Our Veterans Day falls on what used to be called Armistice Day. On that day in 1918, the major fighting of World War I ended. My grandfather fought in France in WWI, but when I think of that horrific, interminable conflict, and all that it says about war, I think not of him, but of George Lawrence Price.
My dad was in college at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, before Pearl Harbor. Afterwards, according to family myths, he went and had many long talks with his advisor- a monk from the college- about whether to enlist in the military.
Dad was a truly devout Catholic, a first generation American and an only son. He knew that killing was wrong and wished to become a conscientious objector should he be drafted. He felt that staying here to help his parents was truly important as his mom, my grandmother, was in frail health from her diabetes.
Brother Vincent had a different idea. Enlist in the Army and go to officer’s training school. That would give dad some choice in where the army would place him and what he would do while in it. Dad took months to make the decision but in the end, joined and went to officer’s training school and became a supply officer.
While stationed in England, dad led a platoon of mostly African Americans. While in North Africa, he led both African Americans and locals. He had a way of inspiring hard work and his guys appreciated the fairness he offered them. He always spoke with great pride of those with whom he served
My dad often bragged that his proudest achievement in WWII was that he never had to fire his gun at someone; that he never killed anyone. He was able to stay true to his belief that taking a life was immoral. Sadly, the truth was it didn’t matter.
My dad died 39 years ago this week. He was in a car accident, broke a bone in his neck, and lapsed into a coma. He never emerged and died in his hospital bed at the VA in Minneapolis. What killed him though was alcoholism and the memory of the horrors of what he saw in WWII. War ended his life just as surely as the bullet ended Price’s life in WWI.
I was thinking about Paul Gosar’s horrific anime’ stunt this week glorifying symbolically killing AOC and President Biden. It seems like we have elected a group of truly pathological nutcases who are trying, very hard, to lead us into civil war. What’s a conscientious objector to do? Good question.
- Bobbie O'Million lived above me in a three flat building. We became friends due to our proximity. A year later he moved to Highland Park, IL before it became fashionable to live there. I would spend weekends out there and we would explore the various areas that are built up now. Bobbie was older than I, graduated high school and enlisted in the Army.
It was less than a year later, we heard from his mother that he had been killed in a head-on accident when a drunk driver of a car hit their van. Six young men were in the van being driven by their Sergeant First Class (a father with 4 children). Bobbie was the only one I got to see (at his funeral) of the ones I knew from that era who died.
- Paul Placzek and I were in Boy Scouts together at the age of 13-14 years old. We spent the years together camping in various spots in the Midwest. Did other things together outside of Boy Scouts. It was just a fun time. We started to go our own ways when we were in the later years of high school I in an all boys high school in Chicago and he in a mixed high school. In 66 he graduated and I in January 67.
We both kicked around for a while working and then enlisting. He went into the Army before I did the Marines. After Boot Camp I was home for a bit before being reassigned. In the news one evening I saw Paul's father raging against the draft dodgers because Paul had died after stepping on a mine.
- Tim Gilson and I became quick friends in Boot Camp. We just kind of bonded. He taught me some things from when he was in ROTC which helped me get through it all. We both graduated and went on to ITR up in Pendleton. He was in an infantry company whose next stop was Vietnam. I went off to another type of company which consisted of the backers, cooks, and candle stick makers as they called us. I rained at an Army Base in Red Bank, NJ to become a Crypto - Tech. in 68.
I never knew what happened to Tim. He was not at his home in Moose Heart and neither was his family. I lost track of him and was afraid to look other places for him. My oldest went on a trip to Washington D.C. I asked Eric if he was at the Wall if he would sketch a few names for me of the people I knew. Tim came back with that bunch. He was head shot while with 7th Marines up north while trying to relive a platoon trapped by the NVA.
I got my row of ribbons. I was a deadly shot lobbing rounds 500 yards with few missing the target. The loss of my friends I could not stop with all of my abilities. I miss them. It is not a day I celebrate, it is not a day I take advantage of free food, I cringe at being thanked for my service. I do not like to be exalted in any manner. This is something I did to myself and learned from it.
I am older as you might have guessed and I wonder what it would be like if they were still around. Its 4 AM in AZ. My wife and I are moving into our new home in spite of the bungling builders. My children are grown and successful. My memories are fainter than when I was young. And I wonder what could have been. It is good to remember but it is far better to think of what could have been.
"Price became for the world a heartbreaking symbol of hatred’s sheer waste. But the shooter? He simply faded into anonymity, becoming the evil that men do."
This speaks to the reality of hatred and bigotry, even in the basal wars that emerge on our own streets today -- the senseless, heart-wrenching killings that end with the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse terminating two lives and disabling another for no other reason but sheer loathing and evil.
HCR, thank you for taking a break from the horrific and interminable conflicts we are experiencing today--which seem at the moment to be unresolvable--to search back to one crystalline moment that encapsulates all the mindless sadism and dehumanization that this world experiences because of the propensity for people in power to weaponize their citizenry. Humans are uniquely wired to find excitement in mindless acts of violence; whether in war or merely rubbernecking, our prurience when it comes to destruction and violence seems to be one of the defining components to being human. This makes me unutterably sad, because instead of questioning why humans love to engage in mindless violence and trying to learn how not to be this way, most people wallow in it. And glorify it. And encourage others to do the same.
