Memorial Daze

Memorial Daze

   Pulitzer-Prize winner and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Will Durant had this to say about war in his posthumous book (discovered 37 years after his death), Fallen Leaves:   For five hundred centuries, two thousand generations have struggled for that terrain in a calendar of wars whose beginning is as obscure as its end.  Even the sophisticated mind, made blase by habituation to magnitude and marvels, is appalled by the panorama of historic war, from the occasional brawls and raids of normally peaceful "savages," through the sanguinary annals of Egypt, Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, the untiring fratricide of the Greek city-states, the conquests of Alexander and Caesar, the triumphs of Imperial Rome, the wars of exploding Islam, the slaughters of Mongol hordes, Tamerlane's pyramid of skulls, the Hundred Years' War, the War of the Roses, the Thirty Years' War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, the English, American, French and Russian Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Second World War...This, to our pessimistic moments, seems to be the main and bloody current of history, besides which all the achievements of civilization, all the illumination of literature and art, all the tenderness of women and the chivalry of men, are but graceful incidents on the bank, helpless to change the course or character of the stream.

   If you're not familiar will Will Durant, he (and later with his wife, Ariel) wrote the massive 11-volume set (with each book in the set being at or close to 1,000 pages), The Story of Civilization.  In my younger days, I remember underlining and highlighting passages like a hungry student thirsting for discovery, finally giving up after completing about 4 books.  It was simply too much history, history made even more daunting by the fact that someone had attempted, and for the most part succeeded, in getting it all down on paper (and something that obviously proved too much for my meager patience to take in all at once).  So I jumped to his other shorter books, The Lessons of History, The Story of Philosophy, and On The Meaning of Life.  But the bottom line was this, here was someone quite qualified to voice an opinion of how distant time-free travelesr would likely view our species...would "war-prone" or "war-like" be among their first descriptions of us?

   The excellent and short-lived BBC series, The Street, featured one episode of a now-disfigured soldier returning from his tour in Afghanistan.  What awaited him were a loving family trying their best to both comfort and understand, a neighborhood and a public that awkwardly stared and looked for the person they knew before he left for war, and of course, his memories of that event, a mother walking in with a baby and appearing to be also holding a bomb.  "Shoot her," his co-worker yelled, "shoot her," as he then raised his gun and pretty much saw and heared only the baby crying.  "Shoot her!"

   The decisions are --and have to be-- instantaneous.  Stories go on about convoys moving quickly through a small town when a child or old man jumps (or is pushed) in front of the lead vehicle.  As the driver, do you stop the entire convoy (and possibly set everyone up for what commonly becomes an ambush or a massive firefight), or simply run over the person and prevent the encounter (thus sacrificing one life but saving dozens of others).  What if you want to stop but your buddies are yelling at you to keep going, to run the child over?  Right or wrong, the memory of what decision you made will stay with you, with another to arrive the next day, and the next, and the next.  And then, maybe you witness your close friend being killed, perhaps because of your decision (such a revelation was shown on a recent episode of 60 Minutes, part of that dialogue being:  But what torments (Marine Devin) Jones is that he isn't alone. There is the persistent presence of his friend Dennis Burrow.  After Burrow was killed by a landmine, Golf Company put his name on a combat outpost so he wouldn't be forgotten, but it turns out that isn't the problem, the dead are immortal in the mind.  Scott Pelley: Were you there when Burrow died?  Devin Jones: Yes. Yes, I was.  Scott Pelley: What happened?  Devin Jones: I'm not sure if I really wanna go into detail on that too much.  You know?  I'm not-- I don't wanna be the person that the family hears that from if they don't already know.  You know?  It's not easy to think about that day.  Because that was a pretty rough day.   Sorry.

   Karl Marlantes, also a former Marine and veteran, wrote:  The violence of combat assaults psyches, confuses ethics, and test souls.  This is not only a result of the violence suffered.  It is also a result of the violence inflicted.  Warriors suffer from wounds to their bodies, to be sure, but because they are involved in killing people they also suffer from their compromises with, or outright violations of, the moral norms of society and religion.  These compromises and violations are not generally discussed and their impact on a warrior's mental health and soul is minimized or even ignored entirely, not only by current military training but by society at large.  Those words helped introduce his best-selling book, What It Is Like to Go to War, a sobering view of what often proves to be the reality of being thrust into war.  He tells of his experience of encountering bush-covered trenches where enemies would wait, firing their machine guns at the ankles of the passing soldiers, thereby immediately disabling their ability to escape or to properly continue fighting.  That is war, all bets are off.  And as the author writes: The preparation for these aspects of combat must be done by the individual, in the quiet places, alone, in communion with his or her own heart and soul.

