Just As I Thought (32 page)

With that in mind, I called this talk, this oration, “Connections,” because that is what it is. A couple of weeks ago I was at a gathering in New York of an organization called Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. They were honoring a couple of older people for their lifelong contributions to organizing—the head of Local 1199 and a teacher from City College—and they were being honored for work in their fields, in thinking about ordinary people. Toward the end of the evening, a young black guy came up to me and said, “Don’t you know me, Grace? It’s me, it’s J.J.”

“What? Jimmy?” I could hardly recognize him, because I hadn’t seen him in about twenty years.

In 1969, I flew to Vietnam and then spent a month traveling south from Hanoi down to the DMZ with Jimmy and a couple of others. We had this peculiar task. We were bringing three POWs back to the United States. In the middle of the war. The Vietnamese had agreed to send three POWs every month or two. This was in 1969. The bombing of the North had stopped for a while and the Vietnamese thought this might work—that it might be a sign that they wanted the war ended, so we had been asked as peace-movement people to bring these men back, which we did. The only thing the Vietnamese said was that they shouldn’t go back into teaching—they were all fliers, by the way—they could go back into the Air Force, but they mustn’t start teaching pilots again, pilots who would then fly to Vietnam and kill Vietnamese. That made a lot of sense. Unfortunately, at that time the United States or maybe Nixon and Kissinger didn’t seem to really want the war to end very much so very quickly, so they had these guys teaching pilots. After about nine or ten POWs had been freed, that was the end of the program. And very little is publicly known about it. I would probably know very little about it myself if I hadn’t been part of it.

Anyway, this guy Jimmy Johnson whom I met after twenty years, who went to Vietnam with me and five others, had already spent two and a half years in prison. He had spent two and half years in prison—he was about twenty-two or twenty-three—and he had already spent all that time in prison because he was one of a group called the Fort Hood Three. Some of the older people here might remember them.

I had been to his trial in the mid-sixties, maybe 1965 or 1966—you know, you’ll notice when you get older you really lose track of dates and you begin to depend on things like the Freedom of Information Act to bring you your records, so you know when you said what and to whom. So I have to look this up, but it was sometime in the mid-sixties. I went to his trial, which was in New Jersey at Fort Dix. And he was a very impressive young fellow. The thing that got me was his parents—they really admired him so much. I mean, there they sat at his trial; he’s being tried and God knows how many years he’ll get, and they’re so proud of him. They just looked at him, and I had to go back into my own culture to feel what it was, as though it was his bar mitzvah and not his trial for near-treason. He was one of three young men who had sat themselves down on the tarmac.

At any rate, he sat down on it, as others have done since (during the Gulf War), but he was one of the first three young men who refused to go to Vietnam. He refused to move toward that plane. And way up in the high reaches of our American world, President Johnson and a whole bunch of people—men—had already decided that the war would go forward and that there would be large troop movements, that there would eventually be 500,000 men in Vietnam and that the bombing of the North would start again. All of this happened around the same time that Jimmy Johnson said he would not be one of those men.

And a lot of those decision-making men came from here. Harvard. I really am sorry to say that. And some of them may be celebrating their fiftieth right now, or some may be celebrating next year, and some may have celebrated a year or two ago. But you needn’t feel too bad, because Yale has taken over that job recently with President Bush’s men. I mean, good things do happen.

But the reason this war in Indochina had continued in this particular way was because of what was called a crisis of credibility. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but this fear of not being credible, of not being believed unless you are very strong and violent and offering more violence, it’s very similar to … Well, you know we have often talked about how Asians and Indians and others need to save face, and we have treated that as kind of a backward idea. You know, you want to save face, what are they going to do to their faces after they’re saved? But we Americans (some of us) have the same need, really. We like to be credible and it is really pretty much the same thing. And one might say it is really not a facial experience, this need, it’s really a testicular one.

But anyway, I’m making these connections in order to get on to our latest war, because a lot of you young people—well, you weren’t even born at that time and you keep wondering why people are always talking to you about Vietnam, Vietnam. It’s really pretty boring in many ways. Still, actually it turns out that Vietnam is not only on my mind and my friends’ minds but it is so much on the President’s mind and so much on our leaders’ minds that
they
talk about it all the time. They are very much afraid that we’ll forget about Vietnam and yet they
want
us to forget about it. They want us to forget—they want you to forget about it, at least about American resistance; they don’t want you to think about it. But it’s this “credible” thing, and then it’s this face-saving thing, and it turns out that we not only went into that war as fiercely as we did for credibility but at the same time that we were making ourselves credible, we were losing face. So we lost our face in Vietnam, and that is why Bush and other leaders and the American public have to keep talking about it. They call it the Vietnam Syndrome. But what the Vietnam Syndrome is about—I’ll talk about that a little later.

In any event, once our leader pointed out this loss to all the Americans who really thought they
had kept
their faces for the last fifteen years, the people began to understand they had really lost them. So the yellow ribbon was invented and appeared everywhere easily, as though there had always been a great vat of yellow dye in the middle of the country. And in front of that ribbon organizations, churches, all sorts of authoritative people—Congress and so forth—fell. Then they recovered, held up their yellow ribbon, and were declared present.

It worked like that for a lot of people. But think about the war itself, the war that you have known recently, your most recent war, the Gulf War, which, because it was brilliantly executed, very few of you really had too much to do with! Young recruits were sent over—which most of you were not, although some of you could have been—and old reservists. Really old reservists. For instance, there was a whole group of about fifty-year-old men from Harlem who had been sent by accident into some forward position, which they were not exactly prepared for. What was the Army doing with these old black men down there?

