BYLINE: Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
DATE: April 5, 2004
PUBLICATION: Austin American-Statesman (TX)
SECTION: Editorial

March 21, 2004, marked the anniversary of the first death of an American soldier in combat in Iraq. The death count is now 600 and getting higher. Fifty-nine British soldiers have been killed.

Three days after this solemn anniversary, President Bush attended the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, D.C., as a guest, according to CBS News chief political writer David Paul Kuhn, of “the talking heads, the television powerful, the broadcast journalists.” Our commander-in-chief there delivered a pre-scripted comedy routine, complete with slides, showing him looking outside White House windows and under a White House couch. He joked, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.” He got lots of laughs.

On the same day in my economical Bed & Breakfast near the building in London that George Orwell used as the model for his Ministry of Truth, I read some day-old news that got no laughs in Great Britain. The Daily Telegraph reported on its front page that 14 British soldiers had been wounded, three seriously, in street protests in Iraq. A large color photograph showed two British soldiers in riot gear, their helmeted heads and upper bodies aflame after being hit by petrol bombs.

The number of U.S. military wounded in Operation Iraqi freedom and its aftermath now approaches 3,500.

Given such human cost, it is not unreasonable that some people should be concerned about the lack of judgment the president and his advisers showed in dreaming up and delivering this WMD skit. Readers of the Statesman responded strongly with letters to the editor. The fact that these jokes were not “off-the-cuff,” but instead planned and approved, gives us cause to wonder whether the president’s insulated inner circle understands how ordinary people might feel.

Of even greater concern, in my opinion, is the subsequent politicizing of this episode and the further trivializing of the issue of WMDs as the main reason for launching a pre-emptive military attack against Iraq. You may think I am being a stodgy moralist here and dismiss this whole matter as “a silly controversy” and politically motivated “cheap advantage grabbing,” as liberal talk-show host Harry Shearer has. So let me explain.

Corpses, maimed bodies and veterans with wounded psyches are not political matters. Dead men and women no longer have a political affiliation. What the loved ones of soldiers who have died in action — and what soldiers who will bear physical or psychological scars for the rest of their lives — have to believe is that their sacrifice was worth it.

In a profile of Iraqi-war amputee Michael Cain in the March 8 New Yorker magazine, Dan Baum reports that Cain told him he had no regrets and would serve his country again. But Cain vowed that he would never let his son join the army.

Most poignant, however, is what veteran Steve Reighard, another amputee at Walter Reed Hospital, says: “I believed in what we were doing. If we hadn’t gone to war, eventually we’d see chemical arms and those kinds of munitions in our streets.” Reighard believes the WMDs matter. Why? As he tells Baum, “You, know, we kind of have to think that. Otherwise, this (missing arm of mine) is in vain.”

In this, Reighard and Cain — and bereaved mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, sons and daughters — are no different than their counterparts in previous wars. Those who fight are dead serious about the reasons for their great sacrifice.

When Siegfried Sassoon, the British officer and poet in World War I, sensed that his men were suffering and dying abominably for no clear purpose, he publicly refused to fight until the British government explained its objectives clearly and set a timetable for either achieving them or ending the war.

While in London on leave, Sassoon saw a civilian music review where the chorus sang “the Kaiser loves our dear old tanks.”

His poetic response to such obtuse civilian jocularity was savage: “I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,/ Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home sweet Home’,/ And there’d be no more jokes in music-halls/ to mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.”

Next time the White House wants to tell a joke about non-existent weapons, it should try it out first among the wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital — and only then take it on the road.

Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at UT-Austin.

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
May 4, 2004
Austin American-Statesman (TX)
Editorial

Two controversies in two days, and all about names and numbers.

On Thursday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, when asked about military casualties in Iraq, replied, “It’s approximately 500, of which — I can get the exact numbers — approximately 350 are combat deaths.” The real figures at the time were 722 and 521. A spokesman later said: “He misspoke. That’s all.”

He sure did. But why do numbers matter?

Numbers matter because they are attached to names, and right now the names are controversial, too.

On Friday, ABC’s “Nightline” put the names and numbers together on national television to “remind our viewers — whether they agree with the war or not — that beyond the casualty numbers, these men and women are serving in Iraq in our names, and that those who have been killed have names and faces.”

Before the broadcast, a television critic for the Washington Post called it “a cheap, content-free stunt designed to tug at our heartstrings and bag a big number on the second night of the May ratings race.” So let’s forget the names and the numbers and argue about television ratings and political motives.

Let’s not.

Why do names and numbers of dead soldiers matter? Because it is decent for us to make them matter.

