"When I came back from Luang Prabang / I didn't have a thing where my balls used to hang / But I got a wooden medal and a fine harangue / Now I'm a fucking hero." – Dave Van Ronk, "Luang Prabang"
I am a veteran of a happy war.
My war started on August 2, 1990 when Iraq invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait – the culmination of a dispute over oil and territory at least partially fostered by competing agencies in the US government. A few weeks later, my ship – the USS Iwo Jima – set out as part of the buildup for what would be called Operation Desert Shield, and would later transit into Operation Desert Storm. We were one of the first amphibious assault ships sent. Two carrier battle groups – built around the Eisenhower and the Independence – preceded us, as did the battleship USS Wisconsin. Many others came after us.
And this Veteran’s Day, I think back on how I was treated during and immediately after that war, and it how it compares to veterans of wars before and after mine. . . and what that says about us all.
Read on . . .
"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." - Winston Churchill
Desert Storm was our first war since Vietnam, at least in popular imagination. We’d done combat operations in between – Operations Eagle Claw (the failed attempt to rescue Iranian hostages in 1980), Urgent Fury (Reagan’s blink-and-you-missed-it invasion of Grenada) and Just Cause (Bush 41’s removal of Panama’s Manuel Noriega) particularly, along with a litany of hit-and-run bombings, muscle-flexing and “advising”. But Desert Storm was a
war, a
real war, and it had all the things a real, just war should have.
There was a bad guy: Saddam Hussein – a brutal, tin pot dictator with a flagrant disregard for international law. He lived in excess, wielded absolute power and had enough idiosyncrasies to be a memorable (and mockable) character. And the media obligingly provided enough atrocities, real and imagined, to make him genuine, intolerable evil, a modern-day Hitler of the Euphrates.
There were victims: the people of Kuwait. The country’s ruling class was never as sympathetic or beleaguered as they were portrayed, but the media happily helped with that, too. They were suddenly our friends, facing horrors and humiliations and President Bush told us all we had to help them.
And there was us, the heroes. Off we went, and everyone cheered us. We were suddenly everyone’s home team. After the failures and losses of Vietnam, Desert Storm was packaged as America’s comeback album, and pretty much everybody sang along.
"Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought; it is only a virtue where men have it whether they will or no." - George Savile
And popular we were, without trying. America
loved us during the Gulf War. There were gifts and favors and offers of all kinds, from all over. You have to think “firefighters after 9/11” or “SEALs after the shooting of Bin Laden” to get a real picture of how popular we all were.
The yellow ribbon – which had been used sporadically for events like the Iran hostage crisis – went mainstream. It was fused with a "Support the Troops" message, and ribbons popped up like flowers all over the country. And every time you turned on the radio, you were likely to hear Lee Greenwood’s "God Bless the USA", the unofficial anthem of the war – a song I didn’t care for beforehand, and have pretty much detested ever since.
Various groups and companies sent us gifts. I especially remember boxes – boxes - of Jolly Rancher candies. I worked in a fairly small department – maybe 10 men – and looking back I remember there must have been something like two dozen boxes in our workspace alone. That is a lot of Jolly Ranchers, even over the seven months we were in the Gulf. I have no idea what we ended up doing with them.
We also all received cards from the restaurant chain Dick’s Last Resort, entitling us to a free something-or-other and good "as long as there’s a Dick’s". I had never heard of the chain at the time, and the card simply got tucked away. It might turn up one day in a box with old photos and papers, but I doubt it, so that gift never got redeemed. We all also received a voucher to the Mustang Ranch in Nevada, for a free overnight visit ("a thousand dollar value!"). I never redeemed that one, either.
And then there were the women. It’s not unusual to get letters in the military – at least back then, there were always women sending mail blindly to military posts and ships, looking to strike up a correspondence with a serviceman. You could always wander by the mailroom and grab a stack of these letters, meant for whoever wanted to read them. Some of them were earnest, members of a church group or some such, all committed to writing reams of letters as a heartfelt way to support the troops. Some of them were husband-shopping. Some of them were shopping for something . . . less permanent. But during the war, that sort of correspondence exploded. And then there were letters directly to each of us, from women in our home town that got our name from some local list, or girls from high school we barely remembered.
War has a lot of boring in it. It’s "military boring", which is somewhat different from "regular boring", in that you’re bored without ever being actually relaxed, and it’s punctuated by intervals of sudden excitement, danger and violence, after which you are immediately bored again. But it still left us with a lot of time which we killed by reading through piles of letters, searching through them like Cracker Jack boxes for the occasional gift or photo (which ranged from innocent to boudoir), and responding to the ones we found interesting.
"For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting." – George C. Scott, Patton
Yeah, but it’s still glory. It felt
good, that feeling of being genuinely appreciated, supported, loved. And that spontaneous, sincere outpouring of emotion meant a lot – more than the free six-inch subs or haircuts or tire balancing my VA card can score me today at the right businesses.
I remember those first few days home, with my mother taking me all over town to visit people, all of whom treated me like a rock star. Everywhere we went, someone wanted to salute or shake my hand. Everyone smiled. Leaving one of the places she’d taken me to show me off, we ran into the mother of one of my high school friends in the parking lot. Seeing me, she immediately gave a huge smile, hugged my neck, and launched into the chorus of "God Bless the USA".
"It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle." - Norman Schwarzkopf
There were casualties in the Gulf War: 146 US deaths, by the official count – not many, compared to other wars, but still too many - including some I’d known. There were the long-term problems of trauma and injury and PTSD and whatever Gulf War Syndrome actually was. But the broad perception, at least, was that the Gulf War was a
win, an overwhelming success. America was happy with it, so they were happy with the veterans that came home from it.
We all want to believe that we honor all veterans the same. We do not. The sad truth is how we treat veterans is directly tied to how we feel about the wars they were in – proud, conflicted, disparaging, celebratory or simply apathetic. There are guys that went through much, much worse for much, much longer than I floated through in the Gulf War, who weren’t treated half as well as I was when they came home, because America didn’t like their war as much, or just wanted to forget it was still going on.
Not in the sense of veteran’s benefits, or the broad idea of “supporting the troops”. I mean the day-to-day reception those other veterans got in a hundred thousand minor encounters. Whether people smiled at them, went out of their way to shake their hand, made them –that person, in that moment – feel like someone cared. When we don’t like the war, when we’re just weary of it all, that slides.
"We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually." - Rahm Emanuel
That is a crime. That is a national sin, and today, especially, we need to correct it. Every man and woman who ever suited up and went forth because they were told their country needed them to deserves the same kind of accolades I got. They deserve more than free stuff, even when the sentiment behind it is sincere.
They deserve to be appreciated. They deserve to be loved, and thanked, and serenaded in parking lots with songs they’re sick of hearing. Because whatever the people back home thought, there are no happy wars. They are all hell and death and nightmares and too, too many gravestones. And every man or woman that’s known one, whether just or misguided or disastrous, should be treated like a hero.