Editorials

Thanks to the dogged work of the fearless Martin Snapp, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain’s embedded reporter who is a member of Berkeley’s Veterans’ Day Committee, you can now read about the latest permutation of the city’s Nov. 11 observance in the San Jose Mercury News, the Contra Costa Times, the West County Times, the Berkeley Voice and the East Bay Daily Snooze, and perhaps in many more of the chain’s saturation coverage outlets in the Bay Area. Tuesday’s bottom line, if we think the Merc’s story was the end of the tale: Bill Mitchell, co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, has decided to skip the Berkeley event in favor of a Santa Monica one, and that means the local Disabled American Veterans are back in the line-up.  

First, the instant replay: Country Joe McDonald and Mayor Shirley Dean organized the current form of commemoration eight or nine years ago. Country Joe, a counter-culture icon in the ‘60s, looked to some observers like he was doing penance for his youthful, shall we say, intemperate attitude to conventional patriotism. He recruited a dream team of politicians and veterans to join him, and it became an official city event in 2003 or thereabouts. But this year the committee noisily split over the invitation to Mitchell, whose son died in Iraq, to take part in the program. After a lot of sturm und drang, duly chronicled by the embedded Snapp, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, himself a veteran who resigned his captain’s commission because of the Vietnam War, brokered a short-lived “compromise” which had Mitchell speaking, but with promises not to offend. It wasn’t good enough for the DAV, who bailed. And evidently it wasn’t great for Mitchell either, since now he’s bailed too. 

Really, you can’t follow the players without a scorecard, or at least without your own embedded reporter, which the Daily Planet doesn’t approve of and can’t afford. But it’s only Nov. 4, and things could still change in the next week. For example, new Berkeley resident Cindy Sheehan, the co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, might be asked to speak, prompting still others to pull out.  

This interval gives the rest of us who aren’t committee members time to step back and think about what this seriously over-hyped event is, where it came from and where it should be going. First of all, when I was a child, we didn’t have Veterans’ Day at all. What we had was Armistice Day. They still have it in other countries, like Britain. A two-minute silence is observed at 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month because this is when World War I came to end in 1918. It is a celebration of peace, not of war. 

In this country in my childhood Armistice Day was a solemn occasion on which to reflect on the horrors of war. It was not about the heroism of fighters, but a somber reflection on the tragedy of the loss of so many lives, which happened on an unprecedented scale in the First World War. Pacifists and veterans alike could take part in good conscience. 

The day was taken over in 1954 by the superpatriotism of the Eisenhower era and turned into Veterans’ Day. Rah-rah trappings like parades were added over time. Those of us who are neither absolute pacifists nor knee-jerk patriots have been pushed aside in the last 50 years in favor of the idea that any veteran is worth celebrating, no matter what war he or she fought in.  

Many of us who were around for America’s most unpopular war don’t share that attitude. Not everyone who fought in every war regardless of the cause or consequences is equally deserving of honor. The reason that we fought so hard to stop the Vietnam War is that we knew that a lot of unwilling young men were being sucked into it, and we wanted to bring them home. We’re sorry we couldn’t stop the war sooner so that they didn’t have to serve at all.  

Bravery comes in many forms. We’d also like to honor people like the brother of a friend of mine, a draftee who went out by himself on a lonely California beach one night and broke his own hand with a sledgehammer because he didn’t want to be sent to Asia to kill guys that he had nothing against. That’s a brave man—he later became a firefighter. And there were many more of the same caliber who refused to kill for a cause they couldn’t support, and who suffered all kinds of penalties for it.  

We’d like to commemorate the inadvertent victims of wars as well, like the African-American kids from the South who had no idea what they were getting into in the Army, and who died without ever experiencing the benefits of being American citizens because of segregation. We want to remember Berkeley’s Women for Peace, many of whom have now left us, including Country Joe’s mother Florence. These brave women started questioning what was going on in Vietnam in the early ‘60s. 

World War II is the war that keeps many of us from adopting absolute pacifism. It’s hard to know how Hitler could have been stopped without military action. But the World War II veterans that were around when I was a child didn’t boast of their exploits and weren’t eager to celebrate their war experience. My father told many stories about the interesting places he visited and the people he met, but none about how much he enjoyed combat.  

The unseemly squabble that is now taking place in Berkeley honors neither veterans nor the equally honorable patriots who refuse to support the wrong wars. It’s time to call the whole thing off and return to what Armistice Day was originally intended to be: dignified mourning for the loss of life in war, of combatants and non-combatants alike, and sober reflection on how to avoid it in the future. The people of Berkeley should liberate the event from the high school pep bands, the self-appointed committees and the posturing politicians. Next Friday, let’s gather on the steps of old City Hall on our own as true and thoughtful patriots, at 11 a.m. on 11-11-05, for two minutes of silence. And that’s all.