Friday, July 14, 2023

Answering JFK's Call

One of the most consequential moments in John F. Kennedy's candidacy for the Presidency was a spur-of-the-moment speech he gave in the early morning hours of October 14, 1960 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He was worn out and had intended to go to bed upon arriving, but then he was told that 10,000 students had been waiting patiently for him for hours, so he decided instead to go to the campus of the University of Michigan and deliver what became a life-changing speech for many in my generation. 

He proposed creating a new national service for students, and the young crowd roared its approval. After he was elected, he made good on that proposal by forming the U.S. Peace Corps.

I was a naive young man of 22 when I went to Afghanistan as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1969, having never been out of the country before, let alone halfway around the world.

But by then, thousands of young people just like me were answering Kennedy's call  to serve our country not by going to war but by spreading messages of peace.

We were idealistic and naive, yes, but those of us who were male were also trying to avoid the draft, which would have sent us to Vietnam to fight a war we vehemently disagreed with.

Like millions of others in my generation, I was radicalized in college to the point I considered U.S. foreign policy the imperial arm of an expanding empire. 

Living in Afghanistan proved to be a rude awakening about some of my assumptions. I saw up close how mean and brutal people could be to each other in a poor society, including tribal wars, murders, bribery and cruelty like in the "Lord of the Flies."

I also saw beauty, generosity and tenderness -- the whole range of human behavior was on display every day amid widespread illiteracy and ignorance.

The poorest people on the planet would welcome me into their homes to share the one good meal they would have that entire week. Strangers went out of their way to help me when I got lost. 

When I taught high school in Taloqan, many of my students spouted political beliefs shaped by the five booming radio signals that reached our remote town -- Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, and to a much lesser degree, Radio Kabul, the BBC and the Voice of America.

The brightest kids seemed attracted by socialist and communist ideas similar to the Marxist-Leninist thinking I was familiar with on campuses back home. At first I went along with their ideas about how U.S. imperialism was oppressing people in poor countries, but eventually, like any committed teacher, I began to challenge their assumptions, if only to get them to think.

It was easy to see how Soviet and Chinese propaganda was distorting these young minds, and how their views of America were affected by the worst of Hollywood. The stories they repeated about U.S. barbarism were overblown and simplistic. 

U.S. troops had slaughtered innocents at My Lai, it was true, which was awful, but all armies did that kind of thing. Certainly no country had a monopoly on human rights abuses. Meanwhile, there were also many, many Americans like Peace Corps Volunteers who were opposed to the military and dispensing aid, food, clothes, medicine and education instead of guns and napalm.

But to be truthful, I more or less agreed with my students’ political analysis and wanted no part of the dark sides of U.S. policy, What I did wish to share were the better parts of our culture -- our beliefs in freedom, gender equality, and universal literacy. 

Fewer than ten percent of the Afghans population could read or write. The infant mortality rate was the highest in the world. Women had little access to education, jobs or independent lives.

I knew my students needed a counterweight to what they were hearing on Radio Moscow, but the irony was not lost on me that here I was, an anti-war American, defending my country’s military in some sense as part of my role as a mentor.

Anyway, for Afghans, the problem wasn’t American intervention. The problem was that the Russians were massed right next door. And within a few years of my leaving Afghanistan, the Russians indeed invaded, bombing and strafing the country into submission, or so they thought at the time.

But that ended badly for the Soviets a decade later as they limped back to Moscow in retreat. Once they lost the Afghan war, the entire Soviet empire crumbled as well.

In retrospect our efforts as young Peace Corps workers may have been noble in the moment, but ultimately we were overwhelmed by the masters of war.

(This is a reprint of an essay I first published two years ago.)

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