I do not come from a family with extensive military service. My father was drafted in 1958, served his two-year-long tour and then came back home to a job that had been held for him. He has never referred to himself as a veteran, and always reminds me that the term is more correctly given to those who served in conflict. But he served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Cold War as a calculator, tasked with determining missile flight paths. (I believe he worked with the Atlas missile, an early ICBM model.) He is a veteran, in the dictionary definition sense, but not according to the military.
His older brother, my uncle Richard, was also an Army man, and served from the 1950s into the '70s. In my family's understanding of the term, Richard was a veteran, a combat veteran, and he never spoke of his experiences in Vietnam with any family member; my understanding is he would go silent for long periods so his letters home were not sent from Vietnam or associated mailboxes in order to protect his family from the fear that he was in a dangerous war zone.
Their father, my grandfather, was too young to enlist for action in the First World War, and by December 7, 1941, he was the father of four sons and so could not serve in the Second. His younger brother, my great-uncle Walter, died in action in France in 1944. (My dad has been producing family ancestries and I did not know this fact until recently. At right is a photo found online of his gravestone in Lorraine American Cemetery, near Metz, France, one of 10,000 Americans buried in that cemetery; I do not believe my father has seen his uncle's resting place until now.)
On my mother's side of the family, my great-uncle Lou served in the Army in Europe in World War Two and saw the concentration camps, a solemn thing for a American-born Jew to witness.
When I was 18 and struggling with the identity issues that 18-year-old boys are supposed to struggle with, but a bit more loudly than my New England family was accustomed to witnessing, my Uncle Richard had some advice: "Take one step forward and raise your right hand." Military service was what I needed, he made clear in his curt way, and he was the only family member, friend, or guidance counselor in my life to offer this advice. A couple decades later and a few mistakes along the way, I wonder if he might not have been correct, but only because I remember that at the time, we were not at war.
* * * *
War is one of the least common shared experiences but is the one that writers and other artists most desire to capture in the moment, to make it seem a common shared experience. Many great works are the result of the attempt to make war real for those, like me, who have not and probably never will witness combat.
Each new generation at war masters new technologies for waging war and new languages to describe it. The Civil War brought new fighting machines and battlefield photography; the Second World War debuted mass anonymous bombing runs and heroic, large-scale battles--it was the war for novelists and filmmakers; the First World War was the war of chemical attacks, soul-crushingly slow trench warfare, and new mechanical technologies of death-creation sadly under-anticipated by those who were planning for yet another war fought in straight lines.
World War One was the absurd war, fought for reasons so complicated and obscure to the common fighting man that for Christmas 1914, an unofficial truce was declared by the soldiers on the battlefields of the Western Front and there, on the fields, carols were sung, holiday cards were exchanged, and joint burials of the battlefield dead were conducted by the opposing sides. It was the war for poets.
Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" (Latin for "it is sweet and right") is a poem that attempts to capture a small moment of death in the large landscape of a battlefield shrouded in mustard gas. It calls the Horatian declaration that closes the poem, "Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori" ("Sweet and right it is to die / for one's country"), "the old Lie," and there the reason for the poet's close study of a fellow soldier's violent death is delivered. For Owen, there is no great message to be gleaned from recounting his comrade's gurgling death other than the sad, empty absence of any message. You would not tell children eager for heroic tales, he concludes, you would not tell them of great glory, if you were to see and hear the "smothering dreams" of death that he has seen.
If any members of my family carried such "smothering dreams" in them from the military portions of their lives, they certainly did not attempt to convince any of us in the next generation of the beauty of "patria mori." I suppose that that is an honorable silence. My uncle's Vietnam combat stories were only for the ears of his VFW buddies and hunting partners.
Owen himself would die on November 4, 1918, one week before peace was declared, on November 11. So I honor our patriots this Veterans Day 2013 by reading a poem that reminds us of the absence in the grit of war of any heroic message, a poem that some 95 years after it was composed probably better describes the unconventional battlefields seen in our current conflicts than many attempts today.
His older brother, my uncle Richard, was also an Army man, and served from the 1950s into the '70s. In my family's understanding of the term, Richard was a veteran, a combat veteran, and he never spoke of his experiences in Vietnam with any family member; my understanding is he would go silent for long periods so his letters home were not sent from Vietnam or associated mailboxes in order to protect his family from the fear that he was in a dangerous war zone.
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| Photo by 'Major M' on FindaGrave.com |
Their father, my grandfather, was too young to enlist for action in the First World War, and by December 7, 1941, he was the father of four sons and so could not serve in the Second. His younger brother, my great-uncle Walter, died in action in France in 1944. (My dad has been producing family ancestries and I did not know this fact until recently. At right is a photo found online of his gravestone in Lorraine American Cemetery, near Metz, France, one of 10,000 Americans buried in that cemetery; I do not believe my father has seen his uncle's resting place until now.)
On my mother's side of the family, my great-uncle Lou served in the Army in Europe in World War Two and saw the concentration camps, a solemn thing for a American-born Jew to witness.
When I was 18 and struggling with the identity issues that 18-year-old boys are supposed to struggle with, but a bit more loudly than my New England family was accustomed to witnessing, my Uncle Richard had some advice: "Take one step forward and raise your right hand." Military service was what I needed, he made clear in his curt way, and he was the only family member, friend, or guidance counselor in my life to offer this advice. A couple decades later and a few mistakes along the way, I wonder if he might not have been correct, but only because I remember that at the time, we were not at war.
* * * *
War is one of the least common shared experiences but is the one that writers and other artists most desire to capture in the moment, to make it seem a common shared experience. Many great works are the result of the attempt to make war real for those, like me, who have not and probably never will witness combat.
Each new generation at war masters new technologies for waging war and new languages to describe it. The Civil War brought new fighting machines and battlefield photography; the Second World War debuted mass anonymous bombing runs and heroic, large-scale battles--it was the war for novelists and filmmakers; the First World War was the war of chemical attacks, soul-crushingly slow trench warfare, and new mechanical technologies of death-creation sadly under-anticipated by those who were planning for yet another war fought in straight lines.
World War One was the absurd war, fought for reasons so complicated and obscure to the common fighting man that for Christmas 1914, an unofficial truce was declared by the soldiers on the battlefields of the Western Front and there, on the fields, carols were sung, holiday cards were exchanged, and joint burials of the battlefield dead were conducted by the opposing sides. It was the war for poets.
Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" (Latin for "it is sweet and right") is a poem that attempts to capture a small moment of death in the large landscape of a battlefield shrouded in mustard gas. It calls the Horatian declaration that closes the poem, "Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori" ("Sweet and right it is to die / for one's country"), "the old Lie," and there the reason for the poet's close study of a fellow soldier's violent death is delivered. For Owen, there is no great message to be gleaned from recounting his comrade's gurgling death other than the sad, empty absence of any message. You would not tell children eager for heroic tales, he concludes, you would not tell them of great glory, if you were to see and hear the "smothering dreams" of death that he has seen.
If any members of my family carried such "smothering dreams" in them from the military portions of their lives, they certainly did not attempt to convince any of us in the next generation of the beauty of "patria mori." I suppose that that is an honorable silence. My uncle's Vietnam combat stories were only for the ears of his VFW buddies and hunting partners.
Owen himself would die on November 4, 1918, one week before peace was declared, on November 11. So I honor our patriots this Veterans Day 2013 by reading a poem that reminds us of the absence in the grit of war of any heroic message, a poem that some 95 years after it was composed probably better describes the unconventional battlefields seen in our current conflicts than many attempts today.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
--Wilfred Owen
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