-Shakespeare, Henry V
A few months ago I was riding on my veteran's high horse, snickering at the behavior of those who make a spectacle of themselves in their medals and ballcaps announcing each Veteran's Day on Facebook their participation in a war that may well have involved, for them personally, guarding the PX at Fort Polk. Hero my ass.
P, as is her way sometimes, called me up short.
"Yes, but your war, it wasn't like a war where men are wading through rice paddies getting shot. How many did you lose in your squadron?"
"None."
Did any of you kill anyone, or even fire a shot?"
"One guy. Tater. First night. We never saw anything after that."
Some war.
I did see some tracers up close, particular in the first few nights over there.
It was unnerving at first, but soon we realized they were firing blindly at us, and always missed except for one stray piece of shrapnel that perforated the wing of a friend's jet, unbeknownst to him until he landed and the crew chief noticed the jagged hole in the honeycomb.
Some war.
I think of all that as I continue my journey through a book I've enjoyed as much as any I've encountered in the last couple years, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust. The book addresses how men, and the society that cared for them, dealt with a conflagration that killed 20% of the military-age male population in the Confederacy, and several hundred thousand of their northern brethren. Victorian notions of the "good death" were challenged as men died suddenly or were completed obliterated in this first industrial war, with no last words or professions of faith or family nearby to hear them; society was forever altered by empty chairs at the dining room table of almost every American household; and we took on the task of how to show the proper care and respect for over 600,000 dead bodies scattered all over the South.
The national cemetery system we see everywhere from my old hometown of Marietta, Georgia to the cliffs of Normandy is a direct consequence of that war, as the United States government spent whatever it took to recover and reinter its Civil War dead in tended rows to protect them from the depredations imposed by my bitter, defeated ancestors, who would sometimes allow their hogs to feed on the dead Yankees scattered through our fields and woods.
Peg and I visited one of these cemeteries at Fredericksburg a few weeks ago, not knowing the backstory of how and why these places came to be. These men were gathered from all around this part of Virginia, sometimes a couple years after theirs deaths, and laid to rest here, always where possible with a headstone that gave their name and unit, honoring the identity and sanctity of a human life lost.
To face directly so much loss, the reality of one's mortality, the actual cost of war--an individual or a society that never experiences this, whose closest encounter is a few muzzle flashes and a video game of high tech button-pushing, may make it right up to the threshold of understanding war but never truly experience or comprehend it. Someone serving on a hospital ship in a shooting war knows a hell of a lot more about the cost of it all than I ever will.
My grandfather understood. Born in 1918, he was a B-24 navigator in the Pacific, then a B-17 pilot in Europe. He was one of only two in his pilot training class to survive. He once flew home in a Flying Fortress in which he was the only one out of a crew of ten neither dead nor wounded.
Grandpa knew war, and never once attempted to describe it.
I tell my war stories with an eye roll and a laugh. Not the same thing. Not at all.
So I guess this morning is sort of a confessional, a mea culpa from someone who's too quick to point out self-righteously that only around 1% of military members actually see combat, and I was part of that tiny club. But that doesn't tell the whole story; there is a still tinier club, those who've lost a wingman or a platoon mate and been forced to grapple to find meaning in that experience, and to re-integrate with a world that can never really understand. "We who have seen war will never stop seeing it." So said Joseph Galloway in We Were Soldiers Once, and Young.
I have long since stopped seeing it, because really it wasn't so bad. I go to reunions and listen to solemn toasts to brothers who've "flown west," but in my circle of veterans that usually means a heart attack or a fatal car accident or some such. It never means death in battle. We've mostly died abed.
And there is a larger implication for a society that has no tactile understanding of the horror and absurdity of war. Desert Storm was the beginning of an unfortunate eagerness to show off our military prowess at the drop of a hat, a declining world power acting like a sclerotic old man in his new Corvette. It is easier to avoid facing our senescence as a country while "plinking" bad guys in their cars with smart bombs delivered from a B-1 at 35,000 feet, or better yet a drone being flown by a guy in Nevada while eating a ham sandwich.
"C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre." "It is magnificent, but it is not war." Pierre Bosquet supposedly uttered those words while watching the Light Brigade impale itself in a pointless charge into the guns of Sevastopol, but the words apply with equal force to our current addiction to relatively bloodless (on one side anyway) combat over things that aren't worth the shedding of blood, anyone's blood. Only a society that has had the luxury of unilaterally imposing the costs of war on our less technologically advanced neighbors would have such a hair-trigger when it comes to initiating hostilities. And in each remote-controlled "battle", we learn nothing.
But for now, I'll just meditate on the notion that war is a thing unknown and unknowable to me personally, probably the same as you. P is right. My war was no war, at least not for those of us who experienced it as a bloodless six weeks of extreme sleep deprivation, and little else. I'm not much different than the guy who guarded the PX at Fort Polk, and I need always to remind myself of that. No puffed out chest in a Veteran's Day parade for me. Not ever.
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