Humanity's inhumanity is the singlemost motivator of everything evil in the world. It touches all of us. Although I honor my friends and family who engaged in armed conflicts--and died in them--I admit that I do not "thank them for their service." Because their service should have been unnecessary to begin with. The fault is ours. It continues to be ours.
A parable for you, one, I think, I have posted before and certainly one I have used with my students to get them to understand the toxic soup that mixes power, politics, religion, hatred, and fear of difference and turns people into mindless amoral killing machines as a result. During the so-called Albigensian Crusades of the 13th century, the political leaders--the kings of France and Castile--and the religious leaders--the church hierarchy--allied in order to wipe out perfectly innocuous Christians who happened to have a somewhat different view (their most heinous crimes were that they were vegetarians and believed in reincarnation) in southern France and northern Iberia (Spain didn't exist as a country). When soldiers entered the town of Béziers, they complained to their religious leader, the abbot of Citeaux, that they could not tell the "heretics" (whom they called Cathars) apart from the "orthodox." The abbot's response was "Kill them all! God will sort out his own." The soldiers burned Béziers down to the ground and slaughtered its inhabitants--about 20,000 people by some accounts.
My husband’s Greek uncle Andrew, who fought in Bulgaria during WW I, died on the last day of the war, also shot by a sniper who must have known the killing was unnecessary. We have his photo. He was one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen. A testament to the brutalization of war.
My father, who was born in 1917, was named after two young men from Kansas who also died in the war. His mother picked out the names of two dead soldiers from the local newspaper
as a way of honoring hometown victims. Dad was proud to carry the names of those young boys. But, what a terrible waste.
I have — like millions of soldiers before me, on both sides — entertained the futile wish that someday in the next war the vain politicians who callously send us to war send us to combat would instead have to fight the war that their disagreements caused. Wealthy politician gladiators putting their own lives in jeopardy. Thus saving countless families and innocent civilians from misery, death, and bereavement in a war they did not instigate....
And thank you Dr, Richardson, for making us think on this Veterans Day. I just stayed in the house, hiding. At least I don’t get smashed anymore. Agonized over whether to fly the flag that could once bring me to tears of devotion. After 1/6, it doesn’t seem the same anymore.
In writing today's Letter, HCR may have come close to describing how she first felt when learning about the last soldier to die in WWI.
A life means more than words convey. It is through words, however, the images and sounds, the scene and through our physical responses that death is announced.
The story of soldier George Lawrence Price's death at the end of WWI stopped me from rushing ahead. The emptiness and sadness sunk in. Then gun violence in America, an example of our exceptionalism, was a natural place for me to go next.
There were '98,505 deaths and 195,286 injuries over the past 5 years' in America according to the ABC News series, 'Rethinking Gun Violence.
'What you don't hear about and what people don't assess is for every story of a mass shooting, there are, on average, 300 (other) stories, most of them suicide, that are never told.'
'Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, told ABC News that gun violence goes beyond killings, and frankly, even crime. It has seeped into every aspect of American culture, from active shooter drills in schools and offices to the numbing feeling many people have that they could be shot at any moment, he said.' See link below
At the end of March, this year, David Leonhardt, writer for the NY Times', 'The Morning,' reviewed 'five key facts about gun violence — and the politics of the issue.'
'1. The toll approaches pancreatic cancer’s'
When gun violence is counted as a single category — spanning homicides, suicides and accidents — it kills about 40,000 Americans a year.'
'2. More guns mean more deaths'
'Republican members of Congress often claim otherwise. After the Boulder shootings, John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, dismissed calls for restricting gun availability, saying, “There’s not a big appetite among our members to do things that would appear to be addressing it, but actually don’t do anything to fix the problem.”
But there is overwhelming evidence that this country has a unique problem with gun violence, mostly because it has unique gun availability.'
'It’s not just that every other high-income country in the world has many fewer guns and many fewer gun deaths. It’s also that U.S. states with fewer guns — like California, Illinois, Iowa and much of the Northeast — have fewer gun deaths. And when state or local governments have restricted gun access, deaths have often declined, Michael Siegel of Boston University’s School of Public Health says'.
“The main lesson that comes out of this research is that we know which laws work,” Siegel says. (Nicholas Kristof, the Times columnist, has written a good overview, called “How to Reduce Shootings.”
'3. Mass shootings aren’t the main problem'
'They receive huge attention, for obvious reasons: They are horrific. But they are also not the primary source of gun violence. In 2019, for example, only about one out of every 400 gun deaths was the result of a mass shooting (defined as any attack with at least four deaths). More than half of gun deaths are from suicides, as Margot Sanger-Katz of The Times has noted.'
'Still, many of the policies that experts say would reduce gun deaths — like requiring gun licenses and background checks — would likely affect both mass shootings and the larger problem.'
'4. Public opinion is complicated'
'Yes, an overwhelming majority of Americans support many gun-regulation proposals — like background checks — that congressional Republicans have blocked. And, yes, the campaign donations of the National Rifle Association influence the debate.
But the main reason that members of Congress feel comfortable blocking gun control is that most Americans don’t feel strongly enough about the issue to change their votes because of it. If Americans stopped voting for opponents of gun control, gun-control laws would pass very quickly. This country’s level of gun violence is as high as it is because many Americans have decided that they are OK with it.'
