It could have been ordinary, a 55th reunion at the boarding school I attended as a boy and where I later returned to teach for 34 years. Ordinary in the sense of green lawns and tents, of cocktail parties and a parade led by bagpipers under stately elms; ordinary in the sense of conversations suspended for five years or 20 or 55 and taken up anew. Reunions at schools like this one can feel bi-polar: They are sentimental extravaganzas orchestrated to raise money, but they are also opportunities for self-reflection and existential questions. Each time we return as a class, we have changed some more.
Mortality accounts for some of the change. Since we graduated in 1963, 40 of my classmates have died, 10 of them in the last five years. The number seemed shocking to me until I calculated the rate at 16 percent. That sounds reasonable for men in their 70s (our school went coed a decade after we graduated), but reunions make you think of classmates who died young and never had a chance to live the life you did. One of our classmates was killed in Vietnam in 1968, and ever since he has been the unspoken standard against which we periodically measure the value of our lives.
To give our 55th reunion focus, we decided to spend part of Saturday afternoon discussing how the Vietnam War affected our lives and our culture. As an introduction we watched three short clips from the Ken Burns documentary on the war, and then we turned our eyes to a panel discussion on stage that included three classmates who served in Vietnam and two who took deferments to do alternative service. They were emblematic of our class and generation because the war touched us all personally whether we answered the call of the draft, marched in protest, or landed somewhere between. In a sense, the war prefigured our adulthoods because the draft was waiting for us when we finished college, most of us in 1967. Many enlisted as officers. Some failed their physicals. Some were skipped over by draft boards that had already filled their quotas, but it would be fair to say that, one way or another, the draft determined when we began graduate school, when we married and when we started families.
So much has been written about the Vietnam War that it’s difficult to add anything that doesn’t sound like an echo. One classmate on the panel left college to join the Army as an infantryman and survived some of the fiercest fighting of the war before he resumed his studies. Another served his time in Vietnam and then returned for two more deployments to help released POWs adjust to freedom. A third served in the Peace Corps in Korea. He might have enlisted (and even took the Marine Officers Candidate School exam) but for his parents’ strong feelings about the war. His father had returned from World War II wounded and decorated, but he saw no sense to the conflict in Vietnam. A fourth left medical school after two years to work in public health; eventually became an expert on chemical exposures that cause cancer and spent part of his career advocating for veterans suffering from symptoms related to Agent Orange. The fifth, our moderator, had also served in Vietnam, but he never told his story; instead he guided the discussion and encouraged participation from the audience.
Some in the audience had been soldiers and had stories to share. One’s military assignment involved, among other things, knocking on doors to bring parents the worst possible news about their sons. Some in the audience had been protesters. “I never spat on a soldier,” one woman averred, “but I couldn’t support the war.” Another person rose to say that if instead of the draft, we had a voluntary fighting force as we do today, the war would still be going on.
Historians and sociologists coin the terms we use to frame our human experience. Those of in the class of 1963 have been called “War Babies” and “Baby Boomers,” but those words seem inadequate to describe the forces that shaped our coming of age. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear war cast a long shadow on our youth, and in the fall of our senior year, the Cuban Missile Crisis seemed a greater threat than the Vietnam War.
A year later we entered college and saw our president assassinated in Texas. Then Vietnam began to loom over our college years. In 1968 while many had entered the military, there were more assassinations — Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy — and American cities went up in flames. Suddenly, the war protests and the civil rights movement seemed closely linked. Our world was in chaos.
Now, 50 years later, we are able to look back with some perspective. We have new worries like global warming and cyber-warfare and a government that has lost our confidence. The “quagmire” of Vietnam was what our leaders promised to avoid when we entered conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those involvements have gone on even longer. Race and civil rights are still big issues, and we worry as grandparents about the world we will pass on to our heirs. So what is the defining term for my generation? My vote goes to Vietnam.
The memories of that era linger. At the reunion our class learned what we already knew: Our experiences in the mid-Sixties flung us apart, but over the years we have made what a Hemingway character referring to another war called “a separate peace.” So has the nation. Now we can talk about that time without a rise in blood pressure and even find some common ground.
The stories of classmates and others grown wise with age have helped me understand the profound effect the Vietnam War has had on our culture: but I am a reader, and so has the literature, fiction and nonfiction, that has come out of that time. For me the war now seems like a Greek tragedy told over and over in many voices.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford. He can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.