Died in vain

I was talking about this with my Bride today. She said that she didn't see how it made a difference where, when, or how you died in war; whether you died storming the Normandy beach to crush Nazis or blown up by an exploding latrine while waiting for orders in the War of Jenkin's Ear.

I replied that it was all part of the implied bargain that we the troopers made when we raised our hands.

We promised to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies. With our lives, if it came to that.

They - the Constitution in the form of our People, our government, our Army, and our officers - promised to hoard those lives and ensure they were spent as frugally as humanly possible.

The Old Lie is one thing.

The Old Lie, when the lie is told as part of a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing?

That breaks the bargain.

And that got me thinking of how many bargains have been broken in the Plague Year.

So I posted this to my FB page today:

"Pandemic Timeline, Day 157: It suddenly seems utterly weird to be having a "day" about dead American soldiers when EVERY day hundreds and even thousands of Americans are dying all around us. Weird. And wrong."

And a dear friend immediately spoke up about his disgust that the federal government had decreed an official day of mourning with the national flags flown at half staff for the dead of COVID-19; "Couldn't have waited another few days to let us honor fallen soldiers?"

And I understand that. I do. I know he and his family have a very dear friend who was killed in Iraq, and I'm sure they still feel the pain of that loss.

Our dead are with us always.

But this was my reply:

"But these poor suffering bastards are dying for their country - in the sense that they're dying because of decisions their government made - as much as anybody who got killed at Bataan or Fallujah.

As an un-fallen soldier I'm as angry and grieved at these losses as I am about the lives we threw away in the Middle East or Vietnam. Even the rhetoric - "heroes" - is the same, whether we send GIs into the streets of Basra with hillbilly armor or nurses into the plague ward with homemade masks and re-used gloves.

I understand how you feel, my friend. But I'm too sick and too cynical to feel the outrage. Our country has decided that we are all expendable. So let the poor sods have their flag. We're all being driven into the minefield now."

And with that, I find that today I have nothing more to say.

Except, as always, this.

The Guns Below

I had an incandescent rant all ready to go for today.

I wrote it out. I looked at it, and I just couldn't find the heart to publish it.

What's the point?

You all know as well as I do what I was going to say. War is a racket. We - me, everyone I served with, the people serving now, the veterans of tomorrow and next week and next year - are just the bailiff's men, serving our country's liens in places and on people all over the world. No, we don't do sweet fuck all to "defend your freedoms". We kill people and break shit that our "leaders" have designated as inimical to our national interests. This year we're the button men and women for Donnie "Five-Deferment" Trump and his crew of racketeers - just as we have been for every President and every Congress since about 1945. Maybe 1953, if you want to be nice about it.

Now there's some honor and decency serving as an imperial legionary. Not all empires are Evil.

But to pretend that we're still the Arsenal of Democracy of Remember Pearl Harbor? To tell ourselves that the people who wore the uniforms in the 1980's and 1990's and Oughts and now the Teens are somehow like the Greatest Generation that saw off Hitler and Tojo?

That's just foolish, the self-deluding mumbling of an idiot child afraid of the dark and needing the comfort of a kindly lie.

I won't pretend that I didn't enjoy my Army days. I won't pretend that I'm not proud that I was a good soldier and then a good sergeant. When my days are done I'll gladly slope off for a pint in Hell with my old pals from Division, from my Reserve and Guard outfits, and maybe if we're lucky with the hard boys of the Legio X Fretensis, and the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion of the Légion étrangère. Here's to us. Who's like us. Damn few, and they're all dead.

I know who I am, and what I did. I'm not ashamed of it, but I'm not vauntingly proud, either. I didn't hold Bastogne or Guadalcanal. I did the dirty work of geopolitics and I'm okay with that. I served with good people, had a laugh, and came home sound, and no legionary can ask more than that.

No, it is you and I, my friends, my fellow Americans, my fellow citizens and civilians, who need to look into our hearts and souls and ask why we have been happy - or, at least, not incandescently furious - to be lied to, gleeful to parrot - or willing to let it pass without clamor - the nonsense hurled at us about "freedom" and "fighting them there", eager to pretend - or willing to let others pretend - that we have not sent, or been willing to let others send in our name, young men and women into harm's way for nothing more than a handful of dollars, or a passing bit of geopolitics, or some fancy of "national honor", or some fantasy about dangerous enemies, where there is nothing but ruin and impotent anger that our own nation has grown from the seeds of our own ignorant hate and fear while pretending to be the victims ourselves.

