One Degree of Separation

[Following is a guest posting by Tom Baxter, head of our local Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)]

Why I Fight
________

We're now at the forth anniversary of the proclamation of ''Mission Accomplished'' and the ''end of major combat operations'' of ''Operation Iraq Liberation.'' Meanwhile, I have been standing on Thursdays and Sundays in front of the Capitol with my antiwar signs for almost six years in the ''Eternal Peace Vigil.''

People ask, "Why?" Some of the reasons are the lives and deaths of Dwight H. Johnson, David Funchess and Jeffrey Lucey.

Three brave men. Three men who believed our government's lies. Three dead men, Killed In Action in a combat zone. Three men whose names will never be engraved on a war memorial's marble wall because the mortal wounds they bore were not visible.

Dwight, AKA Skip, a few months younger than I, was born in Detroit and raised in the projects by a single mother. A good soldier, a draftee, made E-5, on his first enlistment as a tank driver. A month after I arrived
in Vietnam and a few miles North on my base, Dwight, trying to catch up with his platoon, came upon them being destroyed by an enemy battalion.

He stopped the battalion. When reinforcements arrived they took him off the battlefield pumped full of morphine and in a straitjacket. A few days later, he was on the streets of Detroit, wandering jobless, teased because he
missed TET. Months later, an MP asked him if he had been arrested since he got out. He said no. The MP said, then come to DC and we will give you a Medal of Honor.

He reenlisted, his first job out of the service. Got married. Used as a recruiter and public relations flack, he tired, started acting out. Wife in the hospital. Home and car being foreclosed. Walked into a liquor store, pulled a gun. Popped some caps, missed every time. Shot four times. Died on the table. His mother said, "Sometimes I wonder if Skip tired of this life and needed someone else to pull the trigger."

His wife received a raise in her pension as he was not conscious of his actions.

I might have met Johnson in Vietnam. Guys from his company came into my compound to pick up trucks and parts. We both drove the hairpin cure in the An Ke pass. One degree of separation.

David Funchess, also a few months younger than me, was a Marine. I would have never met him in Vietnam, though I might have met in Jacksonville where we both grew up. I did meet some black guys while working construction and the shipyards. Young gofers that had more in common with me than with the mechanics.

His stepfather was a vicious and mean bastard. David came back from Vietnam with a Purple Heart, scars from an IED, PTSD and a heroin habit, later he got a dishonorable discharge, i.e., no VA benefits.

Twitchy, he slept in foxholes under his mother's house, later in cars. I asked politically correct friends and they said I could call David, ''nuts.'' You would not let your daughter go out with him. Ted Bundy would be OK. But not David.

David also was involved in a liquor store robbery, except he killed two folks. Bad luck for David; PTSD had not been legally discovered. Since it was not mentioned in trial, it could not be used in appeal. So, David died
in ''Old Smokey,'' the same place as Ted Bundy, becoming the first of many Vietnam veterans judicially murdered in the United States. I worked on appeals for his clemency and shook his lawyers' and friends' hands. One degree of separation.

As Dwight and David died in Vietnam, Jeffrey Lucey died in Iraq.

He was my daughter's age. He had a lot going for him. He was white, middle class, with parents that were willing to pay his way through school. He did not need the service to get out of the ghetto.

Like Dwight he killed face to face. Couldn't get over it. A year back from Iraq, after a few visits to the shrink and some involuntary confinement, Jeffery hanged himself with a garden hose in his parent's basement. His death is the results of my failure. I failed stop the war.

I did not talk to him as I do every Iraq veteran and veteran to be that comes up to talk or argue in front of the Capitol. I tell them, I don't know what your particular hell looked like, but we did stuff our mothers, our fathers, our teachers, our preachers told us never to do: Kill people and destroy things.

It messes with your mind. I may not look like very much, ugly, wrinkly, white haired, balding, running to fat, old fart, but I'm what you want to be forty years from now. I'm alive. I can bounce kids on my knees. I can make them laugh. I buried a bunch of guys over the years who can't.

If you ever think about thumping yourself, your wife, your girlfriend, your kids, remember your parents want you to bury them, not the other way around. Your wife doesn't want be a widow. Your kids don't want to be orphans. When it gets real serious, folks want to talk to you. They want to help you.

I can tell you meds work. I stopped having nightmares, thirty years ago. They came back five years ago. Meds stopped them again. I'm not very happy. But I've got a job, and I'm trying to stop the creation of more folks like Dwight, David, Jeffery and me. And I haven't been doing too good of a job of it.

Tom Baxter
Fiat justitia; ruat coelum
USAV 1967-69
http://tombaxter.livejournal.com
Tallahassee, Florida

Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor." --infidel to every church that
compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the
people.
--Wendell Phillips

"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why?
Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid
injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust."
--St. Thomas Aquinas