Part Two—The Vietnam War In Retrospect: Trading A .45 Caliber Pistol For A Bible

August 5th, 2009  |   

In 1961, six months after I had been discharged from the Marine Corps, Judy and I arrived at Virginia Seminary with our son, Stephen. I still sported my military crew cut, and I was still trying to pick up my life as a father after my stint overseas.

I traded living quarters on a military base for a house in Alexandria, Virginia. A dress blue uniform for a black cassock. A .45 caliber pistol for a Bible. And a Uniform Code of Military Justice law book, for a stack of religious books.

The curriculum changed dramatically. Studying the attack of a fortified position was replaced with the study of hermeneutics. No more Marine Corp Hymn. — “From the Halls of Montezuma.” Now I sang the melodic hymn, “O God our help in ages past.”

Ten-cent martinis at the officer’s club morphed into Holy Communion with bread and wine in the sanctuary. And my vocabulary? Oy vey! The favorite marine four-letter “F” word had to be expurgated — smothered by words like “let us pray” and “amen.”

There were no commanding officers whose orders I had to follow, no platoon to bark at, only classmates and professors who became colleagues and mentors. And if ever there had been a time when God and country were joined at the hip (and there had been), now there was only time for God.

Time only for God? Well, that depends on how you look at it. Cabby Tennis, a classmate from Virginia, made a spirited home-brewed beer which he shared lavishly with the rest of us. And Judy and I found time to “be fruitful and multiply” with two pregnancies, the last of which produced twin daughters.

Seminary was a journey in faith, but not without a glass of beer with loving classmates, and a loving wife with whom I was blessed in my sleeping and in my waking.

Vomited Up On The Shoreline Of Annapolis
 
Graduating from seminary and arriving in Annapolis in 1964, I felt like Jonah must have felt when that big fish vomited him up on the shoreline of Nineveh. Only my Nineveh was Annapolis, on the shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay.

Jonah, as the story goes, had to live inside that leviathan for three days, and eat whatever he could from inside the fish. During my three years tucked away on the “Holy Hill” of   Virginia Seminary, I was fed bountifully from a rich table full of Biblical study, theology, church history, pastoral and clinical training, and worship.  

But as nourishing as it was, seminary education, like all formal education, had inevitable limitations. The gap between gown and town —  the seminary and Annapolis — stretched me way past any book-learning I may have acquired, and forced me to face new experiences in a realm where only a bountiful grace could rescue me.

Mark Twain said “Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.” There a kernel of truth in those words. Some of what I learned at seminary — a basically classical, male, European, Anglo Saxon theology — certainly had to be unlearned when I arrived in Annapolis. And the education I didn’t get at seminary, I would have to get in the midst of the topsy-turvy world of parish and community work I entered in June of 1964.

If basic training in the Marine Corp hadn’t fully prepared me for the actual experience of killing someone, seminary also hadn’t been able to equip me with all the tools necessary for staying alive or for helping others survive.

You Think 1964 — You Think “Hello Dolly” & Burning Bras

You think 1964 music, you think the Beatles. They burst onto the American scene on the Ed. Sullivan Show. But you think 1964, you also think Louis Armstrong. The 63 year-old jazz trumpeter’s biggest selling record, “Hello Dolly,” knocked the youthful Beatles off their 14 week number one hit-song pedestal. Armstrong was hot.

While I was a student at Washington & Lee University, I saw Louis Armstrong and his orchestra play at a school concert. I shall never forget his smiling face and music. What I didn’t know back then was that he wasn’t allowed to stay at the local hotel in Lexington because of the color of his face.

Armstrong pretty-much shied away from political statements, but he did acquire an FBI file because of his outspoken statements about segregation. In 1957, about the same time I saw him perform, he called President Eisenhower “two-faced” and “gutless” because of his poor showing over the conflict around the Little Rock school desegregation.

