The ’40 Ford convertible
Ron and Mr. Cool in the Blue Bomb
Was a bomb,“The BLUE bomb,”
We called it.
Meant for cruising
With the guys,
Ron at the helm,
Mr. Cool beside.
She purred like a kitten
Except when she’d
Claw and hiss with
Cranky old age.
“Get out and push!
She’ll start if we roll her
Down the hill
And pop the clutch!”
The Blue Bomb was
before the Fire Bombs
That would soon drop…
On Vietnam.
Ron and I were best friends from the time we played for the “Big A’s” in Little League. Ron was a pitcher; I was his catcher. In high school Ron dreamed of being an astronaut. As an Air Force pilot he flew 200 bombing missions over North Vietnam while Mr. Cool was in the streets back home protesting the napalm fire bombs killing peasants and destroying peasant villages in Vietnam.
Back in the States, returning Vietnam veterans began to enroll at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where I served as a campus minister. At the anti-war rallies the veterans were seen as serial killers, the enemy. They were persona non grata, the new lepers, shunned and hated. “Leper, go home!”
The phone rang at 2:00 a.m. It was the bartender from the campus pub just up the street. “I have a guy here who’s hysterical. He can’t stop crying. He says he hasn’t slept in three weeks. I’m afraid he’s having a breakdown. I have to close the bar; I don’t know what to do. Can I bring him by the house?”
The inconsolable man at the bar was a Vietnam War veteran who’d been part of the My Lai Massacre. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was sitting in our living room. “No, it is impossible. It is impossible to convey the life-situation of any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning – it’s subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream…alone….” The sleepless vet was dreaming of what he had lived – alone and horrified – suffering flashbacks to the mother and the two children he had shot, lying in the trench. He cried. He talked. There was no meaning to it – no redemption, no going back, no undoing what he had done. No way back to clean hands. “Out, out, damn spot!”
One result of that night was an organizing effort of the anti-war campus ministers and the 300 vets of “The Vets House” (the campus leper colony). The vets went out to tell their varied stories to people in area churches, VARIED stories told by drafted veterans who were as conflicted among themselves about the war as the American public itself.
The vets taught me to remember something I’m embarrassed to say I had forgotten: that no one has clean hands, and that the job in life is not to have clean hands. It’s to get help with washing them, to seek forgiveness, when truth and meaning have been slaughtered. The great human gift – a divine gift – is not to be righteous; it’s to be loving. I had confused the call of the gospel with being on the right side of almost everything.
Ron and Mr. Cool used to cruise the world in Ron’s “Blue Bomb” – the pitcher and the catcher who had each other’s backs through high school and college. It took years of awkward silence before our different understandings of love of country yielded to the old unbreakable bonds of friendship. The two kids in the Blue Bomb remind me of a deeper kinship that no hell – no heart of darkness – can break.
Views from the Edge 
Not many words left in my energy bag tonight, but this is a super forgiveness story! Thanks.
LikeLike
Mona, Thanks for drawing on that energy to write. Blessings.
LikeLike
I love this piece, and it breaks my heart. I was of the generation that got to watch the long-term fallout from the Vietnam war, and as you stated so succinctly, each story was so varied that there can be no singular narrative of those years.
What startled me even further about this poem and essay is the second-to-the-last paragraph, which echoes, elegantly and succinctly, something that has been on my mind lately. While you are not prescriptive here, you do offer a light to help me relocate the center of my compassionate heart. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
LikeLike
Hi Bluebird, I’m always honored when such a great writer takes the time to read what comes from this keyboard. We are all still living with the fallout of the Vietnam War and World War II. But, as my childhood friend, C.A., has written in another comment on this post, World War II came to us; we didn’t go to it. Unlike Vietnam, our participation in WWII met the criteria of “the Just War theory. But the shrieks from unddr the mushroom clouds on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still ehcoing through the world. My father was the Army Air Force Chaplain of the B-29 Bomber unit that dropped the bombs. He would never speak of his experience. He was proud of his service to his country, but he became silent whenever there was discussion about the mass murder unleashed on Japan. I never knew whether he was silent because he felt repentant of his participation, or because, like many others who know the horros of war, he simply fell silent at the thought of war’s horrors. I’m glad, Courtenay, that you found the piece “not prescriptive” and that, in some miraculous way, you found in it “a light to help me relocate the center of my compassionate heart.” God bless.
LikeLike
I think I understand what you’re saying here. Have you ever seen the famous anti-war film “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” by Marguerite Dumas? If you haven’t, I think you might find it interesting. (It’s a French movie subtitled in English, which helps.) God bless you, sir!
LikeLike
Bluebird, It’s late. I can’t remember what I was trying to sy in the post, but I’ll check out the film. God bless you down there in rainy Texas. Bon soir.
