Memory

[pecunium]

World War 1 shaped a lot of the modern world. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, used it to prove they were "real" nations. It killed "the Sick Man of Europe," put paid to the Tsars of Russia, dissolved the last ties of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and laid Germany low, as The Franco-Prussian War had raised her up.

It also set the tone for how we have seen war ever since, the books about it, All Quiet on the Western Front, Generals Die in Bed, Jonny Got His Gun, A Farewell to Arms, etc. were full of disillusion, and the arc of poetry, from the early verses, ( In Flanders' Fields) to the middle chorus (Break of Day in the Trenches) to the later attempts to apprehend it to those who could never understand (Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen).

That sense that war is pointless, and wretched and wasteful is all true, and we expect soldiers to think this. Which is why we are shocked that some of them aren't so be-horrified by it. Some of this is because it's not always like that (not even for those who were in WW1, see Spring Offensive by Owen, which was unfinished at his death).

I hope to think those sentiments are a net good, that the awareness of our common humanity is more widespread because of it (soldiers are a funny lot, we know our job is to kill each other, and as a result we are the most convivial of professions. I've spent many a night in carousing with my fellows; and each of us aware that, should political fortune shift we could be at most serious odds).

So the most hopeful thing to come out of the war is probably this speech of Mustafa Kemal, who led the Ottoman Army at Gallipoli; later remaking Turkey and known to us as Ataturk. It's posted in bronze in New Zealand, where his erstwhile foes built him a memorial.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land. They have become our sons as well.

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a mother, I find Ataturk's words to be cold comfort indeed.

That mankind has not yet figured out how to talk instead of fighting is our constant shame - and our greatest danger.

Armies are necessary as a deterrent - but any actual use is a failure, and such a failure destroys the very soldiers who make up the army.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Speaking a soldier, it's a little warmer. Look at the minds of those who talk of Vietnam as if it were people by fiends and monsters, or those who think Confederate gravestones need to be pointed, lest a, "Yankee" sit on it.

Awareness that the "enemy" isn't the enemy after the shooting stops is a crucial part of keeping the shooting from starting again.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

I hear you, I do hear you.

But "failing to act like self-destructive idiots" is not good enough - I set my sights higher for mankind, and am impatient with its slow progress.

My view is that you - your precious being, unique in the world - are far too valuable to be dashed against the rock of rulers' whims. I value you (and All Our Boys) far beyond what your country does. Therein, I fear, lies the tragedy.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

You and Xopher are in all sweet accord.

I have a slightly different view of the matter. I don't know if more nuanced is the word. I do think the bar to war needs to be really high. Once the bar is met, well it's an ugly business, and there's no getting around it.

WW1 was perhaps (one hopes) as bad as it gets, because of timing (10 years later and communications would have been better, and some of the battles would have been pressed to a very different resolution).

None of which is at odds with your position (I might have a higher bar for the use of force than you do, though lower than Maia's, which is that it's never acceptable).

The real tragedy (to both you and Xopher) is that you probably value me, and All Our Boys, more highly than we do, which is what prevents anyone from having Montesqueiu's "rational army".

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Xopher has always struck me as one of the most solid thinkers extant, and yes, of course he and I value you more than you do yourself: we're the ones who would be left behind to grieve and mourn and "long to speak of it to you/and see you pleased once more, with words of mine".

I wouldn't put my bar at "never" - there are times when it is necessary to insist up to and including the use of military force. But as I said, I see those times are a failure, not a cause for celebration and flag-waving. (Down the same line of reasoning, war profiteering is a form of treason, and should be judged as harshly as mass murder.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I think you value me diffferently.

I don't think war is an occaision for flagwaving, or celebration. I find myself bitter and nasty at those things (and people, esp. politically driven) who try to use it as such.

I flip the television, and billboards, posters, etc., off on a regular basis these days.

The one time I came close to losing it was in the lobby at Walter Reed when Bush said, "bring it on". Had I had something solid I might have thrown it at the screen. As it was I swore, and stomped off to my room, where there was an insufficiency of beer.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't think you are in any way a flag-waver! Sorry if it came out that way - I was pointing at the people who's bar for war is lower, and casting aspersions on their motivation - not at all at you!

In an ideal world, you would not have to be bitter about those people - you could laugh at their misguided folly, because they would not have the power to send people out to war.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It's not the sending out to war which bothers me; it's things like McCain telling people how vets trust him, and he's behind them a hundred percent of the way; when he voted against the new GI Bill, because it would "be too potent an incentive for people to leave the service."

That's the short of shit which pisses me off.

When they follow it with telling me the other guy (whomever he is) fails to be "supportive" of the troops, because s/he doesn't want to treat them in precisely the way that person thinks is proper, or whatever the attempted scandal de jour (Obama hate the troops because he doesn't wear a lapel pin... What the FUCK?) happens to be, well I get cranky.

Sometimes I let them know it, which usually leaves them just a trifle speechless.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

You and Xopher are in all sweet accord.

HELLO.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Oh, you want to chime in with the ovious?

Shall I make a list of all who are of such an opinion, or merely note those who are adding themselves?

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Have the list tattooed on your silly hide.

I have said this before. You *could* persuade me your country has a right to spend you. Being a pacifist does not make me blind to love of country. Not spend you lightly, or easily, or callously, but, yes, with your consent, they have a right to expend you.

You will never persuade me they have a right to *waste* you.

And to make use of what is good and right in you to do a hideous filthy wrong to you AND to others AND to the world ...

