The girl sent him a tiny stone scarab–for luck, for protection. She was barely sixteen, a budding poet; it was in her nature to believe in amulets and the mystical powers of things like scarabs. She drew a peace symbol at the end of one of her letters, but when he responded, he said her hasty artwork had bothered him, stung him, because it reminded him of all the protests back home. “How are you supposed to serve your country when so many in your country hate you for doing so?” he wondered.
The girl never drew another peace symbol in a letter to him. But she wore one around her neck and she wished she were older so she could travel to Haight Ashbury, wave flowers and chant for peace.
The girl was me; the boy’s name was Anthony. I don’t know where he is now. I hope he is a million miles away from the war he brought home with him. As the years have passed, I have written him into characters in novels. And I have re-read his letters occasionally. Mostly, I just find myself thinking about him and feeling my heart hurt at how young boys can go off to war and return so much older than their years.
He taught me about war–about the fear, the waiting, the not-knowing, about the need for slice-the-vein-open humor, about the black well of sickness and sadness when death is piled up all around you. He taught me that nothing is simple in war–there is a whole cauldron of emotions, a “world of hurt.” And yet it’s all chillingly simple: you fight to live and hope you make it.
My father was governor of California at that time, and this young Marine came to the governor’s mansion with me during the summer after his first tour in Vietnam. Anthony sat at the dining room table and told my father what he wanted to hear–the patriotic version of a messy, demoralizing war. He made it sound noble, almost clean; he’d scrubbed out all the rage and bitterness, the black futility I knew he felt because I had a pile of his letters telling me so.
“It’s what your father wanted to hear,” he said to me later that night. “What’s the harm? Should I have told him most of us don’t have a clue what the hell we’re doing there?”
It was an act of kindness, of sparing someone’s feelings (my father’s on that evening) and in making that choice he taught me that sometimes peace is just about leaving the war outside for a few minutes. Sometimes peace is about what you don’t say.
The other day, after this latest war had begun, I passed an anti-war demonstration that had spilled across streets and intersections, clogging traffic, and bringing out dozens of police officers. I went back in time–again–to the high school girl I once was and to the young Marine whose eyes would never again be as clear or as blue or as young as they were when he first put on his uniform. He taught me about the war at home, too, and how it starts to melt into the overseas battle until it’s just a bigger, messier war with fewer boundaries, and how soldiers start to take it personally even if the protests are supposed to be aimed at the government.
He went back to Vietnam for a second tour. We didn’t talk too much about it, but I think it had a lot to do with the way he was treated when he came home from his first tour. The war at home in those days was one of wounding words–“baby-killer” was a favorite–as well as tomatoes hurled at airports, snide comments made on the streets, middle fingers jabbed into the air at the sight of a uniform or haircut that hinted of military enlistment. Home didn’t feel like home; it felt like another war zone–one he hadn’t been trained for.
Anthony went back to the war that felt familiar to him. We lost contact a short while after his second and final return. But he brought two wars back with him, and they roiled up in his heart and hung like weights on his bones. Many of those returning soldiers felt like that–like America and Vietnam had merged into one big shadow of war that they couldn’t shake off.
I have a wish that in my lifetime the world will contain more peace than war. At the moment, it’s a shaky wish and probably not a realistic one. But peace, like war, has many faces. Sometimes yelling for peace when young fresh-faced boys and girls are fighting a war because their government told them to is not contributing to peace. There are soldiers in a stark, brutal desert who are trying to do the right thing, and stay alive, and come back whole, and they want to know that home will feel like home when they get here.
In his brilliant book, “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien wrote: “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.”
Here is one truth about war: Wars do end, somehow, at some point. Those fighting them come back with older eyes and weightier hearts. They come back with war stories, with hard memories that rise up in them in the dark–and with a strong longing for peace.
