This is another excerpt from the book I'm working on called "Learning to Love My Father." It's set in the 1960s in a smalltown in Kansas, and happened several years after the first excerpt I posted a week ago:
I tried to avoid discussing Vietnam with dad because I knew what he’d say: he’d fought for his country in World War II and the young men of my generation were now duty bound to do the same. Even if this war wasn’t as popular as defeating the Nazis, we owed our allegiance to the nation and its elected leaders.
“It wouldn’t bother you,” I asked him one night at the dinner table, “if I got drafted and went over there and died?”
My mother dropped her fork on her plate with a loud clatter. She didn’t like tension, especially when we were eating. “Let’s not talk about this right now,” she said.
“Yes, it would upset me,” dad said softly. “I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt.”
“But you don’t mind if other people’s sons get injured or killed in Vietnam?” “I don’t like war.”
"Then why won’t you or anybody else in this town oppose it?”
He lowered his eyes, pushed back from the table, and left the room, as he’d done every time before when I’d tried to ask him about being a POW in Germany. I stood and followed him down the hall and into his bedroom. We were face-to-face and I was almost as tall as he was. I wanted to say that I’d grown up seeing and feeling what being in a prison camp had done to him. I wanted to ask how he could support sending others into combat for a war that people everywhere were turning against -- but I couldn’t force out the words, so I turned around and left him alone.
A few months later, we were watching a televised demonstration against the war, as he leaned against an oversized chair in the living room and said the protesters were unpatriotic. I was less than two years from draft age and everything about Vietnam was becoming more personal for me. Two boys I’d grown up with had recently come home from the war in coffins and I’d attended their funerals, looking at their young, dead, pasty faces and seeing their relatives kneel down and sob over their caskets. The local minister had eloquently presided at these memorial services, but said nothing about the rising human cost of the war.
“Why can’t you see this war is wrong?” I said to dad in the living room. “Why can’t you just admit it?”
“It will eventually stop. We’re doing all we can.”
“No, we aren’t! We’re killing people and we’re killing ourselves!”
He started for his bedroom. This time I ran after him and caught him in the hallway.
“Can’t you understand what war does to people?” I yelled at his back. “Can’t you see what it did to you?”
He stopped and hung his head, tilting to the side until he scraped the wall.
“You could have done something with yourself,” I said. “You could have been so much more than you are. Why do you want other people to end up this way?”
He slumped over, but didn’t say anything. Then he slowly walked into his bedroom and quietly shut the door behind him.
My mother charged up to me with tears pouring down her cheeks. She grabbed my arm and spun me round.
“Never, ever talk to him that way!” she said. “Can’t you see how much that hurts him?”
My hands were shaking and so was my voice. “Don’t you understand what that war did to him?”
“What do you know about that? You weren’t even alive back then. That’s in the past and it’s over.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s right here in our house.”
“I’ve got to go see if he’s all right. Don’t ever say those things to him again. He doesn’t need to be hurt anymore.”
I didn’t bring up Vietnam again.