LikeLike
Bon soir!
LikeLike
It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old girl is snoring….and sneezing. LOL
LikeLike
Hey! That’s me! Big thunderstorms today, too! Autumn has officially started in Texas. I am bringing out the long-sleeved t-shirts and the socks! : )
LikeLike
Knit stocking caps, too?
LikeLike
People will bring out their nice hats. The ones they can only wear for a little bit each year. And nice leather boots. This weather makes people feel festive.
LikeLike
Festive is good. It’ BEAUTIFUL here in MN right now. Maple trees are brilliant yellows and oranges.
LikeLike
Gosh, that even sounds beautiful! How coool!
LikeLike
Oh, Gordon, you got me again. I was in tears when I finished reading it on my iPhone, which almost never shows pictures. Then I picked up my iPad to write a comment, and saw the photo of you and Ron, and I saw that it was actually taken on Kent Rd. More tears, this time with a smile in the background.
I have been, and to some extent I still am, conflicted about war. Not about Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, but WW II (even if we entered for an almost staged reason and committed perhaps the greatest atrocity possible in the atom bombs on cities). But was there any other way to stop Hitler? And I believe he had to be stopped. Now in Africa and the Middle East, I wonder how to stop leaders of countries or of armies from killing, maiming, raping others by the thousands. Can we swoop into Damascus, grab al-Assad and al-Halqi, force them at gunpoint to recall their soldiers and hook them all up, permanently, to IV drips with tranquilizers? That of course is silly, but I’m not trying to be funny or to lessen the excruciating seriousness of the horror happening in Syria. If we put sanctions on and pull them tight, the weak starve, and all the goods they can get are given first to the army. In Africa we stood by and watched while the Hutu and Tutsi massacred each other. What could we have done? Nothing, probably, unless we could intervene militarily, and maybe not much even then. But the worst of war is what it does to the mind and souls of people just like the soldier who sat in your living room. Or to the morals of those few who find they enjoy the power of life or death over others.
If you want to listen to an extremely intelligent lady who hates war but is adamant that returning soldiers deserve honor and all the help they need to re-establish their lives when they come home, listen to Rachel Maddow. (She wrote a book called “Drift” about how wars have become “commonplace” — I have it in my Nook, but haven’t read it yet.)
Thanks, my friend. Keep writing.
LikeLike
C.A., There are no easy answers, are there, to the ethical morrasses you identify so well? There are no clean hands, only soiled ones, and there is the daily collision between the Parable of the Good Samaritan (not passing by) and “I tell you, love your enemies, and do good to those who persecute you.” Bonhoeffer was a principled pacifist who finally decided to violate one of his deepest commitments/values when he had a shot at stopping Hitler’s madness with a coup. Bonhoeffer’s Ethics is a great work, as are the theology and ethics of Reinhold Niebuhr. I live on a kind of teeter-totter between a principled pacifism represented by Gandhi and MLK, and the decisions of Bonhoeffer and others who decided that standing with the suffering sometimes means not only getting dirt on one’s hands, but getting blood on them. The greatest evils are often the ones committed int he name of goodness. How to live…how to love one’s neighbor as one’s self… how do we live in the tension and the inevitable connection between ourselves and the neighbor (“the other”)? Once again, thank you for taking the time to read the piece and to offer such a probing commentary.
LikeLike
That was beautifully written, and so touching, so disturbing. I cannot imagine having those kinds of things to think about, to contemplate having done them with no way of going back. What a terrible kind of suffering. I love what you said about how clean hands is not our goal – but to help with the cleaning of other’s hands. What a beautiful image. I would love to hear more stories of the stories you have heard in your many years of listening.
LikeLike
Christina, there are lots of stories like that. Some I can share; others I never will. Thanks so much for the encouragement and for your thoughtful summary of the point of the story. Java is coming the fourth Tuesday of this month!
LikeLike
Thanks for that, Gordon. I remember those years when I was filled with anger about the war, and I blamed the soldiers for going to Viet Name. If they had refused to go, there wouldn’t have been a war. Today I feel shame about my condemnation of those men and women. Your writing tells me that I can be forgiven and can forgiven myself. Today I no longer condemn our soldiers although I still hate war.
LikeLike
Cynthia, Thank you. It means a lot for me to hear your reflection. The grandson of one of our church members has just finished his tour of duty in Afghanistan. His grandfather, a dear man who helped to break the German Code in WWII and went on to marry a German soldier awarded the Silver Cross!, has asked to thank the congregation for all the prayers for Tom and to let them know that he is now Stateside and at home with his wife and children. It’s always a delicate thing, isn’t it, as to how to honor and respect soldiers without beating the drumbeat for war. The two are very different. Thanks!
LikeLike