Charlie Among Us!

[Author’s note: The tagline for this website is “Learn and Become What You Are.” This is not some hectoring advice to the reader. It is an admonition to myself about my purpose in life. I wrote this piece a year and a half ago or so, and tried to get it published somewhere. I found no takers, but it’s a piece I’ll stand by. It seems more topical now than it did even a year ago, so I’m putting it out here. Enjoy!]

My father started wearing a Vietnam Vet baseball cap a few years ago. I'm a Gen-Xer raised by and among Vietnam Vets, and I can't put off commenting on that cap any longer. My father bought those caps and had them embroidered with the name of three outfits he served in, and gave one cap to me and each of his grandchildren.

The war was over a long time ago, according to the calendar. Based on my experience with the one who raised me, for many of the six million or so Vietnam Veterans alive still the war won't end as long as they are alive.

Vets coming home from that war had a variety of experiences. Some came home to overt contempt. I wasn't there in 1971 when my father left the Army, but you couldn't live through the 80's without developing the firm notion that every soldier was spat on by a protester in the airport, as if there were a quota system, or it were part of the customs procedures. Daddy said that never happened to him. For the most part to me it seems like they simply came home to a kind of shamed silence from the country at large.

For those who didn't grow up with their own ears still ringing from the machine gun fire that deafened their father, here's the basic rundown, which I'm sure will still strike a wrong chord with many. It has to be told from some perspective, and this is only mine.

Vietnam is a small coastal country in southeast Asia. For much of its recent history other countries have meddled with its affairs. The Chinese treated the place as their property, then the French came and claimed it as a colony. Somewhere I have pictures of tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling through a Michelin rubber plantation installed by the French tire company.

Ho Chi Minh was a young man from a small town. He witnessed the cruelty and oppression of life under occupation and began a lifelong crusade to end it. He searched the international community for anyone who would help the Vietnamese people.

He sought help from the United States and Woodrow Wilson. He did not find it. He did find help in the Soviet Union, and he took it. The situation reminds me of the dynamic that civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin describes Black Americans facing: they needed help and would take it wherever they found it.

But after we rebuffed Ho and he found help in the Communist sphere, the struggle for a free Vietnam became inextricably identified with the struggle for a Communist Vietnam, and at the same time opposition to a Communist Vietnam became support for colonizers.

For the people of Vietnam it was clearly not a simple choice. After open conflict began, Ho Chi Minh and the Communists won control of the northern part of the country, while the official Vietnamese government retained control of the south, heavily influenced by the United States. Ho Chi Minh’s forces in the north had an official army.

In the south, they mounted an insurgent campaign. The fighters on that front were called the Viet Cong, or Vietnamese Communists. They were 'Charlie' to Americans. Charlie might do anything. Charlie was always trying to infiltrate remote US compounds. When he did the cry would go out, "Charlie in the Wire!" That meant "Charlie is among us!"

I do not think we were on the right side; but in my own view we were not on the wrong side either. The right side would have been for the rest of the world to have let the Vietnamese people sort things out for themselves, no matter how well rubber trees grow there and how great it would be for the USSR to have an Asian bulwark against the Chinese.

But the real choice in front of the Vietnamese people was between Trotsky & Mao on one side, and Robespierre & Uncle Sam on the other. I myself cannot agree that the side that helps people resist being subjected to any flavor of totalitarian regime is the wrong side. I think the results after the war ended suggest a great many Vietnamese people felt similarly. The victorious north liberated the south so thoroughly that hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people fled to the open seas on boatsto escape tat liberation and became a diaspora. I wouldn't know how to call anyone a winner.

Draft Dodgers & Babykillers

I spoke about the war very recently with a man of my father's generation who came from the opposite side of the divide. Real hostility rose in me. I felt he spoke from an assumption that all right-thinking people saw the war the way he did. That’s certainly how I spoke of it to him. I cannot read minds, but I felt a very subtle sharpness coming from my friend as well, and perhaps for exactly the same reason.

But I dunno, maybe I bought enough hostility for the both of us. It's happened before. We are almost fifty years after the end of a war that neither of us was in and that I wasn't even alive for and yet there we were, my amygdala all fired up.

That's not a pointless vocabulary word. The amygdala is the part of the brain that tells us 'friend or foe,' 'threat or benefit,' My amygdala told me this man sitting across from me was a threat to me, a foe. Maybe, but he's been my psychoanalyst for years. I have plenty of reasons to be hostile - he pokes and prods and never leaves me alone to just sink deeper and deeper into my own head, the jerk.

