Kent Nerburn

“Hey Nerburn, good to see you. I heard you got killed in Viet Nam.”

It was a surprising greeting, but not unexpected. It took place in a small restaurant right near the Minnesota State Fair, and the man addressing me had been a high school classmate. We were all accustomed to such greetings, because many of us were killed in Viet Nam, and all of us were impacted by it. It was the cultural common denominator of males of our generation.

The result was an unlikely divide that other generations cannot understand. For us, the military, or its lack, defined us.

Those of us who went were shaped forever, either by the jungles of Nam or simply by the fact that we were the short-hairs in a world of long-hairs in which we could not participate. We watched as a cultural wave washed across our generation, in every corner of every country, and we were unable to ride it, at least during the time of our service, because of the demands and limitations that our service experience put on us. When we got out, we were either too late to catch the wave, or grabbed onto what we could find of it with a vengeance. Those of us who had been in the jungles — well, we were part of a different cultural wave, and we would forever be separate in some way from those who doped and danced and criss-crossed the country as part of a national celebration of what seemed at the time to be a cultural revolution.

For those of us who were not in the military, the military kids were the poor sods, the naive, the victims and dupes of a policy of a nation gone mad. Too often we berated them as docile stooges of a government that we knew was corrupt and disingenuous. Today such a notion about the government is old hat. We have seen far too much corruption and disingenuousness lately. But in those days, the simple inference that our government might have corporate rather than national interests at heart was not only heretical, it was very possibly Communist. We must remember that Richard Nixon was president, and Richard Nixon had a political genetic link with Joe McCarthy and the Communist witch hunt of the fifties. So those of us who were on the side of the cultural youth wave were seen by the government as the enemy, and we, in turn, saw our brothers and sisters who were dying in the swamps of Viet Nam as peers who had lost their moral compass for not standing up to the government.

In the end, we stood divided, and the division has never completely healed. Just as my generation could never really participate in the worthy vision of the military in World War Two, the prior and succeeding generations have never understood the depth of the division that has scarred the collective soul of my generation. They have never understood the moral righteousness and patriotism of many of us who refused service, or the anger that came from those of us who were drafted and taken away from our lives to be maimed and wounded in body and spirit in a war that was worth nothing, for nothing, and run by politicians for the good of corporations, or the profound sense of incompletion and national betrayal of those who went with good heart and returned from the jungles to receive no public acclaim, no real benefits, and no real feeling of having served any real national good.

It is a flash point in the psyche of our generation that runs to the very core of our consciousness, and it colors the way we look at war, soldiers, and each other.

It would be easy to draw parallels to our contemporary situation, but that is not my purpose here. My purpose is to speak in honor of those who, for whatever reason, chose or were called to serve in the armed forces, whatever the time and circumstances. GW and Cheney have put the nail in the coffin of any high minded visions of the reasons behind our national war-making. But, the fact is that the coffin lid was shut during Viet Nam for those who were not deaf to the slamming sound. Since Korea, the forgotten war, there has been no time and place where our brothers and sisters died for a high minded purpose. They have been pawns, they have been tools, and this has taken away some of the respect they deserve. I would like to speak out in appreciation of them and respect for what then endured, wherever and however they served.

On a human level, they — all of them, from WWII to Korea to Nam to Grenada to Kosovo to Iraq and God knows where else we send them to put them in harm’s way — have shown a courage that extends far beyond what is required of most of us in our daily lives.

Anytime you experience something that no one who has not been there can understand, you isolate yourself in small ways from those around you. In the supermarket, in the classroom, in the bedroom, you are, in some corner of your heart, ineffably alone, because that part of you can never be shared. All who fought in wars know this. And if you are one who fired a bullet that hit the flesh of another human being, you have an awful knowledge that will forever haunt you and leave a dark stain on your heart that can never be erased.

