The first (with genuine interest): So, I can't figure out your position on the military.
The second (with ill-concealed derision): Dude, you are such a nerd.
To address the second one first: the Amazon.com Marketplace is a very dangerous thing.
Since working on The Company A Blog, I've realized a need to widen my range of research materials, and as such, went hog-wild on the Marketplace about two weeks ago. Packages have been arriving in spurts; days will go by as I anxiously check the mailbox, then four or five will show up all at once. The coffee table in the living room is covered with books on the Marine Corps - firsthand accounts, the easily identified Osprey books on specific uniforms, organization, and battles - and the DVD player has a new stack of documentaries on top of it.
The comment was made by a friend of mine as I expressed excitement over the latest arrival - two collections of original footage shot during the battle of Saipan, one of which had been made into a very detailed USMC training film, and the other (with the sinister title "Saipan Uncensored") containing interviews and sounds recorded during the fight, as well as a large amount of color footage - some of which has never been aired anywhere due to its extraordinarily graphic nature. (We'll come back to this in a little bit).
These films are really invaluable, I think, especially as a research tool - they were shot by trained USMC crews who hit the beaches with the first wave, and while they couldn't record sound on their cameras (the audio was picked up different team) you almost don't need it. The scratches and imperfections make them seem all the more real (which, of course, they are) - especially when they are over- or under-exposed and you know whoever loaded that film had no time to fiddle with their camera adjustments. They provide an interesting and shockingly up-front look into situations that are most often described in words, and no matter how evocative the word, a picture will always be worth a thousand of them. (And speaking of pictures, it's also interesting to see how many famous images are actually still frames from the film crews - someone who has always been frozen while jumping off his amphtrack now appears over the side, rolls over, lands awkwardly on his stomach, then collects himself and stumbles inland). The combat Marines didn't always appreciate the intrusion - some coming off the line glare at the camera with a look that could stop a train - but you are still seeing them there, moving, talking, running, and sometimes bleeding and dying - and it is real. This has not been staged for Hollywood, these guys aren't actors, and you wonder about each face you see pass in front of the camera.
Anyway, I was really excited to get these, and then was promptly deflated by that one comment. I've been called a nerd before (many times) and this particular friend is one of my most caustic (and yet oldest). We're used to quibbling, we've had serious fights in the past, but for the most part we just rib each other and it rolls off like water on a duck's back. He had an edge in his voice, though, which was unusual, and while I'm not taking the fact that he said it seriously, the stigma attached gave me pause.
History, and particularly military history, has been my primary area of interest since I was old enough to play with toy soldiers. Almost every young boy is fascinated by the action aspect, the building of forts, the racing around with cap guns, arguments over who shot who. My friends and I built countless forts in our backyards - endless competitions over who built the best one, who had the best supplies, the design changing by location - by the small pond in my backyard where we dug a stream to provide a natural barrier; by the creek down the hill behind Mike's house where we threw stones at fleets made of tinfoil and built big reservoirs guarded by little plastic men. Mike and I, being voracious readers, picked up book after book on tanks, soldiers, battles, and wars, and while he gravitated towards the modern, I took interest in the past, how the lumbering catapults of medieval times eventually led to the Abrams tank and everything in between. Even then, I thought how important armed conflict and the army had been in shaping the world's history; if a British private soldier had shown less compassion to a wounded German there would have been no Second World War and Adolf Hitler would just be a name on the rolls of the missing on the Western Front; how a Confederate sharpshooter at Monocacy missed picking off Lincoln by the barest degree of error; how my older family members survived or died on what seemed like a whim.
As we grew older, the differences began to tell. Mike, enamored of airplane technology, dreamed of a career in the Air Force. I looked at the pictures of young men grinning as they left their homes, then lying stark and staring in the mud, and wondered why anyone joined the military anymore, especially if they could see such pictures. It seemed like there should be a better way to resolve problems than periodically killing off the youth of a nation.
Some boys never fully outgrow this phase; those who want to keep pretending become reenactors, those who find truth in it join the actual military. I went into reenacting at 16; Mike went into ROTC at 18 and is deploying to Iraq at age 24 (though, luckily, not in a combat capacity).
I'm digressing here. The point is, I have been fascinated by the minutiae of the military for almost as long as I can remember, and I don't consider myself to be a war-positive person. I do think, though, that like it or not the country (and human society as a whole) was created by people killing each other for whatever cause they thought right. This appears to be a basic, underlying precept of human nature - we are a combative species, not content to coexist, and no matter how long or hard we may campaign to do away with warfare, I think it will always define us and always has, from the first club and spear fight between Neanderthals until the day when some uniformed figure pushes the red button on his Doomsday Device. It's an unpleasant reality, but a reality it remains. And whenever the drums start beating, the sabers start rattling, and the speeches get eloquent, people like me are going to drop what they're doing and learn to kill because they think it is right.