But I felt hostility rising at that moment for a different reason. To me, in that moment, I knew what he was. I had a name for it. He was a Draft Dodger. Well, fair enough. I was sitting on the other couch representing the Babykillers, eve though my military service amounted to about six months in the Civil Air Patrol, Wiley Post station.

Those were some of the names people called each other then, and now. Draft Dodgers and Babykillers. People on opposite sides of a divide develop names for each other, big deal, film at eleven.

But what if it were the act of calling names itself that helped steer the complex situation into a much simpler one: a fight between Draft Dodgers and Baby Killers?

When soldiers arrived in Vietnam they learned all about 'Charlie'. Charlie was the enemy. Charlie was the name for any and every Vietnamese who took up arms against our side. Charlie would do anything. I have heard first-hand testimony of the Viet Cong's atrocities against civilians, accounts that would swamp the rest of the essay if I recounted them.

A counterpart coming at the war from the other side would be wise to remind me about “tiger cages” in the Mekong delta and the brutal neglect prisoners taken by the south were subjected to. And that’s before we even get to My Lai.

That would make me look off into the distance for a moment. But then we would argue about whose atrocities were most justified and least atrocious, and which were matters of policy and which were the result of enraged individuals, and we would be perpetuating the whole squalid thing.

Among Us

Among Us has been a hit game in my family for a few years. I like it because it all happens on a little spaceship. In Among Us the crew of the ship has to find an imposter, one who is not really a member of the crew, but only pretending. The 'real' crew members have to get them out before they ruin the whole thing, and the only way is to send them out the airlock.

After the fight breaks out I'd have to pick a side, and so would you, or both sides would fight over who gets to throw us out of which airlock.

This is the revolution, we’d hear, and you can't stand still on a moving train, or the little spaceship. It's just how people do. But soon enough both sides would be indistinguishable, each side feeling the same about the other.

“The war criminals at the other airlock are chucking out freedom fighters, the fools. They're lost in a mob mentality. Over here, though, we have identified the elements that caused all the trouble in the first place, and we are restoring order and freedom.”

The Restorative Justice has pooled up ankle-deep in some places, almost as much of it as the Freedom Fluid that's splattered on the walls.

Bravo Platoon

I can't think of Vietnam and Daddy without thinking of Oliver Stone and Platoon. Oliver Stone was a soldier who like Daddy enlisted in the Army voluntarily. From his life and experience came "Platoon", one of the greatest movies ever. But sometimes it seems like two movies to me. One is is a movie about a young man confronted by love and death and the impossibility of knowing what might have been. The other is the movie that took away the idea Daddy had that he would see his own experience framed in the same heroic light as the World War Two movies I watched with him. Hellcats, Back to Bataan, Flying Leathernecks, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Victory at Sea, on and on.

These were shows that commemorated the great deeds of our fighting men who went off where Uncle Sam sent them, to fight the foes that kept Sam up nights worried. That's about all that fighting men have traditionally known about what it was they were sent off to do. The social contract that I believe many Vets felt applied to them is that when they returned from war, the dead would be honored along with the sacrifice of the living.

They got something different, and I learned that when you want to make a movie about moral complexities and grayness you can set it in Vietnam and everyone will know what's up. If you want to make a movie about heroism you tend to go for World War Two. That's why I'm less excited by Bravo Platoon. What it meant psychologically to my father. I just wanted him to feel honored.

I used to see Oliver Stone as the enemy. As my enemy. His movie hurt my father, the only one I'll ever have. As I think of Oliver Stone now I think he and I would have an enormous amount in common. He's my father's age, he was a soldier, he lived similar experiences. And he turned those experiences into a story that captures something very profound about love and death among men.

There are few people I'd rather have a quiet chat with, about fathers and sons and the war and memory and guilt. Guilt hung heavy on my father, like bandoliers of 7.62mm M60 ammunition he shot from the open door of his Huey.

But the worst of Oliver Stone's sins against me is that he made it impossible for me to go on having my silly biases about Draft Dodgers. The most critical examination of the Vietnam War came from a soldier on team Babykiller.

That's why Oliver Stone throws such a monkey wrench into the whole game of Charlie Among Us. He was on both teams and wasn't an imposter on either. He saw things one way, and then later he saw them differently. For that he gets thrown out the airlock? Hmmm.

Bertrand Russell famously said something very much like, "When I find out the facts have changed I change my mind. What do you do?"

And what should we do? Throw the facts out the airlock immediately, so we can go on not being aware of them?

