He came into the office with a DD214, asking if I would give him some advice
about Veteran’s benefits. I don’t know much about veteran’s benefits and
I have this other meeting I’m late for... and I have this article for the
newsletter to write....
This DD214 paper is sort of like a wedding ring, or maybe the red dot
some Hindu women wear, or like pictures of kids kept in one’s wallet. It
says something about who you are, or were, or meant, or claim to be, to
someone's other than yourself; a history of some kind of standing. DD means
Department of Defense form. And the paper tells when the holder was drafted,
or when enlisted, the places ordered, when discharged, and under what kind
of circumstances - honorable, maybe general, maybe worse -though no one
ever showed me one like that.
It is the honorable part. When I got my own DD214, I understood the ‘honorably’ to mean that I had behaved well enough during my years in the
military. Now looking down at this fellow’s paper I understand the ‘honorably’
to mean how I should treat him, how we should receive him. He shouldn’t
need a letter from the Department of Defense to be so treated, but it is
a real world we live in. He has not always been honorably received -laid
off after 25 years as spot welder at some company in Kensington, welfare
running out, no rent, no heat, nights at a shelter here and nights there,
before someone sent him our way because he was old and didn’t have anyone.
So he gives me the form that says he was stationed in the Panama Canal,
and welded things for the Army, and was discharged a private first class
with this honor after serving us a couple of his young years, almost forty
years ago.
I admit knowing little about Veteran’s benefits, but maybe we could
find some information around here, and a cup of coffee and and you look
thin and is your ulcer still giving you trouble... “The doctor told me
its stomach cancer, Joe. I knew it, my mother died of it twenty six
years ago. the doctor says an operation... chance of cure... some treatment
after...my mother...they couldn’t do anything then, long time ago...cancer.”
The heavy crush of it, the news, wanting to tell someone, some attention
to be paid. This paper between us tells me no pity, no sympathy required,
asked for, no sharing feelings, or tears, just attention to the hard fact
of it. I have heard from somewhere that life ‘is just one damn thing
after another.’ The task this man offers me is just to sit here with him
and recognize, not that we can solve, even know one another’s problems,
but that we can honor one another’s destiny and destinations.
I don’t know how to put all this in the context of the broad changes
of welfare reform that we report to you here. Sometimes, it seems as simple
to me as ...if you remove 4 million dollars in food stamps from poor
people in this county, somebody will be hungry...if no company needs a
sixty year old spot welder, cutting his welfare check is not going to get
him a job. But I know good people are trying to figure out how to create
better government, more efficient commerce, programs that don’t create
stifling dependence, and it is a balancing act that is not simple. So
I wave this newsletter at you, not much different than John showing me the
DD214, to remind us that there are people that need to be honored
though they have sad news; no place to go, nothing for next meal, uncertain
hardship with certainty coming down on them.
