Notes on the beginning of the holiday season, 2016:
I wasn’t in America for most of 1968. I only read about what
was happening in “Stars and Stripes.” It sounded bad. Seemed like each week there
was a new assassination or a new round of riots or a new recruiting office
bombed. My employer—the United States Navy—and my shipmates and I had to deal
with the internal tensions created by the mess back home in addition to carrying
out our mission. In the midst of it all, an African-American sailor in my unit,
the Naval Security Force in Da Nang, was found stabbed to death in a guard
tower during the midwatch. I remember thinking, “How tragic, how utterly
senseless, cruel, and monumentally tragic, to be sent home in a body bag at the
hands of your own shipmate.
After days of lockdown and growing tensions, NCIS apprehended
the killer. The murder had resulted from a personal feud between two members of
the same ethnic group. A mother met her son’s body at the airport as the result
of a disagreement between two Americans. A name is on the wall in Washington,
instilled forever in cold black, granite, because one American killed another
American during an attack of rage and hatred.
Despite all that, I remember the moment when the sight of land
disappeared from beneath the airplane taking us home and seeing, below, nothing
but the South China Sea. In an instant, those sparkling blue waters washed away
all the fears, anxieties, and turmoils of the last year. We all cheered to be
alive and going back to the United States. There were neither races nor colors on
the plane at that moment, only Americans. What a great and wonderful feeling.
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Who knows what I was thinking?
Perhaps I recalled Matthew Arnold:
I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd,
Think often, as I hear them rave,
That peace has left the upper world
And now keeps only in the grave.
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