I signed up for the MS 150 about six weeks ago. The MS 150 is a fundraising bicycling event for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. I received a notice that I was supposed to pick up my packet which contains my rider number, among other things, at a designated time and location. For the past 15 months my social calendar has been a little sparse so I’ve been able to rely on my memory for appointment dates and locations. I’ve been logging things to my Outlook and Google calendars (annoying that they don’t seem to sync) but often don’t look at them, instead relying on my youthful cognitive powers to get me where I need to be when I need to be there.
Yesterday I walked into the building at 600 South Broadway for my 2:30 pm appointment to pick up my materials and the receptionist had no idea what I was talking about. When I mentioned the Multiple Sclerosis Society she looked it up and told me it was located at 900 South Broadway, about .6 miles down the street. I felt foolish but off I trudged, thinking I would prefer a brisk walk in the 85-degree heat over going back to my car and finding another parking place. Fifteen minutes later I entered a spacious, empty lobby save for a resting security guard who failed to acknowledge my presence. I walked past him to the the elevators and saw the the MS Society was on the second floor. I pressed the button labeled ‘2’ several times with no response. I got out and walked up the stairs to the second floor only to find the door locked. When I got back to the lobby I had to disturb the security guard from his rest to ask if he knew where I could pick up my packet for the MS 150 and after he asked me to repeat myself several times he told me that he was a Vietnam vet, was deaf and crazy, and could not hear me through my COVID-19 mask.
I removed my mask and shouted the purpose of my visit at him once again. He told me that the entire building had been off limits to visitors since the beginning of the pandemic. He made a couple of phone calls, reaching only voicemail boxes, while I checked my information and discovered that I was a day early. My packet pickup was scheduled for Saturday. This was Friday. If I had felt foolish 20 minutes earlier I now knew what complete self humiliation was all about.
During the course of our interaction he for some reason mentioned that he had grown up in rural Pennsylvania. “What part of Pennsylvania?” I asked. “I lived there until I was fifteen.”
“Just outside of Norristown.”
“My father grew up in Norristown,” I told him.
“I went to Norristown High School. Graduated in 1963 and enlisted in the Marines. They sent me to Camp Lejeune.”
“My father graduated in, I would guess, 1940 or so. He started college but enlisted in the Marines when World War II broke out and was stationed on a cruiser in the Pacific.”
“How about that,” he said. “No college for me. I joined the Marines right away. Did two tours. I came back after the first one and thought I’d surprise my girlfriend. I surprised her alright. Caught her in bed with two guys. I went right back to the recruiter and said send me over there again. I gotta kill someone and it’d be a lot better if it was a Commie than her. He surprised me, though. He sad, ‘I don’t care about what rank you had before, you’re going right back into ground combat.’ I might have surprised her, but he surprised the hell out of me. But I loved it. I had the time of my life over there. Got to do all kind of shit I never would have gotten away with back here. Hell, they’d have locked me up here for what we did there. You can’t blow up bridges here. We exploded the shit out of bridges. You can’t burn down houses here. We burned down houses everywhere. You can’t kill people here. ” He began firing an imaginary rifle around the lobby.
“I had a student deferment,” I said, “and then got a high lottery number.”
“Well, like I said, no college for me. I’m just a deaf, crazy Vietnam vet. This here’s the perfect job for me. Been doing it for six years, but I’m 75 now, gonna retire in a few months. The past year I’ve just been sitting here in an empty building.” I wondered what he did before taking on this job, but didn’t ask.
“Well I guess I’ll see you tomorrow when I come back on the right day,” I said.
“I don’t work on weekends,” he replied. “You have a good one.”
I walked fifteen minutes back to my car, thinking about the different paths our lives had taken, in spite of our somewhat similar roots and fairly close ages. While I was playing guitar, listening to the Beach Boys and Beatles, learning to surf along Southern California beaches, cruising the streets in my friend’s ’55 Chevy and learning to unhook my girlfriend’s bra strap with one hand, he was witnessing and executing unimaginable horrors and having to convince himself they were being done in the service of some greater good. And now, more than 50 years later, he was still talking about it to perfect strangers, and discussing it as though it was fun. I didn’t believe him for a second when he said it was the time of his life. My guess is those memories have been haunting him his entire adult life.
As individuals we all live with memories that haunt us. Most can be dismissed or repressed sufficiently that we can lead normal lives, but some people have some memories that are too great and too horrible to allow them to function normally. When I think of the United States as a country, and our history of atrocities and massacres weighed against our heroic efforts in both World Wars, I don’t know where the balance lies. It is difficult after a conversation like the one I had with the security guard to not think about the dark side of American history, starting with the treatment by European settlers of Native Americans, the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans by the British, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese, the Civil War, the treatment of immigrants, the oppression of working class people by mining and industrial bosses, the Vietnam War (and others), the continued discrimination of non-whites, and continuing through the injustices that prevail today. Given our history, it’s a wonder we’ve been able to delude ourselves into ever believing we really were the ‘United’ States. But I believe most people in this country hope for and work toward uniting us, and their efforts will succeed.