As The 150th
Anniversary Of The Union Victory In The American Civil War Closes-Marching Through Georgia-For Billy’s
Bummers
From The Pen
Of Frank Jackman
Sam Lowell
knew in his blood-stained heart, his Vietnam War blood-stained heart that as
much as he had come to hate and oppose that war as a participant, as an
unwilling and unwitting tool of forces in the government who were clueless
about ‘Nam, about people who had done them, and him no harm, about people with
which he had no quarrel he could never go all the way in his opposition to
wars. Although after the fact, after his service, he had spent a fair amount of
time in the streets with fellow veterans trying to get the word out that a
monster was on the loose, the American government, a government that had made him,
made his war buddies nothing but savages, trying to work the anti-war veteran point
of view which had some “cred” to all who would listen, half-listen anyway, he
would never really be able to fully make himself a pacifist. Never make himself
a solid almost biblical in the wilderness turning the other cheek man of peace
for all seasons. Go the distance on some “Gandhi trip” as he called it talking
to his old high school friend Bart Webber one night years later when they were mulling
over the question of how far they were willing to go in the search for what the
Quakers called the “peace witness.” Not
when in his head he knew there were causes, just causes that could not be
resolved short of blood and iron if humankind was to roll the rock of progress
up the hill a little, hell, to even get a little justice in this wicked old
world. He favored not that “Gandhi trip” but an idea of some long-bearded robe sheet-clothed
Jehovah all fire and brimstone come seeking vengeance against the night-takers
until the world was gotten rid of night-takers.
That is why
Sam, despite his misgivings about the Vietnam War had never really opposed it
personally via some application for conscientious objector status. Never saw
himself as the friendly Quaker, Mennonite, Amish man of good cheer and no
grudges. Never had been around such people when it counted as he was growing up
although he had heard about their gentility and had seen it in action down in
Pennsylvania Amish country. Even a serious attempt later after Vietnam had
taken so much out of him, had depleted his abstract hates, to become more Quakerly when he had had
a Quaker girlfriend, Susan Rich, failed to his own hubris and sense that fixing
even the small woes of the world required more fire that the “inner light.”
(They would quarrel endlessly if civilly about such matters to no good end and
they eventually kind of drifted apart once each realized that there was no
longer enough glue holing them together.)
What Sam
came to believe, or maybe believed all along and Vietnam and that lovely quiet
Quaker girl just brought his notions to a head, was that his whole blessed life
was stacked against such gentility. He asked himself, and asked Bart as well
since they came from the same poor as church mice neighborhood although Bart
had not faced the ultimate induction crisis since due to a severe childhood
injury to his right leg he was declared by his friends and neighbors at the local
draft board to be 4-F, unfit for military duty, where in his, their growing up
ethos was their room for such thoughts having grown up in working class Carver.
Carver a town where guys volunteered for military service in droves if for no
other reason than to get out of the hick town, get away from being boggers,
cranberry bog workers when Carver was something like the cranberry capital of
the world or else accepted quietly and without rancor induction if drafted. He
would have received no support, from family, friends, including Bart who held
all the same support the government without question at the time and had only
come around when their corner boy friend Jeff Mullins was killed in the Central
Highlands and after Sam had come back to the “real” world to give the real story of the murderous assault on
human dignity he had taken part in, and neighbors. Neighbors who had, as he recalled
to Bart, looked askance at him when in 1966 he had expressed some reservations
about the carpet-bombing of Vietnam back to the Stone Age which was the
effective policy of the military doctrine of the day. Sam frankly said to Bart
that talking night that he would not have known even how to go about doing such
a thing as filing an application for CO status. And if he had known under the
conditions existing in 1966 to obtain CO status, although not a few years later
when though court decisions and changes in draft board policy such applications
were not denied out of hand except for historically recognized objectors, he
would not have been granted that status since he had been raised a Catholic, a
church organization which held to a just war theology rather than an absolute
opposition to war like the Quakers and Mennonites, people who held such historic
pacifist positions.