Oliver Stone's existence undermines the whole premise of the game, namely that there are different kinds of people, Babykillers and Draft Dodgers, the way there are Chimpanzees and Bonobos, and with enough care one could sort them all out into piles. The twentieth century provided us with plenty of piles of humans to sort through in search of the imposters.

Born Again Bosses

I remember when I really started wondering about all this. I've worked a number of Persuader gigs in hospitals. That’s the actual title of the federally defined and regulated job most often called “unionbuster.” I can’t imagine a better job for learning how people really relate to conflict at work.

Nurses run hospitals, that's what I've seen. Operationally, on a day to day basis, they make it go more than any other single group of folks. Relax, Docs, you're still super important, and you can name all the bones and squishy things inside. But the nurses make it go. Most hospitals have a CNO, a Chief Nursing Officer, who marshalls nursing practice. Most floors and units in hospitals have a nurse manager.

Now, on the union side of things we gave all these folks a single name and a single identity: "The Boss." The Boss, well, The Boss is the one we're doing all this against. All the people who are The Boss and therefore headed to the airlock, they were all nurses for most of their career, and therefore on Team Nurse. Then as their careers progressed, some of those nurses wanted to move into leadership or at least management positions and use their experience that way.

That's what made them The Boss?

When did the transition happen, I wondered, as the whole notion of The Boss lost credibility for me. Was it transmitted by spores? Was it reversible? Sometimes The Boss changes jobs and goes back to being a floor nurse. Are they…no longer an imposter? Again? Were we serious with all this? We didn't encourage plans to harass The Boss, we encouraged plans to harass some specific nurse manager somewhere. I don't know why there should be a point in a nurse's career where their attitudes stop being the attitudes of a nurse with a job and start being the attitudes of The Boss.

Looking at the world in terms of The Boss and Workers is not a way of thinking that can survive more than about 30 seconds of analysis, but I held onto it for years. It lets you fight people.

Among Us reminds me of something else. It reminds me of all the talk I grew up with about whether or not you were 'Saved.' We were Born Again Christians. Our branch of the religion was based on the idea of an epiphany experience where you'd be “born again” by asking Jesus to save you and come into your life.

It's the most fashionable of religions to hold in contempt these days, but it's a religious practice like any other. It does have its own weird features, though. We children tormented ourselves about whether we were “really” saved. You said the words…but then some preacher would say it wasn't enough that you said the words, you had to mean them, really mean them.

Well isn't that special. Not just say them, not just mean them, but really mean them.

It's a recipe for self-doubt and worse yet, for self-appointed commissars among us to ask questions and try and see if you were really Saved.

Or are you an Imposter? We're gonna point this airlock straight at the gates of hell before we chuck you out.

Sheep and Goats

It's not until everyone is dead that the real full-contact game of Among Us gets going.

That's when the God I conceived of as a child casts his vote for who is a Babykiller and who is a Draft Dodger. We were taught that at the end of days, that God would have us all line up and tell us the truth about whether we were real crew or imposters.

God calls them Sheep and Goats. God calls the real crew Sheep. The imposter Goats go out the airlock. I'll put my copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book of organizing wisdom in my pocket and go with them.

Organizing goats in hell would be vastly preferable to submitting to anyone that creates them from nothing according to his own specifications and then declares them all damned and sends them away to burn. That God needs to take a good look in a mirror.

But that’s The Boss for you, archetype edition. I'd go full guerilla insurgent on that spaceship. At my house in Vermont I have three goats, and that’s partially why. I’m an ally.

In the dim corners of our minds, though, I'd wager we all sometimes want to sit there on a throne like the God in my tale, deciding for ourselves once and for all whom we would damn, and whom we would spare.

If I make those corners of my mind less dim, I think like that about other people less often. And you know what? I don't find any traitors Among Us when I stop thinking about people as if they are either sheep or goats. They’re just people who see things I don't see. Sometimes I see things they don't see, and I'd rather not be thrown out the airlock for it.

Fog of War

In Errol Morris' documentary The Fog of War, Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert McNamara recounts a message by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev to President Kennedy at the high-point of a conflict between the US and the USSR over nuclear missiles in Cuba, a country controlled by the USSR and only 90 miles from Florida Man's driveway.

The two sides were at the highest level of alert. Only the actual breakout of nuclear war could have raised the level of threat higher. This was in 1962, and the end of World War Two was about as close in time to them as the election of Barack Obama is to us. The war had not been forgotten by Kruschev. The USSR's experience of the war had defined the term 'bitter.'

McNamara reports the late-night communique from Kruschev to Kennedy went like this:

"We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope [in] which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence."

