Audie Murphy's Argumentative Essay On Greeting

Billboards along I-35 leading to Austin proclaiming “Bring Lyndon Home” made me laugh almost uncontrollably. A few weeks before, I had depleted the appeals to my draft board to extend my deferment for another semester, and I knew what that meant: the letter beginning “Greeting” would be in the mail shortly. After a spring break road trip from my East Texas college in Commerce to Marfa and Big Bend, I was stopping in Austin to tell a friend goodbye before my draft notice arrived.
I wasn't sure what to think about the war in Vietnam. I had been raised to believe in my country and its leaders. I had read about military heroes and had seen Audie Murphy, an orphan boy from Texas, in To Hell and Back at least five times as a kid in the 1950s.

I had grown up tempted by the belief that each generation had a war in which the boys became men. I had been brought up believing Americans had a God-given right to lead the world and that American leaders sought truth and justice against the forces of darkness, in this case the Communists working through the Vietnamese. And growing up, I had also learned to believe that the little peoples of the world needed our help in learning to walk the straight and narrow way.
So I would soon have to decide what I would do when I got that dreaded letter. Could I forsake my country and go to Canada or accept the draft notice knowing that I would have to support a war many had decided wasn’t worth the costs? I felt split by fears of participating in the war and of war itself and by my desire to experience life. I also feared being exiled from my family, my country, everything that made my history.
It wasn’t just the fear of losing my country, but I also thought of my grandfather, the first Jefferson Bowie Adams, the man for whom I had been named. Granddad was a veteran of World War I and then worked for the railroad before settling on his ranch in Mariposa, Texas, to raise a few Herefords and a lot of hell with his neighbors. He was a curious combination of Southwestern independence and patriotism, and he spoke with pride about his military service. He had joined the cavalry before the war broke out, and he would bring out his pictures of himself in uniform riding his favorite mount, Chief Bowles, named for the leader of the Cherokees in East Texas. Then he would tell war stories about the Argonne Forest and Bayou Woods. They were still called cavalry units, even though horses weren’t effective in war by then and were mainly ceremonial. So it was for Granddad that I, Jefferson Bowie Adams II, found myself in this quandary, knowing that if Granddad's namesake hightailed it for Canada, his disgrace would be too great a burden for him to carry and maybe for me to live with. This trip was intended to help clear my mind and decide on the path I would take.
When I got to the apartment overlooking Lake Austin where my friend James lived, I asked him about the billboards along the interstate.
“There’s a local politician named Fagan Dixon who’s running against LBJ’s man for Congress, Jake Pickle, but he’s really running against Johnson and the war. Some of his hippie supporters came up with this slogan that has caught on here.”
Decidedly antiwar, James had joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and participated regularly in protests against the war. I knew his point of view but thought it would help me decide if I could hear his arguments about resisting the war, since I had heard the other side regularly from my family. James knew the purpose of my trip and began his discussion before I got my suitcase in the door.
“Look,” he said, “our friends are dying over there for unclear reasons. The country shows no unity of purpose, and the war is cloaked in ambiguity. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was a sham. This domino theory is a crock. The only certainty is confusion and death. Look, no country should make war without knowing why or shed the blood of its sons without a united sense of purpose. No war should be waged without the support of the people, and this war is losing support. The reality is that the guys who die over there will stay dead, even if the reasons are obscure.”
It was a good argument, one I needed to hear, but it didn’t make my position any clearer.
We stayed up late, and James continued trying to convince me. The next day we were going out on Lake Austin, a lake created from a series of dams on the Colorado River. The day started out warm and sunny. The apartment owned canoes that residents could check out, so we loaded our fishing gear and a cooler of beer and paddled toward a nearby cove.
We soon reached the cove, dropped a weight overboard, opened our tackle boxes, and attached cork and hooks to the cane pole lines. James was a serious fisherman, but he knew I wasn’t much use with a rod and reel, so we rocked quietly in the canoe, watched the bobbers, and talked some more about the war.
“Jeff, it’s too bad that draft lottery hasn’t been instituted yet. It might have given you some chance if you had any luck. Have you tried the Reserves or Guard?”
“I’ve been to the Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts. The only way to get one of those prized spots is to know somebody, to have a congressman or senator call for you. I’m just a poor boy from Mariposa with no connections. I even signed a contract to teach English to tenth graders down on the border, but my draft board didn’t buy that as a critical reason for a deferment.”
“Well, you ought to apply as a conscientious objector.”
“I’ve looked into that, too. It’s Catch-22. To be declared a conscientious objector, you need a history with a religious tradition that opposes war. I fled my mama’s Church of Christ as soon as I could. And I don’t oppose all war; I just question this one.”
“You know,” James said, “people have ways to fail draft physicals. You can get fucked up with drugs or herbs that spike your chemicals, mimic diabetes, anything to get you 4F. I wish you’d gotten in touch with me before your physical.”
“Me, too,” I said, although I wasn’t sure I would have taken anything. If my family thought I had some dread condition that would keep me out of the Army, it would have scared them more than my getting drafted.
“Then, you have to go to Canada. I have contacts. When you’re ready, you call me, and I’ll get you in that Canada pipeline.”
“I’m a warm weather boy. What about Mexico? It’s closer to home.”
“Better than going in and becoming a war criminal by participating in that illegal, immoral war. But you’d have more support in Canada or Sweden. Mexico officially deports U.S. citizens, so you have to lay low there.”
Before long, the sky grew cloudy, the temperature dropped, and a Texas norther was rolling in. With the temperature change, a light fog rose over the lake, and we knew the storm would soon arrive.
“We better get off the water,” James said. “Let’s paddle to the shore and look for shelter. I don’t think we can make it back to the apartment before this hits.”
As we pulled the canoe up on the bank, a driving rain pelted us. We followed a trail, saw a cabin, ran to it, where an old man motioned us in. On the porch he told us to take off our wet shirts, went inside, and came out with some towels.
“Well, you boys kindly got drenched,” the man said. “Good thing you come here and not that other trail. You wouldn’t a’ found nothing there but a dead end. Name’s Ledbetter,” he said, holding out a rough hand.
We introduced ourselves. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat and walked with a limp—a short, broad man, a fireplug with a hat and a smile. I noticed that he was wearing black, hightop Keds like I wore in junior high.
“You boys from around here?”
James told him that he lived at a nearby apartment and I was visiting, waiting for my draft notice.
Ledbetter sat for a minute.
“This Vetnam war is a tough one,” he said quietly. “I lost my son Tommy over there last year.”
We gave him our condolences, and James said something about how this was an awful war.
Ledbetter cut him off. “Ain’t no war any good. But you know we got to do them. For me it was Korea. Stepped on a mine and screwed up my foot. That’s why I wear these here shoes. My old nub of a foot just won’t do with boots any more, hard as I’ve tried.
“Anyway, I was proud of my Tommy for joining up with the Marines. You know, a man’s just got to step up some time. These here protests ain’t right. I grew up knowing our job as Americans was to take care of people like Hitler and old Ho She Min.”
And it was just then, as I sat looking down toward that rainy, foggy lake, I could see home, my brother in a cowboy hat, the Boy Scouts, Kiwanis and Lions clubs, the Avenue Church of Christ, picnics by Lake Bardwell, Fourth of July parades, John Wayne movies, Little League baseball, Friday night lights on the stadium, the Southern Pacific railroad line, the Czech polka halls outside town, my small college square. The weight of my short past pressed on me in images. For a moment, I thought Ledbetter looked just like my grandfather.
Although uneasy, James said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Ledbetter, but this is a bad war. The TET offensive was bad, and it showed that the government has been lying about how much progress we‘re making. I’m ready to bring LBJ and the troops home.”
Like many of his generation, Ledbetter picked up on James’ anti-government comments.
“Well, it’s true, I don’t much trust the guv’ment.

