Rambo Vs. Vets

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I was walking back to Widener Library through the rain on Tuesday night, when I was confronted by three television vans, a SWAT team, and a crowd of about sixty people. My first thought, having seen America Under Siege the week before, was that some kind of terrorist-hostage situation was unfolding. Life, as usual turned out to be less dramatic than fiction: Sylvester Stallone was accepting an award at the Hasty Pudding.

The crowd of people was a crowd of Vietnam vets protesting Rambo, and the SWAT team, I suppose, was there in case things got out of hand, which things showed no signs of doing. I stopped for a moment, although ankle-deep in slush, to assess the situation. At the time, it really seemed to me that these people must have something better to do on such a rainy night than to protest a movie. The demonstrators waved their signs. From an upper window in the Hasty Pudding building, three students yelled "Rocky, Rocky, Rocky" at them.

And that was when the situation began to seem almost surreal to me. It occurred to me that these students were choosing fiction over life, a well-muscled Rocky-Rambo as hero, instead of the motley reality of the Vietnam experience that was parading below their windows. Rambo was a hero--tough, honorable, simple, yet sensitive, devoted to a cause, and a cause that was right. You could root for Rambo. How could these students not prefer him over real Vietnam vets--all-too-real reminders of the ambiguous nature not only of the Vietnam War, but of human beings in general. These vets were real people, and real people tend to be too complicated to be described as tough, honorable, simple, yet sensitive, devoted to a cause, and a cause that is right. That is why fictional characters make better heros than real people.

The protestors began moving down the sidewalk in an orderly fashion. From the top window one of the students yelled, "Come back, you chickens." I had been standing, watching, bemused, but now I realized two things: first, that the slush I was standing in had seeped into my shoes, and that I was cold; and second, that I was angry.

It made me angry to hear someone 18 or 19 years old, who had never had to face either the draft or the possibility of death in a war no one really wanted to be fighting, call those vets "chickens". It made it worse, somehow, that this student was a creature of privilege, a student of Harvard University, someone who, in my prejudiced mind, I suppose, should have known better. And yet, although I was still angry, I began to feel I could understand his attitude. This student was so remote from the Vietnam experience that he was only an infant when the evening news included body counts as a regular feature--like the weather. And with reality so remote, who wouldn't prefer to think of Sylvester Stallone as the one with courage, as the real hero, and those (now very wet) demonstrators as shams. Stallone was "Rocky", the vets were "chickens". I went on to the library through the rain, but at least one thing was clear--I knew how to score the evening: Fiction: 10. Reality: 0. Gillian Kendall