Of those who come home missing some body part that once made them whole, nothing need be said. But all who serve in war come home missing something, and, even if we can’t see their loss, they know it each day they wake up with that corner of aloneness that can never be touched. And those who served but never saw combat while their brothers and sisters fought and died, must wrestle each day with conflicting and confusing feelings of good fortune and guilt, for they escaped, yet failed to share in the experience for which the others died and for which they were trained.

It is all something very deep, very private and, in many cases, very dark.

To those of you who have experienced it, I salute you. You have given something of yourself for a vision of your country and a vision of duty. And even if the national purposes for which you served proved not to be high minded and good, your gift is no less worthy. You, truly, have been among the best of us.

May you have a peaceful and fulfilling holiday, and may you find peace in your heart and in your life.

I have just finished a visit with my mother. She lives in an assisted living high rise several hundred miles from here in a pleasant neighborhood of parks, shops, and sufficient traffic and activity to be agreeable without being assaultive or overwhelming. She is 89.

She can no longer walk, cannot see well, and needs assistance for almost all of her daily tasks. The cost of her living situation is astronomical — nearly criminal, one would say — except for the fact that my father’s various pensions from his job and his time in the military allow her to almost break even. The remainder is paid from a small pot of savings that is dwindling by the month. In the harsh world of economic realities, it is a race between her money and her time, both of which are growing short very rapidly.

I, obviously, have never lost a mother. I have lost my father, and it changed my life forever. I do not look forward to the loss of my mother, though I am preparing emotionally and spiritually as best I can. It will be another stage in life’s journey, and another door into a different dimension of understanding.

For now, it is her life that matters. As I watch her struggle with her growing infirmity — and she does not always do so gracefully or gently — I am struck by the strength she displays in the face of the weakness she endures. And though there are many sadnesses that overcome me as I watch the colors of her life fade, the one that hurts me the most is watching her struggle with her feeling of uselessness.

This surprises me. I would have thought that it would be her helplessness that would touch me the most. But that seems so natural and within the course of the human journey. The feeling of uselessness, however, is something that feels culturally created and unnatural, and it seems unfair. She was raised to serve, and, in her own way, she did so wonderfully. She chafed mightily under the cultural limitations of women of her generation, but, after a brief period of personal exploration before the start of World War Two, she settled in to the accepted role of wife, mother, and keeper of the domestic fires.

As these roles were taken from her one by one — by my father’s death, the loss of her house and her ability to perform domestic tasks, and, finally, the need to nurture her children — she lost the handholds she had on her individual importance and significance in the world.

We children do the best we can to assure her that her job in life is no longer to do, but to be. But that is cold comfort to someone who spent her live volunteering and offering assistance to others in one form or another.

Still, it is true. She now represents something, and that is her primary job in life. She represents all of our pasts, she represents the link to a time that we succeeding generations know only by stories and books, she represents the certainty of a mother’s presence and a mother’s love. And these are all real and they are all good. But they are all passive. They are a function of her being, not of her accomplishments or even her personality. It takes a wise person on a good day to be satisfied with simply embodying something for someone else. Most of us would and do find that hard; for her it is supremely difficult. She weighs that almost symbolic value against the very real liability of her physical infirmity and limitation, and the scales do not come out in balance.

What remains for us is to love her, to visit her, to take pleasure in her journeys through the pathways of her memory. It is also a pleasure to see how little it takes to give a small sense of adventure to her life — a trip to the store, a trip around the pond in her wheelchair, a visit to one of my sisters’ homes for a family gathering. If neither she nor we look upon these small moments as revelations of limitation, but instead see them as deeply important moments of human contact and sharing, they fill us with warmth. But when they serve only to underscore her infirmity and our helplessness in its presence, they are hard lessons in the fragile course of life.

