Epilogue
And so a New Soldier has returned to America, to a nation torn apart by the killing we were asked to do.
But, unlike veterans of other wars and some of this one, the New Soldier does not accept the old myths.
We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those
thousands who died for the greater glory of the United States. We will not accept the rhetoric.
We will
not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars-in fact, we will find it hard to join
anything at all and when we do, we will demand relevancy such as other organizations have recently been
unable to provide. We will not take solace from the creation of monuments or the naming of parks after a
select few of the thousands of dead Americans and Vietnamese. We will not uphold traditions which
decorously memorialize that which was base and grim.
It is from these things the New Soldier is asking America to turn. We are asking America to turn from false
glory, hollow victory, fabricated foreign threats, fear which threatens us as a nation, shallow pride which
feeds off fear, and mostly from the promises which have proven so deceiving these past ten years.
For many of us there is little to remember but the promises and, most poignantly, the loss of the symbols of
those promises -- of John and Robert Kennedy, of Martin Luther King, Jr., of Medgar Evers, of Fred
Hampton and Malcolm X, of Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, and William Schroeder from
Kent State and Philip Gibbs and James Green from Jackson State; the loss, too, of friends, of Richard
Pershing, Peter Johnson, Johnny White, Don Droz, and the other 53,000 Americans who have lost their
lives in this degrading and immoral war. The promises of peace candidates who were not peacemakers; of
civil rights laws which were not enforced; of educational and medical aid which was downgraded in
priority below bombs and guns; of equal opportunity while Mexican-Americans and blacks were drafted in
numbers disproportionate to their representation in this country and then made up casualties in even greater
disproportion.
I think that, more than anything, the New Soldier is trying to point out how there are two Americas -- the
one the speeches are about and the one we really are. Rhetoric has blinded us so much that we are unable to
see the realities which exist in this country.
We were sent to Vietnam to kill Communism. But we found instead that we were killing women and
children.....
I hope you have connections to get this over the the American Legion before Kerry arrives. They have aright to know who is speaking to them.