RE-READING HISTORY...AND MY OWN

  Recently I was re-reading “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders(64). The book's title is a phrase handwritten into the photo album of one Kurt Franz, from his days as deputy commandant, then commandant, of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka. 

     The book contains reproductions of a number of black and white photographs, from Treblinka and other camps and execution sites. Many are so grainy and badly focused as to show very little. Yet they show everything: Jewish women being forced to undress before the eyes of their 

captors, trying to cover their nakedness with their hands, being shot, lying dead in crumpled piles as the few only wounded by the first volley are finished off by a soldier standing among them with a submachine gun. 

     As I turned the pages, one of the pictures stopped me.

64 Edited by Ernst Klee, et.al., Op.cit. 

I shuddered. The shudder settled in my stomach and became a vague nausea, a physical feeling of dread. This photo shows a single soldier, his rifle slung underarm, guarding a cluster of Latvian Jews who have been gathered for execution. The photograph is too grainy to be sure, but the prisoners look to be all women and children.

    That photo isn't nearly so horrible as some of the others in the book.

    What caused the physical nausea in me was not so much the ill-focused image of the women who were seated on the ground, with their children, who would all be shot minutes after the picture was taken. 

   It was the angle at which the rifle of the soldier guarding them hung under his arm(65). It was the same as 

the angle of my M14 rifle as I guarded the women and children and one old man near the village well at Tho An. The angle was the same for a simple reason: both of us soldiers had our rifles slung underarm with the muzzles down, which soldiers often do to keep the rifle’s action and trigger ready to hand; or when it’s raining, to keep rainwater out of the barrel. 

     It's especially convenient when we’re guarding people who are sitting, or kneeling, on the ground.

     The awful click in my mind when I noticed the angle of that soldier's rifle (I don't know whether he was a Latvian policeman collaborating with the Nazis, or a German soldier), while it proves nothing, can point to a whole hidden universe, or at least did for me.                                

    That hidden universe is the continuum of male violence. I've seen that continuum in things I've done and witnessed, from shooting the robin as a boy with my bow 

65 ibid., p. 130.

and arrow, to my need to become adept with guns, to be

a hunter as the men I knew were hunters, to the fun-seeking scrappiness of the "townies" I nearly tangled with in Colorado Springs, to my readiness to "kill at least one” of them, to the spark of agreement that arced around our circle of Marines' faces at Chu Lai when one said, "I'd sure like to kill just one gook before I leave this fucking place," to the beatings by angry husbands and fathers of the women and children I met at the battered women's shelter where one little girl asked her sister if I was going to hit them, to the gleam in the eye of an American mercenary in Central America as he told his story of “reloading face to face,” to superpower-induced guerrilla warfare in Central America. 

     A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids as best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.     

     Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a 

Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.        

LIFE AND DEATH

In 1992 I decided I wanted to hunt again, after many years of not being around weapons. But the thought of firing a high powered rifle at a deer or elk still made me queasy. The local archery range was a wonderful system of trails through a forest of redwoods and manzanita brush a short distance from Santa Cruz. My friend Walter Smith and I spent long hours there, and my boyhood love of archery was rekindled.

     That fall Larry Yien and I went for an archery elk hunt on a ranch in the Colorado Rockies. One morning we were out of our tents and in the woods before daylight, and split up to hunt separately. As the Eastern sky took its time going from starry dark to faint light, I crested a gradual rise and stopped to be quiet and listen and look.

   As the light became lighter, the fir branches surrounding me visibly drooped with dewdrops. As the first orange sliver of sun pushed its tiny arc above the mountain to the East, a dewdrop in front of my nose caught that sunlight and became a rainbow that for a long moment occupied my entire vision. Awake now, and having just been taught by the world around me to notice such a thing, that world exploded quietly, with a patience that moved slowly yet wasted no instant, into a galaxy of rainbows refracted in the dewdrops. 

