A Report on My Trip to Fargo

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I got off a Delta flight in Fargo, N.D., last week and heard a brass band playing “Over There” and found the terminal packed with hundreds of people waving flags, holding up signs, welcoming a planeload of men returning from Washington who, I was told, were veterans who’d gone to the capital to see the sights. Many of them were old guys like me, Vietnam vets, and some were younger, from the Iraq and Afghanistan era, and the crowd was very boisterous and happy as they came down the escalator and the thirty-piece band, sitting at music stands, played through “From the halls of Montezuma” and “When the caissons go rolling along” and “Off we go into the wild blue yonder” and “Anchors aweigh, my boys” and the crowd was clapping along with these old upbeat tunes about the giddy pleasure of going off to war.

Little kids got caught up in the spirit of the moment and so did I, even though it meant that my baggage took forever to show up. A woman walked over to the band and yelled, “You sound great!” which simply wasn’t true — they sounded like a bunch of middle-aged men who enjoyed playing music without having to practice regularly, but it was such a happy occasion, I had assumed at first it was for a returning victorious football team or perhaps National Guardsmen returning from a tour in Kosovo, but no, it was simply for old vets returning from a vacation trip.

It’s rare that you hear George M. Cohan’s “Over There” played these days due to the sheer stupidity of the words —

So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.

— so utterly and absurdly incongruous with the brutality of the collision of European empires in 1917, the expense of 20 million lives, men fighting in mass formations against modern weaponry, the Allied victory that laid the foundation for the Nazis and Holocaust and World War II, a dance of death, a jaunty Broadway tune celebrating masses of men dashing from trenches across open fields into bursts of machine-gun fire, all to preserve a rickety antique class of dukes with chestsful of medals and pom-poms on their hats.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody wrote a clever upbeat song about the glory of Vietnam.

Carry on, carry on,
Jim and John, greet the dawn, weapons drawn,
Don’t be slow, off we go to Saigon.

I speak as a draft dodger. I was ordered to report and did not and never paid a price for it. I have told this to men who served in Vietnam and they said, “You did the right thing.” A cousin who served there wrote back: “Do whatever you need to do to avoid coming here.” Some people had hangnails, some got a psychiatrist’s excuse, some dropped acid before the interview, some joined the Guard. I knew people who went and all these years later it’s clear how it messed up their lives. They came back torn in invisible ways, having seen friends killed in a stupid war to uphold the reputations of dishonest politicians. Look at the Pentagon Papers that Daniel Ellsberg smuggled out to the press, detailing the dishonesty of our government to its own citizens.

The people at the airport were having a party out of affection for their uncles and brothers, and that’s a sweet thing. But I saw some ancient vets in wheelchairs who seemed confused by the cheering and a little worried about how they’d find a ride home.

I know people who live in Ho Chi Minh City and have a nice life there and it seems that the communism we sent men to Vietnam to fight turns out to be simply another impenetrable bureaucracy in which, like the Cosa Nostra or the Republican Party, it helps to know the right people and say the right things at all times without exception.

I was ordered by my government to report for basic training and I violated the law of the land and I got away with it and in fact thrived mightily, and men I knew obeyed the law and suffered horribly for it.

A couple nights later, I did a show at an amphitheater nearby and 600 people stood and sang “America the Beautiful” and the Battle Hymn of the Republic a cappella as the sun went down. They sounded fabulous. It’s a great country, folks. But what strange times.

Garrison Keillor © 09.30.24