EPILOGUE: The Web (Essay)
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”([1])
- George Orwell
We need to look at how we look at things.
A few years ago, at the Fishtrap Writers’ Conference at Wallowa Lake, Oregon, I met a woman who had married a young man when she was fifteen and he was not much older. She was pregnant. He joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. She had written that story and presented it to the assembled writers.
We were talking outside. “Dean,” she asked, “how do they do it? How do they get you guys to sign up for... this?” She spread her arms wide to include all that was going on that week in the conference: the theme was the Vietnam War.
I opened my notebook to a clean page, wrote
INFANT ry
and showed it to her. She turned pale: “I never noticed that.” Her husband had been a combat engineer in a Marine infantry division.
Merriam-Webster Online dates the origin of the word “infantry” to 1579, from both Middle French infanterie (modern French is the same; so is German) and Old Italian infanteria. (Spanish is infanterÃa.) The citation continues: ‘from infante, boy, foot soldier, from Latin infant-, infans...Date: 1579’
I looked up infant, the root word of infantry. Merriam-Webster says:
Etymology: Middle English enfaunt, from Anglo-French enfant, from Latin infant-, infans, from infant-, infans, adjective, incapable of speech, from in- + fant-, fans, present participle of fari to speak....
Too young to speak, old enough to die for his country. As I was reading the dictionary entries, I recalled a story told to me at Chu Lai by my friend Sgt. Angelo Walters, who’s mentioned in some of the stories above. He told of being at the side of a mortally wounded buddy during the Korean War, who said to Joe with his last breath: “I’m not even old enough to buy a beer.”
My buddies and I – some of us – call our younger selves “young and stupid.”
There’s some of it: we were young. And if not stupid, then ignorant of the ways of the world, of what we were signing up for, of the reasons behind our reasons for enlisting, and behind the reasons our elders gave us for joining.
In the case of my war, we didn’t know that Ho Chi Minh and his top commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, had been our allies in World War II against the Japanese, and repeatedly asked President Truman to remain allied with us([2]). This fact and others about the war’s origins have caused me to believe strongly that we need never have fought the war that killed 58,000+ of us and 3 or 4 million Vietnamese. [1] From the essay “In Front of Your Nose” by George Orwell, first published in the London Tribune, March 22, 1946. Reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 1968.
[2] See http://www.ichiban1.org/html/history/bc_1964_prewar/first_indochinawar_1945_1954.htm1945.htm; also Archimedes L.A. Patti, Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross; also http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/series/pt_01.html