Kruschev and Kennedy found a way to untie the knot. Each man was a veteran of War and knew the devastation that lay at its bitter end. That's what a sailor would call the frayed end of the rope the two leaders held in their hands. The bitter ends.

Something about the Cuban Missile Crisis let Kennedy and Kruschev see the magnitude of the price they would each pay if they failed to find a peaceful way out. Perhaps the notion of several hundred thousand people vaporized in a few minutes' time penetrated The Fog of War brightly enough to show them how to untie the knot.

It must have been an enormously complex political moment, later as the Vietnam War escalated slowly. It was too slow-moving and too complex for leaders to see that finding a way to untie the knots of war in Vietnam was just as important as finding a way out of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We avoided the Cuban Big Bang but we got the 10,000 Day War and The Wall and Punji Stakes and Doorgunners, Tunnel Rats and The Iron Triangle and Cu Chi and "The famous Marine landing no one's heard of" at Da Nang, and Charlie in the Wire, and we got Hueys, and the distinctive sound of their rotors beating the air into submission.

Instead of one big mushroom cloud, we got millions of individual- and family-sized ones.

It looks to me as if we as a country are just looking for as many knots as we can find, and pulling hard on all of them, without concern for how or if we will ever get them unjammed.

Bayard Rustin: Thrown Out of Two Airlocks

As I thought about Daddy’s Vietnam Vet hat I became uneasy. Why now? And why are so many Vietnam Vets wearing those hats now, and putting Vietnam service ribbon decals on their cars?

I appreciate that my father feels proud of his service now., but something about the whole dynamic unsettles me. It just looks to me like part of why those hats are becoming visible is that the politics of the moment is leading people toward taking what seems like the easy way out and playing a game of Among Us to solve our problems.

I don’t think that’s the easy way out at all. Just the instinctive way: Someone is different, make them go away. It doesn’t matter that much what the difference is; the impulse we have to cleanse our ranks is the same, and so are the results.

We often need more cleansing from what we do to cleanse our ranks than we did in the first place. Then it’s just time for round two: cleanse the cleansers. Among Us is a smash hit because it’s an addictive game, no? It is in real life, for sure.

Kennedy and Kruschchev knew there was no easy way to untie their knot, so they just faced it as something they had to handle with no alternative.

Uncle Ho and President Johnson did not find a way to untie the knot they found in front of them. They pulled on the bitter ends of that rope good and hard and we are still jammed in the knot.

I think I may be sensitized to these dynamics because in my work around organized labor on both sides I’ve more or less been involved in Among Us as a professional player.

It’s what the law and organizing requires: to represent employees you’ve got to take a group of employees from whatever their normal work state of mind is, and move them to an emotional place where each and every one of them chooses a side in an election. They lock in their choice by marking an x on a slip of paper; that simple act makes it harder for each of them to change their minds. It feels like a betrayal of their side.

When I work as a Persuader I live with the label ‘traitor’. I get it. It’s hard.

I came to doubt the whole enterprise of Among Us as a way forward that I myself could push. People make all kinds of decisions for all kinds of reasons, but once you’re in a fight you tend to be more or less seized by your inner primate.

I know the best responses to that line of objections. Organizing, nonviolent resistance, collective action, these are the ways that people have advanced freedom and expanded the notions of human equality. Nothing else works so reliably, and no, it’s not always popular. If the majority didn’t prefer things the way they were there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

Rosa Parks did not just stand up on a bus one day. It was part of a plan. There were goals and a strategy. The overall strategy came out of a group of organizers that included Bayard Rustin as one of the key strategists and thought-leaders. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of him at all, ever. He spent his career strategizing with folks like Martin Luther King Jr. at the highest levels on the most complex issues. He was a lifelong seeker, and a man to be taken very seriously at the highest level.

For me Bayard Rustin has earned a place in the lineage of martyred champions of human dignity and freedom that stretches back to Socrates. He was thrown out the airlock in Athens, Greece in 399 B.C. for refusing to change his thinking to suit the status quo.

If you’ve heard of Rosa Parks, you know Bayard Rustin’s handiwork.

If you haven’t heard of him, it’s because he was a gay black man.

He was thrown out the airlock.

No, he was thrown out of two airlocks, by different teams: one for being black, the other for being gay. The title of his collected works is “Time on Two Crosses.”

Read his words. You’ll encounter a writing voice that rings clear and loud in your mind. It’s the voice of a fellow human who saw injustice and worked hard not only to end it, but to end it in a very specific way: by making the perpetrators encounter him as an equal to them.