I just don't have the heart to rant about this. I am just tired, and a little grieved, for the foolish waste of it all.

On this day I offer only the cold comfort that our nation's ideals promise that We the People can choose to honor our veterans by choosing not to make more of them unless it's for a truly fucking good reason.

For those of you who have come here seeking grave words hymning this day, weighted with honor and glory of the service I and mine have done and do, I have none.

Parade

For the out-of-towners, forget the First Toddler emceeing for an imitation of NorKo’s Kim Il-sung Square.  Here is what a normal American small town looks like on the Fourth of July.  No tanks and no B-1s.  And best of all no pompous windbag bloviating while staying dry from the rain behind bulletproof glass.  

More typical is my small town,  We had a Shopping Cart Drill Team from the local non-chain grocery, 

the Daffodil Ladies,

and the Butterfly Bicycle Troop.

Plus half a dozen gearheads showing off their antique cars, and Shriners in funny hats and trick cars.   

The only military presence was six old men from the VFW marching out of step, mishandling the colors, and winking at certain ladies in the crowd of onlookers.   

The only politician was a county commissioner in a convertible throwing candy to the kids.  No speechifying!  

Plenty of hot dogs and watermelon afterwards. 
  
I skipped the fireworks.  I miss the huge bonfires of stacked railroad crossties from my youth.  They lit up the night until dawn.

Tanks but no tanks

A couple of thoughts, based on this Politico piece that Sven provided in the comments on the previous post:

1. For a dude who claims to luuuuuurve his military guys El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago has no problems with making at least some of the poor bastards work over the holiday weekend rather than hang out at home or drink with the guys in the billets. I wonder who drew the short straw down in Ft. Stewart to drag ass all the way to D.C. to babysit the Brads and tanks and the M88 so somebody who would rather not have dragged ass to Southeast Asia when he had the chance (cough!bonespurscough!) could pose with the heavy metal and get a little woody?

2. There's a big reason that the Fourth isn't like Bastille Day.

For all that both republics were born in war and the use of force, the U.S. deliberately pushed the troops back into the barracks - hell, the Founders and Framers didn't want "troops" in the sense of regular GIs at all - in a way that France did not. And, in part because of that the U.S. has been spared the sort of man-on-horseback problems France has had with it's armed forces. There's a reason we here revere George Washington; for all his flaws (and he had them, like all of us) he could easily have been Napoleon and consciously turned away from that.

It's a sad comment - not so much on Trump, who is a ginormous toddler with the soul of a cinerious lump of coal and the intellect of a howler monkey who can only be expected to crave the fake toughness of being close to soldiers and military hardware, but - on the state of this nation that the vast bulk of Americans are reacting to this ridiculous Red Square propaganda show with vast indifference.

I'm sorry I'm 3,000 miles away, because somebody owes those 3rd ID guys a beer for having to be part of this Reichsparteitag shit, and I'd be buying.

And someone owes Trump a finger, while they're at it, and I got one of those for his orange ass, too.

Forgiveness of the Dead

On this day, 64 years ago, Americans gathered at the cemetery at Nettuno, near what had been the terrible charnel-house beachhead of Anzio, to dedicate what would become the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and to "honor" those killed in the war that had just ended.

You know how I loathe all the flag-waving, pontificating, self-justifying “memorial” dog-and-pony shows that serve only to make the living feel better about themselves and their willingness – or, worse, eagerness – to cheer on others to die for their country if it wasn’t for those dang bone spurs.

The closest to fitting "memorial day" act I’ve ever read of was LTG Truscott’s address that day.

Truscott had commanded the VI Corps at Anzio, and a lot of the dead guys there were from his outfits. And he was a hard man, known to be kind of salty, and was probably more sick of hearing the pious patriotic platitudes than I am.

So when the opening caprioling was done he looked out over the rows of “dignitaries” and reporters and guests, turned, and faced the rows of silent markers behind the rostrum.

