In Search of a Common Cause

Richard’s coffee shop and military museum in Mooresville, N.C., is a down-home place where veterans from all our modern wars gather most days to talk and feel comfortable in ways they only can among their fellow warriors. At the very beginning of my third annual U.S. road trip, on June 1, I had coffee with a bunch of them, assembled by Iraq veterans John Gallina and Dale Beatty, the founders of Purple Heart Homes, which builds houses for disabled veterans. That conversation set the tone for much of what has followed on my journey in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated.

Most of those who spoke with me were Vietnam veterans, and they were not thrilled with the way the country was going. When I asked them how they’d rate Barack Obama as Commander in Chief, they started to laugh, which I thought was unfair and disrespectful. But it turned out they didn’t have much use for Mitt Romney either. When I asked them who the last President they liked was, it was unanimous: George H.W. Bush. “He’s the last one who really served,” said Larry Nosker, a retired truck driver and Air Force veteran. “Air National Guard reserve don’t count.”

It turned out that these vets, like many I’ve met, simply didn’t trust anyone who hadn’t been through boot camp–and so their pool of acceptable leaders was diminishing dramatically and their sense of alienation was increasing just as fast. Practically everyone–women simply didn’t make it onto their radar screen–had served in World War II. A lot of people had served in Vietnam. Fewer than 1% had served in Iraq and Afghanistan–and while they believed the new veterans might include some potential leaders, there still weren’t nearly enough grownups to run a country. I asked if there was anything we as a nation could do about that. “Bring back the draft!” said Ray Pennipede, a former New York City police officer and member of the 1st Air Cavalry in Vietnam, without hesitation. There was applause. “There isn’t an 18-year-old boy who doesn’t need to get his butt kicked,” added Nosker, “by someone in a position of complete authority.”

This theme kept coming up in meeting after meeting during my first five days on the road, though usually in less vivid fashion. I traveled through North Carolina and Virginia, both in areas of deep blue and crimson red, and it was clear neither side trusted the other very much. For the conservatives, the country had changed beyond their imagining; not just civil rights but gay rights (a contentious referendum recently banned gay marriage in North Carolina), and new ethnic groups that seemed foreign–the South Asians who all of a sudden seemed to run half the convenience stores, the Latinos who didn’t seem to want to speak English. Why, even the President of the United States was something strange, neither black nor white. For liberals, it was all about intolerance. You couldn’t have a half-decent conversation with these Tea Party people, they said. “My mouth is bloody,” a woman from Smith Mountain Lake, Va., told me, “from biting my tongue all the time.”

But we were all Americans, I’d remind both sides. How were we going to get to know each other better, find some common ground? And then–eerily–someone would blurt it out: We need something like the draft. Maybe not military service but public service. At a sunset meeting in the beautiful Inn at Montross, in Virginia, a retired FBI investigator named I.C. Smith said, “Too many people just live our lives in contact with a narrow sliver of people. Now, we can’t bring back the draft–the military doesn’t want it, and we don’t need it. But some form of mandatory national service that throws people from different parts of the country together might help.”

Bob Quinn, an audiovisual expert who’d moved to Virginia from the Northeast, quickly agreed: “I went to a private school where the students did all the cleanup work ourselves, except for the heavy-duty plumbing and electrical work, and it created a real camaraderie. I just went to my 50th high school reunion, and that spirit was still there. And I’ll tell you what else, we didn’t have very much destructive behavior or graffiti in our school, because we had to clean it up ourselves.”

The other topic that kept coming up on the road was the Affordable Care Act–or Obamacare, if you must–but, oddly, it wasn’t long before health care and national service converged in my mind in a completely unexpected way. I spent an evening at a successful recovery program in Richmond, Va., called the McShin Foundation. Most of the people around the table were recovering addicts. A woman named Tammie Noey, a former heroin addict who had done time in jail for a felony, told her story. She started injecting herself when she was 9. She was 47 now, and clean for 21 months, and the only job she could get was as a waitress. But she had a friend who owned a farm and was willing to let her grow vegetables on part of it. She had pre-existing conditions as a result of her years of addiction; there was no way she could get health insurance. “I’m not in a position to have this bill shot down,” she said. “If I break my toe and can’t push the clutch pedal on the tractor, I’m done.”

I asked if anyone around the table was opposed to Obamacare. “I am,” said Terry Kinum, 69, a recovering alcoholic, retired from the Navy, who now works with addicted veterans. “I’m sick and tired of all these welfare and socialist-type Marxist programs we’re being inundated with.” Others disputed that vehemently, and the situation threatened to get raw.

But then I had a thought, which had been percolating since my meeting with the veterans: I asked Kinum about the people he had served with. I asked if he trusted them. Well, of course. They had served and sacrificed together. “And you believe they have a right to health care, right?” Kinum started to get up in my face, but I was headed in a different direction: Would he have as much trouble with Obamacare if he knew that the people receiving it had also served, in some way, like his Navy brothers? He nodded his head yes. I asked the addicts in the room about their responsibilities–not just to themselves but also to the communities they had burdened. “I would be happy to pay back with some sort of service,” said Chris Phillips, 25, who may face a felony charge because of three DUI violations, “if I thought I could clean the slate and get accepted to Virginia Commonwealth University, despite my record.”

I’m not sure that Kinum was entirely convinced. And I’m not sure he should be. We have drifted a long way from civic rigor in this country. We’ve had a period of intense prosperity and intense immigration and intense growth of government programs for those in need, followed by an economic crash. We don’t know each other very well anymore, and it’s hard to trust people you don’t know. Throughout history, civilizations have built a common cause through coming-of-age rituals. But we don’t do that anymore. Maybe we should think about that. It could be something as simple as kids’ cleaning up their schools together, as Bob Quinn did–yes, Newt Gingrich was right about that–or it could be full-blown national service, including boot camp. But unless we start getting to know each other better, our chances of coming to a consensus about the important things we have to do together as a nation are going to be pretty slim.

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