Where Were You When the Fire Fell? In the Name of Peace, Consumed with Guilt and Shame, I Fled

Escape Was Easy. Guilt Stayed... and Now There's Gaza

Helen and Barry-- we were all against the war then

I didn’t do enough to stop the war against Vietnam.

By the time I woke up to what was going on, I was a teenager. A slow, sick realization set in— that my country was waging a genocidal war against a people who had never harmed us, who were simply fighting for their land, their independence, their dignity. When I thought about what was being done in my name— villages napalmed, bodies piled in ditches, children burned— I felt the kind of psychic pain that lodges deep in your soul and never fully dissolves. I didn’t know what to do with it. So I turned away; I embraced escapism, fully.

I numbed myself... drugs, mostly. Music, sex, wandering, dissociation. I buried myself in escapist tactics because the alternative— staring the horror in the face— felt impossible. Even the anti-war activism I engaged in was often just performative, a ritual to quiet the guilt rather than confront it. I was at the first big draft card burning “event” or “ceremony” in New York City. I was arrested, part of a staged, kabuki theater act of civil disobedience. They put me in a cell with Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Dr. Spock— icons of the movement. And still, it felt hollow. Like we were acting out a drama written too late or too early to change the ending.

Eventually, I fled. I left the country and wandered across the globe. I told myself that to pay taxes in the U.S. was to help buy the bomb that would kill another Vietnamese civilian. That if I removed myself from the system, I could at least stop being complicit. But absence is not absolution.

While this was eating me alive, I was reading War and Peace; I recognized something of myself in Pierre Bezukhov— the wealthy, well-meaning outsider who is suddenly struck by the enormity of human suffering and doesn’t know what to do with it. Pierre is captured by Napoleon’s army, stripped of his status, and forced to reckon with the bare reality of war, not as a concept or a debate, but as a condition of human misery. In captivity, he meets Platon Karataev— a peasant, a nobody in the eyes of history— who speaks in parables and radiates a quiet, grounded wisdom. It is Platon who teaches Pierre that the deepest truths are not ideological, but moral, that goodness is not in speeches or manifestos, but in simple acts of compassion and presence.

Tolstoy wrote not just to portray war, but to end it— at least within the human heart. Later in his life, he became a radical pacifist, rejecting the state, violence, and even institutional religion. He believed, as I came to believe, that you cannot fight war on its own terms. That to resist violence, you must first excavate the violence within yourself— the pride, the ego, the false absolution of ideology.

A trip to Vietnam many years later did not lift the guilt. I met a man my age who had survived the war. I apologized, sincerely, face to face. He smiled. He accepted it. But it didn’t wash anything away. Guilt, real guilt, doesn’t want to be erased. It wants to be transformed.

Like Pierre, I came to understand that redemption doesn’t come in grand gestures. It comes in humility. In doing what you can, where you are, with open eyes and a soft heart. In refusing to look away again.

I still carry the war. Not just the war against Vietnam, but the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the war of silence and forgetting that continues long after the bombs fall. I carry them like a scar I don’t want to lose— because losing it would mean I’ve learned nothing. I pray for the children in Ukraine and Gaza every day.

And maybe, like Tolstoy, I’ve come to believe that the only real way to end war is to live in such a way that you refuse to be part of its machinery— not just externally, but internally. To choose truth over performance. To choose love over spectacle. To keep listening, like Pierre did, to the soft, steady voice of someone like Platon, whispering through the chaos:

"You must live for the soul, not for glory. You must be kind. You must be present. Even here. Especially here."

But if the past can’t be rewritten, the present can be. And now, again, we are standing before a moral precipice. Trump isn’t just a threat to democracy— he’s a threat to human life, to peace, to the planet, to truth itself. He speaks openly about mass deportations, military crackdowns, revenge, camps… He came into office armed with the knowledge of where the legal limits are— and how to dismantle them. And this time, no one can say they didn’t know.

Sometimes the question haunts me: What would it mean to be complicit in this again, even through inaction?

Back then, during Vietnam, some of us thought we had more time. We thought we could opt out. We thought symbolic resistance might be enough. Like I said, we turned away, numbed out, disappeared into drugs, travel, theory, exile, anything to escape the unbearable truth. Now people of my generation, at least, know better.

Helen and I and a cannoli last month

Real opposition isn’t symbolic. It’s not cathartic. It’s not just burning a draft card or getting arrested in a cell with famous poets. Real opposition costs. It risks. It requires. Tolstoy understood that.

In War and Peace, Pierre begins the novel full of abstract ideas, playing at revolution, romanticizing change. But it’s not until he’s forced to confront death and human suffering without illusion, that he becomes truly awake. Platon teaches him implacable moral clarity and that peace isn’t an idea— it’s a practice. A discipline. A kind of daily, patient refusal to participate in cruelty. I guess that’s part of what I missed, back then.

And now I wonder who are today’s Platon Karataevs? Where are the voices reminding us that resisting evil doesn’t have to be grand— it just has to be real? That the smallest act of refusal, done honestly and repeatedly, is more meaningful than the most dramatic gesture performed once? What does it mean, in 2025, to refuse war— not just the kind waged with missiles and drones, but the war on the vulnerable, the war on truth, the war on democracy itself?

I don’t have a clean answer. But I know this much: This time, I won’t disappear. I won’t seek comfort over clarity. I won’t mistake witnessing for doing. I can’t undo what I failed to stop in Vietnam. But I hope I can can stop being someone who lets it happen again.

And yet… here we are again, in 2025, watching the machinery of fascism grind forward— louder now, prouder, more sure of itself. Trump has been convicted, but his movement has only grown more violent, more devoted, more shameless. We hear talk of mass deportations, purges... They want to finish what other generations of fascists started. What does it mean, in 2025, to refuse war? What does it mean when the United States continues to fuel a genocide in Gaza, sending billions in military aid to Israel as it levels cities, massacres children, and forces entire populations into open-air prisons? How many generations must endure this? How many Palestinians must die before the U.S.— and the American people— are forced to reckon with its direct role in perpetuating this violence?

There’s no escaping that complicity. The same moral inertia that allowed the U.S. to wage a senseless war in Vietnam is the same force that keeps our hands stained with the blood of Gaza’s children. It is the same imperial logic that says some lives are disposable, that borders matter more than humanity.