I post this on my blog every Memorial Day to remember my two friends who died in the Vietnam War. SW

Today, I will again lift a pint of ale in memory of my two friends and their comrades who died in Vietnam.

I honor them without honoring the aggressive and unjust war in which they fought.

I don’t know what their reasons were for joining the military, maybe it was simply that the draft gave them no choice, but it really doesn’t matter now. What I do know is that their lives were unnecessarily cut short.

As a young peace activist in the late 60s, I probably didn’t always make a distinction between the soldiers fighting the war and the war itself. The soldier and the general were equally responsible as I saw it.

But I think differently now. I place the main responsibility for war on its architects in high places and a social system – capitalism – whose logic is to expand, dominate, and make war.

But I think differently now. I place the main responsibility for war on its architects in high places and a social system – capitalism – whose logic is to expand, dominate, and make war.

Ricky and Cotter — my two friends who lost their lives in Vietnam — were near the bottom of the food chain of war making, nothing but cannon fodder. They were working class kids whose lives didn’t count for much in our government’s war plans. Neither was born with a silver spoon in their mouths, which is why in no small measure they ended up with a gun in their hands so far away from where their hometowns.

I will always wonder what kind of lives they would have lived had they safely returned. With no hero’s welcome, no counseling waiting for them, no easy slide into a well paying job, I can’t help but if wonder if they would have had the internal resources and external support to come to terms with their war experience and live productive lives?

I easily (perhaps unfairly) doubt it, because each of them was not that different from me, and I have no confidence at all that I could have made that transition. It was hard enough to grow up at that time, even without the ghastly and up close bloodletting of Vietnam on my emotional resume.

I wish, though, that they had that chance. I wish that their lives hadn’t been cut short doing things that no one should do. I wish that they had the opportunity to live long and joyful lives.

I miss them. I celebrate them. They were “my buddies, my friends.” I wish they could join me at the Bronx Ale House today for a pint in their honor, although knowing them, I suspect, a single pint wouldn’t quite satisfy them, or me for that matter.

I also hope that we could toast to the millions in our generation who opposed the war as well as to their comrades who never made it back from Vietnam. Both deserve to be honored.

Finally, I like to think that the three of us could clink glasses to the people of Vietnam who suffered so much during and after the war, and who are now rebuilding their country in conditions of peace.

Maybe that would be too much to expect. Unfortunately, I will never know. They will join me only in memory this afternoon. I wish it were different, but I will treasure their memory anyway, as I wash down my pint of ale.