'5. The filibuster is pro-gun'
'Gun control is yet another issue in which the filibuster helps Republican policy priorities and hurts Democratic priorities. On guns (as on climate change, taxes, Medicare access, the minimum wage, immigration and other issues), Republicans are happier with the status quo than Democrats. The filibuster — which requires 60 Senate votes to pass most bills, rather than a straight majority of 51 — protects the status quo.'
'If Democrats were to change the filibuster, as many favor, it isn’t hard to imagine how a gun-control bill could become law this year. With the filibuster, it is almost impossible to imagine.' See link below.
What more is there to say? Is gun violence a never ending part of Death in America?
Earlier today, I heard a NPR interview with a U.S. career military officer who served a number of deployments in Afghanistan, but had, in retirement, turned against the U.S. effort. He said: "Though I participated in it, I now think the U.S. war in Afghanistan was wrong. All such colonial wars are wrong! I am not the first to say this. General and then President Dwight Eisenhower was among the first to articulate this warning. To paraphrase the anonymous interview, "As long as we have so many businesses in the U.S. who make huge profits off of our war industries, we will continue to have brutal and unending wars."
Both the shooter and victim were uniformed soldiers. It's hard (for me, at least) to get nostalgic about Pvt. Price's death when every week an innocent child gets shot and killed by drive-by shooters, road-rage shooters, or law enforcement shooters. And if juries fail to convict the murderous, 100% guilty defendants in Georgia and Wisconsin ... and if Jan 6 participants and masterminds continue to escape consequences ... and if the US Department of Justice and the vast nationwide web of racist local judges continue to behave like closeted KKK members and get away with it ... it will be a long, long, long time until the final shooting death in the Republican Civil War against American Democracy.
I don't think the German soldier deserves quite the immorality he is painted with. Consider, "As the moment of the armistice approached, a few soldiers continued to skirmish, and Price's company set out to take control of the small town of Havre. ... the Canadian patrol began to look for the German soldier who had harassed them. They found no one but civilians in the first two homes they searched. And then, as they stepped back into the street, a single shot hit Price in the chest." Here was a squad of soldiers on one side "look[ing] for the German soldier". He didn't know if their watches were synchronized to the countdown clock, if there was one. And he probably was justified in feeling hunted. You have been haunted by the unknown story of the German sniper who was being hunted.
I am not disagreeing with the heartbreak most of us have with wars' sheer waste. Indeed, like many other readers and commenters, my father lost his most loved slightly older brother on July 4th, 1944 when his submarine went down in what was most likely an accident off the coast of Honolulu. And, I did my time as a conscientious objector rather than accept my fate as a draft dodger. But, having been born on a base and grown up as a military brat, I realize that war is no more fair than life more generally.
But this one lone German should not be made to wear the ignominy of that war. He is entitled to his his post-war civilian life and to blend into take part in postwar society and heal his wounds, as are all other regular warriors. On Guam, after the US forces had well and truly taken "control" of the island in 1945, there were pockets of soldiers who just could not accept defeat. One of the Japanese stayed in the hills and valleys of this little island until finally giving up in 1972.
There is almost never a finishing line to cross over at war's end, and the revenge for loss can drag on for years and centuries, as our own Civil(?) War illustrates. It is the ones who have fought, lost, and not quit fighting an ancient dispute who are more becoming of the evil that men do.
There are so many good and powerful comments already, I hesitate to write. But comment I must as I recognize myself in the German soldier. I tried to answer Heather's question of why in those last few seconds of the war he pulled the trigger. What was the point? So I asked myself have there been any moments in my life when I really wanted someone to die? I don't believe in wishing such on anyone. I don't believe in the death penalty. But the honest answer is absolutely, yes.
I am ashamed that I could reach such a level of anger - no, outrage - that I would want someone to die. In defiance of one of my most powerful and strongly held beliefs, I have over the last few years had that emotion. I think we all harbor the potential for killing. After a long series of abuses all it would take is the right triggering event at the right moment.
We have been watching a Netflix series called "Rebellion" about the "Troubles" in Ireland during WWI. The complexities of the times is revealing. It's hard to know who to sympathize with. But the show provides ample examples of why someone could rise to extreme violence. Who knows what motivated that German soldier? But it is not hard to imagine it happening.
As a species we have not found the antidote for the worst of our impulses. Maybe if there were a lot less of us fighting over limited resources? Would that allow us to emphasize our compassion over our aggressive tendencies? I don't know.
I can imagine that some frightened and exhausted soldier, sick at heart for holding close friends and maybe siblings as they died in his arms, had vengeance on his mind when he fired that last deadly shot. Who he was and what he went on to achieve in his life remains a mystery. But how do we put into perspective the likes of a 17-year old racist who takes a deadly weapon to a First-Amendment protected rally to protest the mistreatment of Black lives that mean nothing to the armed teenager? How do we compare the murder of two of those protesters by a teenager who was not ordered to be there to fight anyone's battle to some probably forlorn soldier who was sent to destroy an enemy he could not define? What of the white judge who is so obviously bending over backwards to protect the right of that teenager to volunteer to do his own justice against fellow Americans? What becomes of the fight in this country, right now, for our democracy when that vigilante teenager is not only freed, but praised and made a martyr for a right-wing America that entertains book-burning as an agenda item on a local school board meeting? We have gone way beyond a definable war to the likes of what led to WWII - in the hands of a despicable, murderous dictator that the right-wing of this country would like to lift to power. The evil that men (and women) do is upon us.