(I'm going to just say right here that I do believe in the notion of a Good War. It's not a term that can be used lightly, of course, and the term "good" is relative inasmuch as destruction and death will occur as a result. My chief example, and it's a bit of a cliche, is the Second World War, which for my money absolutely had to be won. While the post-war squabbling launched us into the Cold War, nuclear paranoia, and fears of international Communism, the liberation of occupied countries as a primary goal of an invading force is, I think, one of the best causes that could justify fighting - and, of course, one that is begun on no uncertain terms, which is another kettle of fish for another time).
Digressing again. The question is: why?
Going to war, shooting and killing and the mindless terror it engenders are not something that I can ever imagine happening to me (and this is something I'm very thankful for). I understand that anyone who hasn't experienced these things first-hand cannot possibly know what they're like, and should count themselves lucky. However, I am curious. I want to know as close as possible how people not so different from me felt as they faced possible destruction for an ideal. I want to know what they saw, how their clothing was covered in sand, how minor things like a hot meal became the most important thing in the world; how an eighteen year old kid could go overseas with a gun and come back aged wildly beyond his years; how my ancestors could hide in the trees like I did when I was little, then take aim and kill another human being. I want to know these things because I don't want them to happen to anyone again, as foolish as that sounds and as impossible as it is, I want to learn these things in their detail and try to pass them on so that others will simultaneously realize what a great sacrifice soldiers have made for this (or any) country and by illuminating that sacrifice make people think about where their children are going with the courage in their heart and the fire in their stare.
There is also, I'll admit, a hint of guilt that so many kids have been killed while I can sit here in my office and write about them. Likewise, a hint of jealously that they could believe in something so strongly that they were willing to risk their lives.
This brings me, in a roundabout way, back to the "Saipan: Uncensored" film.
I do think that it is detrimental to exclude scenes of death and devastation from documentaries. I'm not talking about showing a house that's been knocked over, or a line of graves. These images, while evocative, don't pack the same punch as a filmed image of a head lying in a field. Just a head. No body, no equipment - just a head, lying on its side, the eyes still open and staring. Or a short image of a graves registration team, some using long-handled spatula-looking tools, some using hooks on long poles, to detach decomposed corpses from a pile where they fell. Rigor mortis has set in, the arms and legs no longer obey gravity, but what was once a young man now resembles a frog that has been run over on the highway and left to rot in the sun. Pictures of casualties are one thing, and are terrible enough, but it's far too easy to think "Oh, the poor guy" and move on. Filmed images, somehow, are a whole new level.
I've heard the term "war porn" bandied about with regards to such explicit material, and it's one of the most inaccurate terms I have ever heard. Although there are doubtless many people who take a morbidly ghoulish interest in pictures of the dead, I think it's wrong to label them as inappropriate for display. Honestly, people do not learn through subtlety. As John Doe said in the movie Se7en, you have to hit them with a sledgehammer to get their full attention. Certain pacifist groups in Germany, France, and Britain hit upon this idea immediately after the First World War, and collected the most gut-wrenching photographs they could find; these were published in book form in the hopes that people would look at what had been and work together to keep it from happening again. To label such images of reality as pornographic seems to indicate a desire to cast aspersions upon the greatest certainty of warfare - people WILL die, and die violently. When a sergeant from A Company was hit by a machine gun on Saipan, his captain thought the following:
I used to wonder what the people back home thought when they saw the name of someone they knew on a KIA list. Did they think the corpse looked like the one they'd seen in a funeral parlor back home? Because if they did, they were sadly mistaken.
It's this kind of mistaken that leads to the glorification of warfare, and adds in part to its perpetuation. To see someone laid out in state in their coffin does not compare to seeing a body without a face lying alone and far from home as flies and maggots eat away at the tattered flesh. I had nightmares after watching part of Saipan: Uncensored, and I know I won't be forgetting the sight of the head in the field any time soon. To ignore this sort of brutal imagery, or to defame it by labeling it as "porn" is, to my mind, an affront to people who have seen or caused these things to happen in real life and who will be remembering it for the rest of their lives. To shudder and turn away, that is acceptable, but before one goes about glorifying warfare, one should SEE the result.
The ability to remember, to study one's past and interpret its implications for the future is another of those inherently and exclusively human traits, just like organized warfare. Activists are fond of saying that humans are the only species that routinely engages in massed slaughter of their own kind, but it is also true that we are the only species to have any cognizance of what happened to generations before us, and it is foolish BEYOND REASON to discount this second trait in favor of the first.
