Jim had a smile that said, “Gotcha!” and a laugh, low and quiet, that said, “It took you long enough to figure it out!”. He’d been back from Viet Nam over 10 years when we met. While I fancied myself liberal and educated about peace and war and all, I knew nothing. I’d no clue what horrors he had seen, what memories kept him from sleeping more than minutes at a time.

I only knew that he was scarred by his time overseas, forever marked with sadness, and mistrust of others. When he was crossed, real or imagined, it was immediately clear that he was capable of whatever measures were required to end the problem. Including death, if that were to be necessary.

That frightened me, a soft liberal who managed to evade the trauma of SE Asia by being born late enough to avoid the draft that had snared my friend. I made sure, after only a few demonstrations of the depth his anger could reach, to avoid making him angry with me.

I thought we had learned our lesson, back then. Movies, like “4^th of July”, tried to clue in the clueless about what life was like inside the heads of some vets. But we were so totally ignorant of their plight, so insensitive, that many of the most damaged become the invisible homeless in our town. Unable to cope, unable to fit back into society after being driven to such extremes during combat, many found solace with drugs, alcohol, or a gun barrel in their mouth. I thought we would never put our young through that kind of hell again. I was wrong.

Why didn’t we learn that invasion, the toppling of other governments, the insistence that our way of life be universal, will destroy our own society? Why didn’t we learn that we must live in peace with other religions, other races, other ways of seeing the world? Why did we give up our innate compassion? Why do we, especially now, deny our own beliefs of equality and fairness and opportunity? Put another way, what gives us the right? What have you done lately to show that you deserve to decide the fate of others living thousands of miles away? Why do you let our future, our young generation, be scarred and abused thousands of miles away? What can possibly be right about that?