Thank You For Your Service

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May 30, 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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PRAYER:

For the soldiers who are working so hard as we speak,

and for the soldiers who have already given their lives,

may our thoughts be with them, especially this Memorial Day.

May we wake up to the reality that we are not as separate from them as we think, just as we are not as separate from anyone else;

may we understand how deeply connected we all are.

May we remember how connected we are to generations past

and to the soldiers who gave their lives many decades ago;

they are standing close behind us and we give our deepest thanks.

May we come to understand that war is a part of who we are

regardless of how noble the cause. Our kind has been dying prematurely of wars and disease since the beginning of our time. May we always take time to remember those who left us too soon.

And may we extend our deepest warmth and support to those families who are left behind, whose long lives stand before them; young mothers and young children.

May we be aware of their sacrifice and pray for their strength.

May we pray for the leadership of our beloved country, and pray for an end to the chaos in Iraq so our troops can come home. May we be patient, may creative solutions be found to an unprecedented struggle, and may our support for our troops hold steadfast regardless.

May we let there be time for the most difficult emotions to unfold surrounding this war and more recent wars.

Dear spirit of life, please help us, as one nation, to take responsibility for our mistakes, to acknowledge the harm we inflict upon others and upon ourselves. Let us be that brave. Amen.

SERMON:

On “Washington Week In Review” on the TV PBS station early Friday evening, the anchor woman ended the program by saying, “and for those of you who are fighting in these wars that we only talk about, thank you for your service.” When she said that, on the one hand I was struck by the honesty of her statement, but on the other hand it seemed kind of cheap.

Every Memorial Day I’m aware of some kind of uneasiness that I can’t quite name, but this year I’ve gotten closer to putting a name on it, and I think it’s shame. Since Jr. High when I became a tune to the context of United States history, every Memorial Day I’ve had the vague awareness that there’s a debt I’ll never be able to repay. Around Memorial Day there’s a bit of a time warp, or perhaps several wrinkles in time that closely juxtapose every major war of this country – the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI, WW2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and now the Iraq War. All these wars come to mind because we know in our hearts that several of these wars were worth fighting. And we wonder how the world would be different if the good wars hadn’t been won.

I know my life is what it is because the right side won those good wars. Reflecting on this is the stuff of a healthy kind of patriotism – this gratitude and humility – knowing I could never return the favor, so to speak. It’s this reverence for a kind of dedication and courage and violence that I’ll never have to experience. And maybe that’s where the vague feeling of shame comes from – that cheapness of “thank you for your service” seems to belie a sense of entitlement. A sense of entitlement to a service that not only equals the loss of human life, but some things that are worse than death.

Some of the men who came back from Vietnam would have preferred to come home in a box because their lives had been ruined. Losing your soul and your sanity can be worse than death. Discovering humanity’s capacity for evil with your own hands can be enough to ruin a life, even if the events took place in minutes. I bring this up because I think the country is still reverberating from the pictures of torture by our own soldiers’ hands. And yet it seems like a silent reverberation.

This country doesn’t do well with shame and remorse. Like a dysfunctional family, we pretend it isn’t there and so it festers harmfully in a state of non-recognition. If you consider the behavior of our foreign policy in the frame of a family system, the question comes up: are we repeating a mistake now because a generation ago we never acknowledged and mourned properly the mistake of Vietnam? We never, as a whole nation, took the time to ritualize an acknowledgement of the shame of that event, the remorse, the defeat, the waste.

In some ways, the Bush administration is a scapegoat. Sure, we’re in Iraq now because of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeldt. But the fact is history is repeating itself in an effort to reach an opportunity of healing that never took place after Vietnam. That’s my theory. There are different actors now, there are different reasons, there are not as many casualties, thank God. But we’re about where we were 32 – 34 years ago. We’re scared, we’re worried, but most importantly, our country as a whole is in a state of denial of the shame and remorse we’re experiencing as a result of the atrocities taking place in Iraq. And not just to the Iraqis, but probably even more so the atrocities happening to us.