When you think about 1964 and the years that would round out the sixties, you think Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. Pot and Timothy Leary and LSD and his message to young people to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” You think about assassinations — Bobby and Malcolm X. You think about burning bras—Betty Friedan — and NOW. Burning draft cards, a burning Buddhist. You think Liberation theology shaking the foundation of European theology. You think the collapse of European colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean, and various parts of Latin America. You think the death of God coverage in Time magazine.

In 1964, if you are newly ordained, like me, you say to yourself: “Where do I find Jesus at work in all this? Inside the sanctuary of the church, or on the street in a picket line or protest march?”

The Long, Hot Summer Of 1964

The summer of 1964 was an important time in both the civil rights struggle and the war in Vietnam. They vied for public attention, with civil rights gaining the lion’s share of media interest from the American public. 

It was “Freedom Summer” in the south. That meant that lots of civil rights activists, including many young people, spent the summer registering black voters. But like all struggles for human rights, it involved bloodshed and pain. Over the course of the summer, civil rights workers were killed and critically wounded. Freedom Summer workers were beaten. One-thousand volunteers and locals were arrested. Thirty seven churches were bombed or burned, along with black homes and businesses.

On June 21, three men were brutally murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The violence, fortunately, was transfigured by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark piece of legislation. Long overdue, it outlawed racial segregation in schools, public places and employment. (It also had provisions to protect women and included white women for the first time.)

Our family lived on Prince George Street in Annapolis. The house was the point of a triangle connecting the U.S. Naval Academy, St. John’s College, and St. Anne’s Church, on Church Circle where I would work for the next four years. The triangle also contained State Circle which housed the Maryland Legislature and governor’s mansion.

Just down the street from St. Anne’s was a small Episcopal Church — a black church. Adjacent to it was the county jail and a string of predominately black homes which Urban Renewal was attempting to gobble up. A large portion of my life and work would face in that direction as I became involved with racism at the doorstep of the church.

The other direction I faced was toward the USNA and St. John’s College working with midshipmen on their way to Vietnam and students who were saying “no way” to Vietnam.

Looking back on those four years, I know now that I was sailing between the two monsters of Greek mythology — Scylla and Charybdis. In effect, I was on the same journey as the President  — traveling between the rock of racism, poverty and violence at home, and the hard place of the war in Vietnam.

The refrain to the Navy hymn is: “O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea.” Traveling through these straits in 1964, I could only cry: “What do I hold on to from what I’ve learned? What do I need to unlearn from what I’ve learned? What new lessons do I need to learn as the turbulent waters of change threaten to overturn my boat?

Hawks — Doves — Owls

We have come to think of people as hawks and doves when the subject of war arises. But in 1964 Americans could, for the most part, be called owls — sitting in a tree watching. Most Americans were not spending much time thinking about the buildup of troops in Vietnam, and they were fortunate if they were able even to point out Vietnam on a world map—Vietnam, the place that would eventually claim their family members and friends in a war based on a lie.

I say the war was based on a lie because it was. The August 7, 1964 congressional Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, was based on false reports of unprovoked attacks on the U.S.S Maddox by the North Vietnamese. It gave President Johnson broad enough powers to escalate the war in Vietnam. The resolution became in effect a declaration of war.

In 1960, when I was overseas, there were only about 900 military personnel in South Vietnam. In June of 1964 the number had increased to 16,500. By 1968, the year I left Annapolis to take a church in West Virginia, the number of troops in Vietnam had increased to more than half a million, and General Westmoreland would have declared that victory was in sight.

The Cold War was the engine that drove this war. The war game was played with dominoes. Should we lose in Vietnam, so the underlying argument went, all of Southeast Asia would be lost to Communism. The threat of nuclear war, brought home in the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962, increased the fear of nuclear attack. The only remedy to this Cold War game was the dark comedy “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” 

During the four years doing bifurcated work between men on the way to Vietnam and the students writing conscientious objection papers, I confess that I did not take a stand on the Vietnam War. I did controversial work on racial issues, trying to address the segregated situation of two racially segregated Episcopal churches, and working to address the racism in the community right outside the church door. I picketed a racially segregated housing development, and took young people to work with poor black children in the Virgin Islands. It was there, by the way, that we listened to the radio account of the arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. back home. 

