Old Age.

 I am not the man that I once was and it depresses me to think about the minutia of old age that drives me today as compared to the exhilaration of life in my youth.  I gave up a college deferment to join the army during the Korean War at the height of the killing  I expected to be sent to Korea as an infantry man and was disappointed when I was not permitted to join the airborne.  The army saw that I had two years of college and mistakenly thought that I was intelligent enough to be in military intelligence. That error almost certainly saved my life in as much as I was put into a year long course studying the Chinese language instead of fresh meat for the killing fields..  The armistice was in place when I was finally sent to Korea.  I was too young to understand “the big picture”, but Korea made it clear to me that war was not a good thing.  I decided to become a diplomat and “make peace.”

I turned down a Mustang commission and, after completing college, went on to spend my working life in the Foreign Service, where I grew to understand that diplomats and politicians contribute to war as much as do military men and women.  I progressed rapidly in the career in large part because I wanted to be where the action was, believing it to be my patriotic duty.  As a junior officer, I argued against picking up Viet Nam after the French gave it up, but volunteered to serve there because of “duty.”  I served in Saigon and Danang off and on all through the war.  I was Consul General in Danang when the NVA crossed into the South.  After directing the evacuation of I Corps, I went down to Saigon and helped various people that I knew get out ahead of the final defeat of the South.  I still remember walking through abandoned South Vietnamese office buildings looking for friends.  Today, I am not up to doing the family shopping because I am feeling poorly..  It grates on me.

If anyone were to ask me what I thought the most difficult part of life was I would argue that it is the deterioration of mind and body that accompanies old age.  It matters not how good a front you put up, you know the truth and I find it extremely difficult and exceedingly distasteful to cope with.