   Some of this was remembered by Seymour Hersh, a long time writer for The New Yorker, in a piece he titled, The Scene of the Crime, about his return to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.  There is a long ditch in the village of My Lai.  On the morning of March 16, 1968, it was crowded with the bodies of the dead--dozens of women, children, and old people, all gunned down by young American soldiers...an American contingent of about a hundred soldiers, known as Charlie Company, having received poor intelligence, and thinking that they would encounter Vietcong troops or sympathizers, discovered only a peaceful village at breakfast...(at a memorial museum for MyLai) the names and ages of the dead are engraved on a marble plaque...the museum's count, no longer in dispute, is five hundred and four victims, from two hundred and forty-seven families.  Twenty-four families were obliterated--three generations murdered with no survivors.  Among the dead were a hundred and eighty-two women, seventeen of them pregnant.  A hundred and seventy-three children were executed, including fifty-six infants.  Sixty older men died. 

   For those who have gone to war and seen the horrors up close, or for those who served but never left a desk, or for those who lost a loved one because of war, or even for those who never went to war at all, the understanding or expression of what was or wasn't seen is likely something unable to convey.  Understanding becomes almost impossible for all sides, the memories and processing so personal and so convoluted that it might seem frustrating beyond belief, perhaps beyond staying in this world's reality where all else seems right and is functioning normally.  For how can beheadings and sniper fire and unseen missles and mass graves still exist, and still exist in so many places of the world?  Why would this type of behavior seem so celebratory to some and repugnant to others?

   Again, from veteran Karl Marlantes:  I'm occasionally asked, "What's it feel like to kill someone?"  Sometimes I'm not asked what killing someone feels like; I'm told, "It must feel horrible to kill someone."  And infrequently, but harshly enough to sting, I've been judged.  "How could you ever kill a fellow human?"...I have a very hard time giving the simplistic response they'd like to hear.  When I was fighting --and by fighting I mean a situation where my life and the lives of those for whom I was responsible were at stake, a situation very different from launching a cruise missile-- either I felt nothing at all of I felt exhilaration akin to scoring the winning touchdown.  I used to hesitate to say this...maybe some veterans did feel horrible and sick every time they killed another man, just the way people think they ought to.  I'm also sure some of the people telling me they'd feel horrible and sick could very well feel that way if they ever had to do it.  But they didn't have to.  I did.  And I didn't feel that way.  And it makes me angry when people lay that on me what I ought to have felt.  More important, it obscures the truth...What I feel now, forty years later, is sadness.

   No one, except the person there facing that situation, will be able to know how he or she would react (or perhaps did react).  Nor will anyone but that person know the feelings and thoughts and memories that will emerge, perhaps immediately or perhaps only at night or at the sound of an explosion, or perhaps years later when all seems buried and forgotten.  But those thoughts and memories exist, and for many of our veterans, those both living and dead, they are their memories alone, often not shared or shared with only a very select few...and often, taken to the grave in silence.
 This Memorial Day is meant to honor those who gave of themselves.  Some gave their lives, physically.  And some have given their lives, mentally, harboring who knows what images of what they witnessed or didn't want to witness, unable to forget.  We should remember and acknowledge them, all of them, even the desk-bound, for none knew what awaited them...perhaps a leg or arm would be lost, perhaps a face would be burned, or perhaps you would simply return unscathed and thankful to just be heading back to a land, your land, one of safety and freedom...home. 

   In the end we must steel ourselves against utopias and be content, as Aristotle recommended, with a slightly better state, continued author Will Durant.  We must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves.  Perhaps, if we can broaden our borders with intelligent study, impartial histories, modest travel, and honest thought--if we can become conscious of the needs and views and hopes of other people, and sensitive to the diverse values and beauties of diverse cultures and lands, we shall not so readily plunge into competitive homicide, but shall find room in our hearts for a wider understanding and an almost universal sympathy.  We shall find in all nations qualities and accomplishments from which we may learn and refresh ourselves, and by which we may enrich our inheritance and our posterity.  Someday, let us hope, it will be permitted us to love our country, without betraying mankind.

   On this day, a day now regulated to barbeques and sales and inexpensive potted flowers, we should take a step back and try to view history from afar, to grasp a distant view of what happened while still seeing those now almost-invisible people who faced the possibility of being killed or maimed in order to fight for what they or their country or their leader believed, whatever those beliefs might be or might have been.  It was sacrifice, pure and simple.  And sometimes a memorial isn't enough.  But maybe a few moments of our time, our recognition, might be.