Nobody knows exactly what he said – probably because there was either no plan to record his words or because he couldn’t be heard – but based on Bill Mauldin's account the gist was that Truscott didn’t see how there was anything particularly good or heroic about getting killed in your teens or 20s or 30s, and that while generals and politicians would tell you that all your dying was noble and sacrificial that most generals, anyway, kinda suspected that was pretty much bullshit.

He agreed that lots of them had died because somebody, maybe he, had fucked up and if that had happened he was grievously sorry and apologized to them. That he knew that was a big ask, but that he owed it to them to ask their forgiveness anyway.

And that he promised that if, in the coming years, he ever ran into anyone tubthumping a line of guff about the glory of war and heroic death that he, Truscott, would tighten the joker's shot group damn quick smart.

So as far as I’m concerned it'd be great if every damn politician and talking head can stay the hell away and leave those haunted graves to the grass, and the sky, and the dead, and those who knew and loved and lost them.

They won't, because that's not how we do "Memorial Day". But I wish they would.

But I will be in that cemetery today, sharing a drink with my Army brothers. I hope you will, too.

And, as always today, this.

Momento Mori

I never quite know how to deal with this day.

Typically I simmer all day in a sort of low, sullen...not quite anger, more like...irritation, like a peat fire smouldering deep below the surface. My fellow citizens' clueless, careless, indifference to the whys and hows their soldiers died is bitter gall, and the unfortunate alternative is a kind of fawning reverence for some imaginary soldier who has "fought for their freedom" that is almost more irking than the cluelessly indifferent.

I understand that most of these people are trying to say or do something "nice" on a day that has been set aside for what they dimly sense as a sort of patriotic celebration of GIs. They usually have no clue that this is something different from Veterans' Day, and, like a drunk at a wedding, proceed to either offend, with their jingo patriotism, or by their hiding their eyes from the abyss that is death in war.

I want them to just say it; "These men and women died not for me but because of me, because of my choices, or because I chose not a make choices. And many of them, and all of them that have died since the end of the Korean War in 1953, died for damn near nothing, died chasing the ghosts of my fears and ignorance. They died because I thought of dominoes, or of Evil Empires, or of fighting them there so we wouldn't have to fight them here. They died because I let unscrupulous men lie me into fear, into foolish anger, into hate. They died because I was a bad citizen.

And I have never come to terms with that. I've never admitted that, or repented of that, or apologized to the dead for my acts or my indifference."

I know that won't happen, and that galls me, too. We Americans are bad at things like regret, repentance, and apologies.

So I'll say it here.

Fuck, I'm sorry, guys.

I fucked up. I trusted people I never should have. I didn't rage with fire and steel against those people who killed you. No, not the people you fought. The people who sent you to fight for nonsense, or hubris, or greed, or stupidity. And once I knew that they were fools, or criminals, or both I did nothing to punish them for murdering you. They still live, many of them honored and respected, while you are nothing but dust and ashes.

I am ashamed.

All I can promise is that I'll try and do better in the future. I'll try and make sure that they can't make any more of you.

That is all.

Take a break in place and smoke 'em if you gottem.

And, as always on this day; this.

Decoration Day 2014

My daughter is up early, as usual. She's just a natural morning person, and she loves to watch the "My Little Pony" reruns the kid channel shows before 9:00am.

I've been trained into getting up early ever since my first week in Reception Station, so I get up with her, and we cuddle, and then I go make coffee and check my e-mail and my Facebook feed.

Today, as always, there are all sorts of "inspirational" stories about soldiers and "tributes" to the recent veterans of our land wars in Asia, because, frankly, most civilians haven't the slightest fucking idea of the difference between Memorial Day and Veteran's Day but they do feel a sort of vague sense of wanting to do the "right thing".

And I'm sitting here reading my friends Facebook posts and I can't help but think this as I read all the Memorial Day stuff.

I'm glad you're thinking about your soldiers today. At least for one day. I'm glad you are concerned about them and wish them well.

But, frankly, if you really care for and want to do something for American soldiers, you might want to be paying more attention to what your "leaders" are doing in your name. You might want to take a hard, hard look at those people who want to send your soldiers into harm's way to accomplish impossible missions like "fighting terrorism". You might want to work against electing morons who have a penchant for doing moronic things like starting land wars in Asia. You might want to think about what happens to those who don't die in wars, and that only those dead have seen an end to war. That the VA "scandal" is really that a coterie of grifters and sonsofbitches lied to you that war could be painless and cheap, waved a flag and frightened you with the idea of dusky terrorists under your bed and you bought it, or, at least, you did nothing to stop it, and now there are thousands of young men and women who will take the mental and physical wounds of those lies to their graves.

