Green leaves of summer turn red in the fall
To brown and to yellow they fade
And then they have to die
Trapped within the circle time parade
Of changes.

—Phil Ochs

The war in Vietnam came to me in songs. It came to me in the night like a bat changing into Dracula. The early years of the Vietnam War did not replace my ideas of war shaped by watching World War II movies. I was afraid of Nazis and Germany. My parents being West Indians provided cocoon protection. I knew as much about Vietnam as I did about Mississippi and the Southern Civil Rights Movement. I lived among immigrants. We went to sleep dreaming about making money and becoming Americans.

If America went to war, it had to do so without us. I went off to Christopher Columbus High School in 1965. I knew nothing about Watts exploding and very little about the Harlem riot of 1964. But I did know about the draft and how it wanted to go steady with me when I reached 18. At Columbus High School, the students were mostly Italian or Jewish. I was part of a small number of African American kids who took the train up to that part of the Bronx, where there were parks and clean streets. There was one Black teacher at the school, and he taught physics, and so we had nothing in common except our Blackness.

It was while attending Columbus that I seriously started listening to the music touched by the war. I started with Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. It soon became Phil Ochs and Arlo Guthrie. The war in Vietnam had entered my ears. I wasn’t just listening to ballgames on the radio; I had moved up to FM and WBAI. I graduated from Columbus early and took a job working at Bookazine, a wholesale book distributor. I was looking forward to attending Howard University in the fall of 1968. I knew nothing about the Tet Offensive, but the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in April and June of 1968 changed my thinking and my life. I attended a peace demonstration in Manhattan near the United Nations. I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I didn’t want to be drafted. I didn’t want my number to be called.

As the war counted its candles, year after year, it was the Army and the Marines that carried the weight of the fighting, with more Black Americans visible in those services than in the Navy and Air Force, and more Black bodies among the dead being shipped home in caskets. I had a cousin who enlisted in the Air Force, and I picked up a few recruitment brochures from the Coast Guard, trying to play it safe. But my number was never called.

Many years later, I would stand in front of the Vietnam Memorial. I would stare at the black shining wall filled with the names of the departed. I would watch people looking for the names of loved ones, tracing their names, leaving flowers by their names, as they wept into stone. I knew no one on the wall.

After songs came movies, and so for me the Vietnam War was something I watched with actors playing corpses and actors playing heroes. I noticed how, in many of the films, the Viet Cong were never seen. The enemy was invisible. So, largely, were the Vietnamese. Only the American dead mattered.

But history is not invisible; it’s a living, breathing thing. It teaches us about our mistakes and reminds us of our collective ignorance. I remember singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” as if it was a Motown hit. I was unaware of the sadness in the lyrics. It is a sadness now that keeps me awake as I read about Gaza and Ukraine. What do we learn from war? And is our nation still divided as much today as it was before?

On my bookshelf is a copy of Myra MacPherson’s Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. I like Myra. I interviewed her back in 2018. Stuck inside her book are the questions I asked her:

“What might a reader today take away from your book that was written in 1984?”

“What have been the lessons of the Vietnam War?”

We should have learned it is impossible to kill or eradicate an idea or to win a war against people fighting for self-determination. But in my notes about the opening remarks I made before asking Myra my first question, I wrote, “Since Vietnam, Americans have been fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia.” And now we have a president who dreams of empire and real estate, of owning Panama, Greenland, and Canada, of ethnic cleansing and beach hotels in Gaza, a flood of jingoism less than one hundred days into the new administration, and during the fiftieth anniversary of the ending of the war in Vietnam. The Trump regime’s desire to retake the Panama Canal evokes for me an image of someone coming out of the men’s room and drying his hands with the Monroe Doctrine. And wanting to make Canada the fifty-first state is an insult to me and everyone living in the District of Columbia. We are the fifty-first state, as we have been demanding for years. Take away our Black Lives Matter mural and plaza, but give us liberty and home rule.

What have we learned?

How do we teach the lessons of the Vietnam War when America suffers from amnesia?

I’m afraid the chapters about the Vietnam War in the history books that will be given to a new generation of students will be even shorter than the chapters that describe slavery. The Vietnam War will only be described as a time when anti-war protests weakened our nation, and we lost because of domestic politics and because, in a war where civilian casualties outnumbered military casualties at least three to one and atrocities such as My Lai took place, we fought with too many restrictions on the military—something Pete Hegseth, the former National Guardsman and Fox host who runs the Defense Department, intends to reverse by advocating for leniency toward soldiers accused of crimes against civilians and a loosening of the restrictions in place to prevent civilian casualties. This refusal to learn is the shadow of the Vietnam War that hangs over us now as our nation appears to be losing its soul and the Trump regime demonstrates not only how to ignore history but how to erase it, as if it’s an easily edited website.

How do we avoid the despair that fills the air? How can we hope and pray there will be no more wars.? Have we become a nation that can no longer breathe? One cannot speak of Vietnam without remembering how divided we became as a nation. Did we ever heal?

When viewed from above, Maya Lin’s V-shaped black granite wall honoring those who died in Vietnam looks like a wound in the earth. A wound doesn’t disappear. The scars of war will always remain as a reminder that what makes us sadly human is our failures. Yet it’s our ability to love that gives meaning to our lives. It’s the heart’s desire to change and forgive that brings joy in the morning.

E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He was given a 2020 congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism, awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. In 2024, Miller was awarded the Furious Flower Lifetime Achievement Award.