The Crushing Weight of Goodbye

Now comes the hard part, after the flags and candles, after the speeches, after the angry hubris of a wounded nation. Now come the goodbyes.

We see tears and kisses at homes, at airports and at docksides as our young go off to those places where there are no speeches, only vast areas of uncertainty and death.

Terrorists left a hole in our nation where the twin towers once stood, and now they are leaving another, the space occupied by those who now must abandon families and jobs to make war on shadows.

Saying goodbye to them is hard to do.

Those of us who have been there know that war takes on a different tone when the troop ships leave the shore. Pain replaces patriotism in combat, and shouts of vengeance become the cries of those whose lives are left in the shattered paths of moving armies.

Henry Miller wrote, “How different war would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.” As a veteran, I’m here to tell you a little something of what I know about it.

I was a small child when the Second World War began, but I remember as though it were an hour ago saying goodbye to a brother-in-law drafted into the Army. We were at a train station in Oakland on a drizzly morning, and a sadness as gray as the skies lay over those who had gathered there.

About 100 draftees and their families clung to each other in embraces that only a strident call to duty could end, and war creates the most strident of calls for the most terrible of duties. When it was time for them to leave, my brother-in-law touched my shoulder and said, “Take care of your sister,” and disappeared onto the train.

That moment, with its grayness and its finality, became a part of the boy growing up, a memory defined as much by its loneliness as its drama. I walked away from the station feeling as though something had been torn from inside me that would never be replaced.

Years later, as Marine Reservists were called to action, the scene would be replayed in much the same way, but this time I was the central character in a cultural passion play that has repeated itself so often in human history.

That memory too is strong. The same sister I had accompanied to a train station just 10 years earlier was now saying goodbye to me. My wife, barely 20, was clinging to me the way my sister had clung to her young husband just a decade before.

This time it was the war in Korea. This time it was a train station in San Francisco. This time we were wrapped in ribbons of fog that chilled the morning air. But the differences became less significant in the fields of conflict.

My brother-in-law had come back physically whole but emotionally wounded. Horror had created an emptiness in him. He died an old man, unable to talk about the blood that shrouded his memories in deep red until the very end.

The war in Vietnam was next, and we said goodbye to other young men, my nephew among them, whose expression I remember as one of bewilderment as he boarded a plane. There had been a party the night before. The goodbyes were noisy as a rock band played, but now they were quiet.

He went off to war a promising golfer, shelves filled with amateur trophies, and returned wounded, barely able to walk, his goal of turning pro ended by the shrapnel of a single grenade.

What do they teach us, these repetitive goodbyes? Nothing, apparently. In my lifetime, America has lost more than a half-million young men and women on fields of combat in Europe, the South Pacific, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East. Millions more, military personnel and civilians, have joined them in death around the world.

And yet, once more we stand at the points of emotional embarkation, kissing our soldiers and sailors goodbye, waving a last wave, crying tears of fear and sadness. Are the lives we give to this new cause worth the grief?

We look back to the Second World War and say yes, it prevented a new Dark Age. But the others? Korea remains divided, and Vietnam is in the hands of those who were our enemies. In the Gulf War, we saved Kuwait, but Saddam Hussein still owns Iraq.

The politics of war play on a different plane than its realities. Nothing said it better than a Bill Mauldin cartoon just before Korea. It showed two very old and wizened men at their club, sunk into deep leather chairs. One is remarking to the other, “I say it’s war, Throckmorton, and I say let’s fight.”

I think about that today as I remember the face of a friend who was dying in my arms, holding in his own intestines, his eyes staring into mine, pleading, wondering, seeing something I couldn’t see, and then at last collapsing into himself.

All I could think of saying to him as his life ended was a tearful “Goodbye.” It remains today, as it was then, such a lonely word.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He is at al.martinez@latimes.com.