MAY 24, TUESDAY

PATRIOTIC MOTORCYCLE PILGRIMAGE

I missed the 2 mile Run To The Wall motorcycle parade through Swannanoa, stopping at the Harley Davidson Motorcycle store right next to my CVS pharmacy. I read about it two days later in the Asheville Citizen-Times with photographs.

These are veterans celebrating fallen veterans of the Vietnam War, but really, celebrating all American military veterans. I am a veteran, two years in Germany, not Vietnam. The two mile long parade of Vietnam Veterans on motorcycles is one of four coming from different parts of the United States which will meet at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, the erect black stone slabs with the names of every American killed in the war in Vietnam. They will look at the names of the people they fought alongside who died and will grieve. But they are also filled with pride, with a feeling of intense patriotism and bonding with their fellow soldiers. This war was probably one of the most intense times of their life and they want to relive it and celebrate it.

I think of my friend Jussy Von Wurzbach who fought in the German army and was captured and then spent many years in Russian captivity. He was not able to return to his native Yugoslavia and so came to Germany and married and lived out his life. It was his daughters I visited in Aschaffenburg last fall. For him, one of the most intense times in his life was being with his comrades on the front line fighting Russia. He never talked about his years of captivity. And there is no mention in the Citizen-Times article of the Vietnamese who died in the fighting in Vietnam. There is mention of the way soldiers were shamed when they came back to the USA for taking part in that war. The purpose of the ride is to partly to help resolve the pain of the war and the silence and shame they endured when they returned. The other purpose of the motorcycle ride of 200 men stretching out two miles is to relive comradeship and have a good time together.

I am a veteran but I didn’t fight. I also didn’t feel any comradeship at all. I did my clerk’s duties during the day, and escaped the army every evening. Germany was alive for me and it was there that I met Kathe, but the actual army experience is almost blanked out in my mind. The army was all male without any redeeming qualities for me. I never considered that I was defending my country or democracy. I was simply enduring the mind numbing army experience as best I could. I knew exactly how many days until I would get out, 378 days and a wake-up, 377 days and a wake-up. I did consider what they would have to pay me to re-up for one more year and settled on $1 million. One of the things that disturbed me so much about the army was that it was just all maleness, everything about it was masculine. The yellow buildings without any artwork, the mind numbing make work of a peacetime army, the lack of anything beautiful, no art, music, celebrations. I got mocked mercilessly for having a book of poetry in my locker. For almost all of my comrades, stationed in a town rich with art and music and beautiful restaurants and lovely gardens and elegant architecture with inexpensive plays (in German of course) and concerts, the high point of their time in Germany was when they were allowed out every other night to go to the Dixie Bar or the Mississippi Bar in town where they would get raucously drunk and consort with legal prostitutes. I never went with them. We weren’t comrades in any way. I would gladly have burned my uniform in front of the base when I was discharged if I wasn’t afraid of being jailed for destroying government property.

So my question to myself is how I and these veterans on parade could have such different responses to our time in the military. They are rejuvenated by these parades and make the pilgrimage every year. I was even supposed to be in the Army reserves for four years, I thought, but never contacted anyone and never stepped on a military base again.

I am a little ashamed that I did collect thousands of dollars of a veteran’s educational stipend in graduate school (which most of these riders probably didn’t) and might be eligible for more benefits which I am certain that I don’t deserve but will sheepishly take if I can get them.

These guys seem noble and full of high values and are willing to sacrifice for their country as well as feeling great comradeship for each other.

Maybe it is because I was in the peacetime army and they were in a violent and fear filled conflict that we have such opposite views. But I think my growing up in India experience would have made the killing of Vietnamese and the destruction of their villages a sickening experience which I might not have survived and certainly wouldn’t be riding in a parade to honor.

And yet the way of responding of these men seems to be something that makes their lives richer. They feel honorable, I think they are honorable. But how could we be so different?

Part of it could be that the war for them was a time of male comradeship enhanced by the extreme danger they were in. It was a time of being fully alive. The parade is certainly a time of male bonding. And what could represent raw maleness better than riding unprotected on a powerful motorcycle with the whole Harley Davidson mystique enveloping you? Real men are tough men with huge biceps, tattoos all over and scraggly beards with hundreds of horsepower between their legs riding in a risky fashion down the highway. Sissies read poetry and sit in front of an iPad screen wondering about the meaning of life. The ride itself is an extreme form of male bonding. In the old days the power of the generals was represented by the stallions they rode in the statues honoring them, which is now represented by roaring motor cycles. I certainly am not one of these riders and if I had been there to take photographs I would have been out of place.

But I think the real difference is that our values are almost completely the opposite because of the split world we live in. I think that they represent traditional American values of male, usually white, fundamentalist, Christian nationalism and that feeling gives meaning to their lives. While I have been wrestling in these posts with all the ways that letting go of the old values and discovering values different from my native values makes me feel alive. I think the difference lies in the tension between traditional American values and the new multicultural world that is turning upside down and changing everything. It isn’t a moral thing, everyone is right. (I write that knowing that I sound like an elite, liberal snob looking down on and excusing perceived yahoos). Traditional values take us one direction and multicultural secular values take us in a different direction. Rural people are hanging on and old people find it hard to change, urban people live with change and young people live in a radically different world from their parents. We are all hanging on for dear life even as we are completely polarized and threaten each other.

So that is my personal and idiosyncratic attempt to deal with a motorcycle parade through Swannanoa that I didn’t even see.

Citizen Times Article here. https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2022/05/26/250-veterans-swannanoa-annual-memorial-day-motorcycle-ride-wall-harley-davidson/9933475002/.