Vietnam, Nixon and Fatherhood
An Anti War Confession Pt 1
I was born in 1964. I know that’s a hackneyed way to start an autobiographical story but the year is important. In my formative years the Vietnam War raged around us on the nightly news and the war debate tore apart families. One of my earliest memories was greeting my uncle at the airport when he 1came home from Vietnam. We met him at the airport when he came home in 1968. I was only four years old, but I have vivid memories of going to Philadelphia International Airport and waiting for his plane to arrive. That was way before 9/11 when you could sit in the terminal and wait for planes to arrive. We sometimes just went to watch planes land with no one arriving to be picked up. The memories are buttressed with a few photographs of my uncle with our family. The women all had the big sixties' hair and the men were clean cut with short hair almost military in style. My uncle had on his Army uniform. The whole of my family inheritance was my grandmother’s photo albums.
I come from a family with a long history of military service. My grandfather Ben “The Big Apple” Appenzeller served in the Army during World War Two. Since he was partially deaf he remained stateside for the duration. One of my uncle’s, the previously mentioned Army veteran served in Vietnam in 1967-68. He fought in the battle of Dak Tho and I didn’t know that until many years later because he would never talk about his experience in the war. that one fact remains the sum total of what he shared about his war time experiences. His brother the man I was named after, served in the Marine Corps Reserves. He caught the flu at Parris Island and had to repeat basic training. He finally graduated and when it came time to do his weekend drill time, he went awol because he thought his fellow reservists weren’t GI enough. He went through Marine Corp basic training twice and then dropped out, unbelievable. One of my cousins rose to the rank of colonel in the Army Reserves after several combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and I served in the United States Air Force for twenty years until I retired in 2005.
I say this, not to brag, but to point out that many people that I love and admire have served honorably in the various military branches. I want anyone who reads this to understand that I have no animosity towards individual service members. It’s the institution of war that I hate. Whenever I think about the misuse of our military and the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of our people, not to mention the deaths of millions of innocent civilians all over the world, I see red.
I don’t know where I developed the attitude of being against militarism and war. Maybe it was the peace protesters that I saw growing up. Maybe it was the night terrors and battles with drugs and alcohol that I saw my uncle go through when he came back from Vietnam, battles that went on for decades before he finally was able to get the help he needed with PTSD and substance abuse. Maybe it was just the intrinsic knowledge of right and wrong that kids are born with before society can indoctrinate them into the false patriotism that says, “My country right or wrong,” no matter how many innocents we slaughter. I don’t know where it came from but somewhere inside I knew that war was wrong and I kept that buried inside me for fear of offending my family.
In 1972, I was attending Catholic grade school in my old Philadelphia neighborhood. The name of the church and school was Our Lady of Częstochowa. Don’t ask me how to pronounce it. I went there and I’m not sure if even I know how to pronounce it. The church was named after the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, an important symbol in Polish Catholic iconography, since most of the parish were Polish immigrants or of Polish descent. Most of the churches in my neighborhood were divided along ethnic lines in an attempt to make new immigrants feel at home. Many of my peers were first generation US born and had family whose first language was not English.
As well as reading, writing and arithmetic this was still during the time when schools taught civics. People my age may remember civics but if you don’t know what that is please look into it.
As part of our civics course, we ran a mock election campaign based on the two candidates in the 1972 election, Richard Nixon, and George McGovern. The only thing I knew about Mr. McGovern was that he was against the Vietnam War. That and the fact that even back then republicans were considered evil. In Philadelphia it was unheard of to vote republican, at least in my neighborhood. That is, until Wilson Goode, an African American, ran for mayor. It was surprising how many white Philadelphians decided that maybe the republicans weren’t so evil after all. I stumped all over the schoolyard trying to convince my classmates to vote for McGovern. After that I went into a period of somnambulism that would last until I was well into my forties and that period would see me ignore deeply held moral convictions in an act of desperation.
Growing up in a poor inner-city neighborhood there were three ways to break the cycle of poverty:
One way out was a good union job, which were hard to get. From the 1960s on, we saw steep declines in American manufacturing that would accelerate under President Reagan. Philadelphia was particularly hard hit as many cities were that relied on manufacturing. By the times I was in high school Philadelphia had already seen many factories close down. Also accelerating during this time period were legislative attacks on organized labor which really started to accelerate in with Reagan’s firing of 12,000 PATCO controllers in 1981 and resulted in a slew of states enacting right to work laws that damaged unions’ ability to effectively organize.