I guess I am a nerd after all, but I'm a nerd that knows a lot about guns, so watch out.
Heading back to the first line, my position on the military. This has never been an easy question to answer, and it's a favorite with people who want to call me out on being a reenactor (though this particular instance was a genuine question, not an attempt to catch me in a contradiction).
I have had family in the military. William Emerson in the 1st Massachusetts in 1861; Phil Wood Senior and Hamilton Wood in the First World War; Phil Wood Junior, Ned Billings, Linc Richardson, Tom Willams, and Ralph Gillett in the Second. Private (later Captain) Emerson received a debilitating wound that left him unable to use his right arm; Phil Senior landed in the quartermasters while Lt. Wood survived fighting with the 307th Infantry; Lt. Phil Wood Junior died with the Marines on Saipan, Lieutenant Commander Billings disappeared with his burning ship at Guadalcanal, neither Linc Richardson the Merchant Marine nor Tom Williams the pilot were willing to talk about their service, and Ralph Gillett, my grandfather, died before I was old enough to know where Indochina was.
World War Two was a wakeup call for my family, and we haven't been in uniform since.
I have had friends in the military. Eric Wisbeth was a gunner on a Humvee in Al Faw, Iraq. My friend Corinne's brother Paul is flying Apache helicopters overseas. Mike, who I've known since kindergarten, is due to ship out in August. Bobbie Small went overseas with the Army. Lindsay Pfeiffer married a young 1st Lieutenant out of West Point; her cadet brother was in the honor guard. Some have been luckier than others. Joey Walsh got posted to Alaska, where he and Linds have been perfectly content. Paul Neal's gun camera footage was used in a segment by Fox News, so his sister and friends could see tracers streaking by his cockpit as little infrared people fell under his bullets. Mike is working with a damage assessment team, having decided that he wasn't made to kill after all. Bobbie Small came home with wounds and health concerns. Wisbeth wakes up in the night sweating because he looked down the barrel of his M16 at a four year old girl and hesitated just long enough to recognize the difference between a scared child and a screaming insurgent.
Meanwhile, I was raised in a peaceful family, had a hippie babysitter, learned mistrust for the government when young, went to a very liberal school; read and read and read military history and spent money I didn't have on reenacting equipment and trips to Virginia.
It's hard to get into a discussion of feelings towards the military without sounding like a hypocrite about the Iraq war. I don't think we should be there at all, I don't think there was ever a reason to go, and I think that no matter how we try to push up the "liberation" aspect, people there are not really all that much better off. They may become so in time, but it will take many many years to repair the infrastructure. That said, since we DID have the poor sense to go, we owe it to the people whose country we've destroyed to stay and fix it, and that unfortunately is going to involve a military presence.
What the men and women have to do on the ground isn't pretty, but it is now necessary. I don't like why they have to do it, but recognize that it's not their decision. They believe enough that they were willing to go, and for that they should be respected. The way this country has treated its veterans in the past has been nothing short of shameful, especially those coming back from Vietnam. I have never been able to understand how the United States, celebrated champion of equality and fair treatment, could turn her back on the very men and women who secured that safety. Sure, the people might disagree (as is their right, one of the rights those in uniform are ostensibly protecting) but for the government to betray them as well, to deny them opportunities and leave some of them to fend for themselves on the streets is a treason beyond anything Benedict Arnold might have dreamed. Pacifist or hawk, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, those young people who forsook being a carefree eighteen year old and picked up a weapon to fight for you - there are few people more deserving of respect. Understand that I am for world peace - I think it's improbable that we'll see it in my lifetime, or even in the span of humankind, yet I support the idea - but listen: respect the hardship that those in uniform face, because those soldiers are not so different from you. If you must apportion blame, most of it belongs with the politicians whose families have never been touched, who have never been affected when the "purple testament of bleeding war" has been opened, who apparently find the entire thing an adventure.
Tell them about the lone head lying in the field, eyes open and staring, flies buzzing around, maggots already devouring the eyes. Don't tell those who are willing to take the chance on being the faceless corpse far away in the mud. Are all soldiers blameless? Certainly not. The environment created for them robs some of their decency and leaves the rest to handle what is left on their own.
As Sage Francis says: "You support the troops by wearin' yellow ribbons? Just bring home my motherfuckin' brothers and sisters! 'Cause they don't call the shots, but they're right in the line of fire..."
This is enough tirade. Just remember this: there are legions of people your age who are willing to shoulder the responsibility of killing and take the chance of dying to protect the life that you know. Even if you can't endorse it, appreciate and remember it.
