In front of me now are images of Rodger Snyder, who arrives via fading snapshots, random memories and the Ken Burns series on Vietnam, which airs all this week on PBS like an old haunting.
You should trouble yourself to watch it. The old film footage will bring back useful pain. The distant, half-remembered political lies of that era will remind you of President Donald Trump as he goes to the United Nations and casually links the destruction of entire nations with trivializing comic book Rocket Man references, failing to connect any nuclear war consequences to actual human suffering.
Rodger Snyder was one of those who suffered. He was a kid out of Milford Mill High School who lived up the block from me in the 1960s when Vietnam was removing American boys off of street corners by the hundreds of thousands.
Rodger, with no particular plans after high school, imagined Vietnam would be a pretty good place to start his adulthood. He signed up voluntarily and spent a year in Vietnam.
I can see him out there now, in every image on the TV screen. Isn’t that Rodger wading through that rice paddy? Isn’t that Rodger slipping through that jungle foliage with bullets whizzing past?
For 90 minutes a night this week, the war returns to our living rooms, which is where most of us saw it in its original run. Rodger saw it close up. He was a pale kid with blond hair and thick eyeglasses, skinny enough that you could count every rib when he took off his shirt.
He spent a year in the jungle and somehow survived. He’d parachute into jungles and make his way back out, and near the end he was calling home, with the worst of his war behind him, to tell his family he’d be home in three weeks.
“Be extra careful,” his father, Sidney, hollered across the phone lines. “Extra careful.”
His mother, Dolores, prepared for his homecoming. She bought him a little TV for his bedroom and framed a photo of Rodger’s girlfriend. One afternoon, she took a nap and awakened to the sound of knocking on her front door. An Army lieutenant stood there.
“No!” she cried. “Go aw
ay. Just go away.”
She knew. The soldier said Rodger was standing in a field somewhere in a place called Qui Nonh. They never cleared up the rest of it: a shot from some trees, or a small explosive.
The details made no difference. He was gone. He had just turned 20. Rodger — who today has a local Jewish War Veterans post named after him — was one of more than 50,000 American kids who lost their lives, one of multiple more Vietnamese dead on both sides of the war.
They all come back to us in the Ken Burns series. You should watch it. It brings back useful pain. Donald Trump should watch it before he makes casual, comic references to any talk of war.
We’ve heard such language before, and it absolutely killed us.
Get schedule and show information for Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” at pbs.org.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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