Memorial Day contrast
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
As I drove north in Grand Teton National Park yesterday morning, I listened as Fish-mon of KMTN played Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon” on the radio in honor of Memorial Day.
The lyrics, written from a soldier’s perspective in Vietnam, convey some powerful imagery of combat and camaraderie:
We came in spastic like tameless horses
We left in plastic as numbered corpses
And we learned fast to travel light
Our arms were heavy but our bellies were tight… We had no cameras to shoot the landscape
We passed the hash pipe and played our Doors tapes
And it was dark, so dark at night
And we held on to each other
Like brother to brother
We promised our mothers we’d write
As I imagined what it was like for these men hunkered down in the midst of war, I passed the Jackson Hole Airport, where Air Force Two was parked on the runway. How fitting, I thought, that the great warrior Dick Cheney is resting comfortably in Jackson Hole for Memorial Day weekend, while the 150,000 or so U.S. troops he foolishly sent to Iraq are fighting for their lives.
Like many in east Jackson, I had been awakened around 7 a.m. by Cheney’s convoy of Blackhawk helicopters thundering over town. As if the luxury vacation weren’t infuriating enough, the thought of burning aviation fuel to go fishing or play golf was like injecting Napalm into one’s veins.
We all go down together, right?