Stories like this make me tip my hat to you even more professor. The ugly side of history, needs to be remembered and retold and reconsidered, and INVESTIGATED (versus, "not looking back") so that indeed, the arc of justice will bend toward light rather than darkness.
There is a saying among military servicemembers that nobody wants to be the last soldier that died in a war. Coming through war was largely a matter of luck. Probabilistically, except when episodically, most people get through the experience with time spent in boredom and routine. Sometimes those routines are dangerous; some of the jobs are definitely more dangerous than others. Many people volunteer for dangerous duty assignments, where there is a certain cachet and glamour to whatever they are doing; many people feel themselves more alive and in tune with the person they want to be seen as by inviting dangerous duty assignments. Not infrequently, those dangerous assignments require skill levels that are far beyond the requirements of ordinary soldiering. It's not surprising that many of those 'hot' assignments are sought after by young people who are out to prove themselves, by parachuting out of airplanes or equivalent forms a risk taking. Soldiering nowadays is certainly less dangerous than it was a generation ago. There are fewer instances of mass casualties, life-saving measures are certainly a lot more in practice than they were during the World War II era.
But all military service leaves a mark on the human psyche. I was reading yesterday that actor James Stewart, who commanded a squadron of heavy bombers during the war, returned to Hollywood to resume his career; but in the years immediately following the end of the war he suffered from intense PTSD symptoms, and his anguish became visible in his acting performances, in particular, in the movie 'It's A Wonderful Life', where his character faced economic ruin. Audiences today usually view the film on television during the Christmas holiday season, and focus on the happy ending. But by and large, the movie is a downer, and it was not well received when it debuted in 1947.
It is almost axiomatic that in the first decade after the end of World War II, war vets would only talk about their most soul-searing experiences with other veterans. In the 75 years since the end of World War II, with multiple, inconclusive wars being fought, or threatened, we as a people became a lot more sensitized to the destructive effects of war on our national personality. We lost our balance, we lost our optimism about the future, and a good number is lost our humanity.
In some respects, those who lost their lives in war may have been the lucky ones. Many of those who survived the horrors of war lost their ability to adjust and adapt, drifting into extremist politics and bad decision-making. Surviving the war of mass casualties does not necessarily make us better citizens afterwards. The experience hardens people, as I noticed when I was living in Germany in 1963 and 1964. The most difficult part is that nobody really wants to talk about it, and when they do, they don't want to have to do it with some rah-rah flag-waving booster around. People are reluctant to form close friendships with comrades in arms who are liable to end up in the hospital, or in a body bag at the end of the day. That psychic scar tissue makes it difficult to connect with other people once the fighting is over. It's as if everybody dies a little bit, some more than others.
Even as we honor those who sacrificed through their service whether they came home or not we need to quit making of war a glorious endeavour. That we as a society continue to send our young men and women off to fight the wars of old men says that through the centuries we have learned nothing. I honor those who have been willing to make that sacrifice but it does not mean that I stop working for peace.
Here is what I wrote on Facebook yesterday about the anniversary of the end of World War I:
Today marks the 103rd anniversary of the end of World War I, arguably the most pointless war in human history (which is saying something). Over 16,000,000 people died and tens of millions more were wounded. The historical repercussions of that conflict are still being felt today. All of the European empires with the exception of the British and the French ceased to exist (Ottoman, Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian), and in the cases of all but Germany, the countries ceased to exist as well (though Russia was reconstituted in the 1990s). Festering resentment was left on the part of the Germans, who felt with some justification that they had never been truly defeated on the battlefield, and this led directly the rise of Nazism, the most evil state ideology the world has yet seen. In Russia, the Romanov Dynasty fell and was replaced by the Bolsheviks, and seven-plus decades of occasionally hot but more often "cold" conflict involving or instigated by the Soviets then occurred. Marxism spread around the globe. The British and French Empires were so drained by the war that although they lasted another few decades, their exhaustion was complete and their dissolution equally inevitable. Indeed, France was so scarred by the war that it presented only token resistance when the Germans came calling again in 1940. Poland hadn't existed in hundreds of years, yet it was reborn in 1918, with part of its territory consisting of what had formerly been East and West Prussia. Italy, though among the "victorious" nations, was so angry at what it felt had been a complete dismissing of its interests after the war, it went fascist in 1922. A horrific civil war in Spain caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people; a conflict that was militarily supported by the new fascist powers, Germany and Italy. In the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire was wiped away with the French and British picking up the pieces, but the Zionist and Arab Nationalist movements had been accelerated and would not be denied. Thirty years later, the French and British were gone from the Middle East as well, but the national boundary lines they wrote after World War I continue to be written (and rewritten). In Southern Europe, several small countries (Slovenia, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia) were merged into one fractious country, Yugoslavia. That artificial entity last a little over seven decades before its various member nationalities fell to fighting and gave the world the term "ethnic cleansing". The Czechs and Slovaks were carved out of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and formed an uneasy nation for another seven decades, though their eventual "divorce" was peaceful. As well, an exhausted world was then ill-prepared for a massive influenza epidemic that would kill millions more in the year that followed the end of the war. Further, twenty years after the war ended, the entire world would become embroiled in another armed conflict in which tens of millions more people would die, one in which the word “genocide” entered our vocabulary and a sleepy Polish town, Oswiecim, was renamed Auschwitz and became synonymous with mass murder and death.
All of this occurred because a Serbian nationalist by the name of Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an obscure Austrian prince of whom 99.999% of the world had never heard.