     This stuff happens to me all the time; the world just flat knocks my socks off. And anything that birds do – especially flight – amazes me. Pelicans circling with one eye on the water, then diving for dinner in a collapse of wings, a comically ungainly splash and a struggling takeoff, or flying in V formation along the California coast, never fail to remind me of Robinson Jeffers’ line in his poem “Boats in a Fog” about watching a file of fishing boats bucking waves and wind offshore: “...a flight of pelicans/ is nothing lovelier to look at...” Or Canada geese, in Oregon where I live now. A few years ago Kit and Kim Phelps hired me to build a small addition to the old farmhouse on their place. One wintry evening I was working alone on the roof, trying to get the plywood sheathing in place before dark. It had been raining off and on all day. With the quick temperature changes we’re used to in that place, sometimes the surface of the plywood would turn icy as I was nailing it in place. Timm Turrentine, my friend and helper, was sick that day, but I was almost done. Just a couple more sheets...

     In the last light of day, the western sky did what it often does there in the open spaces around Lostine: it burned. With the urgency of getting the roof covered before dark, and getting out of my freezing coveralls, I wasn’t in the mood to pay attention to the sky.

     Neither was the sky in a mood to ignore me. Clouds in bulbous, tubular streams stretched from the southern to the northern horizon, then flamed pink, orange, red, purple, charcoal, against the azure-going-to-indigo sky. The scene gave me a shiver that was not from cold.

     Then I heard them, coming out of the sunset: a V of Canada geese, forced close to the ground by low clouds, were headed straight for me, kneeling there on the roof. Okay, some things you can ignore, some you can’t. They barely cleared the ridge of the roof I was working on. As they passed a few feet above me I watched individual feathers on their wings move. I heard the sibilance of those feathers’ sliding across one another as they did the work of flight, against the very nearby symphony of their honking.

     The violent wonderment in the way I saw and heard the sky and the geese was a direct result, 40 years on, of another moment in Tho An, a couple of hours after the moment of the screaming baby boy and the old man’s hateful stare that ended my religion and all the other Big Ideas that made up the fabric of my life before that April day in 1966. That was the infinite moment when the burst of automatic fire went between those of us standing around the well, and I saw in a blinding lapse of my habitual stupidity (as in “young and stupid”) how easy it is to die, how lucky I was to still be alive, and how precious life is, every moment of every day.

     Religion was replaced, in that moment of my life, by a greater gift: a  love of life as we have it, from rainbows in dewdrops to geese in flight to simply breathing, walking, kissing.... 

      If you ask me, I traded up.      

     Since that change in the way I see things, Life is what matters: the blood and breath coursing through me, through other humans, through my dog and my friends’ horses and other creatures who live with us and by us. And just the living of it: working at something that serves life, such as providing food or shelter; playing music or playing with children, and of course loving. Not fighting. Loving.

   I don’t believe in anything else: no ism, no ology, just... life. Any idea which I see as tending towards life, I support. Any idea which I see as trying to pull humans towards conflict – especially in the name of any ism or “national interest” (which usually means defending some sort of economic interest), I oppose. Any idea that wants to put a weapon in the hands of young men, or boys, or young women, or girls, and assigns a human target to that young armed person, I oppose. The way I see it, all those ideas lean towards, or march towards, or sprint towards, Death.

     I take this stance as a warrior. I am not a pacifist. I would still fight – fiercely and well - to defend my wife, my friends, my neighbors. But our nation is now using wars in such a way as to increase the numbers of people who call us “the enemy,” along with the strength of their resolve to destroy us.

     For anyone who has read Sun Tzu’s 2,500-year-old (give or take)The Art of War, or who has studied martial arts for twenty-plus years as I have, our current politico-military posture in the world is just plain lousy military strategy. It robs us of our money, our blood, our youth, even of the vast reservoir of international good will which we (North) Americans owned after World War II. 

     As a warrior, I oppose it.

WE MEN, WE WARRIORS...

     A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids as best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.     

     Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a 

Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.        

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” which was falsely made to look like it had been necessary, and which needlessly cost 4 million human lives, give or take.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us. 

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with the reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.     

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. It isn’t “terrorism,” or “communism,” or “al Queda,” or Osama bin Laden, or some other designated evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our deepest  beliefs. 

     These are the beliefs and ideas we are willing to fight over. They are the beliefs and ideas which inspire us to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters - to war. They are the ones which cause us to be willing to trade the lives of kids barely out of high school for a piece of red, white, and blue cloth folded into a tidy triangle. 

     Those deep beliefs constitute the human mechanism which we use to slaughter our young. Doing this, we create committed and powerful enemies around the world, eager to do battle with a new generation of our youth.

     This set of deeply held beliefs about what is good-especially that deadly nexus of religion and patriotism - is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.

END

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.