They gonna have to step up. We cain’t let them Communists take over Vetnam, ‘cause all them other countries will follow. But you cain’t trust anything the guv’ment says. When my Tommy died, they sent some major who tells me some shit about how Tommy had been shot in the back by a sniper and died instantly. Talked about how them Cong was cowardly shootin’ a man in the back. But when they shipped his body home, I went to the funeral home. They’d closed the casket, and I called that wimply little man in that shiny suit to open it up. He told me the guv’ment had told him to close the casket. Well, I raised holy hell until he agreed to open it up. By damn, when he opened that thang up, I could see Tommy’s whole face had been blowed off. Shot in the back my ass. I seen men killed in Korea, and it ain’t easy. But I didn’t expect to see my own son like that. I thought maybe it wasn’t him, so I rolled up his sleeve and seen it was his tattoos all right. I sat down there and cried like a baby. I was cryin’ for my dead boy and then for a guv’ment that’d rather tell a lie than the truth.”
His voice broke, and I could feel the depth of his sadness.
“But I’m still proud Tommy died serving his country. He made the sacrifice. These Vetnam vets coming home and gittin’ spit on and yelled at. That ain’t right. It ain’t them boys’ fault. They’re supporting their county.
He stopped and glanced at the sky. “Lookee here,” he said. “Looks like

that storm’s passin’. You boys may want to git on back durin’ this lull.”
We got our things, thanked Ledbetter, and headed for the canoe, as the rain and fog disappeared when the sun broke through the clouds.

