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Bud Grossmann's
Words of the Week
Week of February 27, 2005
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Congressional Record, 1969
© 1969 by Bud Grossmann
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SNUG AND SAFE, WRAPPED IN THE U.S. FLAG
Comment published as
a WIP dated October 9, 2001
© 2001, 2005 by Bud Grossmann. All Rights Reserved.
I have seen combat, but only through the smudged, curved glass of TV screens. I have not yet smelled scorched flesh of human beings.
At an indoor pool at Oaknoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, I played water polo in 1968 with healthy divinity students joining patients in PT. "Pass it, Winters, pass the ball! Over here, Winters, you uncoordinated puke!" I bumped the stumps of limbs of recuperating Marines. Lenny Wagner, supposedly my friend and supposedly a man of God, held me underwater till I feared that I would drown. A game it was, and all in fun, half a world apart from the bullets and the bombs.
In Indiana two years later, some of my college classmates lowered the Stars and Stripes to mourn students slain by Guardsmen at nearby Kent State. I was among those who protested the protesters.
When I left college without earning my degree and drew the number "20" in the draft's lottery, an Army recruiter gave me vouchers for a bus ride, two meals, and a night in a decent, century-old hotel. The trip from Alexandria, Virginia, to the city of Richmond was on a lovely summer day. The Greyhound had hummed a few miles down the highway when my seatmate brought out a pack of Winstons. This hollow-cheeked blond woman, maybe forty years of age, with whom I had exchanged only a cool hello, held up a single cigarette and informed me in a sandpapery Southern drawl, "You don't mah-yind if Ah smoke." I shrugged. She struck a match. Why should I mind, why should I care? What's a little lung cancer, when I was on my way to war? Still, I sort of wished she had asked for my consent.
But I did not, in the end, witness any bloodshed. I traveled as far as Richmond, but was found unfit to fill a uniform. The Army doc said my feet didn't meet the specs set by the bureaucrats. Within weeks, I'll now admit, my disappointment disappeared.
Some years passed by. I married, and became a dad. On a visit to Washington, D.C., when my son was five years old, I watched him practice the alphabet by touching his fingertip to names engraved on polished black granite slabs. Fifty-eight thousand, one hundred seventy-eight names, I am told, have been chiseled into the stone of that sleek wall. My son's finger faltered before he was able to touch them all.
Because I have never had the privilege of risking my own life in war, I hesitate today to question the courage, the wisdom, or the rhetoric of those who order troops to deliver deadly force in our nation's name. I am disinclined, as well, to state my estimate as to whether anyone, named or nameless, ever dies in vain. ♦
This page was updated April 2, 2005, 0954 HST.
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© 2005 by Bud Grossmann
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