My dad was in college at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, before Pearl Harbor. Afterwards, according to family myths, he went and had many long talks with his advisor- a monk from the college- about whether to enlist in the military.
Dad was a truly devout Catholic, a first generation American and an only son. He knew that killing was wrong and wished to become a conscientious objector should he be drafted. He felt that staying here to help his parents was truly important as his mom, my grandmother, was in frail health from her diabetes.
Brother Vincent had a different idea. Enlist in the Army and go to officer’s training school. That would give dad some choice in where the army would place him and what he would do while in it. Dad took months to make the decision but in the end, joined and went to officer’s training school and became a supply officer.
While stationed in England, dad led a platoon of mostly African Americans. While in North Africa, he led both African Americans and locals. He had a way of inspiring hard work and his guys appreciated the fairness he offered them. He always spoke with great pride of those with whom he served
My dad often bragged that his proudest achievement in WWII was that he never had to fire his gun at someone; that he never killed anyone. He was able to stay true to his belief that taking a life was immoral. Sadly, the truth was it didn’t matter.
My dad died 39 years ago this week. He was in a car accident, broke a bone in his neck, and lapsed into a coma. He never emerged and died in his hospital bed at the VA in Minneapolis. What killed him though was alcoholism and the memory of the horrors of what he saw in WWII. War ended his life just as surely as the bullet ended Price’s life in WWI.
I was thinking about Paul Gosar’s horrific anime’ stunt this week glorifying symbolically killing AOC and President Biden. It seems like we have elected a group of truly pathological nutcases who are trying, very hard, to lead us into civil war. What’s a conscientious objector to do? Good question.
- Bobbie O'Million lived above me in a three flat building. We became friends due to our proximity. A year later he moved to Highland Park, IL before it became fashionable to live there. I would spend weekends out there and we would explore the various areas that are built up now. Bobbie was older than I, graduated high school and enlisted in the Army.
It was less than a year later, we heard from his mother that he had been killed in a head-on accident when a drunk driver of a car hit their van. Six young men were in the van being driven by their Sergeant First Class (a father with 4 children). Bobbie was the only one I got to see (at his funeral) of the ones I knew from that era who died.
- Paul Placzek and I were in Boy Scouts together at the age of 13-14 years old. We spent the years together camping in various spots in the Midwest. Did other things together outside of Boy Scouts. It was just a fun time. We started to go our own ways when we were in the later years of high school I in an all boys high school in Chicago and he in a mixed high school. In 66 he graduated and I in January 67.
We both kicked around for a while working and then enlisting. He went into the Army before I did the Marines. After Boot Camp I was home for a bit before being reassigned. In the news one evening I saw Paul's father raging against the draft dodgers because Paul had died after stepping on a mine.
- Tim Gilson and I became quick friends in Boot Camp. We just kind of bonded. He taught me some things from when he was in ROTC which helped me get through it all. We both graduated and went on to ITR up in Pendleton. He was in an infantry company whose next stop was Vietnam. I went off to another type of company which consisted of the backers, cooks, and candle stick makers as they called us. I rained at an Army Base in Red Bank, NJ to become a Crypto - Tech. in 68.
I never knew what happened to Tim. He was not at his home in Moose Heart and neither was his family. I lost track of him and was afraid to look other places for him. My oldest went on a trip to Washington D.C. I asked Eric if he was at the Wall if he would sketch a few names for me of the people I knew. Tim came back with that bunch. He was head shot while with 7th Marines up north while trying to relive a platoon trapped by the NVA.
I got my row of ribbons. I was a deadly shot lobbing rounds 500 yards with few missing the target. The loss of my friends I could not stop with all of my abilities. I miss them. It is not a day I celebrate, it is not a day I take advantage of free food, I cringe at being thanked for my service. I do not like to be exalted in any manner. This is something I did to myself and learned from it.
I am older as you might have guessed and I wonder what it would be like if they were still around. Its 4 AM in AZ. My wife and I are moving into our new home in spite of the bungling builders. My children are grown and successful. My memories are fainter than when I was young. And I wonder what could have been. It is good to remember but it is far better to think of what could have been.
"Price became for the world a heartbreaking symbol of hatred’s sheer waste. But the shooter? He simply faded into anonymity, becoming the evil that men do."
This speaks to the reality of hatred and bigotry, even in the basal wars that emerge on our own streets today -- the senseless, heart-wrenching killings that end with the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse terminating two lives and disabling another for no other reason but sheer loathing and evil.
HCR, thank you for taking a break from the horrific and interminable conflicts we are experiencing today--which seem at the moment to be unresolvable--to search back to one crystalline moment that encapsulates all the mindless sadism and dehumanization that this world experiences because of the propensity for people in power to weaponize their citizenry. Humans are uniquely wired to find excitement in mindless acts of violence; whether in war or merely rubbernecking, our prurience when it comes to destruction and violence seems to be one of the defining components to being human. This makes me unutterably sad, because instead of questioning why humans love to engage in mindless violence and trying to learn how not to be this way, most people wallow in it. And glorify it. And encourage others to do the same.
Humanity's inhumanity is the singlemost motivator of everything evil in the world. It touches all of us. Although I honor my friends and family who engaged in armed conflicts--and died in them--I admit that I do not "thank them for their service." Because their service should have been unnecessary to begin with. The fault is ours. It continues to be ours.