As I sit at home now, four hours away, I wish, as I always do, that I could have done more. I wish I could have been more present to her concerns. I wish I could have given her more of my time. Most of all, I wish I could have bartered away five years of my own life to give her one last real journey, or five minutes of walking, or an hour of clear eyesight, or a night with my father. But I could not do that. And my children will not be able to do it for me. All we can do is bear witness to the passing, celebrate the mystery of life, and share such love as we have with those who are most hungry to receive it.

They are small gifts, but they are our gifts. May we all, you and I, have the power to offer them when life calls upon us to do so.

I received a hearfelt note today from a man writing in response to my recent posting about Bush. This man, who lost a friend in the 9/11 bombings, was bothered by the tendency of many people, me included, to downplay the threat to our lives by the incursions of people who want do damage us and our country. This is more real for him than it is for most of us — he lost a good, kind, apolitical friend in an attack that he fears was just the point of the spear. We make a mistake, he feels, when we think that 9/11 was an isolated incident, and we serve our own and our children’s interests best when we do what is necessary on the foreign front to keep that spear from being thrust closer to our heart at home.

I understand this fear. I share it in a way. I think we all do. But we have buried this concern under a mountain of squalid politics. We need to face the hard fact that the reasons for the attacks on us are complex. For some of those who would attack us, their anger is at our profligate lifestyle, our squandering of the world’s resources, our refusal to address the disastrous effects of environmental degradation, our failure to use our physical and moral force to combat real evil such as genocide in Africa rather than to achieve economic advantage or geopolitical dominance in the Middle East. For others, it is what they see as our libertine morals. For still others it is simple jealousy. And then there are those who hate us because they have twisted their own religious beliefs into a moral justification for vengeance on all who are unbelievers. Then, of course, there are the deranged, the megalomaniacal, the angry ignorant, and those who just want to pick a fight with the biggest kid on the block.

The list goes on. But the truth is that our attackers range from the principled to the thug. Yet, in the outcome, it all looks the same. We are a target and will continue to be one into the distant future.

Those who think we can attack this with ground forces in Iraq are like those who hear noises in the nighttime woods and run out blindly swinging a baseball bat. But those who think we can deny the reality of the the threat to us are like those who hear the noises and choose to deal with them by turning up the volume on the radio.

I don’t have an answer. But that doesn’t mean I have no right to question and criticize when the answer proposed is so manifestly harmful and wrong.

My problem with this current bunch and their policies is in their disingenousness. They lie, they bully, they are both corrupt and inept, and they are arrogant. Their head legal — the man charged with upholding our nation’s laws — is currently lying under oath. They have our young men and women fighting a morally indefensible and militarily unwinnable war with too little equipment and too few soldiers, while outside companies rake in millions of dollars providing ancillary services for monumental profits . They steal from our children by amassing mountains of debt; they terrify people by presenting falsehoods about viable health care reform; they underfund education; they leave a major American city in ruins; and they craft a tax system that allows windfall corporate profits while refusing to protect the benefits of workers.

Then they sell all of this to us — or jam it down our throats — by trafficking in fear. “Al Qaeda is coming.” “Fight them in Baghdad so we don’t have to fight them in New York and Kansas City and Tinytown, Nebraska.” They personalize the fear, but privatize the benefit.

If we are to fight terror, we need to be a moral beacon. It is not just about being a beacon of economic opportunity. (That beacon, my friends, is dimming even for our own citizens.) It is about being a beacon of goodness and hope.

We still have a fragile hold on leadership in the world, and we still are and always will be a country based on a visionary idea rather than on ethnicity or ancient tribal affiliations. We can stand for something. But it cannot be freedom alone. Freedom will eventually devolve to selfishness unless it is leavened by goodness and compassion. I keep harking back to the Marshall Plan in my mind. What a moment of vision for this country, and what a lasting benefit both for us and the countries we helped. We could do that again. I would submit that we MUST do that again in some fashion. We must make other countries want to come to our defense when individuals and groups within their borders plot to damage us.

