Brothers in Arms

As an undergrad, I spent one year at Berkeley, 1968, a year full of death, riots, tear gas, and bayonets under Peder Sather’s gate.  I dressed in Levis, love beads from a head shop on Telegraph Avenue, and an Army field jacket pilfered from Fort Ord.  I wore OD and flashed the peace sign in “solidarity” with my contemporaries who were fighting and dying in Vietnam while I skated by with an educational deferment. Ironically, three years later I was at Fort Ord teaching classes full of `Nam vets, some rotating back to the rice paddies and the jungle.  I learned the shorthand:  TDY, MOS, HALO jumping, “boo-coo” (beaucoup), “bookin’,” and I discovered the joy of teaching military students who were prompt, eager, did the reading, and called me “sir.”  For the next 20 years, outside our barracks classroom was Vietnam, Panama, Desert Storm; inside was Moby Dick and Dylan Thomas.  Then the Soviet Union’s collapse brought base closure, and I was transferred to main campus. I furnish this prologue because recently I listened to a colleague expound passionately on the futility of war, and I wondered how a veteran would feel hearing that indictment of his sacrifice, however well-intentioned.  Professors with pacifistic sentiments are commonplace, of course, but one also finds naked hostility towards the military in academia, such as Dr. June Terpstra’s fever-dream, “Killers in the Classroom.” That’s why I now include a “thank you for your service” in my syllabus and request that veterans identify themselves privately in case I need to adjust class material for them.  When studying film, I often show Apocalypse Now. Thirty years ago, a sergeant asked to be excused from the viewing because he, like Colonel Kurtz, had “gone native in Vietnam.”  Just last year, a quiet, Iraq War veteran also asked for an alternative assignment.  He ended up writing a stunning account of a chaotic, bloody firefight he was in on “IED Alley” outside Al-Qaiim.  He said it helped him to write about it and thanked me.  I could only reply, “No, Corpsman Chan, thank you.”