In 1916, midway though the mechanized butchery of World War I, the British alone suffered 420,000 casualties at one point along the line of trenches that stretched from Belgium to the border of Switzerland. That one point was the Somme River.

Fourteen years after the war, a memorial was dedicated at Thiepval to the soldiers who died along the Somme between July 1915 and February 1918. The memorial, as its Web site reminds us (www.thiepval.org.uk), sits in isolation, without any accompanying visitor center or any other explanation as to why the monument is there. The memorial has a simple inscribed statement: “Here are recorded names of officers and men of the British armies who fell on the Somme battlefields July 1915 February 1918 but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death.” It also has 72,000 names inscribed upon it.

Why did the British do this? Because it was decent.

American Vietnam veterans felt the same way when it came to publicly remembering their comrades who lost their lives. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Inc., through its expert judging panel, scrutinized 1,421 design entries before choosing the design by Maya Lin. It was built in 1982. It, too, stands within a landscape that focuses all attention on the memorial. It, too, consists of names, now 58,235 in number, engraved on stone. The memorial is dedicated to “the 2.7 million men and women in the U.S. military who served in the designated war zone.” We learn the numbers again from the Web site: www.thewall-usa.com/information.

If you have stood in front of those names, as I have, you see your own reflection in the polished stone behind each one of them. And you must ask, “Who am I that these soldiers died in service of my country?”

And if you want to do the decent thing, you will walk away from those names asking the question the old vet in Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” asks himself: “What have I done to earn this?” You might also add, “Was it right that these soldiers should die?” and, “What could I be doing to prevent this?”

The names matter. They have always mattered. The greater the courage of the men and women doing the fighting, the more incomprehensible the reasons for their sacrificing their lives, the more suspect the motives or judgment or policies of their leaders, the more the names matter.

It has always been this way.

Herodotus describes the heroic resistance of King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans against the Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E. and remarks, “In the course of that fight Leonidas fell, having fought bravely, and many distinguished Spartans with him — their names I have learned, as those of men who deserve to be remembered; indeed, I have learned the names of all the three hundred.”

The dead were buried where they fell, and the entire united Peloponnesian force was memorialized with an inscription on the site: “Four thousand here from Pelops’ land / Against three million once did stand.”

Names and numbers and simple human decency.

Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at UT-Austin.

Commentary: Thomas G. Palaima Regular Contributor

The Iliad Gets Lost in Hollywood’s Translation
SPECIAL TO THE AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Tuesday, May 18, 2004, p. A9

“Do you know what a man is? Is not / birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, / learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, / and such like, the spice and salt that season a man?” (Shakespeare, “Troilus and Cressida”)

“But Hippolochus / Bore me, and I am proud he is my father./ He sent me to Troy with strict instructions / To be the best ever, better than all the rest, / And not bring shame on the race of my fathers….” (Homer, Iliad 6.211-215 Lombardo translation)

A few years back, very wealthy donors wanted to back a project to promote Hellenic culture in the United States. I had an idea. I invited my friend Bill Broyles to lunch. Bill is an intelligent man, directly experienced in the ways of war and the ways of the world. He is plain-spoken and wise. Some of you may have read recently his splendid editorial on the virtues of mandatory national service. He is also a good myth-maker. His Hollywood screen writing credits include “Castaway” and “Apollo Thirteen.”

I asked Bill, “Could Hollywood do an Iliad?” I explained that it had never been done, that two readable and moving translations of Homer’s epic had just appeared, that part of one translation had been successfully staged off-Broadway. We then discussed what we both already knew.

The Iliad contains everything about war: real courage, real cowardice, real command failures, real command genius, real self-seeking, real self-sacrifice, real equipment malfunction, real logistical mistakes, real supply shortages, real bad luck, real good luck, real love of family, real love of friends, real love of brothers in arms, real love of country, real hatred, real sorrow, real pity, real wisdom, real folly, real enemies, real death, real ugliness, real beauty, real fog and real clarity, and, yes, even real gods. Let me repeat that: real gods. Just as real as the God proclaimed in Exodus (King James version): “The Lord is a man of war: The Lord is his name.” Real gods who inscrutably shape and shake human lives.

The Iliad is real and it taught Greeks, young and old, what they needed to know about war. It helped them to understand what it is like to attack in an army and to be attacked. Because they knew the Iliad, Greeks who were coming of age for obligatory military service knew what war was. War was a grim necessity. War could confer honor and glory and make a man a hero, a woman a heroine. War could break and ruin good human beings, forever, and bring death to innocents.

This is why I spend four weeks on the Iliad in my mythology classes. This semester students who are veterans back from Iraq or husbands or wives or friends of soldiers there told me that the Iliad helped them understand their own experiences and feelings.