You might consider that the best way to honor our war dead is to make damn sure that our "leaders" have damn good reasons for making more of them.

I know most of you here already know that.

But you might take a moment to remind your friends who don't that they might take a moment to consider all that before they return to their regularly scheduled barbeque.

Dies Irae

I post this every Memorial Day. I don't feel quite the same level of suppressed anger this year as I did in the "Support the Troops" Dubya Years when this weekend became a pep-rally for wars that most U.S. citizens were utterly indifferent to other than as entertainment. But, still.

I have little or no hope that I can ever change the way this "holiday" is celebrated. There will be parades and movie festivals. Warplanes will flyover baseball stadiums. Flags will wave. People will "thank" someone in a uniform for service that was neither done for them nor has profited the serviceman or the civilian.

Few, very few, will visit a war cemetery and ponder the reasons we seem incapable of not making more war dead.

But I will continue to post this every year and hope.

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 to FSB Albany 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. 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 10-penny nail that every single day in every single war some person dies a stupid, meaningless death that snuffs out a world in a moment. That those empty eyes zipped inside a bag or covered by a bloody blanket were once the windows to an entire universe.

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, and what we do, before we open the goddamn doors of the Temple of Janus.

Dead Time

There's something about watching a soil sample rebound from consolidation that encourages reflection.

Boredom, perhaps?

This week between Christmas and the New Year has always seemed like an odd sort of interval of no-time to me ever since my Army Days. Back in the Eighties, at any rate, this week was usually a period of massive "ghosting"; we'd fall in for a ridiculously abbreviated morning PT - often distinguished by pure fun-PT like basketball, dodgeball, or the usual exercises but led by the junior privates for the entertainment and mirth of all involved - and then go hang around the aid station for the morning, clean already-clean weapons, dick off doing small PM chores in the motor hole, or find reasons to go "inventory our TA-50" which always seemed to entail fiddling with the field gear in our racks with our boots off while watching He-Man cartoons.

After midday chow even this pretense of military activity ceased, and we would spend the rest of the afternoon just goofing off; hanging out in the chow hall, or at the gym, visit our married pals at their quarters, watch bowl games in the dayroom or just chill in the barracks with our friends.

I remember one particular mid-week afternoon that turned into a "Faces of Death" marathon from noon until well into the following morning.

Remember those videos?

In the pre-cable era I recall that the "Faces of Death" videos were considered shocking evidence of the decline of Western Civilization; amateur (or professional outtake) films of people getting waxed in various either horrible, or comical (or both) ways. Hangings, electrocutions, falls, plus all the usual gawdawful atrocities humans have always managed to figure out how to perpetrate on each other...packaged in a tidy ninety-minute VHS tape perfect for bored-GI entertainment. But the usual finger-waggers and professional morals nannies considered them the nadir of human morality and signs that Western civilization was headed for the depravity of Rome and Babylon.

How innocent were we..?

Anyway, this week was also the time when young troops would get involved in all sorts of insane horseplay; it was this time in 1986 when Private Black pioneered "drainsurfing" during an unexpectedly-intense dry season downpour and ended up in the swamps behind Venado Beach. Given Blackie's penchant for bizarre nonsense I'd have to say that this was fairly subdued for him; nothing was set afire, nobody but him ended up naked, and there were no arrests. This week was for "Jackass"-grade stunts before there was a "Jackass".

Today I'm a sedate middle-aged, middle-class father and husband and the notion of jumping in a raging drainage ditch with a foam sleeping pad wouldn't occur to me any more than running for mayor of Portland. But this week, this dead-week between the two holidays, still retains an odd sort of surreality for me.

It has always seemed to me that the old year really dies with the solstice and the Jesus-come-lately graft of religio-commercial holiday glitter we've pasted to it. The silly alcohol-fueled celebration of the New Year a week later marks the beginning of another year's journey around the sun.

But for now we wait, idly diverting ourselves with desultory work and the bright nonsense of our new toys, through the short, dark week as the earth spins through the no-time that spans the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.

And, perhaps, take some time to reflect on where we've been. And wonder where we're going.