The scars of war

            The young man shook my hand, smiled and sat down, a notebook and pen in his hand.

            "I'd like to ask you what you remember about the Vietnam War," Carlos said. He was working on a history project and needed to interview someone who remembered the Vietnam War.

            What I remember most about the war comes from my teenage years in the late 1960s, the height of the conflict. I started high school in 1969, and my freshman year was smooth sailing.

            During my sophomore year, racial turmoil boiled over in our small Louisiana town. Integration had arrived, and two high schools in our area – one predominantly white and the other predominantly black – merged.

            Those years were terrifying for everyone. Parents were picketing on the school sidewalks, and students were either scared or enraged.

            I remember seeing our assistant principal with brass knuckles he'd confiscated from a student. The war halfway around the world didn't scare me as much as the war inside the school walls.

            "Did you have any family members serve in the war?"

            The question brought me out of my reverie. None of my family members went overseas, but my friends' older brothers and sisters were staging their own war.

            Every day, it seemed, one would suddenly appear in bell bottom pants, love beads around their necks and their fingers in an perpetual "V" as they smiled and said "Peace, little sister."

            In school, boys were beginning to wear their hair in ponytails or in Afros, and the community was in an uproar.

            Politics and the disintegration of my generation became part of our dinnertime conversation, and I went along quietly until Richard Nixon and Watergate put an end to my gullibility.

            Up to that point, I thought the president was above reproach. After Watergate, I switched my voting designation to Independent and vowed to vote for principles, not parties.

            "Did you know anybody who went to Vietnam?" Carlos asked.

            His question silenced me. I didn't personally know anybody who served when the war was going on, but I've interviewed quite a few veterans.

            One man in particular has never left my thoughts. When we looked at pictures of him as a young man in the jungles of Vietnam, he cried for himself and all the boys who lost the ages of 18 to 25 to a war that took so many before their time.

            His words echoed what a veteran from World War II had told me – he'd left home an idealistic boy and came home a man for whom reality was that death could come at any minute.

            I had nothing to say to this grieving veteran. "Thank you" seemed like not enough and "I'm sorry" changed nothing. So I simply put my arm around his shoulder and sat there with him until the demons were silent.

            "How did the war change you?" was the last question.

            At the time, I didn't think the war changed me at all. I didn't have to go overseas, I didn't put my life on the line nor did I have a family member who served.

            But all of us who lived during that time changed. We became appreciative of our freedoms and discovered we had the right to change a political atmosphere that fostered corruption and allowed a vicious war to continue.

            Wars change people, whether it's a war on civil inequality, persecution half way around the world or a quiet discussion between a baby boomer and a young man ready to take on the world.

            These changes will last long after the last bullet is fired.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.