How we could have taken this moment in time when the cold war ended and so totally squandered our position of leadership is beyond me. We could have reached out and embraced the rest of the world, starting with providing aid and assistance to Russia to help her attain economic viability within the framework of democracy. But we didn’t want to do that. Instead, it was “realpolitik as usual”, using that moment of their weakness to increase our own leverage and strength. And we have proceeded from there, badgering, bullying, demanding, and demeaning — and cloaking it all in high-minded rhetoric about freedom and democracy.

Until we learn that we must help the weak, both within our society and within the family of nations, we will be nothing more than the Godfather nation, dispensing gifts to those who kiss our ring and meting out punishments to those who misbehave or have not done proper fealty.

This administration had a chance. It blew that chance. Now it is trying to justify its actions by lying, cheating, threatening, punishing, and allowing its friends to stuff as much as they can in their kit bags on the way out the door. And it is keeping the rest of us down with fear.

Is there something to be afraid of out there? Yes.

Can it be fought with guns in Baghdad? No.

Can it be defeated by bullying other nations, demanding loyalty to our policies, and building walls along our southern border? No.

Fifteen years ago, in Letters to My Son, I wrote a section on “Strength.” I concluded with the following lines:

“Strength based in force is a strength people fear. Strength based in love is a strength people crave.”

It is as true today as it was then, and as true for nations as it is for individuals.

Unfortunately, too few of each are listening.

I’ve been watching George Bush as he destroys my country. It has not been easy to do. Any of you who have read this blog for years now know that, except for a moment’s hope that he would serve rather than reign after his spanking in the mid-term elections, I have consistently cried out in a Jeremiah-like fashion against this man and his minions.

And though it is not a very pleasant way to reemerge from my blogging silence, I feel compelled to make a few comments on Bush and our national scene as it currently appears to me. I will confine myself to the political; the moral is too painful to even address.

The game is very simple as George Bush plays it: The president is subject to Constitutional checks and balances except in times of war. Therefore, say we are in a state of war and all rules are off. The president then has granted himself the right to be a despot.

It is up to Congress to stop this dangerous foolishness, but they have neither the courage nor the will. It is they in whom the power to make war is vested; the president merely has the power to prosecute that war. Had they refused Bush the right to make war, or, if they were to make a claim on the illegitimacy of his war-making, they could stop him. But they didn’t and they won’t, because the shibboleth of “undermining the troops” will be trotted out to paint them as anti-American and putting our sons and daughters in harm’s way.

As to impeachment, he has insulated himself by putting a criminal in the post of vice president, so his successor would be even worse — a variation on the Nixon-Agnew strategy that the old timers among you will remember. Also, the Democrats now want to drag the Republicans behind the wagon until the next election, so they would rather let the crimes of this administration reveal themselves in excruciating slow-motion than call the administration to task for its betrayal of the trust of this country.

Meanwhile, we kill women and children in Iraq and are subtly shifting the blame to the Iraqis themselves, saying it is their fault all the killings are taking place because they have not put a stable government in place. No one is standing up and saying, “We made a horrible, horrible mistake and must ask forgiveness from an innocent people who had the misfortune to be sitting on a field of oil and to have been under the reign of terror of a brutal, megalomaniacal dictator. We are truly, truly sorry, and will find a way to make it right.”

We also allow our husbands and wives and children to continue to be killed because no one among the Democrats had the courage to fight back when the Republicans called them to task for referring to the dead soldiers as “victims.”

“How dare you call them ‘victims’?” they thundered. “They are heroes.”

No they’re not. A person who gets killed is not a hero unless they are doing something heroic. A person who is put in harm’s way under false pretenses, and is killed as a result, is a victim, even if they demonstrated incredible personal courage and resolve. But the parents who trusted this small and evil president cannot face the fact that their children died in vain. Who can blame them? I couldn’t face it, either. If I let myself face that fact I would be so angry I could no longer go on living. The best I could do is hang desperately onto the notion of heroism and try to move through my grief-stricken life. This is what these parents are doing, and the Republicans are exploiting it in the most venal and unconscionable fashion.