Although
after Vietnam Sam went through a crisis on the question of war and peace in
which he came to err on the “side of the angels” and he abandoned the Catholic
Church and its version of the just war theory which seemed to more often, much
more often than not, justify all of Caesar’s wars without fail, he still held
to a secular version of that just war theory. When thinking about the matter of
just wars then in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Spanish Civil War had come
to mind since he had been something of a buff about that event as far back as freshman
year in high school when he had written a term paper for a history class on the
subject. In that desperate 1930s conflict which pre-figured World War III whose
struggles enflamed his dreams he saw himself obviously fighting, arms in hand, whatever
arms they had which at times were scanty, for the Republican side against the
Nazi-backed Franco forces. He had dreamed as well that he would have, if he had
been around then, signed up as a volunteer for the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of
the International Brigades, the famous Abraham Lincolns who did heroic battle
around the Jarama and in other tough spots when it counted.
Sam knew from
his readings that those organizations were controlled by the Communists of that
age but while in high school he was as fervent an anti-communist as anybody in
town he would give them a pass for the duration of the war, would have joined
the united front even if he was not sure that he would have supported the “revolution
and war” ideas expressed by those to the left of the Communists and Socialists,
mostly Trotskyists and anarchists of one stripe or another. He was still
bitter, always would be, when the U.S. under the liberal oligarch Roosevelt
called for hands-off, for neutrality in the conflict and the British and French
sat on their hands while Spain died a thousand deaths. It would not be until
later when he had to deal with the American progeny of Joe Stalin in the
anti-Vietnam War movement that he would come to curse Uncle Joe’s withdrawal of
the International Brigades while there was still some fight left in the
Republican forces. No, Sam would not have sat on his hands on that one.
Later,
several years later in the late 1970s when the turmoil which had beset America
had settled down and an ebb tide had taken over in the land postponing to the
indefinite future the question of whether a 1960s-type “new breeze” was going
to come again, a time when he was beginning to make a small name for himself in
the legal profession around the South Shore of Boston he developed a strong
interest in the American Civil War, a strong interest in the importance of the
Union victory and the abolition of slavery. This interest had been kick-started
one day as a result of his going into Boston on a legal matter at the Suffolk
County Courthouse on Beacon Hill and passing what was then a much neglected frieze
of the heroic Colonel Robert Gould Shaw-led Massachusetts 54th Black
Volunteers in front of the State House who did themselves proud down before Fort
Wagner and later in 1865 would march into the citadel of the Confederacy
Charleston, South Carolina singing the John Brown song.
Sam had in
high school based on admittedly sketchy information rather grudgingly admired that
Captain John Brown, late of Harper’s Ferry, and the exploits of his small multi-racial
band of brothers in trying to break the back of slavery by a military
expedition to free the slave and create an insurrection. Once Sam delved into Civil
War history, read more in depth about Brown and what history would have looked
like if he had had a modicum of success Sam saw Brown as the Calvinist
“avenging angel” high Jehovah scourge of the night-takers of his day. In short,
that same thought that he had long held in his mind concerning the righteous agents
of just wars like his Lincolns in Spain. [Interesting to Sam then the cosmic link
of Brown in the 19th century and the Lincolns in the 20th
as the epitome of American just causes revolving around key Civil War names.]
While Sam held such thoughts about Brown and men of action like Brown in
ante-bellum times who were not afraid to rankle feathers he admitted to himself
that he would, unlike with the Internationals, not have very likely joined such
an expedition.
As Sam
studied the military situations, the military strategy and tactics that one must
invariable do to catch any idea of why men, brothers and cousins in many cases,
would get their blood lusts rising so savagely, he did find himself drawn to
the General William Tecumseh Sherman-led march through Georgia to the seas. A
relentless organized march to break the will, break the communications, break
the supply routes, to deny the Confederacy the capacity to produce much of
anything. So in his imagination he could see himself as one of “Billy’s
bummers” marching sore-footed through Georgia, making Jeff Davis squeal, making
Robert E. Lee reach for the white flag. Make old Captain Brown a man ahead of
his times. Yeah, Sam would not have sat on his hands on that freedom fight
either.
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