Vietnam veteran’s words hit home
It’s Friday morning, and I’m on my way to finally meet an ex-cop and soldier who lets me have it now and then with stinging e-mails.
“I’m Disappointed!” said the subject line of Terry Schauer’s latest missive, in which he scolded me for last week’s column about my nephew enlisting in the Marines. “I think you took this opportunity to turn your column into an antiwar rant, at your nephew’s expense. It is belittling not only to your nephew, but to all who serve.”
Schauer was in a minority. I’d say roughly two-thirds of the mail I got on that column was from readers who shared my outrage over the war. But rather than bore you with samplings from the echo chamber, I thought I’d drive up to Westlake Village to visit Schauer, whose well-crafted criticism often gets me thinking.
I’m not the only one he writes to. I once came across a powerful letter to the editor he’d written to the New Yorker. In it, he said he was proud to have served in Vietnam, but he eloquently expressed the complexity of his continued distress over the killing of a young North Vietnamese soldier.
“Killing an adversary removes part of your soul,” Schauer wrote. “Your ‘kill’ turns out to be a young kid much like you -- armed, in uniform, sent forth by his country into battle.
“As time passes, feelings of guilt, sorrow, and remorse accompany the odd, displaced feeling that you have become the person you killed,” he continued. “You see him in your sons, and wonder if fate will someday take them from you to settle the score.”
I pull off the Ventura Freeway and turn into a new development that my favorite pen pal moved to three years ago from Sherman Oaks. Schauer -- tanned, husky and handsome at 60 -- answers the door of his two-story house and introduces me to his wife and 9-year-old son. He then leads me to an upstairs den, which is something of a gallery celebrating his service.
On one wall are letters from presidents Clinton and George W. Bush congratulating him on his retirement from the LAPD in 2000 after 30 years. (Schauer sometimes worked a security detail when the presidents visited Los Angeles). On another wall is a photo of him as a young soldier in Vietnam, and next to it is a medal display that includes a Purple Heart, Silver Star and Bronze Star.
Schauer, who grew up in Lancaster with liberal Catholic parents (his mother still has a photo of JFK in the house), got drafted into the Army in 1966. Just 27 days short of completing a year of duty in Vietnam, he was shot in the left flank and suffered burns when his helicopter was hit.
His mother tells Schauer that he never came back from Vietnam. The changed son who did return wanted to be a cop, at a time when the LAPD didn’t exactly have a clean and sparkling image, and his lefty family gave him more than a little grief. How could he do such a thing?
Because of his war injuries, Schauer had to plead his way into the academy. In 1972, three years after joining the force, he was returning home to Torrance after an overnight shift when he was accosted by an unruly man who appeared to be high. The man shot Schauer in the leg, and the officer returned fire, killing his assailant.
All these years later, Schauer tells me, he has no regrets about that shooting. But the killing of the soldier in Vietnam still troubles him.
“If I woke up tomorrow and was 21, I wouldn’t want to join the Army again,” he says, telling me that time has only made him more certain the soldier he killed did not deserve to die any more than he did.
But he draws a distinction between signing up to serve a country versus serving a president. Schauer took particular offense at my having told my nephew that he was a pawn of President Bush.
“Here’s a 21-year-old kid who, for whatever reason, felt a calling and wanted to be separate from everyone else,” Schauer says.
My nephew’s enlistment, he goes on, may have been a statement about a lack of purpose in his civilian life.
“You talked about kids seeing recruiting posters that glamorize the war, and the government using that to manipulate them. But I felt as if you manipulated him for your own reasons,” Schauer says. In the process, he adds, I insulted the intelligence and honor of everyone who chooses to serve.
If so, I apologize. I didn’t intend to insult anyone other than a few people in Washington, D.C. But I make no apologies for saying from the beginning that the war in Iraq was a disastrous idea, or that a face-saving Bush is still trying to sell aimless policies that will only lead to more bloodshed.
Schauer tells me that after originally supporting the war, he, too, questions the strategy, or whether there ever was one. And he resents that the U.S. is now trapped in a place where there’s peril in both staying and withdrawing.
“The longer it went on, the more ... it looked to me like no one knew what they were doing,” he says. “But as for Bush, I don’t blame him. I think of him as a puppet who sits on the lap of some old-time politicians. He was probably as shocked as anyone when there were no weapons of mass destruction.”
The problem, Schauer says, is that terrorism is a real threat. Figuring out what to do about it might never be easy, but for years to come, we’ll probably need thousands of soldiers to be prepared to go anywhere in the world to defend U.S. interests.
“I’m proud of your nephew,” he says.
“His decision to put on a uniform stands apart from all this, and I respect his decision. It has nothing to do with politics, the president or the war. When you’re on the battlefield, you’re not thinking about what the president is doing back in the White House.”
In his e-mail to me, Schauer had enclosed a piece of advice:
“Write him often, Steve. Tell him you love him. Keep him current on what he likes.... Don’t go overboard on telling him you’re worried about him. That doesn’t help.”
