While we protested the war, he was being tortured
My friend Digby took his place every Sunday with the other Quakers among the people ringing the town common protesting the Vietnam War. For a while, they stood out even in the liberal-left college town in which I grew up.
Most people believed in the confident liberalism of the 50s and 60s, the belief in America’s special destiny and in the best and brightest who knew how to make the world work. Eventually, most got over that fantasy — it was a self-flattering one — and started opposing the war.
Reasons differed, of course, from the establishment idea that America had unwisely but innocently gotten involved in a war it couldn’t win to the radical belief that America’s imperial acts hurt weaker nations for selfish and immoral ends.
I was in junior high then, and on the radical end. All the political kids were, but (a lesson) almost no one else. When I turned 18, I got a card from the government telling me to register for the draft, with threatening language, and refused.
In a prison camp
At the same time, in Vietnam itself, Marine 2nd Lieutenant James Warner was suffering in a North Vietnamese prison camp, the one in which John McCain was also imprisoned. He’d been shot down as the navigator of an F4 Phantom just three miles into North Vietnam.
“Most of us were tortured, and some of my comrades died,” he wrote in the Washington Post in 1989. “I was tortured for most of the summer of 1969. I developed beriberi from malnutrition. I had long bouts of dysentery. I was infested with intestinal parasites. I spent 13 months in solitary confinement.” He stayed there, continually abused, for 1979 days. He was, from all reports, a leader and
protector of the other men there.
Some years ago, late at night, I stood in the Warners’ kitchen talking to Jim. His wife and I had become email friends and she’d invited my family to stay with them when we were in the area. He was still visibly in pain from the torture he’d gone through 40 years before. We talked about politics, kids, dogs, the cost of keeping up a house, that kind of thing. He had strong beliefs, but held them genially.
As I went back upstairs, I realized I’d spent fifteen minutes shooting the breeze with a hero. Not just for his courage and the way he gave himself for others in Vietnam, which was more than enough by itself, but for the way he now thought about what he had done.
He and others were released in March 1973 and flown to a base in the Philippines. “As I stepped out of the aircraft I looked up and saw the flag,” he wrote in his Post story. “I caught my breath, then, as tears filled my eyes, I saluted it. I never loved my country more than at that moment.”
It hurt him to see other Americans mistreating the flag, an act of contempt for the country for which he’d just spent 5 1/2 years in a Communist prison camp. But that was the America he loved. An interrogator had shown him a photo of Americans burning the flag to protest the war. “There,” he said. “People in your country protest against your cause. That proves that you are wrong.”
Jim said no, it didn’t. “That proves that I am right. In my country we are not afraid of freedom, even if it means that people disagree with us.” The officer “was on his feet in an instant, his face purple with rage. He smashed his fist onto the table and screamed at me to shut up. While he was ranting I was astonished to see pain, compounded by fear, in his eyes.”
He went through all he had and still thought it worthwhile to protect the freedom of people who despised him and his peers. I’m not sure I could manage that. But heroes can.
A good man
Given our upbringings, I don’t
think Jim and I could have helped being the young men we were and making the choices we did. He couldn’t help being the idealistic, patriotic young man who enlisted in the military and then took a post that would get him sent to Vietnam to fight the Communists who wanted to take away other people’s freedom. But he chose to become the man he is.
Jim’s a hero, a good man to be emulated. Yet if I described his political views, some readers would hate him. That would be a judgment on them. Heroes may be very wrong — Jim and I would disagree a lot on a lot — but their character earns them deference, especially from people who are, how to say this? not heroes, but people who measure their character by their bumper stickers, and whose hatefulness is poisoning our political culture.