This war really hasn’t ended, and it is not going to end so soon. The Vietnam War, to this day, has never ended for the Vietnamese. All these years the Vietnamese have been cruelly embargoed. So we are still at war against them as far as I can see. As for the Panamanians, they are probably worse off than they were before we decided to defend them. And in the Middle East, as we now know, nothing is really much better. If anything, it is less stable than before.

Thousands and thousands of Iraqis are still dead, or injured. The Kurds, well, you know all about them, and we Americans really have a lot of sympathy for them and it’s the best part of us in a sense. It’s something our country’s always done extremely well. I mean, we put them in a position where they are practically slaughtered, but then—I’m going to say something awfully cynical. I don’t like to be cynical in front of young people, and I’m not really cynical, but I’m going to say this cynical thing all the same. Which is that once enough of the Kurds had been slaughtered, we became very good-hearted and have probably taken care of them better than almost anybody else could.

And you can compare that in a sense to the wonderful way we took care of Vietnamese orphans. Then we were strong enough. The truth is, we were strong enough to do that—to kill the parents—but we were also good enough to take care of their orphans. And that is in us also—one thing that is there and is a true thing.

But one of the decisions our administration made, one of the worst—as the Gulf War was beginning—was to stretch a great big wet blanket over the country. At least I felt like that. No air and no airwaves. We couldn’t see or hear the war, the killing which might have saddened us. I don’t remember that kind of silence since the McCarthy days. Our media actually allowed themselves to
not
receive information. We are used to them making a lot of noise. Sometimes we don’t like what they say but we’re used to that general racket out of which certain pieces of fact and truth often slip out and speak to us. This dampness covered us so thoroughly we couldn’t react in our good-hearted way—if I can go from cynicism to sentimentality (which are closely related). Though we saw nothing of the war, the people were generally for it with yellow ribbons and flags flying wildly. But once we saw the pictures of the Kurds on TV, once we saw a few facts and the truth, we were moved, affected by the sight and began to press the government to take some sort of action. So in a sense, the government’s strategic decision to hide the truth from us was the smart thing to do from their point of view.

Well, here we are right now, and we are at a point now where the Israelis and Palestinians hate each other more than ever. Both of them are being driven quite crazy. The Israelis were driven crazy by Europeans fifty years ago and the Palestinians are now being driven crazy by the Israelis.
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When I say driven crazy, I mean that people who are tormented in these ways are really made crazy with rage. People who have no homes, whose homes are taken away from them. And you don’t have to go that far away to see this, because you can walk with me in my own city, and I suppose in Boston, too, but certainly in New York, you can see people who if they were not crazy to begin with are being driven crazy. And that happens in whole parts of the world where people are torn from their homes and their homes destroyed. It isn’t just
our
wars that have made people mad—it’s all the wars.

I’ve tried to figure out why this last war was needed so much, why they wanted it, why it was forced on us. Most of our international allies in the beginning didn’t think it was a great idea, and Congress was at first opposed or ambivalent. Why did the President and his military advisors stampede us? First I think it wasn’t the oil so much (only 5 percent to 7 percent comes from Kuwait) as it was wanting to be the boss of the oil. I think that’s called hegemony.

Another purpose was the real Pentagon need to try out all that trillion dollars’ worth of unused hardware weaponry. Much of it quite new and much of it really almost as good as an atomic bomb, but without radioactivity, so it was a little healthier, you know. So we had to try them out, because how else are you going to know if it works. Now the funny thing about it—because we really are a free country (at least we acted that way before the war)—is that much of what I’ve just said was announced by Pentagon people or weapons specialists on TV. I mean, they would say this much: You know, we don’t know whether this works, and they were so enthusiastic and cheerful. Does this stuff work? Well, we’ll soon find out. So there was a lot of TV enthusiasm about all that.

In a way this is where you all come in, because you are very smart people—you’re supposed to be, anyway, and your brains are for something in this world, and you have to decide what you want to do with your brains. Whether you want to be the person to improve the napalm or let it alone. You have to make that decision, because if you don’t, the gods and goddesses of this world—whoever they are—are going to begin to think that brains should not be considered an important gene for the continuation of the human race. It will in fact be one of the worst things for the survival of the fittest. So you have to consider all these things when you decide what to do with your smartness. And there is a lot to be done in the world. I think you’re the ones who can do it. And you have to protect that biological fact of braininess.

Another major reason for this war was the necessity to prove to the American people and the world that the government could move hundreds and thousands of soldiers very quickly in any direction. Almost more important was the effort to wipe out the historical memory of the sixties, which had become the seventies, with the rise of the women’s movement and advances in civil rights, the anti-nuclear-power movement and the science of ecology.

Now, with the establishment of this non-wimpiness settled, the lives and bodies of women have begun to be returned to their rightful owner: the male state. We have seen the direction that certain states and the Supreme Court have been taking in narrowing women’s lives. Women’s rights, by the way, are human rights!

I want to tell you something Donella Meadows said at a Dartmouth teach-in. She explained that there was alternative energy for everything in normal, comfortable American life. Alternative energy. TV, air conditioners, light, heat, automobiles. That there was only one enterprise that required such massive infusions of energy that no alternative to oil would work, and that was war. A tank, she said to us, could really move not much more than seventeen feet on a gallon of gas. So this made me really think that this might very well be the final purpose of this war, the one we are not quite finished with. It wasn’t a war for stability, in other regards, really—its main purpose was to maintain turmoil in the Middle East, and to prove the nastiness of new weapons. Mostly it was a war to make sure that Americans could continue to make war and—most important—like it. That’s what it was.
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