For those of you who wonder where all this vitriol comes from, and who want from me inspiration and sweetness and light, I can only say that I have seen this before in Viet Nam and Johnson and Nixon, and it scarred me forever. The tricks are more sophisticated now, and the president, incredibly, is even more shameful and less competent. But make no mistake, our nation has been severely wounded and will not be healed in my lifetime or yours or our children’s. The legacy of this man’s reign is one of singular destructiveness.

Put simply, he has been the Hurricane Katrina of presidents. He has laid waste to our moral and political landscape.

May we not see his like again for generations and generations.

A reader asked where I’ve gone lately, after engaging in a dialogue with you all about the wisdom of continued blogging. The answer, I guess, is into a world of transitions. One of our children has just given us a first grandchild and is preparing to be the first to move away from the general area of Minnesota; another has left a long term relationship; a third has just moved into his first apartment; and a fourth is preparing to graduate from high school and go off to either college or Americorps.

As you watch your children grow and change and make decisions in their lives, the sense of your own passage through life becomes more acute. The paths are diverging; the home fires are becoming both more precious and less frequently visited. What is asked of my wife and I as parents changes daily. One of the kids needs physical assistance, another needs emotional support, a third needs greater personal freedom and space. Assaying these needs, and meeting them honestly, is a task that requires a fine attention to emotional detail.

You want to send your children into the world fully formed and fully prepared, but none of us is ever fully prepared for life. It is, as the metaphor would have it, a journey, and there is discovery all along the way.

What we are discovering is the bittersweet joy of letting go; what they are discovering is the fact that choices made limit choices possible. While each of their lives is still in the flowering, they also are setting their feet upon paths that will, in some ways, determine the course of direction of their individual journeys. And that requires them to examine the road not taken.

We want to be there for each of them. In some instances, this means letting go; in others, it means reasserting and reinserting ourselves in their lives. But in each case it means aiding them on a journey that will take them ever further from us, even as it has them valuing the times when they return to us for a moment of respite and rest.

For us, it puts our own experience of passage in high relief. There is something resolved about our stage in life — we have accomplished what we have accomplished and now must refine our skills, use our experience, and commit ourselves to passing on the gifts and wisdom we have attained. It is not that we do not seek to do more. But my wife will not suddenly be plucked out of her small northern Minnesota university to teach at Harvard; I will not suddenly be tapped on the shoulder and handed a Pulitzer Prize. We are who we are, and the scale of our dreams, if not the scale our accomplishments, is somewhat circumscribed. We look for a new phase, a new jump to make, a chance to do something different that builds upon our skills — maybe new jobs, new careers, new places to live.

But we do not look to remake ourselves. It is enough to refine ourselves and to take pleasure in the great, joyful, exciting, and sometimes painful growth of the children.

As a writer, I have always tried to value the near as well as the far. These days, the pleasures and value of the near are outweighing the lure of the far. This is only a phase, and it, too, shall pass. But, for now, it is real. A four year journey of absolute aloneness and literary loneliness in search of Joseph and the Nez Perce left me hungry for the relational and the interactive. I have still not sufficiently fed that hunger.

So, to answer the question of the caring reader about where I’ve gone — I guess I’ve gone home to take pleasure in the domestic while quietly packing for the next great intellectual journey, whatever it may be. I’ve been doing a lot of speaking, a lot of smaller writing, a lot of footwork for the still-possible and ever more probable film of Neither Wolf nor Dog, and a fair amount of partnering and parenting.

Changes are in the wind, and I am listening quietly to their sound.

Sometimes you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; sometimes you have to be your own weatherman, and sit quietly and passively until the direction of that wind declares itself. Then you can set your sail and trim it correctly, and embark upon the next journey.

Right now I am watching other journeys and preparing for a new one of my own. It is a good place to be.