That may not be such a big deal. We had ridden together in several prior ports and enjoyed the exercise, sightseeing, and camaraderie. This ride was different, and for this particular cyclist incredible: Vietnam, me, friends, bikes...and happy Vietnamese people enthusiastically hailing us as we passed. I never dreamed I would experience any of that.
As a new college graduate forty years ago, any vision of myself in Vietnam included a helmet, a rifle, and the risk of not leaving the jungle alive. Several of my high school friends had been exactly there. Were it not for my (belated) acceptance into medical school in the summer of 1969, I very well could have found myself cleaning a rifle in the hot jungle instead of poring over purple stained slides in a chilly histology lab on the other side of the world. By the time I graduated from med school the war was all but over, and the doctor draft a thing of history. Nevertheless the Vietnam war was a powerful force in my life and in those of many of my contemporaries.
Whether or not we ever actually set foot in Vietnam, my generation of baby boomers often knew it as a source of intense agony and ambiguity, a painful coming of age. Our transition from optimistic children of the fifties and early sixties to disenchanted and bewildered young adults of the late sixties and early seventies was a trauma that persisted well into our later years. Raised by parents of the "Greatest Generation" in a time of peace and prosperity in America, we boomers had embraced their core values of patriotism, old time religion, loyalty, devotion to duty, and a belief in the just rewards that any American could expect from faithfully adhering to those values. The Vietnam war and the division it caused across our nation deeply sullied that dream. The resultant disillusionment affected my generation in ways we could not begin to understand, let alone assuage. Vietnam was our inherited original sin, a national shame, proof that Americans can sometimes be ugly, and that the difference between right and wrong is not a thin, distinct line, but a broad span of gray.
Many of us wasted a lot of time and psychic energy in our subsequent adult lives in fitful starts and stops trying to restore that peaceful serenity of our childhood and adolescence. But it always eluded us. Vietnam had happened. America had not only finally lost a war, we had lost our honor, our integrity, and our pride. Vietnam symbolized a failure of the American dream, and it was therefore a place, virtually if not actually, where many Americans swore never to go again. I was one of them.
In my mid-twenties, voting in my second presidential election, I cast my ballot in vain for the Democratic challenger to the Republican incumbent. We wanted out of that Vietnam era. We wanted change in America. We got "four more years" and more disenchantment.
I steadfastly avoided military service largely because of the scars Vietnam left on our nation and our military. For sure, those core values instilled by my greatest generation parents did occasionally remonstrate me for not serving my nation, but I needed only to conjure up images of that terrible conflict to quickly put those noble thoughts out of my head. Then all of a sudden Desert Storm happened, and I witnessed a picture far different from what I had seen in those Vietnam newsreels years ago: a professional, poised, and compassionate military that quickly earned the respect and support of Americans, even if we were not entirely sure why we needed to liberate Kuwait in the first place. Less than a year later I was a newly commissioned medical officer in the United States Navy embarking upon a life change and adventure from which I have never looked back. Some 18 years hence that adventure brought me and my bike to Vietnam where I rode with my friends to China Beach and met friendly, enthusiastic Vietnamese all along the route. And in that instant I felt a bit of that same tranquility that I had known so many years ago. It was an unanticipated and welcome sort of closure.
An American sailor riding a bike in once war-torn Vietnam does not change history. But that simple event does show that very little in this life is forever, neither peace or war, neither success or failure, neither good events and people or evil events and people, neither suffering or happiness, neither pain or joy, tears or laughter. What remains, then, is to transcend the inevitable ups and downs through adherence to true constants of life and to take joy in simple things, like being able to ride a bike at all.
And what are those true constants of life? Well, in their youth our greatest generation parents had experienced their own terrible world war. And although they seldom really talked about it, afterwards they steadfastly rebuilt their personal American dream by living those core values that they tried to teach us baby boomers. Turns out, they had it right all along.
1 comment:
I think you should call this blog "Butts on Bikes."
Post a Comment