Friday, May 22, 2009

Memorium

Twenty-six years ago this October I spent a long half hour under some sort of Caribbean bush with a man about my age. We didn't have much to say. And he couldn't chat much, anyway, being dead.

I didn't know, and never learned, who he was, or how he had come to that lonely little hole, under the roadside bush, to be killed defending his hardscrabble little island from the power and the glory of the United States of America. But there he was. Twenty-something years of diapers and lullabies, stories and tears and hugs, schoolbooks, scoldings, ideas and ideals, love and fear and hate and hope had come down to this; face-down in his scattered effluvia, eventually to be dragged away and tipped into a hole and covered up like trash.

His place at the table forever vacant, his memory slowly fading.

I'm here, today, with my wife and my children and my house safe around me. And a lot of that was because of the willingness of my people to fight - in the Revolution, against slavery, against fascism - and, yes, to die.

But I'll bet that if you could have asked him, he probably would have asked for nothing more.

And, as always:

"It seems to me that the VERY best thing for the majority of Americans would be to think of this Memorial Day not as time reserved for barbeques and softball in the park, but as the time it took a 19-year-old private to bleed out, alone amid the dying crowd in the grass before the wall at Fredricksburg.

The time it took a husband and father to convulse his way into death from typhus in the tent hospital outside Santiago de Cuba.

The time that the battalion runner, a former mill hand from Utica, New York, spent in a shell hole in the Argonne staring at the rest of his life drizzling out of his shattered legs.

The time it took for the jolting trip down the Apennines to the CCP, unfelt by the father of three because of the jagged rip in his gut wall that killed him that morning.

The time required to freeze a high school kid from Corvallis, Oregon, to the parched high ground above the Yalu River.

The time it took for the resupply bird to come for the plastic bag that contained what had been a young man from the Bronx who would never see the Walt Frazier he loved play again.

The time taken up by the last day in the life of a professional officer whose fiance' will never understand why she died in a "vehicular accident" in the middle of a street in Taji.

I've been proud to be a soldier, and don't kid myself that there will be a day when the killer ape "studies war no more". But the modern view of war as video entertainment for the masses sickens me. Every single fucking human being needs to have it driven into his or her forehead with a steel nail that every single day in every single war some person dies a stupid, meaningless death that snuffs out the world in a moment. That those empty eyes zipped inside a bag or covered by a bloody blanket were the windows to an entire universe, once.

That the price we pay for forging our national will is paid in the unlived futures of those we kill and those of us who die to make it so.

Maybe then we'd be sure of what we want to achieve before we reopen the doors of the Temple of Janus."

8 comments:

Publius said...

"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten."

I'm not a religious dude, but Ecclesiastes always comes to mind when I'm contemplating this worst of all possible holidays.

Speaking of religion, the older I get the more unsure I am about the moorings of the nation for which I went to war and the praises of which I've long sung. We say we're secular, but we're not. We actually are quite religious, with our God being the ludicrous and unearned self esteem with which most Americans are overly endowed.

Our infantile love of self translates into the Manifest Destiny horseshit and an unswerving belief that we're entitled to do whatever we wish with the other inhabitants of the planet. Not saying all wars are wrong and that terrorists shouldn't be nailed, but it's getting more and more difficult to find a "just war" these days.

Your video game "patriots" chanting, "USA, USA" ensure that there will always be newly vacant chairs at tables throughout America.

I hope all of the "patriots" get some great bargains shopping this weekend. Maybe they'll bring the economy out of the doldrums.

This "holiday" just depresses the shit out of me.

sheerahkahn said...

"Your video game "patriots" chanting, "USA, USA" ensure that there will always be newly vacant chairs at tables throughout America."___________________________________
Manchurian
winds unknown to most mortals
never - forgiving
hurricane ferocity
(chill factor unknown)
- 40 F.

Somewhere South
of
Yalu River
North Korea
9 December 1950 ... dawn

I asked the rigid Marine

(age also unknown)
teenager or grandfather

the
Question
idiotic or sacrilegious
under normal circumstances
quite normal there

IF
I were God
what would you want
for Christmas?

His answer took almost forever

"Give me Tomorrow"David Douglas Duncan
___________________________________

Gentlemen,
I have spent my life listening and learning from the vets to come to understand my self, and some of my own experiences, and as always I find that I have nothing of substance to offer in return...so, thank you for teaching me, explaining to me what humanity should be, and hopefully I will be a better man through your instruction.
I have come to appreciate the "tomorrows" that many cannot have.
Regretfully, that is all I can offer is my time, my attention, and a willing heart to learn from your experience.

Sheerahkahn

Meghan H said...

Thank you for the reality check. Sometimes a federal holiday doesn't mean much, when Americans collectively stop remembering WHY we have a day off from work.

Plus, many people just don't want to be confronted with the brutal human cost of warfare. What results is Memorial Day as a consumer holiday...because the true meaning doesn't make anyone buy anything.

basilbeast said...

Echoing Sheera, that's why I've hung around for this long.

I'm feeling that old proverb severely right now, that with age comes wisdom much too late.

Speaking of religion, the older I get the more unsure I am about the moorings of the nation for which I went to war and the praises of which I've long sung. We say we're secular, but we're not. We actually are quite religious, with our God being the ludicrous and unearned self esteem with which most Americans are overly endowed.As seems the usual with you guys, well said.

I want to pass on to you all the record of a young man still serving his country to the best of his ability. I think many times it is easier to face the bullet than the public.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_VTvUqb3bo

More wisdom from a veteran, who I could very easily wish were president.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IslIGPTjit4

It's been a pleasure knowing you fellow.

.

Lisa said...

Quite moving, Chief.

Publius: Yes, our religion is our overweening pride and worhsip of the marketplace. We worship at many altars, mostly to the aggrandizement of the self.

"An Army of One" was a pretty powerful and spot-on ad campaign.

rangeragainstwar said...

sheerahkhan,
The tommorrow that you speak of is often locked in the yesterday of many veterans.
jim

rangeragainstwar said...

Meghan, I'm preaching to the choir BUT someday go to the DVA clinic and watch the flow of humanity waiting for treatment. There are at least 5 generations of military men waiting for service. It's quite a humbling and illuminating exercise.
jim

basilbeast said...

http://www.mapthefallen.org/

.