MOMENTS: 2 - DIVINE COUNTRIES

from Rattlesnake Dreams, pp. 515-516:


     In her wonderful Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, the Iranian professor of English literature Azar Nafisi writes of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini as conducting a “war against women....(60)” She also notes 

that during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, Iran used child soldiers to clear minefields ahead of tanks by walking over them. P.W. Singer, in Children at War, quotes Khomeini as saying that the children’s sacrifice in that war was “helping Iran to achieve a situation which we cannot describe in any other way except to say that it is a divine country(61).” Singer also notes that the young boys walking over mines wore keys around their necks “to signify their pending entrance into heaven.” A military history website lists the ages of those Iranian volunteers who cleared minefields by walking over them as “from only nine to more than fifty(62).”

     Divine country. 

     

60 Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Random House, 2008, p.111

61 Singer,Children at War.Op. cit., p. 22.

62 http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/iran-iraq.htm

     Just now I am remembering lines from the “Rifleman’s Prayer” we learned in boot camp:

To God and Country, Home and Corps

     Let me be faithful evermore.

                                   Amen(63)

     It will anger some that I draw a parallel between U.S. soldiers and their Nazi enemies wearing GOTT MIT UNS 

belt buckles. Or a similar parallel between us Marines being marched to chapel in boot camp to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” led by a chaplain with officer’s insignia

on one point of his shirt collar and a cross on the other, and Islamist extremists who call our soldiers “infidels” and “crusaders.” 

    But that’s my point. “Divine country” says it all: 

Your country will send you to war. We will give you a reason. The reason may or may not be true, or it may be a mixture of some truths and some outright lies. But the truth or falsity of those reasons is not your concern. Your job is to do what you’re told, without question, attack the people we tell you to attack, and risk or give up your life as you do this. Your country thanks you for your sacrifice. If you do not come home alive, we will thank your mother. We will give her a folded flag and a prayer to replace you.

63 From the Marines’ “Rifleman’s Prayer.” See above, p. 83.    

MOMENTS: 1 - YOU'LL LEARN NOT TO CRY

 There are also girls in the ranks of child soldiers. The Human Rights Watch report “You’ll Learn Not to Cry: Child Combatants in Colombia” takes its title from this:

  I had a friend, Juanita, who got into trouble for sleeping around. We had been friends in civilian life and we shared a tent together. The commander said it didn’t matter that she was my friend. She had committed an error and had to be killed. I closed my eyes and fired the gun, but I didn’t hit her. So I shot again. The grave was 

right nearby. I had to bury her and put dirt on top of her. The commander said, “You did very well. Even though you started to cry, you did well. You’ll have to do this again many more times, and you’ll have to learn not to cry.”(59)

      Women, and their children with them, have always been lesser beings in human societies.                   

     This is wrong.      

     Women are not the least of us; women are the best of us. A woman has carried in her body for most of a year, before we ever drew breath, every human being who ever lived. Most of our literature has dealt with the deeds, heroic and otherwise, of men, because it has been written mostly by men. But no noble sacrifice in battle, no crossing of formidable mountain ranges or uncharted oceans, matches the quiet (yet sometimes noisy!) heroism of what women do and have always done to give us life, and to keep us alive.

     I’ve come to this: if the world is destroyed, men – in their unceasing quest for power and/or wealth (which is 

increasingly becoming the Greatest Power) - will destroy it.

    If the world is saved, women will save it: women like Azar Nafisi and Shirin Ebadi and Neda Agha Soltan in Iran, like Graça Machel and many others in Africa, like Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Malalai Joya in Afghanistan, Arundhati Roy in India, like the Saudi poet Hissa Hilal, like ordinary women all over the world who simply struggle to keep their children alive in the face of men’s abandonment and depredations - will save it.

59 Human Rights Watch, copyright © 2003 http://www.hrw.org. p. 73. The report was written by Sebastian Brett, senior researcher in the Americas Division.

PROLOGUE

Prologue

Tho An

Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began; others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the F-4 Phantoms - sharks of the air with high triangular tails and turned-down black snouts - finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.
Attached to “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements, or attempts to flee.
They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C4 from the blast. A sergeant cursed the engineer for using too much explosive. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.
I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, yet feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.
But the old man: he didn't wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before too long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I had ever seen on a human face.
Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and the women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. There was a feeling of the veil's movement having a direction: top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of "F" Company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can't explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.
But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.

