Michael Wilson
I was a Maryknoll, Chesterfield alum 63 to 67.
I have long known that the years I was at MM were the beginning of the closure
movements of life as seminarians knew it in many ways and places. Chesterfield
which was initially filled in part with Venard students, Venard itself, and GE. These
were events attached to macro changes in our social order so they were inevitable.
However, a number of Chesterfield alums did go on to GE and they would have
been there 1968 onwards. Key years of the link between USA and VNM.
I would like these not to be forgotten or ignored.
Finally, I was surprised to learn about grave sites at GE?. I thought it was just a
campus. It appears that people were interred there who were not ordained and
did not serve MM in missionary capacities.
Does anyone know what was the rule for being buried
there? I suppose on GE closure the remains were transferred to Ossining?
or the home towns of the deceased? Strange.
I did not serve in Viet Nam in any capacity. I took the standard college
deferment. I was willing to serve and do my best if called, but hoping not
to be. My dad was a decorated WW 2 veteran of the Pacific and head of
the local American Legion Post. I was surrounded with WW 2 vets growing
up. This was not an environment conducive to draft dodging.
My Johnson lottery number was a lucky 283. Assembled with so many others
in a lights out Student Union, watching the black and white flickering wall
mounted television, I remember the howls of anguish from the darkness when
the first number was called.
We squandered the blood and treasure of a generation, waging a war
in which victory was obstructed or neglected so the leadership could
kick the can down the road - - both eyes on the next election. Nothing
was won, national dignity and humanity lost, and an undying debt to those
who served was acquired.
I suggest
reading the book "Soldier" by Lt. Colonel Anthony Herbert who tried to
secure army action for his investigation of war crimes in Viet Nam.
He was eventually ruined by high level oppression. He was excluded to a
desk in a pentagon hallway with no phone. No one dared challenge him
personally. People may or may not believe his observations of the military
animal and associated politics. That's OK. You pays your money and you makes
your choice, but decades of wisdom sourced in hindsight says we pursued
a war that could not be won, and managed it not to win. Then we hung defeat
and our guilt around the necks of the returning veterans.
That is all I have to say about the war itself, except, I never broke faith
with those who served.
I was a rookie on the WASH DC police dept. in the first year of the Nixon
presidency, assigned to a special events team trained specifically for the
anti-war, ant-Nixon demonstrations.
We broke up an illegal (no permit) gathering of about a thousand anti-war
souls in Lafayette Park at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A few hard corps were
not going without a fight but we soon had them on the bus headed for Central
Cell Block. Half of the police were Viet vets.
One man remained, a decorated veteran, in a wheel chair, demanding to be
arrested. Without spoken consensus he was left untouched. When we departed,
long after the Post reporters, he was alone in the center of Lafayette Park.
Perhaps we knew in our hearts that he was right. They all were.
Inevitably this leads to a consideration of corruption in our own body politic
today, bi partisan in its membership, with propaganda differences only.
The current social impetus is that human rights are sourced in a
collectivist construction called the government, to which obedience is the
ultimate requirement. Inalienable is a dead word. This means that human
dignity and the law that rules it are whatever the government says it is.
Please, I am just me, not a "deplorable" or a "trumpist" whatever that is.
Labels are a bad beginning if the goal is re-assimilation into the common
weal.
Going no further on that subject. Yet we know
that "what is past is prologue". Vietnam was a Holocaust when all the bodies are
counted. Today we again have military "advisors" all over the world with inherent
war risk. If we ask our youth to spend their blood again, what justification will we
give them? We possess so little virtue ourselves, what can we claim to justify
another adventure abroad ??? What are they defending over there, that we claim
sacred possession of here? If I am wrong, why are there so many military
suicides, sometimes years after service? Self inflicted death now exceeds the rate
from military action? It's happening all over again slow motion.
Michael Wilson
I was a Maryknoll, Chesterfield alum 63 to 67.