describes one of his two principal protagonists as, “an American samurai,” who’d been bred to war. The character, Robert E. Lee Hodges, Jr., was the son of a World War II vet killed in combat before he was born. His line stretched back to the Revolution, and his extended family was full of soldiers, many KIA, as he learned at his Grandmother’s knee. As Webb wrote, “He believed in God, but he believed in the Ghosts more.” Young Hodges was raised on stories of long-dead Hodges men who’s braved fields of fire, whenever their country called. Indeed, they’d sought danger out, not waiting for the call to the colors. In between putting away the novelist to assume the Senator, James Webb became a scholar. His. Born Fighting: A History of the Scots-Irish in America I’ve not yet read, but its thesis is known to me from other works, including Albion’s Seed and Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins’ Wars. It is that the Scots-Irish, borderland Scots who count William Wallace among their own, are disposed by culture, habit, circumstance and experience to favor the warrior’s life. Just as business acumen seems to follow the Chinese Diaspora around the world, as it does the Dutch and Armenian expatriate, so does soldiering come naturally to the NASCAR Dads we hears so much about during recent elections.
My own roots are Scots-Irish and working-class WASP. I’ve spent many evenings with my cousins, and inevitably talk turns to their father, who spent 2 1/2 years in continuous combat during World War II in New Guinea, perhaps the worst place to experience war. Sherman was right, but even Hell may be divided into planes, and one of the lowest would be equatorial New Guinea, uncharted territory filled with disease, headhunters, cannibals and a skilled and implacable enemy. He was a POW; this did not deter him from re-enlisting, after his release, to make Sergeant. Other members of the clan, some never met by any in the room, will be conjured up and their service remembered. What they did after the war is almost an afterthought. On my mother’s WASP side, soldiers are frequently found, but they served when called, like her oldest brother in World War II, or out of necessity, like the younger brother, who’s joined the National Guard during the Depression, presumably for the extra money. At any rate, they rarely spoke of their experiences, and never brought them up of themselves, in my hearing. And their children generally did not follow them into the service. These thoughts about serving mixed with others accompanying my decision to retire. Like Cpt. Brittles in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, I had decidedly mixed feelings about leaving the service, even though it was time to do so. Memories of the old man, at least 80 years of age, out on a Sunday morning this past September, his black suit hanging loosely on his frame as he knelt to place flowers by a graveside on a Sunday morning, who, at the sight of our HUMMVs coming by in convoy, stood at attention and rendered a sharp hand salute as the wind played with the wisps of his snow-white hair, make me thing that they must have something in common with many others who put the uniform on. I hope that sharing them helps to identify some reasons who the ranks continue to fill, even when most of the country considers both the cause and the leader who took us there unworthy of support.
In closing, my decision to deploy was thrice made: Once when I enlisted, once at my father’s funeral when I chose to stay in uniform, and once before I was born, by the example of family that brought me into the world. As the last-mention preceded the others, I give it precedence in claiming my service, and by extension offer it as an example of why others of similar origin put on the uniform and accept whatever follows from choosing to do so. (I’m sure that my son would tell you the same thing, if you asked him why he joined the Air Force, last August, just out of high school…)