Bill thought a bit and said, “It could be done, but it would have to be done as ‘Planet of the Apes’ or something like that.”

What Bill meant was that a high-dollar Hollywood production would be ruinous. Economic forces would make the film a spectacle, rather than a valuable myth. But if the story were translated into a different setting and filmed at a modest budget, the core values of the Iliad might be communicated.

Alas, Bill has proved more accurate than the Greek seer Calchas. I have been involved in a Discovery Channel documentary related to the film “Troy” and I saw the film last night. Economic forces turned a potentially fine documentary into a two-hour promotional for the film, with four or five good moments of edu-tainment..

As to “Troy” itself, my reactions have little to do with changes in the plot of the Iliad. In “Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare plays as freely with the plot as Hollywood. The Greeks are in the seventh year of the siege. Achilles’ comrade Patroclus has parodistic acting talents. Ajax is as alienated as Achilles. So a film version that makes the entire war at Troy last, by my reckoning, fifteen days (instead of ten years), that kills off Menelaus on the first day of battle (instead of having him return home with Helen), and that lets Helen and Paris and Hector’s wife and child escape, would be okay, if the changes amounted to something.

What they amount to is summed up, unfortunately, in Brad Pitt’s reply – it is certainly not Achilles’ – to the question of why he has come to Troy. Pitt says he wants what every man wants, he wants more.

If you see the film, ask yourself, “More of what?”

Tom Palaima is professor of Classics in the College of Liberal Arts at University of Texas at Austin.

Do You Have to Be Brave to Attend this Year’s Olympics? by Tom Palaima.  

August 3, 2004.

Mr. Palaima teaches Classics in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas.

In 490 B.C.E., on the Plain of Marathon 26 miles northwest of Athens, Athenian citizen foot soldiers known as hoplites advanced on the run against an invading Persian army and defeated it. In 2004 C.E. the Greek enemy is terrorism threatening the security of the Olympic Games that will begin in Athens on Aug. 13.

The main question for many people has more to do with the movie Marathon Man than with the ancient battle that changed the course of Western history. Like Sir Laurence Olivier, they are asking again and again: “Is it safe? Is it safe?” And they are getting answers no better than those offered by the tortured, but clueless Dustin Hoffman.

The Greeks themselves have asked the Marathon Man question and come to us for answers. In late May, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis visited the White House. The president will not attend the Games himself, but Prime Minister Karamanlis reasoned that it “constitutes a vote of confidence the fact that his father will in essence head the U.S. delegation.”

His reasoning is quintessentially Greek, focusing on personal and family relations. Surely the president of the United States would not send his father into danger. The Greek prime minister was also heartened by the president’s public thanks for his hard work and his intentions to have successful Games “in as secure an environment as possible.”

But intentions often do not coincide with ultimate reality. Despite our preemptive invasion of Iraq and our continuing military presence, and losses, in recently democratized Iraq and all-but-forgotten Afghanistan, al Qaeda still operates and terrorist attacks occur regularly in Iraq and other countries.

So what can we make of such assurances? Right after the White House meeting, a Greek satirical political pamphlet calling itself the Column Foundation Course of Peace ran a crude cartoon mocking the hollowness of the president’s and Greek prime minister’s promises. Its satirical brilliance rivaled the ancient comic poet Aristophanes both in its creative ingenuity and in the seriousness of the political topic it was satirizing. I cannot even describe its sexual explicitness without offending readers.

Is it safe? One voice that I listened to carefully is that of Nicholas Gage, author of the autobiographical novel Eleni, which portrays the horrors of the Greek civil war after World War II and the blood-fueled passions for vengeance and justice that its violence created. Writing in the New York Times, Gage has declared that he is going to the Games with his wife and daughter because he knows that they all will be safe.

How does he know this? Because Greece has spent $1.2 billion dollars on security (three times as much as for the Sydney Games). Because Greek authorities are cooperating with security experts from the United States, Israel, Great Britain and other countries. Because 70,000 Greek police will be on the alert. Because of a thousand security cameras and Nato AWACS planes and the personal security forces accompanying important foreign officials.

Gage is a brave man and he knows and loves Greece in all its tragic beauty and contradictions. He knows from his long familiarity with Greece what foreign ticket holders might want to read on the Council on Foreign Relations Web site on terrorism.

Gage, Prime Minister Karamanlis, President Bush and Olympic organizers do not speak about the terrorist organization called November 17 that operated with virtual impunity in Greece between 1975 and 2002, claiming responsibility for twenty-one murders including Athens’ CIA station chief, a U.S. Navy captain, and a U.S. and a British defense attaché. They surely know that November 17 expanded its targets in the 1980s to include ordinary citizens and property. They also know that Greece in 2002 clamped down on this terrorist organization and arrested some key members mainly in response to the soon-to-be-held Olympics.

