Column | ‘It could have been me’

You hear more about the weapons than about the men, often boys, who have to operate them. That’s how it always goes in wartime, now also in Ukraine. Who are they, where do they come from, was it their own choice to fight there, did they know what to expect? And most importantly, how afraid are they of dying?

You sometimes see them on stationary tanks, looking around, or hiding alone in trenches, but their agony remains invisible – we see that later in the feature film about their war.

These days I often think of Vietnam, where America fought a war just as wicked in the middle of the last century as the Russians are now in Ukraine. Like the Americans biting down on the better-motivated Vietcong, Russia is grappling with Ukraine’s furious opposition. Will Russia eventually, just like America then, have to end up with its tail between the destroyed tanks?

Artists have written and sung a lot about the Vietnam War. One of the better known books is In Pharaoh’s Army – Memories of a Lost War by Tobias Wolff, a writer who served as a junior officer in the United States Army in Vietnam. Two anecdotes from this book will stay with me. The night before he leaves for Vietnam, Wolff has dinner at a restaurant with a friend who also has to serve in Vietnam and will leave with him. The friend’s father joins the dinner and turns out to be a fierce opponent of American participation in the war. He tries to convince the young men that it is better not to go. The next day Wolff gets on the military bus, without his friend, who has decided to desert. Who will be sitting on this bus again in a year’s time, Wolff wonders lost.

Later, during a military operation, Wolff stands next to another lieutenant. One of them has to go into the area to provide assistance as an American adviser. The commander puts his hand on the shoulder of the lieutenant next to Wolff. “Well, Keith, what do you think?” says the commander. “I’ll pack my things,” says the lieutenant in a flat voice. That afternoon he is killed by a shot to the stomach. “It could have been me,” Wolff will often think.

Recently I heard a penetrating anti-war song about Vietnam by Allan Taylor, an excellent British folk singer who is now 76 years old, who has remained too unknown in the Netherlands. It’s called ‘The Morning Lies Heavy’ and it’s on his album Old Friends – New Roads, along with the beautiful love song ‘Like I Used to Do’. In ‘The Morning Lies Heavy’ Taylor sings about a soldier who has to go to the front in Vietnam, like a brother-in-law of his at the time.

The morning lies heavy on me, father/ I couldn’t find the time to fall asleep/ And I couldn’t stop from thinking on it either/ And the morning lies heavy on me. (…) And tomorrow I’ll be flying from the mainland/ And joining in a new company/ And some of us will never see our homeland/ And the morning lies heavy on me. (…) Tell me, who’s the one who fights until he’s broken/ Is it the men who sit in judgment of us all/ I wouldn’t care if it was their lives they were taking/ But they don’t listen nor even answer to the call†

The people who judge us (“who sits in judgment) ), those are the people who say, “Well, Keith, what do you think?”