That night was my last in Austin. James said we should go down to the Vulcan to hear the regular band that played there called Shiva’s Headband. I’d never heard of the place or the band. Right then I wasn’t thinking about anything except that my time was running out.
The Vulcan Gas Company was in an old building on Congress Avenue, the front covered with psychedelic posters advertising the night’s performers and the special on Pearl Beer, fifty cents a cup. The building had a couple of stages and homemade benches and old church pews. In front of the stage was a space for dancing. The whole room was strobed with a psychedelic light show.
James and I got there just after the music started. With all the seats taken we stood near the dance floor. Before long, someone handed James a hand-rolled cigarette. He took a drag and offered it to me. The small college I attended wasn’t isolated, so I had been around marijuana before, with plenty of opportunities to join in. But I’d decided that I’d stick to beer as my conventional narcotic, so I shook my head and passed the joint.
Shiva’s Headband wasn’t terribly psychedelic, more like the Grateful Dead than the Doors, with fiddle and harmonica and a back-to-the-earth sound. But the psychedelic lights and loud speakers created the sense of a hallucinogenic experience. Soon they began to play a song that the leader, a guy named Spencer Perskin, said was called “Kaleidoscoptic.” The next song was introduced as “Take Me to the Mountains,” and I was soon reliving my drive through the Davis and Chisos Mountains with a hike to the Window in Big Bend. The lines reflected the back-to-the-land, country-rock music that was beginning to take over the music scene.
The next song became the one I remember with both clarity and confusion.

It was one of those songs that started with a long instrumental intro before any singing. The drummer began with a gentle rhythmic beat, then the violin broke in, and the instruments went on and on with this dreamy sound. The people all around, mainly long-haired young men in bell-bottom jeans and striped or tie-dyed t-shirts and braless women in peasant or granny dresses or bell-bottoms embroidered with flower or peace symbols, began to sway with the music. Soon they raised their arms and swayed in unison as the music looped for what seemed like ten minutes. James and I raised our arms and began to lean with those standing packed in near us, and I noticed the haze of smoke as the strobe lights lit the stage. Swaying back and forth, I realized my head felt light, my eyes blurred, my mouth was dry, and I then imagined myself and my family. I disappeared from the setting but saw my mother and grandfather, and both looked far away with longing and sadness in their eyes, as if I had left or not returned. When the band began to sing, I came back to the present and realized with a start that this must be a contact high, as I inhaled the thick smoke in the enclosed space. James was feeling good and continued to sway. The song, I learned later, was “Song of Peace,” and the lyrics, the best I could hear, were about reaching personal peace, not peace in Vietnam, and urged the listeners to raise their

arms and let their burdens go. I raised my arms, opened my hands, but the moment had passed. I felt some release but nothing like a bolt of lighting with the clarity of purpose I longed for.
Then I noticed that just to my side was a young, bearded, long-haired man wearing an Army fatigue shirt with the sleeves cut off. The shirt looked real, not a knock-off, and I could see the U.S. Army insignia above one pocket and the name “Wentworth” above the other. As he swayed to the music, I realized that the man was about my age and that he, too, like most of them here, had faced the same choices that I had before me. The song began to end as it had begun, and it seemed to me that these swaying men and women looked almost like a single entity, morphed from individuals into a whole.

I pulled out of Austin on Sunday night, the last day of March 1968, driving north toward East Texas with a mixture of dreaminess and ambivalence. I snaked slowly through traffic to the interstate. I could see in the headlights that bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush had exploded along the roadside. Someone on the radio broke in to say the station was switching to live coverage of an address to the nation by President Johnson. I half listened because I had heard Johnson speak so many times with no effect as the war droned on. His speech seemed boilerplate about a peace offer Johnson had made to the North Vietnamese, more about how great President Thieu and the South Vietnamese were doing. He talked about his history in public service, all standard stuff, I thought. And then he said with America's sons in the fields far away and the future under challenge at home, he couldn’t spend any time on “personal partisan causes,” and then he dropped this line: “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
At first I couldn’t believe what I had just heard but then began to realize the significance of what Johnson had said. LBJ had just withdrawn from the presidential campaign of 1968 and was coming home; I would soon set out on my next big journey—wherever it would lead me. I thought about my Vulcan reverie, my contemplation of the future, and, with a start, noticed as I passed it, another billboard imploring, “Bring Lyndon Home.”