Friday, July 29, 2005

THE LATE NITE SERMONETTE (SORT OF) WHIFFS OF WAR AND THE NUMBERS GAME: DR. OMED RAMBLES ON   I once worked with a German baker who as a child somehow survived the fire-bombing of Hamburg in World War II. More than 200,000 people killed, I think.  Someone will correct me if I’m wrong. Many more than were killed at Dresden, the fire-bombing of which was made famous by Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughter House Five; more than were incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together; about the same death toll as the Tokyo fire-bombing. He didn’t talk about it much. He was in the Hitler Youth; said it was like being in the Boy Scouts. One night he opened up a little bit. His description of coming up out of the shelter he thought was going to be his tomb, and seeing his home neighborhood that had once existed reduced to charred sticks, shattered and burnt masonry, and metal melted and twisted by the tremendous heat and force of the incendiary and high explosive bombs, is not something I’ll ever forget. When he spoke of reaching down and picking up the blackened head of a neighbor, that was lying in the street like a football, it gave me the shivers. I understood then why he was often such a cold man.   My wife has already described how her father never got over his service in battle in World War II, as she says, the closest thing to a just war that we’ve fought in a century.  All the bombings I’ve described in the previous paragraph occurred in that war and we, the Allies, the good guys, the saviors of democracy and civilization, planned and committed deliberate war on civilian populations, rained death from the air and sacrificed these hundreds of thousands of people who were then our enemies in true holocausts of fire to achieve the objective of defeating the Nazis and the Nips. That Hitler and Stalin killed millions more somehow doesn’t make it all right that we did some of that killing for no good reason whatsoever. That some of the killing seemed necessary doesn’t make it all right. That some of the killing was necessary doesn’t make it all right.   At the end of World War II, the American Air Force sent out shining hordes of Roise-riveted B-29s from tiny atolls in the Pacific, fire bombed Tokyo and other cities, and dropped its two and at that time only atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cities that had about as much military significance as Dresden. Truman wanted to drop the first bomb on Kyoto, the spiritual and cultural center of Japan. Greatest Generation Airmen killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in an effort to convince the Japanese military aristocracy that we would rain destruction on their cities and annihilate as much as of the population as we could before even one Marine would hit the beach in the Land of the Rising Sun. Well, it worked, didn’t it?   It had the intended effect. The Japs surrendered. We won. Then Uncle Joe wasn’t our friend anymore, the Russkies had their own A-Bomb, the A became an H, China was Red, Korea was a police action, and all of sudden our parents were digging holes in the backyards and putting in underground doomsday parlors next to their patios. In Elementary School we were doing the duck and cover, and watching “educational films of nearly naked Japanese with radiation burns, the Bikini Mushroom blooming in Kodacolor over pygmy warships staffed with goats and other livestock, and that shot of houses blowing away like Kleenex in the blast effect. We cracked our eggs, made our omelet, and had to eat it or sleep in it. Cold. We began playing our numbers game according to both Malthus’ theory and the Pogo Principle on a planet wide scale: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”   Civil War General Sherman said “War is all Hell, there’s no use in trying to reform it. The South chose this war, and I intend to visit that Hell on the people of the South, and make war so terrible to them that it will be a hundred years before they again resort to it.” (I’m quoting from memory here, but I think I have gist of it.) Sherman was the first modern general, the first who deliberately made war on civilians and civilian infrastructure. As in so many other matters, Sherman was prophetic; the people of the former Confederacy have never again resorted to open war against their perceived enemies, since Sherman’s Army ravaged its way across the heartland of the South and “made Georgia howl.” A bit of insurgency here and there, occasional terrorist torture and murder, were employed to bring, and keep their former slaves in line and Northerners out of their beeswax; Lynch Law and Jim Crow established to maintain control over the “enemy” population.  Some of my forbearers fought in the Civil War. They were Confederates, from Georgia. A traitor to my ancestors, I’m a Union man myself.   Over half a million soldiers died in the Civil War. In a country with a population of maybe 30 million souls. Shelby Foote (recently deceased, alas) and others have pointed out the weapons were way ahead of the tactics the officers had been taught, and accounted for the high casualty rate. But most of the deaths in the Civil War were due to the fact that no one knew how to dig a proper latrine, sterilize a scalpel, or had any inkling of or opportunity for personal hygiene. The majority of soldiers died in camp of infectious diseases. The number of American dead in Bush’s Iraq dust up is miniscule in comparison to the deaths in Vietnam, Korea, WWI and II. This does not mean we do not have just as much reason to mourn their loss. The number of total casualties is not quite as small. Some have asserted that the deaths have been so few because of our vastly superior military technologies, weapons, and tactics. The real reason so few soldiers (and that few too many) have died