he is also the editor of Different Drummers: Military Culture and Its Discontents and, with Eric A. Eliason, of Warrior Ways: Explorations in Modern Military Folklore.
Tuleja applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Skirmishes with Patriotism: Looking for America in the Long Shadow of Vietnam, with the following results:
Sixty years ago, at 24, I declined my government’s invitation to fight in Vietnam. I did so for what I believed were moral reasons, yet saying “the right No” to the war was a decision that had me asking myself for decades not only “Did I do the right thing?” but also “What if I had gone there?” Skirmishes with Patriotism began as an attempt to answer those questions. But the tale grew in the telling, and the book became a meditation that tries to work out more generally how manhood and nationalism come together around the noble infatuation we call patriotism. Ultimately it grapples with the question “What does it mean to say you love your country?”Visit Tad Tuleja's website.
The story begins in the Eisenhower 1950s, when I was a Boy Scout and the son of a U.S. naval officer. The book’s first half tracks my journey from that trusting childhood to the late 1960s when, having escaped the war, I spent some time in Paris and London. When I came home in 1971, I wrote an essay for Chicago Review entitled “Notes on a Homecoming.” On page 99 of Skirmishes, I reflect on that essay. It’s an appropriate glance at the book, for it shows an old man critiquing the certainties of his youth—the same critique that drives the book overall. Here’s the text of page 99:On the facing page of my [Homecoming] essay, a French news photo shows an old Vietnamese woman aiming a rifle while a young woman corrects her technique. Are these the freedom-loving peasants we are there to protect, or a pair of VC irregulars with GIs in their sights? There is no way to tell from the picture, and that tells us something dreadful about the war: It erased the line between our friends and our enemies.In the second half of Skirmishes, I track my engagement with Vietnam and with patriotism from that grim April day to the present. In trying to understand what the war I hated felt like to the young Americans who fought it, I drew on the memoirs of fine writers like Philip Caputo, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, and Karl Marlantes. And I came to see that it was not impossible to reconcile a hatred of war with respect for soldiers. Respect especially for the sacrifices that they make “for God and country.”
Yet this fact seems barely visible to the young radical-in-exile. He is talking of the war as a political evil, not as a place where people point rifles at each other. He is aware, fleetingly, that there are people involved. Not the Vietnamese: They are never mentioned in this diatribe on the war. But there are Americans there, in those “rows of dead soldiers.” In the first pages of the piece, as he sits in the sun playing Hemingway, he is aware of these men. “Comfortable in my cafes, wined, dined, and anodyned,” he imagines the faces of “young men like me who, unlike me, will not return.” It’s a small but telling moment of awareness. Even while riding the winds of smug outrage, he is able to recall, for a second, the break he’s been given.
I am speaking of this young man now as if he is alive, and as if, even stranger, he is not me. That is a way of creating a salutary distance, of owning and yet not owning these decades- old words. Yet it was some version of “I” who set them down. And they spoke some truth to the reality I saw then, to the power and the abuse of power that embroiled my world. I wish I could say I was more concerned with our soldiers than is suggested by the hint of “young men like me.” But that was a mission failed which has taken me most of my life to come back around to. It is part of why my “right No” is still a weight to be borne.
Saigon fell on the last day of April 1975. Within hours, American TV screens aired film of the victors’ tanks rumbling through the streets of the capital—soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City—and of civilians scrambling for space on the Air America helicopters that were spiriting people away from an anticipated bloodbath. The war that had torn us apart was over. We watched its final twitches in sick satisfaction.
The final chapters of Skirmishes move beyond the battlefield to the home front, where as I said in a song written decades after the war, “Elders write the contracts while children close the deal.” Writing this memoir eased the burden I’d carried for decades while convincing me that George Orwell had it right when he said the worst of war propaganda, “all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” Something to remember the next time somebody with a flag pin and no uniform tells you our latest “patriotic” adventure is worth service members’ lives.
--Marshal Zeringue
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