Doug Bradley learned that the most important lessons are those that cost the most.
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By Doug Bradley
I learned what I know about peace from the most unlikely of sources. It wasn’t teachers or clergy or pacifists who imparted my life lessons. No, it was my fellow GIs in Vietnam who helped me to understand what peace is, and means.
Paradoxical, no?
Who better knows the value of peace than soldiers whose job it is to wage war?
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Not if you think about it. Who better knows the value of peace than soldiers whose job it is to wage war? Or in my case support the guys who were doing the fighting and dying.
By the time I arrived in Vietnam in November 1970, the U. S. was on its way out of Vietnam. “I ain’t gonna be the last GI killed in Vietnam” was the mantra and there was strong resistance to orders and commands that put soldiers in harm’s way. Scores of GIs, committed to peace, stood up to the military. That took enormous courage.
There wasn’t anything courageous about what my fellow rear echelon comrades and I were doing. We were working in a corporate-esque, bright and shiny, public information office in the U.S. Army’s headquarters at Long Binh, a former rubber plantation 15 miles from Saigon. And while we didn’t necessarily write the truth about what was going on, or going wrong, we could at least stay out of harm’s way.
Unless you were Steve Warner.
Guys like Steve weren’t supposed to be in Vietnam. A Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society graduate of Gettysburg College in my home state of Pennsylvania, he’d been drafted in June 1969 after his first year of law school at Yale. Steve was not an admirer of U. S. policy in Vietnam and had a first year law student’s keen sense of actions that were lawful and unlawful. But, unlike the rest of us Army “journalists” who cursed the military under our breath, Steve put his principles where his mouth was and took every occasion to go out into the countryside and see what was going on. While he was out there, Steve interviewed, photographed, and bonded with the grunts who were doing the fighting and dying, seeing himself as Vietnam’s Ernie Pyle, the great WWII war correspondent.
“What sold me on Ernie Pyle,” Steve wrote his parents, “was a book by him . . . it said ‘He hates war but loves the men who have to fight them.’ That about sums me up too!”
In retrospect, Steve’s forays into the field only added to his consternation about the war. He held his ground when he was told by the Army brass to “paint out the beads” at the bottom of one of the photographs he took when he was out in the field. During this time (1970-71), many soldiers wore a plethora of physical adornments, including peace symbols and “Love Beads,” a direct violation of military dress regulations.
Steve shot the photos the way he saw them, understanding better than the brass that many of his fellow soldiers wanted peace. And so the military “censors” came down on him – “remove the beads from the photos!”
Steve kept the beads in the photos, and in doing so let the rest of us know that some of our fellow GIs very much wanted peace.
You can find Stephen H. Warner on Panel W5 Line 104, on the Wall in D. C He was killed in an ambush near the Laotian border on February 14, 1971. At the very least, he gave peace a chance . . .
Doug Bradley is a Madison, Wisconsin-based Vietnam veteran who has written extensively about his Vietnam and post-Vietnam experiences. Doug was drafted into the U. S. Army in March 1970 and served as an information specialist (journalist) at the Army Hometown News Center in Kansas City, Missouri, and U. S. Army Republic of Vietnam (USARV) headquarters near Saigon. Following his discharge and tenure in graduate school, Doug relocated to Madison where he helped establish Vets House, a storefront, community-based service center for Vietnam era veterans. Doug is the author of DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle and co-author We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War.
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Photos: US Army Africa and Doug Bradley