A band of stainless steel

Idon’t know what became of the stainless steel P.O.W. bracelet I wore back in high school. I remember taking it off the day my P.O.W. was released in 1973. I probably put it in a drawer with my Boy Scout pocketknife and Sgt. Fury comics.

I feel bad that I don’t remember my guy’s name, but I know he made it home safe. That’s why the bracelet came off.

Wearing those bracelets—and a lot of us did back then—didn’t necessarily mean you were for or against the Vietnam War. Most of us didn’t have opinions, we just reacted to the bluster we heard. Some of us identified as hippies, some thought Nixon was being railroaded. The bracelets were seen on all sorts of people. It was a way of connecting with the troops.

I’ve been thinking about that bracelet a lot lately. And thinking about John McCain, who was briefly my senator and with whom I had a couple of contentious but respectful interactions. There are people better qualified to eulogize him, but my best thought may be that he was emblematic of a certain kind of man of his generation.

He was four months older than my father and there were certain congruencies in their experience.

They were probably more alike than different. Every generation has its own kind of greatness, and its own blind spots.

Vietnam was a different kind of war, mainly because of the way television brought it into American living rooms. That’s where it horrified and—more importantly—exhausted a civilian population that could never entirely grasp the nuanced politics that put American troops in the middle of what was essentially a civil war, with our main enemy consisting not of a regular army but of guerrillas. It was a war in which Morley Safer narrated a scene where U.S. Marines use their Zippo lighters to burn the village of Cam Ne to the ground while the old men and women who occupied it looked on helplessly.

It was a war where the primary aim was to kill and demoralize the enemy rather than take and hold territory. They say all wars are mad and that’s why soldiers cannot be allowed to question their orders: Theirs not to make reply/Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.

I don’t know that Alfred Lord Tennyson was my father’s favorite poet, but he could recite “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” And he always empathized, when he heard it misquoted, that it was “to do and die,” not “to do or die.” That was important to him; you needed to get that right.

We know what happened to McCain during the war; he was shot down and and thrown broken into a miserable prison. He emerged after five and a half years, having twice attempted suicide, having several times declined offers of early release, the sort of figure we mythologize.

My father never saw combat, at least not that I know of, but he saw other things in the jungles of Laos and Cambodia, only a few of which he could tell me about. We suspect some of the chemicals he was exposed to contributed to his death at 48.

He was disappointed with the experience, and had I been born a few months earlier he would have done whatever it took to keep me from going. He told me as much. He said he would not have allowed me to go.

This surprised me. I grew up on air bases, around uniforms, saying yes, sir and yes, ma’am. I did what I was told, and if anyone had told me to go to Vietnam I would have. I wouldn’t have had the extra complement of selflove or outrage or political indignation that might have led me over the border and through the woods to Canada.

I might have cried and shivered and thrown my rifle in the river. I might have made it back, I might not. I might have cracked up. It isn’t easy to know these things about yourself. Some knowledge must be earned. It is too easy to imagine yourself brave and meritorious.

I have talked to enough people who served in combat to believe that no sane person should ever imagine themselves fortunate to have been in a firefight, though there are inexperienced people who feel they have somehow been cheated. And no doubt the experience of war is in some sense good for some of those who survive it.

Aristotle thought there was a special kind of courage that could only be tested by those “fortunate enough” to go to war. Emerson, in a famous essay, wrote: “War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.”

I call BS on those great thinkers.

It’s not a slight to think men like John McCain and my father were ordinary enough, that whatever gifts they had were within the normal range. Most of us are capable of behaving honorably, even if it sometimes seems that we are constantly presented evidence to the contrary. We might all be heroes, in the right slant of light. We all have our bad moments.

Mainly, John McCain’s death reminds me that the world revolves, and that the past is, Faulkner notwithstanding, really gone. Like that stainless steel bracelet that I used to wear.