One Mans Courage

"The disturbing roar of hollow patriotism" was forwarded to me in an
email. As I read this mans views, it made me mad. REAL mad, until I
read the second letter, which is an awesome response to Garrison
Keillor.

I have no idea if this was an actual article written by this Mr.
Keillor person, but I felt compelled to share it because my husband IS
himself a Vietnam Veteran, and the response to this article is well
written and well deserved, fact or fiction.

The Disturbing Roar of Hollow Patriotism

By Garrison Keillor

May 28, 2008

Three hundred thousand bikers spent Memorial Day weekend roaring around
Washington in tribute to our war dead, and I stood on Constitution
Avenue on Sunday afternoon watching a river of them go by, waiting for
a gap in the procession so I could cross over to the Mall and look at
pictures. The street had been closed off for them and they motored on
by, some flying the Stars and Stripes and the black MIA-POW flag,
honking, revving their engines, an endless celebration of internal
combustion.

A patriotic bike rally is sort of like a patriotic toilet-papering or
patriotic graffiti; the patriotism somehow gets lost in the sheer
irritation of the thing. Somehow a person associates Memorial Day with
long moments of silence when you summon up mental images of pilots
revving up B-24s and infantrymen crouched behind piles of rubble
steeling themselves for the next push.

You don't quite see the connection between that and these fat men with
ponytails on Harleys. After hearing a few thousand bikes go by, you
think maybe we could airlift these gentlemen to Baghdad to show their
support of the troops in a more tangible way. It took 20 minutes until
a gap appeared and then a mob of us pedestrians flooded across the
street and the parade of bikes had to stop for us, and on we went to
show our patriotism by, in my case, hiking around the National Gallery,
which, after you've watched a few thousand Harleys pass, seems like an
outpost of civilization.

There stood Renoir's ballerina in pale blue chiffon and Monet's
children
in the garden of sunflowers. And Mary Cassatt's "The Boating Party,"
which I stood and stared at for a long time. A lady in a white bonnet
sits in a green sailboat, holding a contented baby in pink, as a man
rows the boat toward a distant shore. (Perhaps the boat is becalmed.)
The man wears a navy blue shirt, he is preoccupied with his rowing, and
the lady looks wan and mildly anxious, as well a mother should be. The
baby is looking dreamily over the gunwales. Is the man a hired hand or
is he the husband and father?

A work of art can lift you up from the mishmash of life, the weight of
the unintelligible world, and vulgarity squats on you like an enormous
toad and won't get off. You stroll down past the World War II Memorial,
which looks like something ordered out of a catalog, a bland insult to
the memory of all who served, and thousands of motorcycles roar by
disturbing the Sabbath, and it depresses you for hours.

If anyone cared about the war dead, they could go read David
Halberstam's The Coldest Winter or Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers
or any of a hundred other books, and they would get a vision of what it
was like to face death for your country, but the bikers riding in
formation are more interested in being seen than in learning anything.
They are grown men playing soldier, making a great hullabaloo without
exposing themselves to danger, other than getting drunk and falling off
a bike.

No wonder the Current Occupant welcomed them with open arms at the
White House, put on a black leather vest, and gave a manly speech about
how he'd just "choppered in" and saw the horde "cranking up their
machines," and he thanked them for being so patriotic. They are his
kind of guys, full of bluster, giving off noxious fumes, and when they
leave town, nobody misses them.

Meanwhile, the man pulls at the oars, the lady wonders if this trip was
a good idea or if some disaster is at hand, and the child lolls on her
lap, dazed by the sun. They started this trip in 1894 and haven't
advanced an inch; meanwhile, half the people who ever stood and watched
them have reached that distant shore and the rest of us are getting
closer every day.

I am the boatman and maybe you are, too - it is quiet on the water, we
lean on the oars, and we are suspended in time, united with every other
man, woman and child who ever voyaged afar.

_______________________________________________________________________
__

Dear Mr. Keillor:

Your article was forwarded to me by a very large number of very angry
individuals, and, just as I suspect that they will have something to
say to you about this, it has also prompted me to respond. I'm angry
too, but I will try very hard to choke that down so that I can provide
what I hope will be seen as a thoughtful response to an extremely
insensitive and not terribly well-thought out opinion piece.

