Of Trains, Planes and Liberal Refrains
I had one of those moments yesterday that seem to come to us with lesser frequency as we advance through life. Now in my sixth decade, it has been a very long time since I have experienced a flashback to my earliest childhood; but it happened yesterday morning in the Raleigh-Durham airport as I waited to return to my home out west from an Army medical conference in Fayetteville.
Arriving early for my flight, I found myself grumpily grumbling about the hassle of airline security and as I struggled to get my metal-studded western belt back through those damned harder-to-reach loops and pull my boots back on, the thought blossomed in my brain momentarily, that given the opportunity, I would gladly don the uniform once again and join the mission to seek out and take out some of the terrorist bastards who were causing me this too early-in-the-day aggravation. As I proceeded down the concourse, I indulged myself with the thought of laying the sight blade of an automatic weapon on some Muj and sending his raggedy butt smoking off to Paradise for causing me to be sent through all this airport security: not exactly a balanced trade-off, I know, but hey, they started it.
As I approached the still sparsely populated waiting area for my gate, I noticed two young Army majors in desert camo uniforms. Both were wearing jump wings, which is always the first thing we old ex-paratroopers look for when surveying the uniforms of serving soldiers. Once they’ve met that threshold, further approval is usually automatic. One wore the Ranger tab and the Expert Infantry Badge. Taking a seat across from them, I was tempted to point out to him that his EIB, which requires passing an arduous test of your soldiering skills, was significantly more difficult to achieve than the miniature CIB, combat infantry badge, that I always wear in my lapel when attending military meetings and functions. It is my badge of inclusion, the fraternity pin of the infantry. But the CIB, while my most prized military award, in truth only proves that you’ve been shot at by the enemy; your physical presence and the absence of a Purple Heart proves they missed. Yet I was willing to bet, like all young, gung-ho infantrymen, the young major would much rather be wearing the CIB.
It’s always a good thing to let the young studs know that while you are now an old fart civilian, you just happen to be one old fart who’s walked the walk. It tends to temper their normal soldierly disdain for civilians, especially those of advanced years and advancing beltlines. As I sat there watching the two officers converse with the pretty wife of one, seated between them, I thought better of interrupting and decided to read my paper for a while; minutes later, when I looked back around the waiting area, there were now several young officers in their camo uniforms and all were accompanied by family members. I stood and moved over to the window where I could take in the entire scene: there were small family clusters throughout the waiting area and more gathering in the concourse corridor. As my eyes moved from group to group, the young officers were all grinning and high spirited, but the women’s expressions told the real story: except when smiling at their soldiers, they were somber; some of the younger women, spouses or girlfriends, and a couple of the older women, obviously mothers, were dabbing at their eyes with tissues. Their men were going to war.
Suddenly my mind went back to the huge, cavernous interior of 1940’s Union Station in St. Louis, where as a small boy clinging to my mother’s hand, I stood waiting to catch a train. All around us were family groups like these, with the same emotions on display: good cheer and hearty bravado among those actually going off to an unprecedented adventure, but a wistful, teary-eyed acceptance of the inevitable on the faces of the women being left behind to wait. My own father was already in the South Pacific and of his departure I had no recollection, having been too young to retain that memory. But my little brain must have developed to the point of preserving such images because standing here in this airport in 2006, that old memory was vivid right down to the constant, clamoring, echoing background noise of that enormous, 1940’s Romanesque edifice punctuated by metallic, reverberating announcements of departures and arrivals. I could hear the train sounds themselves: the huffings, chuggings, hissings, and screeching brakes and the shrill, steam whistles signifying their departures. The only element of my recollection missing today in this airport waiting area was the omnipresent swirl and smell of tobacco smoke. Some change is good.
But the human drama playing out before me had not changed in the six decades that had passed. While now, soldiers flew off to war in small groups from quiet airport waiting rooms rather than by trainloads from crowded, noisy stations, mothers and wives still wept while fathers and sons displayed manly, if somewhat strained, bravado. And the thought occurred to me that while these young warriors probably share the conviction of most soldiers that the present war, their war, isn’t nearly as bad as those fought by the fathers and grandfathers seeing them off, the harsh truth is that it can be every bit as fierce, maiming and deadly as any faced by their forebears.
Easing over to the gate agent, I inquired as to the families being present at the gate and the young woman said that the security folks make an exception in the case of families of soldiers going to war. I actually felt a surge of warmth for those same security villains who had been the source of so much irritation a half hour earlier and made a silent resolution to remember their humanity when on some future date they pull me aside for a wand wave because in another senior moment I forget to remove my watch or take my phone out of my pants pocket before entering the metal detector. Good on the TSA.
Once we were boarded, the captain came on the intercom and asked the passengers to give a round of applause to these Iraq-bound soldiers, which was answered with an enthusiastic response. As the applause died away and the plane began to taxi, I found myself thinking that the biggest difference between the scene at Union Station and the one I’d just witnessed, is in the politically charged atmosphere of the country these soldiers are leaving to defend. Those warriors boarding those trains in Union Station sixty years ago did so with the confidence of knowing that their nation was behind them in its entirety. Sure, there were isolationists who opposed our intervention in Europe and the Pacific but they were relatively isolated themselves in that belief.
The warriors of my father’s war fought with the assurance that the people back home were fully supportive of their military efforts and wanted them to return, but only after defeating our enemies. There were no headlines or broadcasts proclaiming that they were losing, even when they were frequently doing just that in the early days of the war. They didn’t have an entire political party scheming for ways to use their smallest military setbacks to embarrass the opposition party and bring about its defeat. The media and the movie industry of their day were guilty of spin, just as they are now, but the spin was to further America’s cause, not our enemy’s.
Yeah, I know, it all began changing during and after my war and I’m still wishing, forty years later, that it hadn’t. But at least in 1965 I didn’t have to leave for war under such contentious circumstances as these troops, with pompous talking heads on airport TV monitors somberly reporting every negative event with a gleeful undertone, or liberal newspapers and magazines lying about in the waiting area, filled with articles predicting civil war and other impending disasters or editorials calling for troop withdrawals. It takes real courage to fly off to war in the face of all that domestic adversity, proceeding to your combat duty station in spite of that incomprehensible failure by so many misinformed Americans to understand that we are in a war for our very existence.
We all owe these warriors, but the heaviest debt will forever lie upon those liberals who make it so much harder for them.
Russ Vaughn
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66