II. Learning War
I first saw the world on January 23, 1943. Pearl Harbor was 13½ months in the past; the United States was at war with Japan and Germany. The 1st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal( ) 5½ months earlier; Americans had invaded North Africa 2½ months earlier. The Soviet Army had counterattacked Axis forces outside Stalingrad, trapping 91,000 German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops inside a pocket. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would surrender all those troops a week after I was born, and the Japanese would begin evacuating Guadalcanal a day later. Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term as President of the United States. The blockade of Leningrad was in its 502nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva( ) was 5 months dead. Treblinka( ) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland, would stage a sufficiently successful revolt that the Nazis destroyed the camp for fear that the escapees would tell the world what had happened there, which they did.( ) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.


NEXT: Table of Contents, and a story or two from childhood.

WOUNDED KNEE

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2011

WOUNDED KNEE

December 29 is an important date for me, in my history as a writer. It appeared earlier today on a friend’s page, and I included some of the following information in my comments. But I don’t see it any more; maybe just another Facebook mystery.

         On December 28, 1890, troops under the command of Colonel James Forsyth, US Army, moved about 350 Lakota Sioux into an encampment near Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

         The following morning, the encampment was surrounded by a superior number of soldiers (Wikipedia’s report says 500) who had four Hotchkiss guns among them, strategically placed on high points overlooking the Lakota camp. A Hotchkiss gun was a light, mule-portable mountain artillery piece (1.65”, or 42mm); or, depending on the model, a rapid-firing 37mm early machine gun.

         At daybreak, Forsyth ordered the Indians to surrender all weapons. As the story goes, one old man, who was either deaf or did not understand English, or both, was struggling to keep his rifle, which went off in the struggle and killed a soldier.

         Little more than an hour later, 150 Lakota men, women and children (mostly women and children) lay dead on the snowy prairie (it was December in South Dakota), along with about 25 white soldiers. (Some of whom may have been killed by friendly fire; it was by all accounts a chaotic day.)

         Sometime late in 1990, I asked my editor at a small weekly in Santa Cruz, California, if I could write a review of the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” which was coming to town. He said “Write it, and let me see it.”

         I went downtown to a store that rented VCRs and video tapes, and asked the proprietor if he’d let me sit in the store and watch “The Wizard…” as it was coming to town and I wanted to write a review.

         Hm… no-brainer: more business. “Sure,” he said, “have a seat.”

         I sat through the movie, took lots of notes, and went home and wrote a piece that said Dorothy’s neighbor had every right to call the Sheriff because her dog Toto had been tearing up the neighbor’s garden, and anyway the Sheriff didn’t shoot the dog, just scolded Dorothy. So then, in the movie, the neighbor lady, who was only trying to protect her garden, metamorphoses into the Wicked Witch of the West.

         Later, the Wizard turns out to be a bullshit artist, the Cowardly Lion has his affliction cured by pinning a medal on his chest, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man receive equally phoney solutions to their problems. When Dorothy wants to go home, all she has to do is click her red shoes together.

         I called bullshit on much of that: is this the stuff we want to raise our kids on? Tread on our neighbors’ rights, then send in troops when they get uppity about it?

         That editor usually accepted what I wrote -  typically an article about Reagan’s interventionist policies in Central America, mainly Nicaragua and El Salvador – without objection. But as I waited for a reaction to the review of Oz, none came. Finally I went in to see the editor: “Did you see my review?”

         He reached into a drawer, took out a manila envelope containing my manuscript, and tossed it rudely across the desk toward me. He didn’t say anything, but when I picked up the envelope, I saw he had scrawled across the front “Wizard of Odd.” I turned and left the room, to the accompaniment of snickers of my fellow staffers, the same people who were usually very supportive of my antiwar writings, and which were generally well received in that town which would later elect at least one Socialist mayor, and which was often lumped together with Berkeley as havens for leftists.

         Some weeks later, in late December, I was driving in four lanes of heavy traffic on Soquel Drive, at the end of the work day. Traffic was so heavy it just inched along, but I was content to listen to “All Things Considered” on NPR.

         A report came on which noted the 100^th Anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29^th, 1890. A woman historian was being interviewed. I didn’t catch her name, but she said that a few days after the massacre, a South Dakota newspaper editor wrote in his editorial advocating the extermination of the Sioux.

         That editor, she said, was L. Frank Baum, who was later to write and publish “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

         My shout was so loud it drew surprised and frightened looks from drivers and passengers across the four lanes of stalled traffic: I knew it! I FUCKING KNEW IT!!

