Our Good Life Carries a Cost, and We Can’t Know Who Will Pay It

When I was growing up in northern New Jersey in the 1950s, my family never missed the parades on Memorial Day and July 4, which always included the Gold Star mothers, who had lost sons or daughters in war.

When World War II ended, these women--and perhaps most other Americans--believed that Gold Star motherhood would end with them. Of course it did not.

Fast-forward to July 1969: I stop in to visit my folks the afternoon before flying to Ft. Lewis in Washington state. My mother says, “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.” She wishes me luck, and the image fades. My father is not in it.

A year later, my part of the war in Vietnam is over. I am unscratched and whole, the second son to return from the war unhurt, though not unmarked. I walk into the living room of the house in Teaneck, having come directly from the airport. My uniform is new, the only time I will wear it. My father is upstairs, but I hear him moving. He starts slowly down, and I am shocked.

This once athletic man, still slim and wiry, grips the banister and guides himself down the staircase one slow step at a time. His body is broken by a stroke suffered months before, and a cruel palsy distorts his face. He is close to tears. For the first time I can recall, he hugs me. If he said anything, I don’t remember it, but he conveyed his message: “My boy is home.” Thirty-six days later, he was dead.

My father was 59 when he died, retired after 42 years with Standard Oil. I was 27. Now, at age 59 myself, I still ponder the cost of the war on him and on the other fathers whose sons went to Vietnam. Especially, I think of those whose sons came back in caskets or wounded in body and spirit and who still fight the demons that came home with them. Although my point of reference is Vietnam, the principle applies to all wars.

I suppose the way mothers and fathers respond has much to do with the psyches of women and men. Gold Star mothers share their loss and somehow gain solace from their common grief. For the fathers, who perhaps know firsthand what their child has gone through, the force of grief may be too powerful to risk releasing it, even if sharing the pain might help. The wound never heals, and it will not bear reopening by talk of war and loss. Public grief is not an option for most, and their private grief is wrapped up in the unfulfilled life that had once held so much promise. Whether the war is popular or reviled makes no difference. The costs are identical.

Memorial Day, 2002: We have almost forgotten the meaning of this holiday, which began as a day for decorating the graves and recalling the sacrifice of the Civil War dead. Many of us will go to the beaches, mountains and malls. Other Americans, however, will march in or watch parades and attend commemorations at the village green or at national cemeteries.

But all of us will recall the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001, the most recent reminder that all we have in this land comes at a cost, and we never know who will pay it.

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David J. Rabadan, a retired Foreign Service officer and former high school history teacher, now works on a State Department program to publicize the dangers of land mines.