Recently I came across a trove of letters from a soldier drafted into the Vietnam War. Though he refrained from any graphic content in those letters, much was implied in the mental and emotional state of this soldier. Even while in BCT (Basic Combat Training) his anger boiled within him as he saw boys barely out of high school being brow-beaten into a warrior-like machismo. Unlike the current model of a volunteer professional army, Vietnam era draftees were just kids picked at random. Training was intense in order to transform average, non-violent civilians into a fighting force. They needed to follow orders and react as trained without thinking and under fire. They were inundated with propaganda about the threat of communism to Americans and our way of life. Many of them, he would come to learn, would not see more than their initial six months in Vietnam. If they survived that period, they would become seasoned veterans in a combat zone. Otherwise, they would have returned home in body bags. He, however, was fated to survive. In one of his letters, he described how he had experienced such good fortune. He had retreated into his mind, a condition he called “body alienation.” At one point, he could not even relate to his own image in a mirror. From a hospital bed, he writes,

“My corporeity is no longer something real to me. I am mind and spirit that subsists regardless what happens outside of me. Among events that affect my extended self are pains, sickness, strain, physical mutations. These events/experiences touch not me. When I view myself in a mirror through the window of my soul, I am genuinely surprised to discover figure, size, solidness where I expected to see nothing but air. The mass in the looking glass, however, is nothing I could identify with. Across its forehead, there seems to appear an emblem of the United States Government and the number (his military ID number).”

I suspect many have shared his feelings of alienation: the slave before emancipation, the democratic Muslim reformer in a Middle Eastern jail, perhaps even a teen age gang member in an American inner city. Despair may have many different causes, but we all suffer it the same. Later, after experiencing the worst phase of the Vietnam War—the Tet offensive and its aftermath, this soldier came to see the “enemy” in a new light. Some he was even fortunate enough to befriend. With a new perspective, he writes,

“I’m not with movements, idealism, religions . . . There has been an undercurrent of change building in me these past years. No longer can I visualize man as the re-former of reality in his own likeness or, rather, in his self-deceived projection of himself . . . The era for loving man, humanitarianism, must now yield to the era of loving individual men, (that is) this man—personalism.”

War can change people in many different ways. Apparently, this soldier came to realize the shift Martin Luther King demanded from a “thing-oriented society” to a “person-oriented society.” Amongst the “things” we pursue are not only material things, but the things we create in our minds, like the feeling of security, the need for power, and the various “-isms” that inspire or demand our commitment. But the people with whom we relate are the only realities that truly matter in our lives. You cannot harm somebody with whom you have connected, for that person has become a reflection of who you are. You cannot form a close-knit community without respect for individuals’ differences. You cannot maintain a cohesive society without common values that respect the basic rights of individuals.

It may well be that the most sacred part of our lives is the relationship we have with the deepest mystery we will ever encounter: the other person. That relationship must become the basis for society, culture, and human co-existence. On that basis we humans could end civil injustice, xenophobia, racism, war, and the deepest alienation of all: estrangement from the persons we really are. But that day will not come unless each of us learns to live in our relationships now.

It took a war for me to learn that truth.