A parable for you, one, I think, I have posted before and certainly one I have used with my students to get them to understand the toxic soup that mixes power, politics, religion, hatred, and fear of difference and turns people into mindless amoral killing machines as a result. During the so-called Albigensian Crusades of the 13th century, the political leaders--the kings of France and Castile--and the religious leaders--the church hierarchy--allied in order to wipe out perfectly innocuous Christians who happened to have a somewhat different view (their most heinous crimes were that they were vegetarians and believed in reincarnation) in southern France and northern Iberia (Spain didn't exist as a country). When soldiers entered the town of Béziers, they complained to their religious leader, the abbot of Citeaux, that they could not tell the "heretics" (whom they called Cathars) apart from the "orthodox." The abbot's response was "Kill them all! God will sort out his own." The soldiers burned Béziers down to the ground and slaughtered its inhabitants--about 20,000 people by some accounts.
We have learned nothing in 800 years.
My husband’s Greek uncle Andrew, who fought in Bulgaria during WW I, died on the last day of the war, also shot by a sniper who must have known the killing was unnecessary. We have his photo. He was one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen. A testament to the brutalization of war.
My father, who was born in 1917, was named after two young men from Kansas who also died in the war. His mother picked out the names of two dead soldiers from the local newspaper
as a way of honoring hometown victims. Dad was proud to carry the names of those young boys. But, what a terrible waste.
I have — like millions of soldiers before me, on both sides — entertained the futile wish that someday in the next war the vain politicians who callously send us to war send us to combat would instead have to fight the war that their disagreements caused. Wealthy politician gladiators putting their own lives in jeopardy. Thus saving countless families and innocent civilians from misery, death, and bereavement in a war they did not instigate....
And thank you Dr, Richardson, for making us think on this Veterans Day. I just stayed in the house, hiding. At least I don’t get smashed anymore. Agonized over whether to fly the flag that could once bring me to tears of devotion. After 1/6, it doesn’t seem the same anymore.
In writing today's Letter, HCR may have come close to describing how she first felt when learning about the last soldier to die in WWI.
A life means more than words convey. It is through words, however, the images and sounds, the scene and through our physical responses that death is announced.
The story of soldier George Lawrence Price's death at the end of WWI stopped me from rushing ahead. The emptiness and sadness sunk in. Then gun violence in America, an example of our exceptionalism, was a natural place for me to go next.
There were '98,505 deaths and 195,286 injuries over the past 5 years' in America according to the ABC News series, 'Rethinking Gun Violence.
'What you don't hear about and what people don't assess is for every story of a mass shooting, there are, on average, 300 (other) stories, most of them suicide, that are never told.'
'Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, told ABC News that gun violence goes beyond killings, and frankly, even crime. It has seeped into every aspect of American culture, from active shooter drills in schools and offices to the numbing feeling many people have that they could be shot at any moment, he said.' See link below
At the end of March, this year, David Leonhardt, writer for the NY Times', 'The Morning,' reviewed 'five key facts about gun violence — and the politics of the issue.'
'1. The toll approaches pancreatic cancer’s'
When gun violence is counted as a single category — spanning homicides, suicides and accidents — it kills about 40,000 Americans a year.'
'2. More guns mean more deaths'
'Republican members of Congress often claim otherwise. After the Boulder shootings, John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, dismissed calls for restricting gun availability, saying, “There’s not a big appetite among our members to do things that would appear to be addressing it, but actually don’t do anything to fix the problem.”
But there is overwhelming evidence that this country has a unique problem with gun violence, mostly because it has unique gun availability.'
'It’s not just that every other high-income country in the world has many fewer guns and many fewer gun deaths. It’s also that U.S. states with fewer guns — like California, Illinois, Iowa and much of the Northeast — have fewer gun deaths. And when state or local governments have restricted gun access, deaths have often declined, Michael Siegel of Boston University’s School of Public Health says'.
“The main lesson that comes out of this research is that we know which laws work,” Siegel says. (Nicholas Kristof, the Times columnist, has written a good overview, called “How to Reduce Shootings.”
'3. Mass shootings aren’t the main problem'
'They receive huge attention, for obvious reasons: They are horrific. But they are also not the primary source of gun violence. In 2019, for example, only about one out of every 400 gun deaths was the result of a mass shooting (defined as any attack with at least four deaths). More than half of gun deaths are from suicides, as Margot Sanger-Katz of The Times has noted.'
'Still, many of the policies that experts say would reduce gun deaths — like requiring gun licenses and background checks — would likely affect both mass shootings and the larger problem.'
'4. Public opinion is complicated'
'Yes, an overwhelming majority of Americans support many gun-regulation proposals — like background checks — that congressional Republicans have blocked. And, yes, the campaign donations of the National Rifle Association influence the debate.
But the main reason that members of Congress feel comfortable blocking gun control is that most Americans don’t feel strongly enough about the issue to change their votes because of it. If Americans stopped voting for opponents of gun control, gun-control laws would pass very quickly. This country’s level of gun violence is as high as it is because many Americans have decided that they are OK with it.'
'5. The filibuster is pro-gun'
'Gun control is yet another issue in which the filibuster helps Republican policy priorities and hurts Democratic priorities. On guns (as on climate change, taxes, Medicare access, the minimum wage, immigration and other issues), Republicans are happier with the status quo than Democrats. The filibuster — which requires 60 Senate votes to pass most bills, rather than a straight majority of 51 — protects the status quo.'