Hollow patriotism you say? The connection you quite obviously miss
between "these fat men with ponytails on Harleys" and "pilots revving
up B-24s and infantrymen crouched behind piles of rubble steeling
themselves for the next push" is that many of these Harley riders have
been the pilots and the infantrymen of which you speak.

If you had taken time to look around at places like Khe Sanh, or LZ
XRAY in the Ia Drang Valley, or perhaps some hot, stinking nondescript
rice paddy seven clicks from "who knows where in the hell we are" in
the 1960's, you would have seen a lot of us. Maybe you were there and
didn't look.

Maybe you weren't, but like to talk about the issue as though you
actually know something about it. Either way, you should know that we
weren't fat in those days. We didn't have ponytails either. We were
young, filthy dirty, underweight, sick and scared to a point of
numbness that you can't know unless you've lived it, every damned day,
with no escape. We lost friends; we lived through and saw things that
can, without warning, wake some of us even today, screaming from our
sleep.

Like every solider who has ever fought, since the dawn of history, we
did not fight for honor, for duty or for country. We fought for the
guys beside us who refused to run out on us. The ones that talked us
down from madness. The ones that held us when we were sick, or shared a
last cigarette hiding under a poncho and a blanket of mosquitoes. And
the ones that we watched bleeding to death, and crying for their
mothers while we held them in our arms, trying to comfort them while we
watched their eyes go dull. For us, it is not the vivid blues and
greens of the art that lifts you from the mishmash of life that are
important on Memorial Day. Instead, on this day, we have these images
that we will never forget, as long as our hearts still beat.

You seem most upset because you were inconvenienced trying to cross a
street that you admit had been blocked off for the passage of these
riders, many from the Patriot Guard, or other organizations dedicated
to honoring both the living and the dead who go in harms way in our
Country's name. Upset because these classless oafs delayed your trip to
the National Gallery where you celebrated Memorial Day by taking in a
Renoir.

Meanwhile many of the fat, pony-tailed oafs, tried, after several
aborted attempts, and with tears streaming down their faces, to make it
to the Wall without collapsing in tears in front of names engraved in
stone, but with the memory of souls engraved more deeply in our hearts
and minds. And we leave mementos, a flag, a patch, a ring, a medal, a
can saved from a 1 in 12. Something, anything to let a comrade know,
"Brother I have not forgotten you, and I know I'll see you soon." I
have names on that wall. I have started and stopped on that path a
dozen times. Sometimes I make it, sometimes I don't. I believe in my
heart that the brothers I go to see there know that at least I
tried.

Perhaps we rid e and rev our engines to celebrate the life a buddy
cannot. Maybe some of us do it because it keeps them from sticking a
gun in their mouth to end a pain and guilt they cannot escape. Guilt
and pain caused by the knowledge that we lived while a buddy died.

Maybe we do it because by banding together we can absorb the strength
to
go on from one another. People who have shared the horror, people who
would rather work up the guts to look at their tear streaked
reflections on the Wall than to study Monet or Cassat at your side. As
much as many of us appreciate the art, on this day, we have other images
to deal with that are much more compelling to us.

We do care very deeply about the war dead, Mr. Keillor. We need not
read Hablerstam or Ambrose to get a vision of what it was like. We have
visions we cannot escape. Of death and destruction. Of the shredded
meat left by a claymore on a jungle trail, or the empty hole where a 19
year old buddy from clear back at Basic was trying to get small just
before a mortar hit it. We ride to honor our dead, we ride to show
solidarity with those in harm's way now. What have you to teach us of
war and death Mr. Keillor? What have you to teach us about remembering?

You may be the boatman. For all I care, you can have the boat. But I,
fat and pony tailed as I am, along with my fat and pony tailed
brothers - We are our brothers' keepers. And every Memorial Day, from
now till the day I go to join my friends, lost so long ago, I will have
my fat ass planted out there on the Harley, flag flying, wind in my
hair. Because if a certain Lance Corporal had not died while pushing my
face down into one of those stinking, filthy rice paddies, this is
exactly where he would be and exactly what he would be doing.

So, you celebrate this solemn holiday your way, Mr. Keillor. I and my
brothers and sisters will choose to honor our dead in our way too. You
can question our fat, old bodies all you wish. But don't you ever
question our patriotism again.

And since I have failed miserably to keep my anger in check, despite my
promise to do so, you can go to Hell, Mr. Keillor, and you can take the
Renoir with you.

Jim Nolley