Vietnam, Nixon, and Fatherhood
An Anti War Confession Pt 2
One of the things I was happy for when I retired was the way the ceremony also honored the sacrifices made by the spouse. It made my wife happy to be honored that way. I didn’t really care. I was just happy to get out with my retirement benefits. When I retired, I cut off ties with everyone I ever served with except my last enlisted Supervisor. She was always very kind to me and saved me from getting in trouble several times during my last year. Many men and women who serve in the military bond together in ways that last a lifetime but I never felt that kind of comradery. When I was in tech school learning to be a pharmacy technician, I used to socialize with other airman but it never felt right to me. Some of it was my emotional instability but much of it was the deep-seated feeling that I shouldn’t even be there. At the Airmen’s Club at Sheppard Air Force Base they would often play Lee Greenwood’s song God Bless the USA . All the airman in the club would sing along and I would feel like a fraud. After a year of constant trouble because of my drinking I sobered up to save my military career. I stopped socializing with other airmen and just hung out with my sober civilian friends. The military was just a job I went to during the day and nothing else. I sometimes felt guilty about that because some of the people I worked with were true believers with a deep patriotic fervor for the United States and I felt deep ambivalence at best.
The constant movement and the unending stream of new people the military puts into your life makes it difficult to feel any sense of permanence or stability. The days turned into years and the next thing I knew I was on the downside of my second decade getting close to retirement. I married for a third time to the wonderful woman who I am still married to twenty years later. We met as civil war re-enactors and she has deep patriotism combined with a kind heart. One thing the military does that in trouble at the very end of my career.
On September 11, 2001 I was in the base Pharmacy at McGuire Air Force Base. We saw the towers go down on the television in our lobby. McGuire was the closest military base to New York City so we immediately went into lockdown. We didn’t know if we were going to be attacked next but after a few months of heightened security things went back to normal. I went through the last four years of my career and retired in 2005.
I have very mixed feelings about my military service. I know my grandfather would have been proud of me if he had lived long enough to see me join the Air Force. When I tell strangers that I am retired military they thank me. I won’t deny that this feels good, but it is also embarrassing. They are thanking me for something I really wish I hadn’t done. As a retiree I get very good healthcare benefits and a small pension. It embarrasses me that I get taken care of pretty well when actual combat veterans have to fight to get the government to take care of them. Some are homeless. Some have mental health and substance abuse issues. There is a suicide epidemic among veterans. A 2022 VA study estimated that more than forty veterans a day kill themselves and it makes me feel a little survivor’s guilt. Our government, eager to send our youth to war have not addressed the problem of how to take care of them when they come home.
When I retired in 2005, my wife and I decided to adopt a child. In my forties, I finally reached the time where I thought I could raise a child without causing too much harm to them. Everyone likes to think that they will be the perfect parent but in my world, there is really no such thing. The details of the adoption would make up another whole essay but I can relate some of it. Adopting from China we were mentally preparing ourselves for a baby girl. The Chinese government at the time kept changing their rules for foreign adoption and this kept prolonging the process. We were about to give up when the adoption agency told us that there was a little boy available. He had a cleft palate but in all other ways he appeared healthy. We jumped at the chance and were soon on our way to Beijing.
I am sure that if we had adopted a little girl, I would have loved her just as much but I secretly wanted a son. I wanted a son to give some little boy the opportunity to have a father, an opportunity that I never had. We hadn’t even considered boys’ names and at the last minute I asked Debbie if we could name him after my father. That’s how this little Chinese boy got the very Irish moniker Charles Patrick Doogan. The Chinese adoption officials came to our room at the Beijing Hotel and handed us this little boy. The external part of the cleft was repaired but he had an angry scar right under his nose and would require more surgery when we returned to the States but to me, he was perfect.
I understood the story that a catholic priest once told me. He was talking about how God sees our flaws and he said, “God looks tenderly out our flaws in the same way a parent would look at the defects of a beloved child.” The moment I saw my new son I knew what that meant.
During our preparations we decided to buy a pouch to carry the baby in instead of trying to lug a stroller all over China. In addition to Beijing, we had to go to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, the province where Charles was born and Guangzhou, where the American consulate was located. I carried him all over Beijing and Hohhot in the pouch I can see him carrying a little Chinese flag that we bought from a street vendor in front of the Forbidden Palace in his little hand. I don’t remember a happier time in my life. I was a father and along with the happiness the responsibility terrified me.
When we arrived in Guangzhou the consulate was located near the
Buddhist Temple of the Six Banyan Trees. The original temple on this site was built in the eleventh century. This proximity led many adopting families to have their newly adopted children blessed by the monks who lived there. As his last concrete connection to his Chinese heritage Charles received his blessing and we shortly returned to the States.
The blur of being a new parent took over our lives and it was several years before I began to think in terms of my little boy being old enough to join the military. As time wore on, the little boy we brought home from China became the most important person in my life. I began to imagine how devastated I would be if anything ever happened to him.
In 2016 I was invited to a neighborhood house party by an organization that was trying to get Senator Bernie Sanders to run for president. I didn’t know much about him but the more I learned the more I liked. My main fear of a Clinton presidency was the continuation of the endless war that she had supported all of her career as a senator and later as Secretary of State. My anxiety metastasized from an impersonal concern about militarism taking away much needed funds to help people here in the states to an overwhelming personal concern that if things continued the way they were going my son might die in another unnecessary war of aggression designed to enrich the military industrial complex at the expense of the American people.
“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?”
This is the chorus to a song written in the United States in 1914 just prior to our entry into WWI. Written by lyricist Alfred Bryan and composer Al Piantadosi it gained traction within the pacifist community and a recording by the Peerless Quartet sold 650,000 copies at the time. When I heard Enoch Kent’s later version it hit me particularly hard. I decided right then and there to dedicate whatever energy I had to peace activism. As Charles got older, we began to attend peace rallies and demonstrations for peace related issues. I wanted him to see the other side of the issue before the propaganda machine of the US empire got its hooks into him. I wanted him to see the many good people working for peace.
Unfortunately, things have deteriorated since I first came to the realization that my life had been based on a lie. We are currently supporting genocide in Gaza, a far-right regime in Ukraine in a proxy war against Russia, attacking one of the poorest countries in the world for fighting to prevent further genocide and antagonizing China over Taiwan. That isn’t a complete list by any accounts. I can no longer believe in the myth of American exceptionalism and I constantly grieve for my son’s generation. Whenever I hear someone, my age, criticize younger generations I want to scream, “We should be begging their forgiveness for the shit show we’ve left to them.”
My son is fourteen years old now. In just four more years he will have to register for the Selective Service. I have the financial means to protect him from the poverty draft but by that time we might have to face the reality of a real draft like we last had during the Vietnam era. I pray for parents who do not have the same resources that I have. I pray for the war dead and the survivors who come home irreparably broken in body and spirit. I pray for the millions of innocents our imperialist war machine has chewed up and spit out, the children who will never grow up, who will die at the tip of the US spear of hegemony and brutality. Like the children of Gaza, they will not have a chance to grow up. They will die or those that do survive by some miracle will lose whatever little bit of joy they ever had within the memory of lost limbs and lost loved ones. God save us all.