Memory bumped into an old Rod McKuen poem last week. I was cleaning out my clothes closet and the lines bridges fall down/and meadows turn brown/and life falls apart/in a little room on Stanyan Street popped unexpectedly into my brain… and stayed there for the rest of the… well, until at least now because here we are, aren’t we?
Don’t razz me for knowing and remembering a McKuen poem, okay? It was the sixties, I was a mixed-up kid with a girlfriend named Holy Cow, and President Richard Nixon had just sent me a letter. “Greetings!” he said. “@#%* me,” I said. Two months later I met my first redneck, Drill Instructor Warren L. Kittridge. “Sound off like you got a pair!” he said.
At the very back of my closet is a US Army uniform. I took it off on June 26th, 46 years ago; it’s been hanging at the back of some closet ever since, and I’ve never worn it again. For most of those years no one said much about my time in the army, but lately, it’s become fashionable, or polite, or something else I can’t define, for people to say “thank you for your service” when it comes up in conversation. I say, “you’re welcome,” … and then I say, “… it was a long time ago.”
It was a long time ago. The fact is the Vietnam War resonates among most Americans with the vividness of recollections of the Spanish-American War. Vietnam veterans are doddering grandfathers now with grandchildren who’ve forgotten the single paragraph covering the war in their High School textbooks. What did we learn from Vietnam? What do we do with our old army uniforms?
This isn’t a criticism or complaint. We Baby Boomers remember where we were the day Kennedy was shot, but for younger Americans, the Kennedy assassination is almost as distant in time and memory as the McKinley assassination is for us. Bridges are always falling down, and meadows keep turning brown, and someone’s life is inevitably falling apart in a little room somewhere.
What we learn from history is that we seem destined to repeat it.