Where a song can take you...

Yesterday I listened to Neil Young's "Roger and Out" from his Living With War album. The song deals with loss from the Vietnam war. It not only gave me a chill and a major lump in my throat, it also focused me on today.

In 1970 I was an 18 year old Hospital Corpsman working at the Naval Hospital at St Albans, in Queens, NYC. We received dozens and sometimes hundreds of patients a month from Vietnam. They were treated in hospitals and on hospital ships in-country and then shipped to states-side hospitals closest to their homes of record as soon as they were stable enough to travel.

The first decorated Vietnam casualty I met ( he was given a Silver Star) was a young UH1 (Huey, as they were commonly called) pilot who had been injured flying a medevac mission. Huey pilots--this one particularly-- bore a distinctive wounding pattern, almost a signature. The seat protected their buttocks and upper-thighs, not to mention everything else above mid-thigh. They came into the battalion aid stations with everything from mid-thigh to the ankles shot up because "Charlie" learned that if he fired into the bottom of the cockpit as the bird lifted off, he could get the pilot in the legs and bring the bird down.

The Siver Star Huey pilot earned his award because he kept control of the aircraft and flew his patients to safety while one of the attending medics tried to stop his bleeding.

St Albans Naval Hospital was full of men who were from one to five years older than me. All had been seriously injured and were trying to come home in one way or another. Among those of us who cared for them, most had not been to Vietnam and were awaiting our turn. All of us who waited wondered if we were up to taking care of "our Marines" when we got there.

My time never came. Through an administrative wrinkle I went to a WAVE boot camp to give shots and open health records. By the time my next transfer came around, the war was winding down for Americans.

The song, "Roger and Out" reminds me of the days before. When it was our chance to do what our fathers and uncles had done. When it was our chance to save the world from tyranny. When we were kids and did not realize that some men fought wars to the last innocent kid's death to keep from being called a "wuss" or soft on communism; or to win an election.

Today I look at the kids coming back from Iraq and they are really kids now. The wounds are so much worse. Many who would have never survived in Vietnam now make it back and carry a tremendous burden. They are the same age now as then, for the most part. I am 55 and they are so young. And it seems so criminal a waste.

We cannot easily extract ourselves now. Our administration lit this conflagration, allowed it to rage out of control and proposes that the next administration take care of putting it out. If we leave precipitously the fire will grow worse. If we stay it may worsen anyway. But to leave now and send the region over a cliff would only compound our culpability. We have to find a way out and it will cost more blood and treasure; and we must remember, this Memorial day, as we mourn our losses and thank God for those who have been spared, that this war was entered on pretext--on a lie--and that high crimes and misdemeanors have been committed.

When this administration leaves office on January 20th 2009, I hope and pray the next administration and Congress demand of Bush, Cheney, et al the truth, accountability, and justice for this crime.