'If Democrats were to change the filibuster, as many favor, it isn’t hard to imagine how a gun-control bill could become law this year. With the filibuster, it is almost impossible to imagine.' See link below.
What more is there to say? Is gun violence a never ending part of Death in America?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/america-gun-violence-problem/story?id=79222948
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/briefing/gun-control-suez-canal-ship-vaccine-astrazeneca.html
Stark beauty!
Earlier today, I heard a NPR interview with a U.S. career military officer who served a number of deployments in Afghanistan, but had, in retirement, turned against the U.S. effort. He said: "Though I participated in it, I now think the U.S. war in Afghanistan was wrong. All such colonial wars are wrong! I am not the first to say this. General and then President Dwight Eisenhower was among the first to articulate this warning. To paraphrase the anonymous interview, "As long as we have so many businesses in the U.S. who make huge profits off of our war industries, we will continue to have brutal and unending wars."
Both the shooter and victim were uniformed soldiers. It's hard (for me, at least) to get nostalgic about Pvt. Price's death when every week an innocent child gets shot and killed by drive-by shooters, road-rage shooters, or law enforcement shooters. And if juries fail to convict the murderous, 100% guilty defendants in Georgia and Wisconsin ... and if Jan 6 participants and masterminds continue to escape consequences ... and if the US Department of Justice and the vast nationwide web of racist local judges continue to behave like closeted KKK members and get away with it ... it will be a long, long, long time until the final shooting death in the Republican Civil War against American Democracy.
I don't think the German soldier deserves quite the immorality he is painted with. Consider, "As the moment of the armistice approached, a few soldiers continued to skirmish, and Price's company set out to take control of the small town of Havre. ... the Canadian patrol began to look for the German soldier who had harassed them. They found no one but civilians in the first two homes they searched. And then, as they stepped back into the street, a single shot hit Price in the chest." Here was a squad of soldiers on one side "look[ing] for the German soldier". He didn't know if their watches were synchronized to the countdown clock, if there was one. And he probably was justified in feeling hunted. You have been haunted by the unknown story of the German sniper who was being hunted.
I am not disagreeing with the heartbreak most of us have with wars' sheer waste. Indeed, like many other readers and commenters, my father lost his most loved slightly older brother on July 4th, 1944 when his submarine went down in what was most likely an accident off the coast of Honolulu. And, I did my time as a conscientious objector rather than accept my fate as a draft dodger. But, having been born on a base and grown up as a military brat, I realize that war is no more fair than life more generally.
But this one lone German should not be made to wear the ignominy of that war. He is entitled to his his post-war civilian life and to blend into take part in postwar society and heal his wounds, as are all other regular warriors. On Guam, after the US forces had well and truly taken "control" of the island in 1945, there were pockets of soldiers who just could not accept defeat. One of the Japanese stayed in the hills and valleys of this little island until finally giving up in 1972.
There is almost never a finishing line to cross over at war's end, and the revenge for loss can drag on for years and centuries, as our own Civil(?) War illustrates. It is the ones who have fought, lost, and not quit fighting an ancient dispute who are more becoming of the evil that men do.
There are so many good and powerful comments already, I hesitate to write. But comment I must as I recognize myself in the German soldier. I tried to answer Heather's question of why in those last few seconds of the war he pulled the trigger. What was the point? So I asked myself have there been any moments in my life when I really wanted someone to die? I don't believe in wishing such on anyone. I don't believe in the death penalty. But the honest answer is absolutely, yes.
I am ashamed that I could reach such a level of anger - no, outrage - that I would want someone to die. In defiance of one of my most powerful and strongly held beliefs, I have over the last few years had that emotion. I think we all harbor the potential for killing. After a long series of abuses all it would take is the right triggering event at the right moment.
We have been watching a Netflix series called "Rebellion" about the "Troubles" in Ireland during WWI. The complexities of the times is revealing. It's hard to know who to sympathize with. But the show provides ample examples of why someone could rise to extreme violence. Who knows what motivated that German soldier? But it is not hard to imagine it happening.
As a species we have not found the antidote for the worst of our impulses. Maybe if there were a lot less of us fighting over limited resources? Would that allow us to emphasize our compassion over our aggressive tendencies? I don't know.
I can imagine that some frightened and exhausted soldier, sick at heart for holding close friends and maybe siblings as they died in his arms, had vengeance on his mind when he fired that last deadly shot. Who he was and what he went on to achieve in his life remains a mystery. But how do we put into perspective the likes of a 17-year old racist who takes a deadly weapon to a First-Amendment protected rally to protest the mistreatment of Black lives that mean nothing to the armed teenager? How do we compare the murder of two of those protesters by a teenager who was not ordered to be there to fight anyone's battle to some probably forlorn soldier who was sent to destroy an enemy he could not define? What of the white judge who is so obviously bending over backwards to protect the right of that teenager to volunteer to do his own justice against fellow Americans? What becomes of the fight in this country, right now, for our democracy when that vigilante teenager is not only freed, but praised and made a martyr for a right-wing America that entertains book-burning as an agenda item on a local school board meeting? We have gone way beyond a definable war to the likes of what led to WWII - in the hands of a despicable, murderous dictator that the right-wing of this country would like to lift to power. The evil that men (and women) do is upon us.
Stories like this make me tip my hat to you even more professor. The ugly side of history, needs to be remembered and retold and reconsidered, and INVESTIGATED (versus, "not looking back") so that indeed, the arc of justice will bend toward light rather than darkness.
