I hate Memorial Day. Very simple: outside of a few parades, maybe some standard TV spots, that's it. It's all about sales and trips and beer and maybe a few cliches to make people less guilty, if they so much as feel any twinge at all.
Old men sit in Veteran's Homes, looking up hopefully every time a car goes by, and then slumping again when they pass by. The VA hospitals need volunteers to serve coffee, visit patients, push wheelchairs, even bring approved pets to visit, as well as give rides to and from the hospital. A patchwork of veterans' aid groups has sprung up to fill in the gaps, but it's very hard to find them if you're suffering from debilitating conditions.
Memorial Day is supposed to commemorate soldiers and service. Many graves will receive no visitors, and many veterans' families will try to mourn their losses as many others barbecue, get drunk, flood to big box stores.
Veterans themselves, especially of recent wars, will smell smoke and flames and burning meat and flinch as firecrackers go off. With fireworks legalized in some states, the kids start using them as early as April for July 4th. Maybe they need practice. I don't know. We all deal with it the best we can. There's no alternative.
I'm not saying that these things should be stopped. But as soldiers are reacting or freaking out or waiting for visits that never come, perhaps you could spare something, anytihng for them.
Don't expect a lot of links today. I'll do that later. I'm kind of thrown, but the hits just keep coming.
You will see video of someone's funeral cortege on the news, the occasional perky news story about the heroic amputee vet, but then next day everyone goes back to work in their gas-guzzling SUV with the faded yellow ribbon on the back that reduces patriotism, service, and gallantry to two or three words, also seen on tee shirts. Nothing says commemoration or somber reflection like a silk screened teeshirt adorned with belligerent or sappy cliches. There are shocking news stories about the occasional scandal at the VA or whatever, but nobody ever gets it right, the essence of service. And because it's so many things mixed into one, it can't be fitted into a twenty minute Sixty Minutes segment, or even an hour-long special here and there. The Army itself doesn't tackle it, for whatever reasons. The PAO is more comfortable dealing with either symbolism or carefully managed photo ops. The discipline and self sacrifice you learn in the military exist uneasily alongside the pragmatic stuff: the colorful bitching, the snark, the complaints about the food---and the moments that are so small but mean so much. The military doesn't break you down and turn you into some killer zombie. It strips you of pretense and finds your strength and your true personality, teachs you how to use that strength, and puts those newfound lessons to work. Before Basic, people say, "It might be possible, but it's too hard." After Basic, soldiers say, "The sooner we start the sooner we're finished."
The Army doesn't ask the impossible from people. It asks the things that many people don't think they can do, don't want to do, or don't want to find out if they can do. Possibility leads to actuality and that in turns leads to strength that you're taught equals responsibility and moral obligation. Soldiers are taught to disobey illegal orders no matter what, but we come from our culture, and so do the people we report to. Many heroes in the Army have been ostracized or driven out. The Casualties of War ran and murder of a young Vietnamese girl resulted in paltry sentences-----and accolades----for the squad who kidnapped, raped, and murdered a young girl who was no more than sixteen. The soldier who turned in the rest faced death threats----and attempts. Abu Ghraib was exposed by Joseph Darby, who was sickened by the photos he found. He knew what he saw was wrong. He reported it.
He was ridden out of town on a rail. The town his unit came from didn't believe the charges, nor much care. Those soldiers came to the military already formed by their town, their culture, their upbringing. Even the military couldn't change them. People think evil is a grand thing. Often it's petty, because it's the act of petty spiteful people, Americans all. (Of course I'm speaking about America today, but just look at certain French intellectuals, defending various rich rapists, if you want to see the international version.)The occasional news stories that surface in journalism about veterans who commit horrible crimes blame the events on the military, or the service in the wars, but that's just butt covering. William Calley's very ordinariness shocked people after My Lai, but he showed the dangers, perhaps, of how evil blooms not just where you might expect it---in deprivation, squalor, and abuse----but in smug privilege, prim unquestioned superiority, and in the cesspool of what some people call patriotism. Calley's background was devoid of....anything, really. His life appears devoid of any real deprivation of any kind, and also any stimulation, intellectual or otherwise. He sought out nothing, and was apparently interested in nothing. He was mediocre. He was passive; he drifted. He was empty. He was, however, a white guy in a nation that then as now has trouble admitting to its prejudices. He was accepted at Officer Candidate School, even though he flunked out of college, showed a complete lack of leadership---or any--- ability, and in fact was notable only for the fact that he didn't have enough personality to make an emphatic impression. He was a non-entity. He had just enough privilege to be arrogant, yet not lenough to buy the things that would give him any semblance of character: private tutors, travels, good schools. In any case the flaw might have been there in him, by whatever means, at birth, and his boring environment only intensified it. William Calley today is arrogant, complacent, and unrepentant. The unformed slug of decades past has now matured into a cocky murderer who got away with it.
