It’s Hard to Imagine What the Nation Owes Its Veterans

One of my favorite idle exercises is to imagine people who experienced things that seem unimaginable.

At the more twisted end of the spectrum would be things like plane crashes in which the passengers know they’re going down. Remember a few years ago when the fuselage of an airliner blew open and several rows of passengers got sucked out of the plane, still strapped to their seats? Any fatal disaster is awful enough, but imagining people still alive and airborne was too much to contemplate.

At the more pleasant end would be riding a horse across the finish line in the Kentucky Derby. Or, being married to Marilyn Monroe. To know that actual people have experienced both is so far beyond my ken as to seem mythic.

With each passing year, I spend more time thinking of men who fought in wars.

It may require my advancing state of middle age to adequately reflect on the business of war, because for so many years soldiers were not real. Little boys, especially, get introduced early on to soldiers, through toys, comic books or TV. As such, they’re objects of entertainment, whose brushes with courage and cowardice or life and death never fully register as real human endeavor.

Then you get older, and you begin to put faces on them.

Over the years, I’ve had many conversations with male friends in which we try to imagine what it would be like to have been in combat. All of us know that, but for quirks of fate, it could have happened to us.

I was in college during the cresting period of the Vietnam War and had a student deferment through the summer of 1971. A lottery number of 140 was high enough to keep me from being drafted after that. Friends from college say they remember me fretting my entire senior year about possibly being drafted after graduation.

I didn’t go, but friends and acquaintances did. Two that I know of were killed.

But it wasn’t Vietnam that came to mind this Veterans Day. It was a mental image of all wars, fought on hundreds of battlefields over the last 200 years of American history. It was a mental image of faces of young guys, faces either frozen in fear or set with determination.

I suppose Hollywood tried to humanize soldiers, and maybe it succeeded in some people’s minds. For me, it had the opposite effect. Watching John Wayne at Iwo Jima was still the movies. There were no stuntmen at Pork Chop Hill.

I’ve been trying to imagine the real human beings who slogged through fields and forests, who manned the battle stations and who fought hand-to-hand halfway around the world against strangers from another country. Most of the time, I can’t bridge the gap between knowing those situations existed and imagining ordinary people doing extraordinary things in the middle of them.

If not for how frightening it was, how utterly absurd it must have seemed to young men to be squaring off with bayonets or M-16s against a counterpart from Germany or Italy or Vietnam. Even if they believed in the cause, they must have thought they were walking through some prolonged dream sequence as they considered the fates that led them to kill or be killed by this 20-year-old man facing them.

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In my more self-indulgent moments, I try to picture doing that--to imagine what it would have been like to shoot someone or throw a grenade into a bunker. It’s not like picturing riding to Mars on a spaceship; after all, but for a different lottery number I could have been there. But even knowing it could have happened doesn’t make it any less fantastical.

Would I be a different person today if I had some “kills” under my belt? What if I had saved someone’s life with an anonymous heroic act or, perish the thought, frozen at the moment of truth?

Veterans who read this will probably get a good laugh out of it. Or, some will blast me for protesting Vietnam while others fought. And that’s OK with me. I acknowledge that those who have been there and done it have the right to be bemused or disgusted by my wonderment.

I probably sound like some wide-eyed kid shocked to discover there were real people inside those uniforms. It isn’t that so much as it is kind of an amazement that we don’t acknowledge those guys more often, considering what they experienced.

Obviously, we can’t stand in awe every day of the year. A national holiday makes perfect sense. Every monument we’ve erected was worth the money. Cemetery plots are justifiably hallowed.

It’s just that we’ve symbolized everything. How often do those of us who never had to do it really stop and think of what it was like, day by day and week by week, to fight our country’s wars?

Does it sound ridiculous to say, “I don’t know how you did it, but thanks.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.