Read that again. Bayard Rustin regarded it as a goal to be seen as the same kind of person as the people who were throwing Black Americans off buses, which need no airlocks.

Organizers and activists treated the people who were literally throwing them off buses with the respect those activists demanded for themselves.

As I see it, the most fundamental idea in the mind of the best strategist in the Civil Rights movement was that the way forward was by obliterating the very notion of the game Among Us: there can never be any imposters. My working hypothesis is that there’s not one human being that has ever lived who is one stitch different from me in any meaningful way.

It’s an impossibility, imposters among us. All of us are real crew members. Nothing human can be alien to any of us. So said Maya Angelou. Part of me is aware that as a middle-aged white man from Oklahoma, some might think I have no right to paraphrase Maya Angelou, or invoke Bayard Rustin either one. I am neither Black, nor gay, nor a woman.

But I am afraid that I must respectfully insist, as a fellow human being, on my unfettered right to search for wisdom and light, and to pick them up where I find them. I simply encounter other humans like me when I read the words those two wrote.

My perspective is that of a person who has lived with the charge of being a traitor to my side. I was. I hope I will be again if I find myself in a similar position. I fully support betraying ideas and abstractions in favor of respecting actual human beings. For all I know, some in the union-avoidance world will regard this essay as treasonous. I’m ok with that too. I’ll drink more hemlock if I have to, but my tolerance is off the chart now. As long as it’s not laced with fentanyl I’ll take my chances.

I spent a decade in organized labor, and then I rejected it and went to work on the other side. That started a period of observing the world I knew from the opposite perspective. It also started a period of hiding from myself and denying the life I’d lead in the union.

In my own personal case, I found over time that on the union side I was spending far too much time reassuring myself that the ends justified the means. The ‘ends’ were abstract and in the vague future, but the means were concrete and manipulative to actual living and breathing human beings in the present.

I’m not against unions or companies, certainly, nor even against polarization. Bayard Rustin polarized: people who think Blacks should ride in the backs of buses and people who think they should not occupied opposite poles. Let’s go ahead and find out what’s what.

The trouble is all in what happens after the polarizing.

I’m against dehumanizing opponents to make it easier to throw them out the airlock. And I’m against heaping contempt on them as a way to soften them up first.

Why does this matter to me? Because I know what hard contempt feels like. I’ve thrown shovelfuls of it on others, and I’ve had shovelfuls of it heaped on me, by both sides in my little world. I invited conflict and then was changed by it.

Chagrin is the name for the emotion you feel when you see yourself from another’s perspective and don’t like the view. It’s a hard feeling to tolerate. Sometimes I feel chagrin is the water I swim in, to paraphrase Mao. So is being called a traitor hard to tolerate. Nonetheless, I’d take them both every day of the week and twice on Sundays over playing Among Us any longer.

Respectful Engagement

After the polarizing happens, I’d rather weld the airlocks shut and play a different game: Respectful Engagement.

I invented it for myself while I was doing Persuader gigs. It’s not great as a game, really. There’s no goal beyond playing it, and only two rules: When you’re talking with someone opposite you on some polarizing issue, you just try to discover how they got there, and then try and imagine what kind of circumstances or values it would take for you to come down on that side.

As long as both sides are playing the game, both are winning.

The only way to lose the game is to stop playing.

But start small and develop your skills on easy things, like beer vs. wine. Don’t go straight for the hard stuff.

It feels strange. You might even feel like a traitor. Hemlock is best on the rocks with a basil twist, if it comes to that. You never have to change your mind one little bit, though. Neither does your playmate.

But do it long enough and I’ll bet you both change.

If the Cap Fits

Platoon is on Hulu now. I think I’ll put on my Babykiller cap and watch my favorite Draft Dodger movie.

Here’s one of the outfits Daddy stitched on the caps:

336th Assault Helicopter Company, 25th Infantry Division.

It turns out Oliver Stone and Daddy could be said to have served together.

Oliver Stone was an infantryman in the 25th Infantry Division, in a unit near Cambodia, serviced by the Hueys my father was doorgunning in.

I like to think perhaps Daddy was on a chopper that picked up Private Stone after a patrol. I know helicopter crews regarded nothing in the world as important as getting their comrades out. I imagine Daddy watching the treeline, M60 bouncing on bungee cables while Private Stone clambered into the bird.

I wonder if there might be a picture somewhere with the two of them in it.

That’s fanciful, of course.

But even if such a picture did exist, after all this time it would be hard to tell the two of them apart.