August 20, 2004 - I’m tired of lies told thrice as if in the repetition they well be transformed and made into a truth. That is what our public men had made of the drive attain and retain political power in our democratic republic. They tell us that which we seek lies just around the corner and we are turning it now. They tell us that the goal is just beyond the far side of the hill, across the next river, concealed by a tangled forest. In a feigned purity they send others to speak falsehoods so that they maintain implausible deniability and say, donning an air of innocence, “Not I.”

“It don’t mean nothing.” My brother brought that phrase home with him 30 years ago; an all purpose phrase; a comment for every situation at once without meaning and full of import. It fit both death and survival in equal measure. “It don’t mean nothing” was at once a benediction for an innocence lost and a prayer for a discovered purpose. Slowly, as the years passed, that fatalistic phrase passed from his vocabulary. It was as though the wounds he bore deep within him had been exorcised and healed.

In late 1969 I got the one letter from him. A picture of an armored personnel carrier with the legend, “Nixon’s Hired Guns” painted on its side was enclosed. “Keep this for me”, he wrote, “I’m marching so you have to keep marching. I’ll tell you about it if you see me again.” He came home. I gave him the picture. He looked at and said, “It don’t mean nothing.” He put the picture in his pocket. We never spoke of it again,

I wanted to shout, “It had to mean something! When they stole your youth it had to have been for a purpose! It had to have meant something.” I kept that cry to myself. My little brother had gone off to war and I did not know the man who had come home. I nodded instead and reached up to his shoulder. He turned away, as though contact hurt him somewhere deep inside and went out my door. It don’t mean nothing.

We have never talked about his war. I know that I can never know what he knows. I can discover what troops were where. I can read the words of those who came home and told their stories. I can follow the symbols on a faded map and try to visualize the action. I can read the high flown rhetoric of the commendations written of those whose last breaths have been long since stilled, but I can never know what they know.

This year my brother says he will vote for John Kerry because he says John Kerry knows and had the guts to tell the truth. He told me that and then he looked at me and said, “It can’t mean ‘nothing’.”