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Me and Veterans of Foreign Wars

By Bill Ehrhart

About a month after I got to Vietnam (February 1967), I got a letter from my father saying that the local VFW chapter, Forrest-Post Lodge, wanted to make me a member and they would cover my membership fee as long as I was on active duty. I wrote back that it seemed kind of weird to make me a veteran of a foreign war while I was still in the war, and only recently in it at that. My father, who was neither a member nor a veteran, wrote back saying that it didn't matter; they would make me a member immediately and pay my fee. I figured, what the hell, why not, at least I'd be able to get a beer when I got home. I would be 19 and the legal drinking age was 21. And when I got home from Vietnam, I dutifully went to the VFW Post to be officially made a member.

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. My father was a minister. The members of the VFW Post were the fathers of the kids I'd grown up with, I knew them and they knew me. It felt kind of weird sitting at the bar drinking beer with these men who were a generation older than me, and men I'd known most of my life. One of the members was one of my teachers and some were members of my father's church. Very weird. This was compounded by the fact that when I came home from Vietnam, I was an emotional and psychological wreck. On multiple levels, I had nothing to say to these guys, nothing to share with them. I don't remember the conversation at all, I only remember an intense feeling of discomfort.

And then the formal meeting began, and the first thing they did was swear me in as a member. I mean, they literally swore me in. I had to raise my right hand (I don't recall if there was a Bible involved or not) and solemnly swear to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Seriously. I had to swear to the exact same oath I'd taken when I had joined the Marines nearly two years earlier. I did not know this was coming. I remember thinking, "What the fuck is this? I thought I was joining my local VFW, not the National Home Defense Force. This is Perkasie, Pennsylvania, for chrissake! Enemies foreign and domestic? Like the Hippies?" As soon as that meeting was over, I beat it out of there. And I never went back. This was March 1968.

In retrospect, I realize that those men probably meant well, but we had about as much in common as a Maine lobster and the Man in the Moon. Within a few years, I got involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I'm still involved with VVAW 45 years later.

W. D. Ehrhart holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wales at Swansea, and teaches at the Haverford School in suburban Philadelphia.