Arlington West
© 2005 by H.B. Koplowitz
I got pissed off on Independence Day. I was working the holiday at a news agency in Los Angeles, but that wasn't why I was pissed. It was a slow news day, so there was heavy TV coverage of July 4th celebrations -- parades, patriotic music and fireworks -- along with tributes to our fighting men and women overseas. One story I kept seeing, I thought fell in the category of "don't let the facts get in the way of a good story," and it was being distorted the same way by all the stations. It had to do with a display of crosses that were set up on the beach in Santa Monica, one for each soldier, sailor or Marine who has died in Iraq.Nearly every weekend since Feb. 15, 2004, the local chapter of Veterans for Peace -- many of them Vietnam vets -- have erected a growing sea of crosses on the sand just north of the Santa Monica Pier. Its purpose is, to quote their Web site, "to acknowledge the costs and consequences of the addiction to war as an instrument of international policy."
Mute, stark, respectful and haunting, it was a powerful antiwar statement, and quickly drew the attention of the media. But over the past 15 months, as the display metastasized from about 500 grave markers to more than 1,700, the message got truncated from "support the troops, bring them home," to just "support the troops."
If I was at home I would have growled at the TV and maybe thrown a shoe. But being at work, I was in a position to provide some counter-programming. It occurred to me that the organizers of the memorial might be just as pissed as I was by how their message had been turned inside out. Maybe I could get a good quote to hang a story on.
So I went on the Web site of Veterans for Peace, found a contact number for Vietnam veteran Ed Ellis, and left a message on his cell phone. Several hours later, Ellis called me back as he was driving through a canyon, so our conversation was disjointed and full of static.
Which may partly explain why, when I began to question him about the changing meaning of the memorial, he didn't seem to understand what I was getting at. I said everyone was reporting how the display was a tribute to the troops, but not a protest against the war, and he said, well, it is a tribute to the troops.
We got cut off but he called back. Wasn't he upset that people were taking the display the wrong way? I tried again. He said yeah, they recently took "Arlington West" on the road, and that even at the Vietnam Memorial, some people attacked the group for being unpatriotic when the display is not meant to be unpatriotic.
After another cut-off he called me a third time, and I gave it one more try. Did he think the media was portraying the display correctly? I asked.
He said he saw a talk show on Fox in which one pundit "criticized" the memorial for focusing on casualties instead of winning the war, but that another "defended" it by saying it was a moving tribute to the troops.
"But isn't it a protest against the war as much as it is a tribute to the troops?" I sputtered.
Again he didn't seem to get my point.
"So it doesn't piss you off that the media is portraying Arlington West as a tribute to the troops rather than a protest against the war?" I asked.
"No," he said.
Now I was both pissed and perplexed. Since he hadn't answered my questions the way I had wanted, I couldn't write the story the way I had intended. But damn if I was going to write it the way TV had been reporting, so in frustration, I spiked it.
Driving home after work, I started to get pissed again when one of the news radio stations replayed a phone interview with a local soldier in Iraq -- I believe he was a colonel from Glendale -- who said the media isn't giving an accurate picture of all the progress that is being made. "Iraq isn't Vietnam," he said.
There's an old saying in politics and journalism -- when they say it's not about the money, it's about the money. That's what I think every time I hear someone say Iraq isn't Vietnam.
Let me count the ways.
- Hubris.
- A guerilla war without battle lines.
- Bad intelligence.
- Nation-building.
- Spreading democracy.
- Liberating people from tyranny.
- We are there for oil, WMDs, terrorism, democracy, freedom, dominoes, in other words, we don't know why we are there.
- Now that we're in, we can't just pull out. We have to stay the course.
- There's light at the end of the tunnel.
- Iraqiazation.
- To timetable or not to timetable.
- Secret peace talks.
- Anyone who expresses opposition to the war is unpatriotic, undermining the war effort, helping the enemy and harming the troops.
- Tet?
Actually, Iraq is worse than Vietnam. According to a Reuters story on the Veterans for Peace Web site, since the war began in March 2003, more American military personnel have been killed than during the first three years of the Vietnam War. The article was published in November 2003, when there were just under 400 U.S. war dead. The war in Iraq is still less than three years old, and the American military's official death toll was closing in on 2,000. The Vietnam War lasted over a decade. There are 58,249 names on the Vietnam Memorial. Do we really want to go there?
Still listening to the radio, I got even more pissed when the colonel from Glendale, mouthing the company line, said we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we're not fighting them at home. "You (expletive deleted)," I yelled at the radio. "Iraq isn't Afghanistan."
The one good thing that came out of the Vietnam War -- well, besides the '60s, which is just a draft call away -- was that Americans learned a hard lesson in humility. We're no better than any other empire at imperialism, colonialism, nation-building or whatever you want to call it. There are limits to even a super power's power. And if you go to war, you better have a damn good reason, like to stop another 9/11. Like Afghanistan.
But many are still in denial about Vietnam, and learned the opposite lesson, or myth, known as the Vietnam Syndrome. America didn't lose the war in Vietnam, we just fought with one hand tied behind our back. We just weren't "resolute" enough, as President Bush likes to say. But ruthless is what he means. As if napalm, carpet bombing, hamletization, defoliation, My Lai, the Phoenix Project, 11 years and 58,249 dead or missing Americans weren't resolute enough. Let's try torture.
As the generation who went through that war, our Vietnam vets are our canaries in the coal mine. And when the Iraq war began, they got Vietnam flashbacks and warned us with crosses in the sand. As the display has grown, maybe some of them also got Vietnam Memorial flashbacks. The feeling of not being appreciated for their sacrifices is still a raw emotion among Vietnam vets, so if they are less sensitive that Arlington West isn't being viewed as a protest than they are to being accused of not supporting our troops, I'm willing to cut them more than a little slack.
And if, to keep up morale, that colonel from Glendale, and the thousands of fighting men and women with him in Iraq, need to believe they are fighting the war on terrorism, I'm cutting them total slack as well. If only it were true.
Several days later I calmed down and realized I should have handled the "Arlington West" story the same as any other "cyclical" story. Every weekend, news outlets do a story listing the top 10 movies at the box office. Every week, they do a story on the average price of gas in their area, and whether it is up or down compared to last week, last month and last year. Every month there are stories on the average price of a home in the local area, compared to the state and national average, and whether the price is rising or falling. Same with employment statistics.
Surely the number of service personnel killed in Iraq is as newsworthy as the percentage of households that can afford to buy a median-priced home. So had I done a story on "Arlington West" on July 4th, 2005, it might have looked something like this:
Volunteers set up 1,743 crosses in the sand at Santa Monica over the Independence Day weekend, each one representing a U.S. service person killed in Iraq.
That's 12 more grave markers than there were last week, said Ed Ellis of Veterans for Peace, which organizes the display every weekend.
So far this month, two Americans have died in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.
Last month, 78 U.S. service personnel died in Iraq, compared to 42 in June 2004. As of June 30, 411 Americans have died in Iraq this year, up 35 fatalities, or 9.3 percent, from the 376 Americans who died in Iraq over the same period last year.
Sounds like news to me. But I should probably clear it with my superiors before sending out something like that. The Bush administration is pretty sensitive about coffins, and someone might complain that focusing on casualties is unpatriotic and harms the war effort. That it is too much like "body count" stories during the Vietnam War.
But Iraq is Vietnam. And until we realize it, Arlington West will continue to grow.
