PERSPECTIVES: Vietnam era nightmares (05/27/01)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Vietnam era nightmares

It was 1969, and I had just graduated from college. Not yet 22, I stood in line with scores of other guys on one of the upper floors of Cleveland's Federal Building undergoing my draft physical. That morning my mother had given me some highly caffeinated drink that was supposed to raise my blood pressure to unhealthy levels.

What kind of mother wants her otherwise healthy son to have high blood pressure, you ask? A mother like mine who loves her children and knows war. She had seen more than her share of it: the Nazis came to her village in 1942. Two years later, it was the Red Army. Both used guns, fists, a hangman's noose and obscenities, my mother recalled. In five years of war and occupation, she had witnessed lots of brutality and seen many dead bodies. "Only a miracle will spare us," she wrote to my father.

The miracle happened, of course, and we ended up in America. Twenty years later, she didn't want her son to die in Vietnam. That's why she gave me that potion to drink. I doubted it would work, but I drank it anyway because I didn't want to go to Vietnam either. Unlike my Mom, though, I never considered the possibility of being killed. What bothered me, instead, was the idea that I would have to kill someone else.

These memories of 1969 come uninvited as I ponder Sen. Bob Kerry's nightmare in the village of Thanh Phong in February of the same year, when he became involved in the massacre of Vietnamese women, children and old men, just a few months before my draft physical.

That day, I recognized a few guys from high school, recent college graduates like me. We exchanged greetings and wished each other luck. That translated into "I hope they find something wrong with you so you'll flunk your physical."

That's how President Bill Clinton's special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, avoided military service. He had psoriasis and was classified 4-F. Bill Clinton, a year older than me, got a graduate school deferment (2-S) to go to Oxford. I considered graduate school as well - I had been offered a scholarship to Notre Dame Law School - but my senior year, graduate school deferments were eliminated, so I declined the offer. Had I taken it, I now realize, I might have ended up in the Indiana National Guard with Dan Quayle (1-D). George W. Bush was in the Texas Guard (also 1-D). Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney got out because they were fathers (3-A). Muhammad Ali went to jail. Bob Kerry volunteered (1-C).

As for me? Whatever my mother gave me didn't work. I passed my physical and was classified 1-A, so the day after Labor Day in 1969, I reported to West High School in the shadow of downtown Cleveland to teach English and coach track. My draft board reclassified me 2-A - an occupational deferment. For the next nine years, I taught at West. Not much older than my students, I had become an authority figure. As someone with "good rapport" with the students, the principal looked to me to help keep order during turbulent walk-outs, particularly in May 1970 when we invaded Cambodia.

Like most men of my generation, I used the rules to avoid serving in Vietnam. Although I thoroughly enjoyed teaching, I learned quickly that an inner city school is no picnic. The experience has stayed with me ever since. For years I've had a recurring dream - a nightmare, really - that I'm teaching, the students are fooling around and it's my job to control them. It's a wrenching, frustrating dream. The more stress in my daily life, the more likely I am to have it, even now more than 20 years after I left the profession.

Some of those who ended up in the National Guard, as it turned out, didn't have an easy time either. The day I was trying to corral the kids demonstrating at West, members of the Ohio Guard killed four students at Kent State near Cleveland.

The War in Vietnam grew out of a Cold War consensus that communism was evil and had to be stopped. Growing up Ukrainian in America, I shared that view: it was hard not to. I had heard the stories of murdered poets and imprisoned priests. The Soviets had sent my father's brother to Siberia because he was a Catholic seminarian. He died there in 1940. They also hanged my mother's brother-in-law, exiled her sister and would have shot her husband if he hadn't found a way to escape their clutches.

Despite that personal history, my parents opposed the war in Vietnam, particularly my mother. She hated communism, but she hated war even more. She was relieved when I became a teacher and, like most Americans, she welcomed the Paris Peace Accords that finally ended the war in 1973. By then, everyone was heartily sick of it and most agreed it had been a mistake. To many, it was a bitter revelation but really no surprise when five years ago, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote in his book, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lesson of Vietnam," that already in December 1965 he had advised President Lyndon B. Johnson that the war was essentially unwinnable.

Perhaps - but still the war went on.

And so, more than three years later, Mr. Kerry, under enormous stress and mired in the "fog of battle," was forced to make the split second decisions in Thanh Phong that led to the massacre that put him on the evening news 35 years later.

It's gratifying to me that after the war ended I found a proper outlet for my anti-communism. Along with many others, I helped organize blood bank drives and vigils dedicated to political prisoners, lobbied my congressmen and senators to support the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, to fund the Commission on the Famine in Ukraine and to write letters to Amnesty International.

I became friends with Baltic Americans, Jewish Americans, Polish Americans and others who did the same. Amplified by global communications, the message about freedom and democracy got through to the ordinary citizen in Central and Eastern Europe. Eventually, in all the great capitals of Central and Eastern Europe, millions took to the streets, proving yet again that all the armies in the world can't stop an idea whose time has come.

Vietnam was a trauma for the entire nation and, as the Bob Kerry story illustrates, we're still trying to come to terms with it. I make no judgments about the war or Bob Kerry. For what it's worth, though, a couple weeks ago I had another one of my teacher nightmares: I was alone, teaching a stadium full of kids - they were screwing around and I couldn't find my place in the lesson plan. It was very unpleasant, but you know what? I wouldn't trade my nightmare for Bob Kerry's or Bob McNamara's, in a million years.

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