See, the thing is, we are so deeply connected to one another – that is a spiritual law I am certain of and I think we forget about 99% of the time – we are so deeply connected to each other that ALL of us are fighting the war in Iraq. And the reason I say this is because I believe that any of us, put in that situation as a soldier, would probably commit the same abuses, the same tortures. All of us possess the capacity to do evil, and under the precise conditions – when the enemy is invisible, when our friends are dying bloodily around us, when the level of frustration and anger are so high, and our supervision has effectively condoned it – all of us are prone to committing these kinds of acts as a group, or alone.

What I’m trying to get at here, is not only do we need to acknowledge that all of us as a nation have blood on our hands because it’s the truth. But we need to stand in solidarity and likeness with our soldiers ALSO for the sake of healing, for the sake of grieving as one nation, for the sake of saving the souls of these young soldiers who were put in that situation by their higher-ups; for the sake of acknowledging the shame as one nation.

How do we do this? I think by naming it, by talking about it, by acknowledging it. By honoring our soldiers who are suffering the worst of this useless sacrifice. For the sake of our soldiers we need to share the shame with them and not pin it on them. We need to experience a healthy kind of shame that recognizes there’s no way we can make up for this. We can’t make it up to the children who are losing their parents or the parents who are losing their children. The war will never be over for them – for the family members of fresh casualties, the war is just beginning.

Thank goodness for the arts – for books, for movies, for music, for sculpture – these seem to be the only mediums in which our culture has attempted to address the truth of Vietnam, to give ourselves opportunities to grieve. But these are only voluntary opportunities; eventually we’ll have the same kind of movies and books written about Iraq that we have about Vietnam. But those opportunities aren’t compelling enough to do the kind of grieving work this country desperately needs to cleanse itself as a whole. I know I’m fantasizing here, but wouldn’t it be great if our leadership – whether Republican or Democratic, it doesn’t matter – declared a holiday for the specific purpose of mourning the event of Vietnam? For the specific purpose of acknowledging we made a big mistake? The Wall of Names is great, but the Wall is very quiet.

The fact is Vietnam just wasn’t that long ago. Yesterday Davidson emailed me the interesting factoid that of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII, less than 1/4 are still alive, and about 1,100 are dying every day. So I’m surmising that means that of the Americans who survived serving in Vietnam, at least half are probably still alive. I doubt there’s many people in this room who would not say his or her life has somehow been affected by the Vietnam War. The point is that this recent history is still terribly relevant and for the health of the family history of this country, I think it still needs to be dealt with somehow.

I want to talk more about this war stuff in the context of a country family system history. I learned a lot about WWI and WW2 growing up, especially WW2. I remember that history was totally overwhelming. I don’t know a thing about the Korean War, except that it was Communist related (I think) and that *MASH* was based on it. And then there’s Vietnam which I learned the most about by watching the television series China Beach, which I think was around the late 80’s. I also read Johnny Get Your Gun. Saw Platoon. I loved that show China Beach and almost every week I cried when I watched it. It wasn’t a comedy like MASH; looking back, I’m surprised such honest television was aired for as long as it was.

When I began writing this sermon and the word shame popped up, at first I wondered if I should dismiss it as embarrassing “liberal guilt.” Liberal guilt because I know my Dad didn’t have to fight in Vietnam because at the time he was a member of the educated class – he was a Freshman in college at Duke University when he became subject to the draft. But the reason I know this is more than liberal guilt is because I have inherited from my father the shame he carries surrounding Vietnam. I know I have – otherwise watching those China Beach episodes never would have affected me the way that they did. I was born just around the time the war ended! I didn’t personally lose anyone in that war, as most of my peers didn’t. And yet I know that my generation has inherited the shame and the guilt of that war. What it amounts to is a lot of sadness and that nameless uneasiness around Memorial Day. I guess we’re still figuring out what to do with it. This is just another theory, but I wonder if the generations getting successively more self-destructive has something to do with this nameless shame we’ve inherited. I don’t know.

