[Oe List ...] Have you been watching the Vietnam series on PBS?

[Terry Bergdall via OE]

Diann,

The series has affected me greatly. It appears that I am a year older than
you since I was a senior in high school during the spring of 1968. By that
time, I was thick into oppositions activities — such as I could do in a
small Oklahoma town. I trace their beginnings back to a trip to the United
Nations and Washington DC sponsored the Oklahoma Conference of the
Methodist Church in October 1965. We heard one story about fighting
"international communism" in DC and one in NYC about the folly and tragedy
of being on the wrong side of a misguided effort to fight a colonial war.
The latter message was from a Methodist Bishop. That trip began my journey
of questioning, and then opposing, the Vietnam War. Throughout 1967, I
passed out petitions, “Negotiate Now,” and solicited signatures until the
HS Principal forced us to stop on school grounds. Then in mid-January 1968
— 10 days before the Tet Offensive — the confrontation came to a boil when
a friend and I wrote a letter to the editor of local newspaper (see
attached) which then released all hell in my hometown:  neighbors
aggressively called our parents and publiclly condemed us “commies." The
Vietnam series has forced me to re-examine what I thought an authenitic
ethical response was then, how I acted in real time of the sixties, and how
my current life reflects a continuity (or not) of that ethical
understanding. For those reasons, I consider the Vietnam series to be a
VERY powerful experience.

The Ecumenical Instite and Order, of course, were ultimately central in my
response to the “tumultuous times” that was described in “The Declaration
of Spirit Movement.” I was very active in the region with EI affairs in1967
when it first published.

BTW, “Stoner” is also one of my favorite novels. So much said about life’s
journey in so few pages.

Terry B.

++++++++++++++++

On Sep 27, 2017, at 11:21, McCabe, Diann A via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
wrote:

Terry and I have been watching the series (usually a day or so late) with
deep interest. I was a junior in high school in the spring of 1968, exposed
only to mainstream headlines and TIME magazine. (I remember reading an
article about a Vietnamese farmer who was overjoyed to find, finally, after
much bombing, earthworms surviving in his field. I was moved to tears
reading this at age 17.) When Terry and I met in the fall of 1969 at
college, he organized the moratorium against the war on campus. I began to
be exposed to the war below the headlines--but not enough to feel that I
understood much, and as J. Wiegel wrote, there was a lot of life going on
around us.

Taking in this series is in many ways like swallowing difficult large
pills--but I find myself so grateful to have these stories to fill in some
of the spaces in our national and global story about this war. And about
all wars. The other night on one of the episodes a North Vietnamese veteran
said, "War awakens a savagery in people." And U.S. veteran, Matt Harrison,
said quietly after describing some horror he witnessed, "The veneer of
civilization is very thin." And I think of a line from one of my favorite
novels, STONER, from a professor commenting on the start of WWI: "A war
doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men.
It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a
people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute,
a creature that we--you and I and others like us--have brought up from the
slime."

Another line from the film struck me came when a North Vietnamese veteran
talked about noticing how American soldiers reacted when one of their
fellow soldiers was killed. He said something like, "They gathered together
around him and comforted each other in respect for the fallen
solder.           Just as we do.        And I realized that we share a
common bond with humanity.        And that gave me something to think
about."
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