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Saturday, March 13, 2004 |
While reading John Kerry’s speech to the Senate Committee on behalf of the Vietnam War Veterans back in April of 1971, I was reminded of a journalist character in the Leon Uris’ classic novel, Mila 18, the account of the Jewish-ghetto uprising against the Nazi regime in Warsaw, Poland. The journalist’s name is Christopher de Monti.
In light of the continuing war in Iraq, the subsequent and deadly bombings in Iraq and Spain, and the continuing investigations on why we were misled into war and the breakdown of intelligence in pre-9/11, I wanted to share a few conversations Chris has with his good friend Oscar. They seem applicable to these times.
As background to this conversation, Chris has lost his faith in the human race. He had witnessed the Italian troops kill women and children, torture soldiers and Moroccan men by putting their testicles in a vice, and witnessed them bragging about their deeds to other troops. Chris took up binge drinking and became irresponsible, two habits that were ruining his life and starting to get him in trouble. In fact, he was picked up and imprisoned by the Paris police for his behavior after a drinking binge that had lasted an entire month. His friend, Oscar Pecora, came to his rescue, bailing him out of prison and taking him to his villa on the lake at Lausanne.
The opening of the conversation takes place here, on the balcony overlooking the lake that is illuminated by a full moon. Chris has just questioned why no one seems to act upon the news he’s been sending of the atrocities.
"Christopher. Every report that you sneaked out of Spain was planted in newspapers and wire services. All we can do is give the facts to the people.We cannot force them to stage a rebellion in righteous wrath."
"You are so right, Oscar. The whole goddamned human race sat on its hands and watched them murder Spain. Lemme tell you something, brother. They’ll pay for not stopping Mussolini and Hitler in Spain. Pretty soon they’ll run out of hiding room and, Jesus Christ, will they get clobbered!"
Oscar Pecora’s sympathetic hand fell on Chris’s shoulder. "We journalists are like garbage cans, Chris. Everybody sends us their filth. Through us comes all that is rotten in man. Christopher, what you are going through now...You were a single small voice that cried out for justice in a dark and angry sea and no one heard you. Until a man is struck in his own face he does not want to believe the attack on his brother concerns him."
Chris stumbled from his chair, staggered to the rail, and hung onto it. "Shall I tell you why I became a journalist? Do you know Thomas Paine? ‘The world is my country, all mankind are my brethern...to do good is my religion.’"
* * * *
The next afternoon, after Chris awoke from a deep sixteen-hour slumber, he found his way to Oscar Pecora’s study....
* * * *
"It has all been a pretty startling lesson, Oscar. I can see why the men in our business turn crass and cynical. We sound the great trumpet and no one hears us. Free men with full bellies don’t want to believe that a black native in Ethiopia concerns them or that the bombing of an open city in Spain is the prelude to the bombing of London. . . .Can I go on being a journalist under these conditions? I have learned now that truth is not truth. Truth is only what people want to believe and nothing more."
"But you will continue to seek it as a journalist or as a streetcar driver in Geneva. You have lost sight of the fact that there is a world of decent human beings and a lot of them are listening. They depend on the Christopher de Montis to be their eyes. You are not a man to abandon the human race because you have lost a battle. Now, what do you say, Christopher?"
5:50:55 PM  | |
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Coming on the eve of the first anniversary of the start of war, news out today (by Robert Burns of the AP) that this war's vets are going to be returning to Iraq can't be good for a president who is trying to convince America that he is a good leader who can keep things in control. We simply have too many aspects of America that are out of control--national deficit, lack of educational funds, lethargic economy, highly exclusive international relations, to name a few. More importantly, this news can't be good for the morale of our troops.
The Army is spread so thin around the globe that when it needs fresh combat troops for Iraq this fall it will have little choice but to call on the same soldiers who led the charge into Baghdad last spring.
The 3rd Infantry Division has already been given an official "warning order" to prepare to return to Iraq as soon as Thanksgiving. When those soldiers flew home from Iraq last summer to their bases in Georgia, few of them could have known they were, in effect, on a roundtrip ticket.
They are not alone in facing back-to-back deployments to Iraq. Some of the same Marines who teamed up with the 3rd Infantry to topple Baghdad are already assembling again in Kuwait, only a matter of months after returning home, and more Marines will go next year.
Other Army units that recently returned to the United States or are preparing to come home this spring, including the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, are candidates for a quick turnaround.
The Army has not announced which units will join the 3rd Infantry in the next rotation, although it has notified three National Guard brigades and a National Guard division headquarters that they are likely to go in early 2005.
When the Saddam Hussein regime collapsed, U.S. troops in Iraq figured the war was over, except for some mopping up.
But as the acting secretary of the Army, Les Brownlee, acknowledged to Congress last week, "we simply were not prepared" for the insurgency that developed in early summer, prolonging the war and taking the lives of hundreds of American soldiers.
One 3rd Infantry soldier, Sgt. 1st Class Eric Wright, put it this way in Iraq last June: "What was told to us was that we would fight and win and go home."
Eric, we were all told that lie by everyone peddling this war.
9:47:10 AM | |
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