A Day of Pride, and of Sorrow, and of Horror

With every breath he takes, Winston M. Roche remembers the horror of war. He remembers being gassed. He continues to breathe the effects in coughs and painful wheezes. His legs were so badly burned during World War I, which filled his teen-age years, that the scars remain at age 90.

“War is a terrible, evil thing,” Roche said Friday after addressing World War I veterans and their spouses at a Veterans Day luncheon at a cafeteria in East San Diego. “The most distressful aspect I experienced was the continual, nagging realization that all of this might end today--that I would never see tomorrow.”

Roche paused. His ice-blue eyes filled with tears.

“I loved my country, but I really loved my family,” he said. “I just didn’t want to be without . . . my family. The soldier’s life is entirely different from that of the average citizen. You don’t know if you will see tomorrow, and the feeling never really leaves you.”

The Rev. William Mahedy observed Veterans Day on Friday. Mahedy is the Episcopal chaplain at UC San Diego and San Diego State

University and the author of “Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Veterans.” He is also a Vietnam vet and a counselor of veterans from five wars. He recently returned from the Soviet Union, where he counseled soldiers returning from Afghanistan.

Mahedy said the untold truth of Veterans Day is that, while it may be noble to serve one’s country by going to war, any war has a way of haunting people for the rest of their days.

“The Vietnam veterans’ problems of readjustment--coming back into society--made them unique, but combat-related stress was not unique,” Mahedy said. “Combat issues rest with all veterans.”

In 1977, Mahedy conducted a survey while working for the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles. He talked with veterans of the Spanish-American War, which began in Cuba in 1898 and ended in the Philippines four years later.

“I visited this one old guy who was 99,” Mahedy said. “He was working through, as if it were yesterday, the death of his best friend, who was killed in the Philippines in 1902. He dug a grave with a bayonet, and 75 years later was tortured with unresolved grief.”

Mahedy remembers talking for hours one afternoon with a group of World War I vets who wouldn’t let him go. They spoke of their moments in the hell of that war as if it were yesterday. Their need to talk had been obfuscated by society’s need to mythologize and romanticize war, which Mahedy believes occurred with every war before Vietnam.

Wounds Are Masked

“The mistake we make is going to war in the first place,” he said. “The second thing is, because of the great victory that World War II was, it masked over the psychological and spiritual wounds of war. So much so that many of the victims dealt with it privately, in deeper anguish than they would have otherwise. World War II led many down a road of alcoholism and divorce.

“I’ve known World War II vets who still can’t sleep at night--they’re running from the Germans, or feeling guilt over taking no prisoners by blowing up a bunker of Japanese with a grenade.”

Robert Van Keuren is executive director of Vietnam Veterans of San Diego. He believes in patriotism, in the flag, in wars that “need to be, must be fought,” but never, he said, at the cost of forgetting the nature of war.

“War is the admission that we failed as a people,” he said. “We failed as nations, as a world community . . . failed in our attempts to live together peacefully. There’s nothing more denigrating than war, which means choosing up sides and killing people. Talk to World War I vets, to vets of Guadalcanal and Khe Sanh, and they all have essentially the same story: that there is nothing worse than war.”

Even so, Van Keuren is a proud veteran. He served in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970 as a machine gunner on a river patrol boat. He led more than 200 missions near the Cambodian border. He received the Purple Heart and Navy Commendation Medal. In many ways, he said, Vietnam was the high point of his 39 years.

Every day though, he sees the legacy. Of the nearly 6,000 homeless in San Diego, 35% are said to be veterans, and the “vast majority” of those are Vietnam-era veterans, he said.

His Worst Moment

Van Keuren said that, every time he thinks of “bombs bursting in air and the rockets’ red glare, which means something to me,” he visualizes a homeless vet, or simply looks across the room, where one may be sitting. He remembers his worst moment of war, which was watching friends die “and wondering who would be next.”

“I’ve known parents who have raised a child, nurtured a child and had that child taken from them. There’s nothing sadder than being at the wall (the Vietnam memorial) in Washington and watching a middle-age couple sobbing next to their son’s name. At that point, you have to ask why.”

Winston M. Roche has silver hair and a leathered face and the faintest trace of a stubbly mustache. Some of his friends were teasing him Friday about “the Don Johnson look--at your age.” He wore medals on his coat. His hands trembled.

“It makes you an elite member of society to have placed your life in the service of your country,” he said. “As a citizen, you can do no more than that.”

As a soldier, Roche (who now lives in North Hollywood) was gassed twice and machine-gunned once.

“I marvel at how close the bullets came to hitting my head,” he said with a shy smile. “They came close to hitting my head when they tore through my helmet.”

Burden of Guilt

Royal L. Thomas, 94, another veteran of World War I, said the worst for him was feeling that, if a friend got hit and he didn’t, he must have done something wrong--that it was somehow his fault, his responsibility, his burden of guilt.

“But war was exciting,” he said, and his voice drifted off.

And so it was and is, Van Keuren said.

“The mythology of war suggests there’s this great rite of passage in charging up a hill for one’s country,” he said. “In the final analysis, all you’re doing is staying alive to be able to kill somebody else. And you know what? Sometimes that feels good. In the chapel services, we were essentially praying, ‘God, let me live so I can kill somebody else before they kill me.’ What kind of statement is that?”

Mahedy said a mistake is made in “overdoing” Veterans Day. He preferred Armistice Day, which he said celebrated peace. Veterans Day officially replaced Armistice Day as a national holiday several years ago. Mahedy said that switched the focus from peace to war.

“To honor veterans is fine,” he said. “But there’s a status given to wars and fighting wars that somehow . . . allows them to continue or seems to honor their continuing. It’s the making of our warriors as great heroes that bothers me. ‘Cause there’s the notion that it’s all right to do it again--like it’s how we achieve manhood or greatness as a country.”

Van Keuren said it’s important to understand how and why we fight for a country.

“When you go to war, the flag’s not flying and the band’s not playing,” he said. “Not when you’re lying there, watching a friend bleed to death and you’re hoping to blow somebody’s brains out. At that point, there’s nothing but a lot of pain . . . nothing but the worst of life.”