There is a saying among military servicemembers that nobody wants to be the last soldier that died in a war. Coming through war was largely a matter of luck. Probabilistically, except when episodically, most people get through the experience with time spent in boredom and routine. Sometimes those routines are dangerous; some of the jobs are definitely more dangerous than others. Many people volunteer for dangerous duty assignments, where there is a certain cachet and glamour to whatever they are doing; many people feel themselves more alive and in tune with the person they want to be seen as by inviting dangerous duty assignments. Not infrequently, those dangerous assignments require skill levels that are far beyond the requirements of ordinary soldiering. It's not surprising that many of those 'hot' assignments are sought after by young people who are out to prove themselves, by parachuting out of airplanes or equivalent forms a risk taking. Soldiering nowadays is certainly less dangerous than it was a generation ago. There are fewer instances of mass casualties, life-saving measures are certainly a lot more in practice than they were during the World War II era.
But all military service leaves a mark on the human psyche. I was reading yesterday that actor James Stewart, who commanded a squadron of heavy bombers during the war, returned to Hollywood to resume his career; but in the years immediately following the end of the war he suffered from intense PTSD symptoms, and his anguish became visible in his acting performances, in particular, in the movie 'It's A Wonderful Life', where his character faced economic ruin. Audiences today usually view the film on television during the Christmas holiday season, and focus on the happy ending. But by and large, the movie is a downer, and it was not well received when it debuted in 1947.
It is almost axiomatic that in the first decade after the end of World War II, war vets would only talk about their most soul-searing experiences with other veterans. In the 75 years since the end of World War II, with multiple, inconclusive wars being fought, or threatened, we as a people became a lot more sensitized to the destructive effects of war on our national personality. We lost our balance, we lost our optimism about the future, and a good number is lost our humanity.
In some respects, those who lost their lives in war may have been the lucky ones. Many of those who survived the horrors of war lost their ability to adjust and adapt, drifting into extremist politics and bad decision-making. Surviving the war of mass casualties does not necessarily make us better citizens afterwards. The experience hardens people, as I noticed when I was living in Germany in 1963 and 1964. The most difficult part is that nobody really wants to talk about it, and when they do, they don't want to have to do it with some rah-rah flag-waving booster around. People are reluctant to form close friendships with comrades in arms who are liable to end up in the hospital, or in a body bag at the end of the day. That psychic scar tissue makes it difficult to connect with other people once the fighting is over. It's as if everybody dies a little bit, some more than others.
Even as we honor those who sacrificed through their service whether they came home or not we need to quit making of war a glorious endeavour. That we as a society continue to send our young men and women off to fight the wars of old men says that through the centuries we have learned nothing. I honor those who have been willing to make that sacrifice but it does not mean that I stop working for peace.
Here is what I wrote on Facebook yesterday about the anniversary of the end of World War I:
Today marks the 103rd anniversary of the end of World War I, arguably the most pointless war in human history (which is saying something). Over 16,000,000 people died and tens of millions more were wounded. The historical repercussions of that conflict are still being felt today. All of the European empires with the exception of the British and the French ceased to exist (Ottoman, Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian), and in the cases of all but Germany, the countries ceased to exist as well (though Russia was reconstituted in the 1990s). Festering resentment was left on the part of the Germans, who felt with some justification that they had never been truly defeated on the battlefield, and this led directly the rise of Nazism, the most evil state ideology the world has yet seen. In Russia, the Romanov Dynasty fell and was replaced by the Bolsheviks, and seven-plus decades of occasionally hot but more often "cold" conflict involving or instigated by the Soviets then occurred. Marxism spread around the globe. The British and French Empires were so drained by the war that although they lasted another few decades, their exhaustion was complete and their dissolution equally inevitable. Indeed, France was so scarred by the war that it presented only token resistance when the Germans came calling again in 1940. Poland hadn't existed in hundreds of years, yet it was reborn in 1918, with part of its territory consisting of what had formerly been East and West Prussia. Italy, though among the "victorious" nations, was so angry at what it felt had been a complete dismissing of its interests after the war, it went fascist in 1922. A horrific civil war in Spain caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people; a conflict that was militarily supported by the new fascist powers, Germany and Italy. In the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire was wiped away with the French and British picking up the pieces, but the Zionist and Arab Nationalist movements had been accelerated and would not be denied. Thirty years later, the French and British were gone from the Middle East as well, but the national boundary lines they wrote after World War I continue to be written (and rewritten). In Southern Europe, several small countries (Slovenia, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia) were merged into one fractious country, Yugoslavia. That artificial entity last a little over seven decades before its various member nationalities fell to fighting and gave the world the term "ethnic cleansing". The Czechs and Slovaks were carved out of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and formed an uneasy nation for another seven decades, though their eventual "divorce" was peaceful. As well, an exhausted world was then ill-prepared for a massive influenza epidemic that would kill millions more in the year that followed the end of the war. Further, twenty years after the war ended, the entire world would become embroiled in another armed conflict in which tens of millions more people would die, one in which the word “genocide” entered our vocabulary and a sleepy Polish town, Oswiecim, was renamed Auschwitz and became synonymous with mass murder and death.
All of this occurred because a Serbian nationalist by the name of Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an obscure Austrian prince of whom 99.999% of the world had never heard.
“In Flanders Field”
by John McCrae, May 1915
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.