Monday, May 30, 2011

Open Doors

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."

3 comments:

Lisa said...

This is greatly moving and should be published in every newspaper.

While I have always admired the bravery of our Soldiers, I also feel great sorrow for the sheer destruction of war, the pity of war. I think of all of the years spent raising a child, only to have him or her die from a piece of hot metal. Or all of the wood, glass, sweat and tears that go into the construction of anything, and to have that razed in an instant -- for what? Merely to be be built again?

What tremendous waste and profligacy. Until we create an understanding that people and things are precious (and that would be an imposition of a value in contradiction to our tribal thinking), we will not progress significantly.

FDChief said...

Sadly, Lisa, I'm not sure if that will ever happen. We're a careless, spendthrift sort of ape, and we tend to have a hard time thinking beyond our bellies, or the tip of our erect penis. We seem to always find an excuse to grab for the short-term gratification, whether its physical, emotional, political, or sexual.

I wish I thought that would change. But it's going on 1.8 million years and so far, no.

So perhaps the best we can do is try to make the best of our own small garden plot and hope that the Fates are sleeping.

Lisa said...

FDC says,

we tend to have a hard time thinking beyond our bellies, or the tip of our erect penis

Sadly, yes. It seems even the brightest among us are enslaved by petty ego needs or destructive desires. The best we can do is, as Faulkner said, to "try to better than (our)selves".