The veteran Social Studies teacher of over 30 years and soon to be retired approached me quietly yet intently in the back of the auditorium. He whispered, “They are going to eat him alive.” It was 1995 and it was the high school’s “once every two years” Career Day. I was a 29 year-old school counselor still freshly minted out of grad school two years before.
As the co-planner of the event and selector of the kick-off speaker, in my relative youth, I was fairly certain that the students would not engage in cannibalistic, anti-social mayhem. The kick-off speaker was Captain Edward A. Davis, a former P.O.W. for seven and a half years in Vietnam. His former sadistic North Vietnamese captors with nicknames like Rabbit, Dip Shit, Mickey Mouse, Spot, Chihuahua, Pimples, Big Ugly, and the torturer-master Pigeye a.k.a Old Straps and Bars (a reference to his tools and techniques), had certainly prepared him sufficiently to face an assemblage of a 1000 potentially antagonistic or at least apathetic adolescents with no fear to adverse events and audiences. The kids were golden.
Davis began his speech with a reflection that when you are in solitary confinement for over a year, one certainly did consider career development. Graduating in 1962 from the U.S. Naval Academy, he had been shot down in his A-1 Skyraider on August 26, 1965. Until his release on February 12, 1973, he was a Prisoner-of-War in the Hanoi Hilton. At the time of his capture, he was 25 years old, not much older than some of the seniors in the audience and four years younger than I. I remember him pulling two boys who were twins from the audience, both wrestlers, to demonstrate the “rope trick” where the guards would tie his hands behind his back with a rope and then raise the rope off the ground, bringing his hands up to his head. He took the arms of the pliable and limber wrestler twins and raised them until they said no more, with their hands ceasing at their hips.
It was so quiet, I could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Usually, kick-off speakers are high-energy spazzes who capture kids by being loud, funny, and interactive. Davis was none of this. He was soft-spoken, reflective, and thoughtful. And the students hung on every word. His words were like silent mortars, hitting home in the students’ souls. Somber is not usually the vibe I am looking to impart to an audience at an event like this, but I sensed it was the right tone. I was more than right. The teacher was wrong.
Even in 1995, the Vietnam War was a memory that America wanted to forget. It was a divisive war, unpopular at home, leaving its veterans orphaned from the affection of a grateful country, an appreciation that had been the case with all previous wars. The Vietnam War divided the country, like no other, with the exception of the Civil War. There was malice towards all and an affection towards none, and the scars, though softened with time, still mar this nation. My first-hand memories of that time are so buried in my subconscious as to be gone. I have recollections from around the end of war including a classmate’s in elementary school with an unusual last name (Tschudy) dad being released as a P.O.W. in 1975, a fact I only recalled after reading Jeremiah Denton’s autobiography of the Hanoi Hilton titled When Hell Was In Session where he was mentioned.
I also recall an anti-war protestor painting signs with words urging Nixon to sign the Paris Accords for the cameras broadcasting the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I was more fascinated by his painting and lettering skill than the message since I had no geopolitical awareness as a nine-year old in the early 1970’s.
Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the North Vietnamese resistance, petitioned then U.S. President Truman, for redress of grievances against French colonial imperialism, in 1946 in the aftermath of World War II. He pleads for Vietnamese self-determination, a creed embodied in our founding documents, which he had read and believed. No one knows what would have happened if Vietnam had been able to determine its own destiny–had the U.S. heeded that appeal for support. The coinage of U.S. authority may have averted the crisis to come. True, liberators often become despotic in the aftermath of armed triumph, but one wonders if the atrocities all-around contribute to the atrocities’ aftermath, like a tsunami generated by an oceanic earthquake. We can’t wash the blood from our hands so blithely.
There are many unanswered questions still about the Vietnam War, yet a grateful nation, though long in coming, has accepted the Vietnam War’s veterans with the affection so long in arrears.
Frederick Buechner in his book, A Room Called Remember, writes “The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming.” A painful and yet purposeful reflection of past, present, and future, both personally and as a national exercise with the Vietnam War. Perhaps it is now time to blow-off the dust of the past and examine the lessons within, glaring or subtle as they are.
At the conclusion of Davis’s speech to our students, he gave me a commemorative U.S. Silver Dollar minted in 1994 to honor American P.O.W.’s over the long history of war in the United States. The front of the coin has an eagle flying free of its chains, the chain still attached to its leg but the chain now broken. The back of the coin is a rendition of The National Prisoner of War Museum in Andersonville, Georgia, which opened in 1998 on the site of the infernal P.OW. Internment camp of Federal soldiers in this nation’s Civil War.
“E Pluribus Unum” rims the back left of the coin. “Out of Many, One.” More an ideal promise rather than a practiced principle. Yet, a nation is not only judged by its actions but by its aspirations, for aspirations slowly challenge and correct actions in time. A national reflection that shines as sterling as the tempered steel in this silver dollar.