Why dwell on My Lai, on Haditha, on Abu Ghraib, this weekend of all weekends? Because they were never honestly dealt with, and because many soldiers come from exactly Calley's background----and they turn out to be Hugh Thompson, who had a strict upbringing, but dropped out of college, served briefly in the Navy, then ran a funeral home. Like Calley's his life was fairly ordinary, but in looking at the man, his honor tends to color the assessment. Yet what he did, it's important to note, is no more than decent, no more than compassionate, nothing but human. This is not said to denigrate what Thompson did. It's to give it the respect it deserves. In war, some people are all too eager to lose their humanity, to kill and rape as if they've been waiting for the opportunity. It's the thing you hold on to tighter than anything else, because when you lose it it's gone forever. It's a choice to make, especially after the shock of combat. You get up the next day, go outside the wire and wonder, Were you one of the people trying to kill me? That's your choice: suspect everyone, protect yourself, and lose a piece of your soul, or treat everyone as you would any one from your home country, as a human being, until they prove themselves to be an enemy. The second will cost you, but it'll let you keep your soul.
Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, in the wake of Calley's trial, instituted American Fighting Man's Day and asked Georgians to drive with their lights on for a solid week. The states of Texas, Arkansas, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Kansas requested clemency for him. George Wallace asked Nixon to pardon him. Is there some kind of calculation there? How many murdered Vietnamese men, women, and children does it take to get America outraged? More than Calley, America's indifference to his acts proves he was truly his country's representative at the time. Five hundred and three Vietnamese men, women and children were not equal to one meagre little excuse for a man. Yet Hugh Thompson's role came to light slowly and without much fanfare. He and Joseph Darby and all the other soldiers who do the right thing are heroes, but they make for boring news stories, I guess. Thompson's death fairly recently got little mention.
When people say hero, they conjure up a hazy picture of a stern-faced G.I. Joe figure, young, tough, and battle-hardened. There are no Hugh Thompsons or Glenn Andreottas in this picture. (Andreotta was one of Thompson's door gunners.) But herosim has many forms, and the sheer cold bravery that it takes to think about running into enemy fire and then doing it is the only kind that America wants to discuss. Bravery and honor like Thompson's or Darby's can be translated into actions in the civilian world, and that and the fact that these guys are all products of their environment make people very uncomfortable.
People love to blame the Army for the things they don't want to look at too closely. So when there's an Abu Ghraib, they call it some bad apples and turn away, ignoring that Abu Ghraib was excused or approved of by those of a certain political persuasion. The less humanity a person possesses in the dominant class' mind, the less offense is taken at any act which harms them till the suffering reaches horrifying levels. This is why when a mosque is vandalized in this country, many people shrug and point to Times Square, or the shoe bomber or 9/11 itself. They've taken the first option: treat everyone with suspicion and cut away parts of your soul to do it. We are indeed the products of our culture.
People forget William Calley. They deliberately push him from their minds, when if they actually dealt with him, he'd be exorcised, and further My Lais---now known as Haditha---would be prevented. Yet at the same time, do they remember Kareem Khan? When Keith Ellison wept while recounting the story of Salman Hamdani Republicans jeered. Ellison himself demonstrated conclusively a certain cheeky gutsiness by asking to be sworn in---as America's first Muslim American Congressman----on a Koran. When Republicans objected, he used Thomas Jefferson's own Koran, borrowing it from the library of Congress.
If you want to truly appreciate soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Airmen, you have to understand the bad with the good to better realize the distance between horrible and honorable, the varieties and degrees and gradations of each, and how closely they're all related to the culture we're all steeped in. You have to look the beast in the eye to vanquish it. The way to deal with Abu Ghraib and My Lai and Haditha is not to obfuscate and twist and evade and try and hide it away. It's to act swiftly and openly and decisively, to admit fault and error openly, in front of the world. These were not ambiguous situations----unless you're a President who thinks torture is fine. If your administration uses it, and a substantial---and humiliating----percentage of the general civilian population approves of it, if used on certain people with a certain skin color----then of course it's going to be a difficult situation. Memorial Day, it turns out, is not so much about remembering as it is avoiding and forgetting, and it's not just soldiers I'm talking about now.