         My shout, not understood by the alarmed motorists nearby, was an expression of self-righteous delight at my take weeks earlier on the story content of the “Wizard of Oz,” before I knew anything about L. Frank Baum, or very much about the massacre at Wounded Knee. It was all right there, in a story which millions of American families read to their children.

         I had seen it, looking at the story with the eyes I’d had in my head since I left the burning village of Tho An, over twenty years earlier.

WOUNDED KNEE

December 29 is an important date for me, in my history as a writer. It appeared earlier today on a friend’s page, and I included some of the following information in my comments. But I don’t see it any more; maybe just another Facebook mystery.

         On December 28, 1890, troops under the command of Colonel James Forsyth, US Army, moved about 350 Lakota Sioux into an encampment near Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

         The following morning, the encampment was surrounded by a superior number of soldiers (Wikipedia’s report says 500) who had four Hotchkiss guns among them, strategically placed on high points overlooking the Lakota camp. A Hotchkiss gun was a light, mule-portable mountain artillery piece (1.65”, or 42mm); or, depending on the model, a rapid-firing 37mm early machine gun.

         At daybreak, Forsyth ordered the Indians to surrender all weapons. As the story goes, one old man, who was either deaf or did not understand English, or both, was struggling to keep his rifle, which went off in the struggle and killed a soldier.

         Little more than an hour later, 150 Lakota men, women and children (mostly women and children) lay dead on the snowy prairie (it was December in South Dakota), along with about 25 white soldiers. (Some of whom may have been killed by friendly fire; it was by all accounts a chaotic day.)

         Sometime late in 1990, I asked my editor at a small weekly in Santa Cruz, California, if I could write a review of the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” which was coming to town. He said “Write it, and let me see it.”

         I went downtown to a store that rented VCRs and video tapes, and asked the proprietor if he’d let me sit in the store and watch “The Wizard…” as it was coming to town and I wanted to write a review.

         Hm… no-brainer: more business. “Sure,” he said, “have a seat.”

         I sat through the movie, took lots of notes, and went home and wrote a piece that said Dorothy’s neighbor had every right to call the Sheriff because her dog Toto had been tearing up the neighbor’s garden, and anyway the Sheriff didn’t shoot the dog, just scolded Dorothy. So then, in the movie, the neighbor lady, who was only trying to protect her garden, metamorphoses into the Wicked Witch of the West.

         Later, the Wizard turns out to be a bullshit artist, the Cowardly Lion has his affliction cured by pinning a medal on his chest, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man receive equally phoney solutions to their problems. When Dorothy wants to go home, all she has to do is click her red shoes together.

         I called bullshit on much of that: is this the stuff we want to raise our kids on? Tread on our neighbors’ rights, then send in troops when they get uppity about it?

         That editor usually accepted what I wrote -  typically an article about Reagan’s interventionist policies in Central America, mainly Nicaragua and El Salvador – without objection. But as I waited for a reaction to the review of Oz, none came. Finally I went in to see the editor: “Did you see my review?”

         He reached into a drawer, took out a manila envelope containing my manuscript, and tossed it rudely across the desk toward me. He didn’t say anything, but when I picked up the envelope, I saw he had scrawled across the front “Wizard of Odd.” I turned and left the room, to the accompaniment of snickers of my fellow staffers, the same people who were usually very supportive of my antiwar writings, and which were generally well received in that town which would later elect at least one Socialist mayor, and which was often lumped together with Berkeley as havens for leftists.

         Some weeks later, in late December, I was driving in four lanes of heavy traffic on Soquel Drive, at the end of the work day. Traffic was so heavy it just inched along, but I was content to listen to “All Things Considered” on NPR.

         A report came on which noted the 100^th Anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29^th, 1890. A woman historian was being interviewed. I didn’t catch her name, but she said that a few days after the massacre, a South Dakota newspaper editor wrote in his editorial advocating the extermination of the Sioux.

         That editor, she said, was L. Frank Baum, who was later to write and publish “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

         My shout was so loud it drew surprised and frightened looks from drivers and passengers across the four lanes of stalled traffic: I knew it! I FUCKING KNEW IT!!

         My shout, not understood by the alarmed motorists nearby, was an expression of self-righteous delight at my take weeks earlier on the story content of the “Wizard of Oz,” before I knew anything about L. Frank Baum, or very much about the massacre at Wounded Knee. It was all right there, in a story which millions of American families read to their children.

         I had seen it, looking at the story with the eyes I’d had in my head since I left the burning village of Tho An, over twenty years earlier.

ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE 40 YEARS AFTER EXPOSURE TO AGENT ORANGE

December 8, 2011

         On November 15, 2011, my wife and I were seated aboard a Continental Airlines flight at El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, Colombia, waiting to take off for Houston, Seattle, and Walla Walla. It was to be a short trip to Northeast Oregon for the first public reading of my just-published memoir, RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: An American Warrior’s Story.

         Our trip was suddenly shortened. I lost consciousness, just sitting there. When I came to, flight attendants and my wife, Patricia, were huddled around me. The flight attendants were urgently questioning Patricia and me: what was my name? what had happened to me? had I been sick recently? How did I feel right now?

         Patricia explained to them, and to me, that she had been asleep in her seat, waiting for takeoff, when she was wakened by me, noisily gasping for breath in the seat beside her.

         Paramedics came aboard, took my blood pressure, found it elevated, gave me a medication or two, then brought a wheelchair, helped Patricia collect our personal belongings, asked her for our personal data so they could retrieve our luggage from the belly of the aircraft, and wheeled me off the plane, Patricia walking behind.

         They took me to a clinic at the airport, then by ambulance to a hospital. A lot of questions, blood tests, electrocardiograms, more questions.

         We were there 2 days: more tests – especially more electrocardiograms – more questions. One young doctor there was especially notable for her throroughness, her knowledge, her obvious caring, and her efficiency without seeming impatient with my slow answers in Spanish. This doctor mentioned the possibility of my condition being “isquemia (Spanish), a word which I didn’t know in either Spanish or English.

         Nov. 19, a couple of days after we arrived in Oregon, my friend Walter Smith forwarded to me an email of an artile titled “How Agent Orange Led to Ischemic Heart Disease in Veterans.” “Ischemic” would be the the English pronunciation of the adjective for “isquemia.”

         BINGO.

The article Walter had sent me was a wake-up call, but was very brief, and sent from a website I didn’t recognize. After we got home and I had two more attacks and more treatments, my wife got on the internet and found an informative article on “isquemia” in Spanish, which she urged me to read immediately. When I got to the end, it turned out to be a pretty informative piece from the New York Times, translated into Spanish. The original English is here:

file:///Users/deanmetcalf/Desktop/Desktop/Agent%20Orange%20-%20NYTimes.com.webarchive

         Some more treatments, some more medications, an appointment scheduled with a cardiologist in Bogotá, and now I’m home, working some but mostly resting. First priority is to finish this note and send it to friends – especially veterans – so you’ll know why I’ve been so absent these past few days, and especially so that vets will know about ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE CAUSED BY (APPARENTLY) TRACE AMOUNTS OF AGENT ORANGE INGESTED 40 YEARS AGO.

          In my case, this explains a few things previously unexplained.

         But for now, this is long enough to be AN ALERT TO VETERANS: WATCH YOUR BODY. IT MAY CONTAIN INFORMATION YOU DON’T YET KNOW ABOUT, REGARDING THINGS WHICH MAY VISIT YOU LATER, AS YOU GET OLDER.

For decades, I was a serious athlete (ultramarathons, martial arts) and continuously active construction worker. But there were strange, infrequent episodes of unexplained weakness, to the point of not being able to walk. I once had to turn myself into an emergency room in Santa Cruz, California. I had to walk there, and though it wasn’t very far, I had to sit down several times on the sidewalk in order to regain enough strength to continue.

         There were others, isolated, unexplained by doctors.

        

         “The most common of the three illnesses, ischemic heart disease, restricts blood flow to the heart, causing irregular heartbeats and deterioration of the heart muscle–from the New York Times article noted above, which was published Oct. 12, 2009, and reported by James Dao.

The Veterans’ Administration recognized ischemic heart disease in October 2011 as being caused by toxins in Agent Orange, which was sprayed widely over Vietnam to kill foliage and deny the enemy cover; also to kill their rice crops. Vietnamese people are experiencing 4^th generation birth defects from Agent Orange.

         You don’t want to see the pictures of these children.

VETERANS' DAY POST: POEM BY WILFRED OWEN

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 gas-shells dropping softly 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

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

Owen was a WWI Conscientious Objector. At the same time, he was a Lieutenant in the British Army. Lines in this poem about dreams remind me of some of my own – which is not to put myself in the same league with him as poet or writer. He was killed in combat a few days before the Armistice on 11/11/1918, which we now celebrate as Veterans’ Day. He was about 24 years old. The last two lines, with Latin translated, would be:

The old lie: sweet and proper it is/ to die for one’s country.