Just before Ken Burn’s “THE WAR” was broadcast on PBS a couple of weeks ago, I spent some time at a local coffee shop with one of the men who I interviewed for CALLED To SERVE. Guy Sussman had asked to meet with me to discuss an experience he had had in 1998, which recent events had brought back and crystallized for him and that he thought would make a strong and updated addendum to his interview about his draft experience. I intend to add the story he told me to the book, but it felt even more relevant to this moment in time in the wake of the Burns film and in the context of the war our country continues to be enmeshed in in Iraq.
Guy proceeded to tell me that his father had died in January of this year. In October, prior to the ceremony for the unveiling of the gravestone, a Jewish tradition, Guy’s daughter wrote family members an e-mail in which she expressed her hope that by starting a scrapbook of memorabilia, folks would be encouraged to talk about her grandpa after the unveiling.
Guy then took me back 40 years and reminded me of the conversation he had with his father, described vividly in the interview in CALLED TO SERVE, about the draft. Guy asked him if he had felt fear when he contemplated being drafted during World War II. His father proceeded to speak of the realization he had while taking a shower (the same shower in the house the family lived in until 1994!) and Guy saw, as he recounted this experience, that his father was looking inward to that moment when he might be called to serve. As Guy recounts:
“He began to describe the moment in detail from an inner knowledge of that experience and the feelings he had, not only what he felt, but where he was – standing in the shower before work. He remembered his exact thought. He told me these words: ‘I said to myself, if I get drafted I’ll just close up the shop and go.’ And that’s what happened. I listened to this and replied, ‘If that was the way you felt I can respect you.’ We embraced and the tension was alleviated between us.”
After this encounter, and Guy firmly believes that, in no small measure, because of this encounter, his father supported his efforts to NOT be drafted during the Vietnam War.
Fast forward now to 1998 when his father had a surgical procedure from which he never really recovered. Guy needed to go to Florida where his father was now living to deal with all of the papers and other personal effects of his now seriously impaired dad who was about to move into 24 hour care. Inside his father’s wallet, Guy found the draft card he had been issued in 1940, 58 years earlier. Guy confided to me that:
“I began to cry for a multitude of reasons, but what it boils down to was the symmetry of our lives. My father was born in 1911 and was a young teen-ager in the ‘20’s who was moving into the world of adulthood when the Depression hit. In 1930 he was 19 years old and looking for work and struggling. I was born at the end of World War II and my young years were during the boom years of the ‘50’s and early ‘60’s. As a young man, my dad faced a major depression and I encountered a booming economy. Then he faces the possibility of being drafted into an extraordinarily popular and just war while I face the possibility of being drafted into a war I don’t believe in, which is very controversial and diminishes the stature of our country and which I want to avoid at all costs. My father was willing to accept his fate with the draft and what it betokened in terms of serving during a war filled with casualties whereas I was not willing and as a result, tormented by what I faced. He ended up being drafted as was I, but I avoided the draft (as his story in CALLED TO SERVE recounts) with a great deal of shame.”
Guy’s father was drafted in the summer of 1945 and was sworn in days before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Even though the end was in sight when he was called to serve, the military had been contemplating a land invasion of Japan during which the expectation, based upon previous efforts to invade Japanese controlled islands, was that there would be tremendous casualties. When, instead of the invasion, the bombs on first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki were dropped, Guy’s father was immediately decommissioned, but for Guy the essential fact remained – that at age 34 with a wife and two children, his father had been willing to go. Looking at the draft card 58 years after it had been issued, but still occupying a significant spot in his father’s wallet and life, brought all of this back. As all of us who lived through that era and that draft know, you were supposed to have the card in your possession and on your person all of the time. When Guy saw his father’s card he cried and felt a very strong need to hold onto it as another link to his father and to what mattered to him. It turned out that he temporarily misplaced the card while going through his father’s possessions in the apartment and then cried all over again when he relocated it. He expressed it this way:
“The distillation of all of this is that a draft card represents so much in one small piece of paper – the effect that it had on both of us. That at 87 he still carried that card with him – 57 years later and he was still carrying his draft card. It shows how strong an imprint that war made on his life. He was still proud to carry the draft card that resulted in his serving, albeit for a few days. And I never cared about mine. It represented a nightmarish time and it has vanished somewhere. My Dad was no pack rat, so having the card and carrying it with him reveals the power of the experience for him. When my daughter suggested that we put together a scrapbook to remember him, I felt that the draft card should be in it. The story I have just told you will now be able to be passed down through me to my daughter and become part of our family’s history. Years from now it will be like an old Civil War story.”
is my hope that Guy’s addendum will also serve to recapitulate the enormous divide, still experienced so many years later, that exists between the two wars he references. Yes, the Burns documentary showed the horrors of World War II, but it also showed that, for the most part, that war had the nation’s support. The Vietnam War and the current Iraq War not only contain the horrors we can read about daily, but there is the added challenge of having our country acting not from a need to prevent the spread of fascism, but to assert our control over other lands and people. Guy’s story about the draft cards heightens our awareness of this gap and the effects that will not go away. It is best to acknowledge them if we are to continue the healing process. I thank Guy for his efforts to assist himself and us to do so.
Sigh … it is still so present, after all these years, how differently those wars were experienced. I think that is part of why so many of us felt such estrangement from our families around working to stop the war in Vietnam. I think many of those divides still live on today – with being seen as not good for being against the war.
And again we have a great divide between Vietnam and Iraq. Before Iraq many of us were working hard to prevent that war. And the knowledge of that war is so much more present than even Vietnam – in terms of details. sigh … when will it stop?
~ Diane Clancy
http://www.dianeclancy.com/blog