You don't appreciate a soldier unless you know what they gave up, and every soldier is as different from the next as we all are. It's just that the uniform and the standards are the same. In that unity of purpose comes not robotic sameness, but the freedom to find the deepest reaches of character, the heights of ability that were never touched before. The discipline, the marching in step, the identical uniforms----these things tend to make some civilians unnerved, because they make self expression an more private affair, limited, perhaps, to family and friends and company members. It may be unimaginable to some how one can choose to sacrifice segments of one's self determination in today's culture, but what one gains are far greater than what one sacrifices. A true sense of self, newfound strength beyond what one thought possible---and I am not referring to the body----and discipline and patience. William Calley had no self to bring out, no strength to further develop, no character to build. In ordinary life, he would have continued to drift, attracting no notice, destined perhaps, for a life of eventual petty arrests for things like drunkenness, disorderly conduct, DUIs while driving home from the Country Club.
In Calley's day, everyone was conscripted. Today, we're all volunteers. That means that people research the job, know the risks, and yet find the chance of unity and comradeship irresistible. Some of them do so out of desperation, others out of idealism, others because there's no other place to go. There are as many reasons as there are soldiers. If the quiet heroics of Thompson, Andreotta, Lawrence Colburn (Thompson's other door gunner) and yes, Joseph Darby are hard enough to do justice to, then factor in the additional condition of conscription.
That there are many shades of heroism is demonstrated by Jessica Lynch, who arouses a curious kind of hatred in people who think that women don't belong in the military, much less gays. Much derided by some truly extreme rightwingers, who describe her as 'a little girl who should have been in college' Lynch was the victim of the Army's rush to publish a heroic story about a female soldier, eager to allay, perhaps ambiguity about women serving in combat. (The American public seems to view all soldiers' deaths as equally tragic, despite apocryphal--and in my experience utterly false----stories about male soldiers getting more broken up by female casualties than any other.) Based on one source only, they confused the blonde Lynch with a reddish haired male soldier who did go down fighting. The Army sensed or feared that the public wanted black-and-white John Wayne style heroics, and even though Lynch herself has repeatedly corrected the record, there's a puzzling hatred for her, perhaps for even being in the Army. She also made the mistake of praising the Iraqi doctors and nurses who treated her, hiding her from Republican Guard members, and in the case of one nurse, even singing to her. They might have saved Lori Piestowa, too, but for intermittent electricity that made delicate neurological surgery impossible. Several Iraqi informants came forward and gave Lynch's location to the Army near the area, which itself takes a huge amount of courage----unarmed, no weapon, no body armor, in a combat zone where active combat is going on?-----especially when you consider that they could have been shot had anybody known what they were doing. Pat Tilman---who was actually there during her rescue, as a perimeter guard during the rescue------suffered from a similar fate when he was killed by friendly fire. Tillman was a progressive, a star football player, and he gave it all up to serve as a specialist in the Army, first in Iraq, then in Afghanistan. Other troops mistook him for the enemy and some rumors remain to this day. Maybe people are uncomfortable discussing the ramifications----is he still a hero if he's killed by his own comrades? Was it deliberate? Was it an accident? How do you balance all these contradictory confusing feelings?
You don't. There are few black and white wars. You accept that that it's confusing, and you deal with it as best you can. The quest for a victory, for a way of making what's acknowledged now as a war based on lies seem like WWII, is an obsession with some people. That means that the villains have to be truly evil, and so Islamaphobia is exceedingly common in America, even though it's the conservative white guy gun nuts like Ted Nugent who making (some) empty threats and brandishing guns. Others actually attack, spurred on warlike rhetoric by the likes of Sarah Palin and others who share her sympathies. "Don't retreat, reload," is not a motivational phrase, and 'retreat' has more than one meaning in the military. But if the war's ambiguous, are the soldiers at fault? Soldiers who suffer from PTSD may ask themselves that question repeatedly. Nobody else should, and the correct answer is a resounding no.
Ultimately, it's not the parades or the ceremonies once a year that soldiers need; it's an honest appraisal of what they do and why they do it and attention, assistance and care the other 364 days of the year. We fought for our country. Shouldn't our country fight for us? The word 'hero' needs to be retired and replaced with something else. What's a word that has approximately 2,200,000 meanings? Hero is someone grand and cliched, without fear or doubt. Any good soldier will tell you---if he or she thinks you're the sort who can take it----"Hell, yeah, I was scared shitless." Fear is human, and it'll keep you alive. The greatest fear is not to be afraid of death, or injury, or shame, but of being forgotten. And it's a funny thing, with the ceremonies of remembrance this weekend, how the reality of soldiers and what they do will be forgotten, buried under a cascade of platitudes and barbecues and beer, while a few old men search empty roads for visitors, far too many homeless veterans wonder how they came to be where they are, and where young veterans try and figure out how to live after their lives have been changed forever.