in the field in Iraq, I think, is our vastly superior medical technology, triage, and evacuation techniques. Soldiers who would have died on the field in any former war are scooped up and saved for a fate worse than death: spending the rest of their lives as human jigsaw puzzles. I am sure that some of the severely wounded soldiers are simply glad to be alive; I am equally certain that some of them wish they had died on the battlefield. Almost 1800 American soldiers are dead in this…is it still the War on Terror or are the spinmeisters calling it something else this week? As per Tommy Franks, we’re not counting the civilians, and the DoD keeps the exact number close to its collective bemedaled chest, but as far as total American casualties go, the ratio between the wounded and the dead must be at least 6 to 1. I’m just guessing here, so if anyone wants to go do my research for me and come back and tell me I’m a commie pinko idiot, be my guest.    I grew up surrounded by veterans. I myself would not exist if my father had not joined the Air Force, done his stint in Korea, and been stationed upon his return to the States at Vance AFB just outside Enid, Oklahoma, my mom’s hometown. Dad’s experience in Korea changed the course of his life, and created mine and my siblings. I don’t think he would be the prosperous retired businessman he is today. His ambition before joining the Air Force was to be a telephone lineman. He didn’t have to fight or kill anyone, not directly, anyway, and discovered he’d rather rule from the desk than serve on the line. My Dad’s first cousin, raised with him like a brother, and who I knew as an uncle, was not so lucky. He was an infantryman in Korea, and got caught behind enemy lines in winter. When he came back he was broken and nobody could find the glue to put him back together. The alcohol sure didn’t do it.   Hal, our next door neighbor when I was growing up, had no toes. He’d lost them to frostbite in Korea. I mowed his lawn for him. Every year or two, the flesh of his feet would become necrotic, or potentially gangrenous, and the docs at the VA would take another inch. Eventually, he didn’t have any feet left at all, and the VA medicos were working their way up his legs. First he wore special shoes. Then he wore the special shoes and used a cane. Then he was in a wheel chair with the bottom half of his trousers neatly rolled up and pinned or a blanket over his thighs. Hal died before they got past his knees. Hal didn’t have any children. I don’t know whether or not he got a Purple Heart for his toes, but he deserved a Medal of Honor for living the rest of his life without his toes but with a great deal of dignity.  One of my own grandfathers died from gangrene from a gunshot wound after a botched amputation. Nasty way to die. My mother hated doctors.   Two of my maternal uncles served in the Navy in WWII. Another served in North Africa; Uncle Carmen had brought back a Walther PPK as a souvenir. A James Bond fan, I thought that was exceedingly cool. My youngest uncle, my father’s brother, was a cold warrior during the Vietnam era; the Air Force taught him Russian and sent him to a listening post in Germany. West Germany, it was then.  I was just young enough to miss the draft, but I tried to join the Navy when I was 18. I was a good tester back then, PSAT Scholarship and all that, in spite of being a troubled young man (suffering the first symptoms of Bipolar Disorder), scored in the 99th percentile on all their tests, I was healthy, Uncle Neptune wanted me. But when they sent me to their psych doc, I do believe he took one look at me, decided I would end up in the brig before I got out of basic training, did me a big favor, and gave me a mental 4F. I guess he could sense I had this little problem with authority.  My younger brother and I are the first males in our family not to serve in the armed forces of the United States during a time of war in a couple of generations. But it’s not like we haven’t seen at least the effects of what we’ve been missing. Even today. My wife’s brother did make it into the Navy, just in time to serve in Gulf War I. He has the syndrome. He loved the Navy, but his health deteriorated and he could no longer take the high stress of his high tech job. He was sent home. Today he works as a security guard at an Indian Casino, lives with his mom, and does the best he can.   I can’t believe that any American of my approximate age and upbringing would not have experienced these whiffs of war, even if they had never served in the military, as I myself have not. Many, like my friend Jonah, has an older brother who served in Vietnam. Some, like me, have friends and loved ones “Over There.”  When we started this war we bragged on our high tech precision bunker buster cluster fucker bombs and what all else. We pretended nobody but the bad guys were getting killed in those kill boxes. We did a lot of pretending and still are. But a lot of people outside the kill boxes were being killed and put into boxes because of our highly effective precision ordnance.  Woman. Children. Innocent bystanders. Iraqis are dying just because we’re still there. To echo something General Sheridan said about Indians, the principle would seem to be the only good Iraqi is a liberated Iraqi. But we don’t know how many Iraqis we’ve liberated, forever, because we’re not keeping count of all those zeros, are we? Antique military acronyms from WWII can be applied: we’re past SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up) and have arrived at FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition). I can already hear the last chopper lifting from the roof of the Embassy.   Note: I now (8/3/05) realize this post should be on WHITE CROSSES, BLACK RIBBONS, AND CHALK, as well as on the Tent Show home page. So here it is on both. 12:04:19 AM    comment []