The second way out was to get a college education to better your career prospects. This was doable for smart kids. Back then you could work summers, get grants, and take out low interest loans. Back then if you got in financial trouble, student loans could be discharged via bankruptcy just like any other debt. The skyrocketing cost of education and the increasing scarcity of government subsidies for education make it much harder to pay for a college education. Predatory lending makes it common that even if you have the means to repay your student loans, you often wind up paying the original principal several times over. In 2005, a bill supported by then Senator Biden, called the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act made it virtually impossible for student loans to ever be discharged through bankruptcy. Please don’t think that this is accidental. It is by design which brings me to the third point.
The third way to escape poverty when I was growing up was military service. To bring this rambling essay back to the personal where it started, I was a good student in high school and had no trouble getting into the college of my choice and with the help of some PHEAA grants and a small loan I was able to afford my first year in college but due to my own emotional instability and substance abuse issues I was forced to leave school after the first year. It quickly became apparent to me that I had no prospects, no job skills, and no chance to gain any in the near future. So, I took the only option that I could see. I joined the USAF.
The official Selective Service Draft ended in 1973 but we’ve had an unofficial draft system that has filled the ranks ever since and has disproportionately impacted our poorer communities. I know that there are many service members who join because they want to “serve “ their country but I also know that even among those who said that they joined because they wanted to serve their country, there were always economic considerations, like gaining jobs skills, travel and education which wouldn’t be possible for them without their military service. I know because I was one of them and I knew many more people like me in my twenty years of military service.
I call this the poverty draft. I’m not clever enough to come up with such an apt turn of phrase but I don’t know who to cite here. My apologies to anyone who knows the original source. I did write the lyrics to the following song about that topic.
The Poverty Draft
Let’s all cheer, have no fear.
The poverty draft, the poverty draft
It’s all here. Grab your gear.
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
Where’s your sons and daughters? Get them ready for the slaughter.
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
Got no food or education? We can help your situation.
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
When you find yourself in trouble, we’ll help out on the double
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
Sign right on the dotted line everything will work out fine
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
Lose an arm or leg, who cares? You’ll have to beg.
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
Come back injured and maimed, we won’t even know your name.
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
Come home in a box, Oh, Lord what a shock.
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
Your loved ones yes, they’ll cry, because you had to die
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
When you go to meet your maker, tell God you are no faker
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
You died to protect their profits, oh my that’s as sad as it gets.
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
The war to end all wars, is the next one that we fight.
When will people ever see the light?
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
When will we ever learn? How many times must we get burned?
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
It’s all a lie, who wants to be the next to die?
The poverty draft, the poverty draft.
It’s the poverty draft, the damned poverty draft,
it’s way past time to end… the poverty draft.
As a proud military man, my grandfather was always trying to convince me to go into the military. He was convinced that it would make a man out of me. The Depression and World War Two were the seminal events of his generation and they indelibly marked him and he thought I would benefit from a similar experience. I have pictures of him in his Army uniform. When the war came along, my grandfather’s partial deafness limited him to state side service and in a selfish way I’m glad that he was partially deaf. I might have never known him otherwise. He wanted me to have the same life changing experience that he had in the military. They became known as the greatest generation because they defeated the Nazis and fascism. Those that made it home came home to a booming economy and the GI Bill that made things like a college education and home ownership much easier to attain for veterans and millions of veterans took advantage of this help. This also became the main selling point for recruiters all over the country. The military will pay for your education became their mantra, repeated endlessly to prospective recruits many who did not have any other prospects.
In late 1984 I went to the military recruiting center in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania a few months after my best friend Michael, from high school. Always being on the portly side, my mother bought my clothes in the husky section of Robert Halls clothing store, I was told I had to lose weight before they could induct me. I exercised my ass off for three months, lost the prerequisite weight and I was accepted. I scored high on the ASVAB test. (armed services vocational aptitude battery) I could have had any job I wanted. All I had to do was wait for an opening but I was desperate to leave home, so I told them I wanted to work in the hospital, not in the kitchen, and I wanted to leave as soon as possible.
This brings me to the moral questioni asked myself of my military service. In my heart I knew that killing was wrong. The biblical injunction of Thou Shalt Not Kill was drilled into me by nuns and priests at the various Catholic schools I attended and it was one of the moral lessons they tried to teach me that I actually had very little trouble accepting. Part of me knew that the main function of the military was as General Patton once said, “making the other poor, dumb, bastard die for his country.” I had seen the horrors of war played out on the nightly news when I was very young and knew that I didn’t want any parts of that but I was desperate and felt like I had no other option. I also knew that medics were classified as noncombatants and were not required to take life. This was the loophole my desperate self was looking for. I became an Air Force medic and it worked. I got through twenty years of service without seeing combat and being required to kill anyone. For over twenty years I buried the fact that I was actually helping to make people healthy so they could continue to operate the system that killed so many people all over the world. This came to my understanding after I retired.