2005-06-01
Editorial
Bernard J. Fine
Memorial Day Redux
The following is from a novel in progress, “Dib Krohmer and Friends”
The media feed the public with images of war. Actual battle scenes are shown on television. Virtual battle scenes are created for the cinema. Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola excel at shocking viewers with graphic depictions of other people's blood and guts. Lifeless bodies with wounds exposed are shown draped in the positions they assumed in the moments before they died. A heroic sergeant barks out orders to his squad while mortally wounded. A cowering soldier cringes in his foxhole shaking with fear. Grenades and shells explode; machine guns and mortars fire. Your neighbor's brains are splattered all over you. The kid without fear dies crying. Drawn, oh so weary faces silently watch him die. A lad who can stand it no longer rises up out of his foxhole and yells “you bastards,” as he runs toward an enemy machine gun nest, grenade in hand. Brave voices. Brave men. Heroes, Cowards. Macho meets wimp. A new national prayer is born: “Our fodder who art in heaven, hollow be thy names.”
If there is a universal truism about war, it is that the elders wage it with the bodies of the young. The most troubling thing about this is that yesterday's young are today's elders and that very little learning has taken place. After so many wars, so-called “good” wars and “bad” wars and after so many monuments and parades and tributes and memorials, where are we?
We remember the past, but what we tend to remember is idealized. We pay homage to the glories of battle, the victories, the heroes, the great and noble causes. We have parades honoring the dead and the living soldiers who have served their country. “Never again” has become our motto how many times? Our clergy dutifully and repeatedly preach the immorality of war. Our editorial writers wax and wane in their enthusiasm for sending our young to war depending on the writers' particular economic and political inclinations. And although we are almost religious in our belief that we are a peaceful nation, we are arms merchants to the world. No matter where our young people fight, they are as likely as not to be killed by arms made in the United States of America.
Unless one has lost a loved one or been in serious combat oneself, the blood and bones, terror and agony and the ignoble causes are quickly forgotten, repressed along with all of the other unpleasant things in life that we prefer not to deal with. Our battles over and our heroes enshrined, we get all comfortable again . . . until the next time and the next and the next.
If one were to read aloud the names of all Americans who died in wars [editor's note: Afghanistan and Iraq not included], including both battle casualties and war-related deaths, assuming that it takes about three seconds to read a name, it would take at least 40 24-hour days to cover all of the wars in which this country has participated. OR . . . if all of the above names averaged 1 inch in length when set in 8-point type and the names were typed end to end with a single space between them, the list would be almost 18 miles long. OR . . . if each of the above names was represented by a person 5' 9” tall and those people were placed end to end, the line of bodies would be at least 1238 miles long. SO . . . if you were to drive from New York City to Little Rock, Arkansas, there would be an unbroken line of dead Americans lying head to toe by the roadside every inch of the way.
Rarely mentioned in our sporadic romances with war are those who also serve. Parents, wives, husbands, sons, daughters, lovers, friends; those who wait, hope, pray. There is no day for those who raised children for others to send away to be killed. There is no parade celebrating the misery of those who wait. There is no memorial wall inscribed with the names of young women and men pining away for lost loves.
Who suffers most, the young man killed instantly by an enemy bullet or the parents who raised him? The brain-damaged result of a shell fragment or his loving wife? The returnee with post-traumatic-stress-syndrome or the mate who eagerly awaited his homecoming to a future productive life?
1238 miles of dead soldiers. How many miles of dead dreams and hopes and loves?
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©2005 by Bernard J. Fine. All rights reserved. Permission to republish in any form must be obtained. Contact Editor at http://www.fiatlux.info .
