Pat Tillman Memorial Day and Veterans

Memorial Day - Memory Loss

As a cadet reporter in the 60s I volunteered to go to Vietnam to watch people dying.

Almost 30 years later I attended a Memorial Day service at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC.

Having missed the call-up which had captured many of my friends, it seemed to me that I could best serve the cause of freedom and liberty by going into the front lines with pen in hand.

Being a young idealist I believed the adage that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Nevertheless I was also prepared to carry something more substantial in the cause of self-defense and defense of my comrades. As I discovered when I eventually started my US citizenship application process, one must be prepared to bear arms in defense of this great country. It’s the American way. And I agree with it 100 per cent.

I agree with Freedom of Speech 100 per cent, and likewise the right to bear arms.

Although I volunteered, I never made it to Vietnam as a reporter, so I never saw the killing, the napalm, the Agent Orange, the booby traps, the bodies in rice paddies, the massacre at My Lai by American troops, the fancy Saigon clubs, the half-breed children, and the final evacuation from and abandonment of Saigon, Vietnam and its people to the Viet Cong.

It was a war with no heroes – except, to my mind, the young and the restless on American streets and campuses. The protestors who refused to go along with the idea that Americans should die in a foreign land for no just cause.

A Nation Betrayed

Some veterans believe to this day that the Vietnam war was all about control of a vast drug growing area called The Golden Triangle – and that culpability in this nefarious trade went to the highest levels of politics. Colonel Bo Gritz would eventually write a book about that, and in "A Nation Betrayed" he laid out the case that his fervent patriotism was actually used against him.

He fought and survived and came home a changed man. His book, with all its evidence of intrigue and betrayal, is his memorial to lost comrades, including those who were abandoned as POWs and MIAs.

Preceding that Memorial Day service I eventually attended in Washington DC, I chose to make a pilgrimage as it were to the White House – that symbol of American governance in the name of Justice Freedom Liberty.

I wanted to be in that place, up close and personal, even if only as an unknown visitor.

But it took almost a full hour to get across Pennsylvania Avenue.

Why?

Because it was a day for a "Rolling Thunder" protest event.

Thousands of Vietnam veterans had come to Washington on their Harley Davidsons to thunder down Pennsylvania Avenue – some towing trailers on which cages of rough wood sticks held ‘prisoners’ – the abandoned ones left behind in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. Prisoners never acknowledged as worth recovering.

It is an odd thing about the US Media. In the three days I was in Washington DC, not one local or national TV station carried one single frame or one single word about that protest.

Kill for Peace

But they did film the General who came to speak at the Vietnam Memorial.

I took a background spot, and watched and listened as he told those present that America "must always be willing to fight for peace."

Such a sentiment, cockeyed and backward as it sounds, has been used through the ages to motivate men without number to go to war. It has worked for generations. It has fueled the natural patriotism that any man or woman feels for the homeland.

But coming home from the killing fields is another story. Another story that the media prefers to ignore, except for occasional blips on the screen in the late news or the early early morning.

News looks a lot better when it comes in the guise of a spotlessly uniformed military icon to parade before the public – be that a General justifying the use of Agent Orange to kill the enemy and eventually kill Vietnam veterans as well – or a football hero such as Pat Tillman turned into a national hero because of his decision to fight terrorism on behalf of his fellow Americans.

News does not look so good if it includes too much in the way of visuals about the actual costs and consequences of fighting for peace liberty and justice. Which is why very few cameras were trained on the shortest veterans at that Memorial Day ceremony.

Short veterans are not really newsworthy. Especially if they are scowling at what the General is saying about how it is good for America to kill people overseas in order to defend America at home.

Short veterans really don’t count. Because they live in wheelchairs, and wheelchairs are a bit like a Rolling Thunder demonstration. They remind us that there is a seamy side to war – a price that some people pay for the rest of their lives. And that price gives them the right to speak out against the atrocities they have seen committed in the name of freedom – in the name of America.

God Forbid

God forbid that we should take any notice of such veterans.

God forbid that we should ever question our patriotic fervor.

God forbid that we should ever ask ourselves – why do politicians lie about the "good" reasons to go to war; and why does the military lie about using troops as guinea pigs (as they have done in testing and using everything from atomic bombs to drugs to Agent Orange).

Why is it okay for our leaders to tell the United Nations to go to hell, okay for them to suggest that America is exempt from obligations to the Geneva Convention, okay to transport prisoners to other countries where they can be tortured (as in stripped and hung on a spit over an open fire), okay to keep people without charge or trial in cages in Cuba, okay to blame just a few ‘rogue’ elements for atrocious treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, okay to exonerate all senior commanders and all high level politicians of any involvement or complicity or even awareness that bad things are happening on their watch.

Why is it okay to believe the rhetoric and the lies?

Why?

Because the truth sucks.

It really sucks to know that the military lied about the death of Pat Tillman. They lied, deliberately, and said he died in Afghanistan while leading a charge against the enemy.

They lied and had a grand funeral. They lied about the fact that he died in a "friendly fire’ incident – a tragic mix-up that had all the wrong elements of a great story for the American people.

Americans want heroes – not truth. Americans want spiffy looking Generals – not veterans in wheel chairs.

Americans want lying politicians – leaders who can justify their actions, whatever it takes, and never admit that they were wrong.

It is much easier to follow the leader, to believe in the words, to honor fallen soldiers with memorials to the dead – than it is to face the living veterans, the wounded and maimed, the one-armed vet on a Harley or the legless man in a tattered uniform sitting in a wheelchair at a Memorial Day service in Washington DC.

The General never once looked in his direction by the way. The General was too busy convincing us that those who had been killed in a failed cause had not died in vain. They would not be forgotten.

Yes indeed. It is much easier to listen to and swallow and believe misinformation and stirring promises and five-second sound bytes than it is to face the truth.

The truth sucks.

© 2005 Michael Knight

First News of Tillman's death
MSN carries the army's cover-up version