I’m a sensitive person, so maybe I’ve just paid more attention to it. But I’ll never forget the day when my father and I were canoeing in a pond up in Wisconsin, on a very quiet serene day with no one around. I think I was in High School. Somehow we got on the subject of Vietnam. My father’s shame around Vietnam was made concrete when his roommate in college flunked out of Duke, got drafted, and was killed in the war. So he knows that he escaped a similar fate by the savior of education and being able to succeed at it. Sure there’s some liberal guilt in there, but it’s so much more than that. It’s survivor guilt; this stuff goes way deep into the psyche. It’s the trauma of losing thousands of peers. It’s trauma that goes beyond my comprehension, and yet I’m getting a taste of it watching all these young people die in Iraq.

There’s this song that my father knew about Vietnam, an a capela folk song by the artist Steve Goodman. He started singing it to me that day in the canoe, but he couldn’t get through it all the way because he had to cry.

The song is sung in first person as a young widow of the war. And I want to share it with you because I think one of the best ways to honor our soldiers who have died is to also acknowledge the families that so many soldiers leave behind. Young, just getting started families, young mothers and children. Their sacrifice should also be honored.

This song is called “Penny Evans.”

Oh my name is Penny Evans and my age is 21.

A young widow in the war that was fought in Vietnam.

And I have two infant daughters, and I do the best I can –

now they say the war is over, but I think it’s just begun.

I remember I was 17 when I met young Bill.

On his father’s grand piano, we’d play good old Heart and Soul.

And I only knew the left hand part, and he the right so well –

he’s the only boy I slept with, and the only one I will.

And it’s first we had a baby girl, and we had two good years.

And it’s next the one a notice came, and we parted without tears –

it was 9 months from our last good night the second babe appeared.

It was 10 months and this telegram, confirming all our fears.

Now every month I get a check, from an army bureaucrat.

And it’s every month I tear it up, and I mail the damn thing back.

Do you think that makes it alright? Do you think I’d fall for that?

You can keep the bloody money and it won’t bring my Billy back.

I’ve never cared for politics, and speeches I don’t understand.

And like wives took no charity from any living man

But tonight there’s 50,000 gone in that unhappy land;

50,000 heart and souls being played with just one hand.

And my name is Penny Evans, and my age is 21.

A young widow in the war that was fought in Vietnam.

And I have two infant daughters, and thank god I have no sons –

now they say the war is over, but I think it’s just begun.

– Steve Goodman

I’ve been scouring the Internet the past couple days, looking for stories behind the faces of the American soldiers getting killed in Iraq. I didn’t find as many as I thought I would. And again, I think this is to keep us numb. If we knew too many of the stories of the fine young men and women this country is losing, we’d have to feel that shame head-on.

I think I’ve driven my point home about the suppressed shame that the country is suffering, and the need for it to be expressed on a larger scale so we can be free of its clutches, so we don’t keep passing it on to our children. But I realize that it’s also just plain and simple sorrow that I share with my parents’ generation. The kind of sorrow that will always be with us.

I want to try to end on a positive note; I know this sermon is not uplifting. There’s just no way to sugar-coat what’s going on. But I hope being honest with ourselves can be uplifting, and offer hope for healing, for a healthier future. It’s not “this too shall pass.” What we want to have and work towards are sharing scars from these wars – wounds that have healed but still hurt when we touch them. We can’t pretend they’re not there. These wars, whether we’ve participated in them or not, are a part of who we are, they are a part of our American psyche, they’re a big part of our story. We need to try to integrate this truth into our national identity as well as we can – grow with it – and not ignore it at our peril.

Our soldiers are not victims. If they’re victims, then we’re all victims, and we’re not all victims. They are literally our warriors, they are survivors, they are doing the hardest job in the world. I am very proud of them and I support them as we all must. We’re here because of them.

Those wrinkles in time I mentioned, juxtaposing all our major wars – they’re not so much wrinkles – all those wars stand very close behind us, without the help of a wrinkle in time. The past isn’t nearly as far behind as we think. Vietnam was like yesterday; World War II a short 50 years ago. We are such a young country – just a couple centuries old.

At this time, I’d like to ask anyone here today in church who has served in a war to please stand.

I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the most I can offer and I really mean it,

“Thank you for your service.”