Periodically we come across great quotes (and poetry) that serve to illuminate the human condition in combat. One is the Augustine of Hippo quote we learned about from Nate Fick, which we blogged about here, in 2006:
"Anyone who looks with anguish on evils so great must acknowledge the tragedy of it all; and if anyone experiences them without anguish, his condition is even more tragic, since he remains serene by losing his humanity." -- Augustine of Hippo. From One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick.
Another one is the great Tim O'Brien one, which Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D. wrote about here:
"As Vietnam combat veteran Tim O'Brien wrote in his novel, The Things They Carried: 'A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil ... You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty'." -- Achilles in Vietnam, by Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D.
Do you see where this is going yet? If a war story isn't brutal, isn't ugly, it isn't true. People do unspeakable things to each other in combat; and the way they survive is focusing on how to get through (the band of brothers, for whom they fight -- the wet bond of blood -- fighting for the one who stands at your shoulder); and numbing themselves out so that they can keep going on, putting one foot in front of the other, but feeling ... nothing... that they can manage to feel at the time, because there simply isn't psychic space, isn't room. If they feel at all, that will come later. But not during. God help the ones who feel, during. They're likely to not even be able to go on.
To put this another way, they focus on what they can control (almost nothing, literally) -- like being there for the guy or gal next to them; not what they can't control (everything else, including why they're there, whether the mission now or ever did make sense, whether they'll survive, whether they'll ever see home again.) By putting one foot in front of the other, by continuing to stand shoulder to shoulder, somehow, they make it through, often, just barely, and are left -- usually alone, I might add, and it's shameful that this is the case, these people we ask to fight -- to deal with the repercussions themselves, when they simply aren't capable of integrating such a great (as in mighty), all-encompassing, horrific, and horrifically graphic experience on their own. Imagine trying to put these pieces together, yourself. You simply could not; or you'd be the ridiculously rare and most likley superhuman individual if you could. That's just not a realistic (or fair) expectation at all; so let's dispense with it, and get on with the business at hand: understanding what they actually went through, and developing some compassion -- fellow feeling -- for it.
As you read Pat's reminiscences -- the series of accounts of this young Marine, 17, in Vietnam, which I'm titling "eyewitness to combat" -- think about these things.
Remember what Ernie Pyle, the greatest and significantly most humane American war correspondent called it? "The Powerful Fraternalism of the Ghastly Brotherhood of War." And he made the point, too, that these guys did it -- sometimes the only thing they could adequately focus on was that:
"He did it for the kid next to him; he couldn't let him down. They needed one another so bad."
So don't get up on your high horse and be horrified by what Pat's saying, if he has to say something that strikes you as terrible. War IS terrible; it IS never moral; and it DOESN'T make for perky stories told in three points with a snappy introduction and a great takeaway message to mull on with your popcorn. It's dirty, messy, evil business that often breaks those who participated in it, who rarely even come to terms with what went on while they were. And we just stand by and WATCH that, and wonder, or criticize them, for not being able to cope "better" with what they went through. What would be "better" be, exactly? Would WE know it if we saw it; would THEY?
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Remember too, you weren't there. Our "Representative Veteran," Pat, was -- and he's still trying to process why he had to experience that, and what it means to him that he did. The remiscences, of which we'll only be sharing some, took 40 years to get down in transmissable form. That's a lot of painful "elephant" being fed through a very small aperture, so that it can be understood by the rest of us -- and hopefully taken to heart, so that we treat this generation of returning warriors better, and don't make them beg for the services, and the appreciation, that they deserve. Remarkably, scratch a Vietnam vet -- lonely, neglected, cast off by society, EXILED in his own land -- and you find someone who would give half a paired something to see the current generation better than they were. Not bitterness, a desire for betterness. Well, most of them at least. And the bitterness is easily understood, where and when it exists, as to why.
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And by the way -- we never did give these guys an offical, actual "Welcome Home." Chew on that instead, if you want to point fingers about who should have done what in war. WE should have done THAT. And in some small way, by making one combat veteran's experiences known in this manner, on this blog -- heh -- that's exactly what we're doing now.
Welcome Home, Pat, Rob, Claude, Grif, Jeremy's dad, Ray, Shad, John Paul's dad, Steve, the other Steve, Congressman Thompson, Max Cleland, Kathie's husband, Bet's husband, Cecil, the cute flirty guy with the eye patch, who sat next to me at a photography exhibit (still learning!) and who'd just survived a stroke -- everybody else who didn't get that at the time, and we can guess with great certainty hasn't been able to since, either. Oh, and that would certainly include the abandoned and forgotten guys on the streets (homeless), and the various guys lolling off to sleep in wheelchairs at the veteran's homes, with their little American flags staked into their chairs, who I am pretty sure aren't having visitors, and are dying by the score every month, lost to us for good.
I had a conversation lately with Pat: how many of those guys are you still in touch with? Because it sounded like very few. This is what he had to say:
"The problem with being attached to [that group of] Marines is that very few of each deployment survived long enough to ever get together. 1/9 tried reunions for a while but too few [were alive] to meet so they suspended it. 2/9 still is trying but no one from my days are there. The thirteen guys I went into the Marines with were either killed in action; died of their wounds; committed suicide later; [or] were so severely wounded that they are still in VA mental hospitals and don't recognize anyone [so there'd be no point]. Only two of us are still alive 'n kicking and we got together for eleven years on what we called our "kill day". He drifted up into Canada, I drifted to Texas; we have not spoken for over 20 years so I don't even know if he is still around." Yikes. See bolded statement for emphasis...
Really and truly, America -- don't you dare criticize these people. You haven't walked a mile in their shoes -- and until you do what YOU need to do, and uphold YOUR side of the bargain -- you really haven't earned the right. If anything, read and learn -- and recognize how very human the motivations, compromises, and eclipsing of characters is. And just be glad that you didn't have to be there; and do what you can to provide a measure of comfort, acceptance and acknowledgement to those who were. Don't NEGLECT America's warriors; FAIL to welcome them home; STAND BY and watch them be crippled from what they experienced, for which they have often have no HEALTHY RECOURSE WHATSOEVER; and then have the NERVE to point out their moral turpitude, as if you knew. You don't; they do. Point, theirs. And that's the only point worth hearing on this one; sorry.