But I was not yet ready to challenge the Annapolis military ethos or connect the dots between race and war — civil rights and Vietnam. Looking back, I was a hawk on racism during the day, and a nighttime owl when it came to the war. 

Connecting The Dots On My Way To Resisting The War

What I was beginning to learn in the summer of 1964 was that the ongoing struggle for civil rights and against the war in Southeast Asia — the area where I had done military service — was in fact a spiritual struggle with racism and militarism—two foundation blocks of the American Empire.

I had done my share of clinical hospital training in seminary and learned about the pastoral role of the church in healing ministry among individuals. What I now began to see was the prophetic role of the church in healing our community and nation, a nation that John Shaplen, a fine journalist who covered the Vietnam War, called “the sick man of the Western World.”

Racism and militarism had also infected the church. The segregated hour of church worship mirrored whites-only public facilities. American flags in the sanctuary linked God and country and were threatening symbols to clergy who wilted under the red-white-and-blue flag, fearful of raising critical protest against the war. The pulpit lost its prophetic status, and the church became polluted with a spirituality that shunned the suffering world at its doorstep. I was a part of that church, committed to that church for better or for worse.

I was beginning to connect the dots between events all around me and the people I was called to serve in parish life. My God, the midshipmen who came to our home to eat and talk, who sat in the pews on Sunday, who went with me to the jail, and even called for the vestry to address the racism involved in the two separate and anything but equal Episcopal churches in the neighborhood, were the same midshipmen who would be Navy and Marine fighters in Vietnam. And the conscientious objectors emerging from the classrooms of St. John’s College down the street, protesting the war, were also, in a mystically earthy way, connected to these midshipmen.

Arriving on the shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay in the summer of 1964 was a blinding experience for me — a Pauline road-to-Damascus happening. It led me to conflict not only in the community, but also to conflict inside the church with parishioners who did not understand this prophetic aspect of ministry and did not want the church involved in controversial issues, particularly with political and economic ramifications.

Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian, had his own blinding experience. At an Evening Prayer service in 1965, the words he was singing from the Magnificat jolted him: “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.” Those words convinced him that he should go to Selma, Alabama, to work for civil rights. On August 14, 1965, Daniels was killed in Hayneville by a blast from a 12-guage gun.

On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached at Riverside Church in New York City. I believe it was his most magnificent sermon. It was entitled “Beyond Vietnam.” Well ahead of the anti-war movement, he called for a withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam. He connected the dots between the civil rights struggle and the war, which he said was “doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home.” It was sending poor black men “crippled by society” to fight and die for democracy in Southeast Asia when they were still denied basic liberties at home. “I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”

The pieces were all falling into place for me. Working in both the black community and with students caught up in the Vietnam War, I was connecting the dots. And it wasn’t long after Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 that I decided to commit myself to more than silence around the war.

In the summer of 1968, I was called to serve Trinity Church in Martinsburg, West Virginia. It was there, in the a state that continually displays its patriotism by sending large numbers of troops to war, that I finally found the insight, wisdom, courage, and grace that it took a stand up against the Vietnam War.

Martinsburg—A Step Into Becoming A Resisting Christian

Arriving in Martinsburg, I discovered that the editor of the Martinsburg Journal, also a parishioner, did not print letters-to-the-editor pertaining to the assassinationof Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He thought it might stir up a hornets nest.

The paper also had not printed anything about what later was called the My Lai Massacre. That was because the story about the slaughter, rape and torture of the Vietnamese civilians in that village had not seen the light of day. Americans did not know about what our U.S. Army troops had done on March 16, 1968 until investigative reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story in November of 1969 in The New Yorker.

Hersh’s account was an example of the truly remarkable and courageous news coverage of the Vietnam War. That coverage, compounded by my Marine Corp experience, seminary education, and four turbulent years in Annapolis, ignited my conscience and my will to speak out boldly against the war.

In the next edition of Notes, I will say more about the media and my continuing journey as a resisting Christian.

Entry Filed under: Fig Tree Notes Archives