"Why?", he asks.

The summer Tim O’Brien received his draft letter reveals his very first questions of the Vietnam War. On page 38 we read, “In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naïve, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why?”

Tim O’Brien goes on to say, “It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.” Not only did Tim O’Brien question the purpose of the war before every being drafter for it but he continued to question it as the years went on.

 Even twenty years after the war, when O’Brien returned to Vietnam, it was clear he still did not know why he had ever been sent there. He had taken his daughter and while they were visiting the paddy where Kiowa died she said, “Well, I don’t get it. I mean, how come you were even here in the first place?” His response was, “I don’t know, because I had to be. It’s a mystery, I guess. I don’t know.” The question of “why” still had not been answered and likely never would be.

This made me think of Pink’s song Dear Mr. President. This song is dedicated to the idea of questioning the government. It reminds us that our society is built on the idea of it being ok for the American people to question the acts of its elected government officials, even the President. In the 1960’s the people questioned why we were at war in Vietnam, today we question why we went to war in Iraq. Perhaps the most important thing to gain from this is the idea that we must continue to question our government when we do not understand what they are doing.