Editor, The Commercial:
Have you ever sat down to supper and looked over at the TV to see a handful of bedraggled men in camo toting body bags to a chopper, knowing they were carrying that day’s tally of Johnnys who would not come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah?
Congratulations, you’re a Boomer.
We are often represented as the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation, those valiant souls who marched off to battle “the Hun” and stopped the advancing “Yellow Menace.” Yet we had our own battle, one far less glamorous yet just as bloody, one our fathers had fought to forestall, yet our brothers and cousins, our classmates and neighbors had taken up arms to fight, not always willingly.
Though their numbers may have been fewer, their suffering was not. And we did not have to wait weeks and months to learn their fate; it was delivered daily, at dinnertime, in images we can never forget.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
In the back of our minds, in the pit of our stomachs, we carried the realization that we were not immune, that the only thing separating us from that poor soul in the body bag was … the luck of the draw, a flipped page on a calendar, the whim of a fickle fate. That could be us.
That was us!
There was no if, but rather the hanging gloom of when? How much longer could we hold out? ‘Cause when your number’s up, mate, it’s all over. That’s all she wrote. There ain’t no coming back.
That was the mood that sparked the anti-war movement. We were the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation, and we would have gladly laid down our lives to follow in their tradition, to give our all to save our country from oppression, from the threat of an advancing menace.
Yet the menace was not advancing. It was in stasis, a bunch of half-trained little men half a world away who seemingly sought nothing more than to preserve their hard-scrabble way of life. They wanted to push back the tide of an advancing threat — us! We were the threat, and we had no business being there.
That was a hard realization to accept, one that went against everything we had been taught, everything that had been ingrained in our souls. We were the good guys; we had to be. Our leaders were just and honest men, men of honor … Or, they had been.
Somewhere along the way, those men of honor, those men who had led our fathers into battle, had been replaced. We did not realize it, not for a long time, but they had been replaced by functionaries from what no less a visionary than General Dwight David Eisenhower had dubbed “the military/industrial complex,” a cabal of people more interested in the profit to be had from war than in the outcome of it, or the cost.
When we did realize it, we bristled, and rebelled. We fought back, as best we could, in the only ways we knew how. Marches. Demonstrations. Mass protests. We wanted to be heard. We had to be heard.
Eventually, we were.
It did not come right away, though, not until we had given far too many of our number, way too much of our soul, perhaps more than a slice of our humanity.
We are the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation. They gave far more than we could ever imagine. We gave far more than they ever would have wanted.
D.H. Ridgway,
Pine Bluff