As I've said before, my motives for doing the work I do right now are not as pretty as they appear. I have a little list. "People who thought that this obscenity was the best possible use that could be made of Terry" is a recognised class on said list.

And as for your theory that you are expendable... you're Just Wrong about that. Sorry. We all have our blind spots...

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I never said I thought my being wasted was good, nor even acceptable. It is something I allowed as a possibility; then again I also allowed as fragging someone who so planned was a possibility too.

I can't explain the idea of my, "expendability." It's not something I want to have done, nor is it a position I want(ed) to be in. It's part and parcel of a soldier's lot, and I have, in various incarnations, accepted it.

Is is pleasant? No. At times it was deuced unpleasant. I didn't like it in the least, and the idea of it happening in the goat-rope going on now is... well it's not explicable.

I am furious about the wasted dead. Not that they died in vain (because that, from a soldier's point of view isn't so cut and dried) but because this adminstration wasted them; and in so doing has broken my army.

Words fail me.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

It's part and parcel of a soldier's lot, and I have, in various incarnations, accepted it.

We're about 99 percent in perfect agreement, and that one percent... is that chasm we'll never cross, and wisely don't spend too much time staring into.

You don't put yourself above the expended. And I don't put them below you.

I feel like I ought to be able to say that better, but I can't.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

That says it well enough for me.

There is only one of him. Though he go willingly when he is sent, any such going is a failure of the sender.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

You have a funny definition of willingly.

I was reluctant as all fuck to go. I went because the thought of my friends going without me was intolerable, but the thing I most wanted was for all of us to stay home.

Part of why I am on a strange form of terminal leave, is that I refuse to go again.

Are there circumstances in which I would go willingly? Probably, though I can't think of them. I certainly can't see any coming up in the time I would have left (four years) to get my retirement, so I walked away.

There was more to it than that, but that played a big part in my hanging it up.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Willingly: you went. You weren't dragged or threatened. That intollerability of the thought of abandoning your friends is internal, not external - so willingly.

I'm glad you are on that "strange form of leave". Both personally and because you are the canary in the mine - I'm seeing others do the same.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

If I may make a side trip:

A few years ago, my then-early-20s older son accompanied his friend Chau in escorting Chau's aged aunt and uncle back to Vietnam, from which the family had fled perilously many years before.

I found it a surreal experience to say, "My son is in Vietnam," given what it meant when my mother and her peers said it.

Thank you for your service, Terry

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

I value that.

I too am offended beyond belief by McCain. The things he voted for, like torture and against the new GI Bill proved to me he's an elderly idiot. Yeah, he served his country well at one point, now he's serving it badly.

Sigh. I'm gonna make my comments about family and friends in the service over at my LJ. I'm not naming friends, mostly because except for you, I'm uncertain who is or was in the service.

[labelleizzy.livejournal.com]

wow.
that last quote... it's amazing.

thank you for sharing.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I once read an essay by OSC blaming the cynical attitude towards war on Vietnam. It's as if he didn't know WW1 existed.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

One of the oddities of the american zeitgeist is our recurring naivté.

Just look at the hand-wringing about how Iraq is causing us to lose our innocence, which we lost on That Tuesday, and before that when McVeigh blew up the Murragh Building.

Which was apparently a different innocence from the one we lost in the bombing of the Barracks in Beiruit, the taking of Hostages in Iran, the Fall of Saigon; the Chinese sweeping south in Korea, the attack on Pearl Harbor.

None of that could have happened if we'd not had some left from WW1.

Perhaps the world was different when the Maine blew up, the Civil War raged or the British (with some Canadian help) burned Washington, twice.

So OSC is just keeping up a merry tradition of American dewy-eyed jejuenité

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Perhaps one thing that America didn't have intil now is the feeling that my Grandfather had.

He'd come off the ship from Boulogne, or leave, to discover that the Armistice had been signed. Party time.

Twenty years later, it looked like it was going to happen all over again, maybe to his sons.

The USA stayed out of that one until the Japanese took a hand, which isn't quite the same.

And maybe two invasions of Iraq isn't quite the same.

Maybe.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I think what some people call "innocence" (in this context) is really arrogance: it can't happen here; we're God's chosen country; we're always and inevitably the good guys; everyone loves us...

So it comes as a horrible shock when it does happen here, someone else claims God for their cause, we're not the good guys, and not everyone loves us. And as quickly as possible, we go into denial and pretend the shocking thing never happened.

[anna-en-route.livejournal.com]

That bronze sits high above the sea looking out into the Pacific, on ANZAC day there's an army band that plays there. We found it by accident on a walk one day.

It's about the most fitting memorial I can think of

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I understand that not every soldier thinks war is pointless, wretched, and wasteful. I don't think every war is pointless, but wretched and wasteful, yes.

Humans should be able to get past needing war. Any animal can fight, but only humans can negotiate. We should be able to use our unique gift. But we aren't there yet; I just hope we don't wipe ourselves out before we get there.

[lalouve.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a pacifist, I feel that pacifism is more than opposing wars - just like consensus instead of majority decisions is not just a question of a larger majority. Consensus requires more than just getting a majority of 100% - it requires working, from the very outset, in a different fashion. Pacifism requires more than just not fighting wars; it, too, requires a different outlook, from the beginning, on world affairs. Once you're in 1939, it's not much use doing what should have been done in 1919...
If we ever start valuing each other at the level I think we should, there will be no more wars. I know a lot of soldiers, some of them on active duty (I have a friend in Iraq), and while I respect their choices to do a difficult thing that they feel needs doing, I do so wish we could learn not to need them.