Friends,Robbie was the kindest person I ever knew.I met him in our dormitory the day we entered college in 1964. He saw me struggling to carry my big luggage crates up the two flights of stairs to my dorm room and, without saying a word, grabbed one and hauled it to the second floor.“Thank you!” I stammered when we reached the landing.“Don’t mention it,” he said with a broad smile, and then offered his hand. “I’m Robbie.”“Bob,” I said, shaking his hand.“Good to meet you, Bob!”He must have noticed I was exhausted by the effort, and lonely to boot. “It’s close to dinner time,” he said. “Wanna walk over to the dining hall?”“Sure!”That was the start of our friendship.Robbie was intuitively and naturally kind. He combined a remarkable warmheartedness with a degree of compassion I had never known before. And it wasn’t only toward me. Every young man in our dorm, and many in our class, came to admire and depend on Robbie.Robbie went missing in action in Vietnam on October 12, 1972. His body has never been recovered.I think of Robbie on Memorial Day, as I do of others who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. I demonstrated and marched against it. I was too short to be drafted, but I detested the cruel absurdity of that war, the lies with which it was sold to the American people, the utter waste of it. In the end, more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese lost their lives in it. Many more were grievously wounded.But when I think of Robbie, I also remember his sense of duty. Duty was inseparable from his kindness. Whatever the situation, Robbie was eager to help.What do we owe one another as members of the same society? To me, that question lies at the heart of this Memorial Day.Our current president apparently believes we owe each other nothing. To him, everything is a transaction — a deal in which each of us is in it for as much money and power as we can get.During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump denigrated Senator John McCain, whose plane was shot down over Hanoi in 1967.McCain became a prisoner of war. The North Vietnamese offered him early release because McCain’s father was commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time. But the young McCain refused the offer in order to uphold the Code of Conduct, which stipulated that prisoners of war should be released in the order they were captured. As a result, he remained in North Vietnam for nearly five additional years, during which time he was put into solitary confinement and tortured.“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain during the 2016 presidential campaign. Then he altered his comment: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”Trump avoided serving in Vietnam by claiming he had a bone spur in his heel. As Michael Cohen, Trump’s “fixer,” told members of the House Oversight Committee in 2019:“Trump claimed [his medical deferment] was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery. He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment. He finished the conversation with the following comment: ‘You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam.’”Trump and his family business are now planning a $1.5 billion golf complex outside Hanoi and a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City — the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam. The two projects are part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever before attempted.Robbie was never in it for himself. He did what he did because he felt he had an obligation to do it, a duty to the nation he loved. It’s why I remember and honor Robbie today.Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