If I were considering going to the Games, I would ask myself how safe their well-developed anti-terrorist measures make Israelis feel. I would ask what the chances are, with multinational anti-terrorist organizations assisting regular Greek police, of a friendly-fire accident taking place.

And I would go if I were as brave as Gage, his family, and the Athenian hoplites at Marathon.

We are all modern hoplites fighting a new kind of war.

_________

This article was first published by the Austin American-Statesman and is reprinted with permission of the author.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/11/6palaima_edit.html

Palaima: In his election victory, Bush sees a divine right to carry on

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR

Austin American-Statesman Saturday, November 06, 2004

The post-election news coverage and opinion columns have been filled with assertions that President Bush’s re-election by 51 percent of the voters has given him a clear mandate to proceed with his agenda.

Some pundits are hoping Bush will get rid of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, because of their mishandling of the war in Iraq, as well as Attorney General John Ashcroft because of his disregard for civil liberties.

But this is a president who believes he is on a mission, has repeatedly vowed to stay the course in Iraq, prays daily for divine guidance, and, in the second presidential debate, could not think of one mistake he – or by extension his heavenly or earthly advisers – had ever made.

Let’s say Ashcroft does step down. Would a new attorney general have values any different than those the president and his strongest base clearly share with Ashcroft? Conservative columnist George Will gets it right: the president will “feel vindicated in his foreign policy and empowered in his well-advertised domestic agenda.”

The New York Times reports that Bush tapped into America’s moral center, and Knight Ridder lists what Bush intends to do with the backing of his coalition of the morally willing: set Iraq on the road to democracy, defeat global terrorism, spread freedom throughout the Middle East and bring free-market capitalism to Social Security. These goals are as unrealistic – and the ways to achieve them as unexplained – as they were when they were recited as a holy litany throughout the campaign.

In presidential politics, ends don’t justify means. They make means irrelevant.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof sums up the Republican core campaign values as “God, guns, gays and grizzlies.” The first two are issues Bush’s Christian conservative base supports; the last two they oppose.

In regard to gays, Washington Post columnist David Broder stresses that the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision to allow gay marriages galvanized the one-third of Americans who are evangelical Christians to come out in key states to vote for both anti-gay-marriage initiatives and Bush. While this identifies the initial cause, it overlooks the hand of Bush’s Republican strategist, Karl Rove, in having U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, whose election campaign Rove ran, red-flag this divisive issue nationally by proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages.

All this would be well and good, if we could be sure that voters really knew what they were voting for, beyond denying gay men and women the right to share fully in a mainstream institution that is tied to all sorts of powerful human needs – for social acceptance, for medical and retirement and inheritance benefits, for the joy of openly loving another human being among supportive fellow worshipers of God and for the comfort of having one more major stigma removed.

At least my New Testament reads that the second great commandment is, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I love my duly wedded wife and our son born and nurtured in wedlock. I find it sad that some fellow Americans want to deny the benefits of holy or civil matrimony to men and women who deeply love each other and long to have church and state bless and legitimize that love. To me, it is an uncharitable form of ignorance and deserves the graceful contempt that Gregory Peck afforded such forms of narrow-minded bigotry in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” But I am no Gregory Peck and no Harper Lee.

But what else did voters think they were voting for? The Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International Studies of the University of Maryland published a study just before the election of what Bush and Kerry supporters thought about key issues. Only three out of 10 Bush supporters understood the extent of world opposition to America’s use of preemptive military force in Iraq, and a majority of them consistently got wrong the president’s positions on major foreign policy issues.

For example, 62 percent wrongly believed Bush favors our participation in the International Criminal Court and would lead by setting the example that no nation, no matter how powerful, is above universal standards of justice. Eighty percent thought he supported the international land mines treaty, signed by 130 countries of the world and ratified by 50 more. He does not, despite Pope John Paul’s prayerful urging years ago that “God give all nations the courage to make peace, so that the countries that have not yet signed this important instrument of international humanitarian law do so without delay.”

It would seem then that when religion and politics mix, belief triumphs over reason – and even over love.

Palaima teaches Classics in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

COMMENTARY Austin American-Statesman Wednesday, December 08, 2004
http://hnn.us/articles/8945.html

Palaima: Their service is over; don’t make them fight on

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR

I don’t know how long or how widely Tim O’Brien searched for the epigraph for his masterwork on the experience of war in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried.”

But he eventually chose a passage from John Ransom’s “Andersonville Diary,” a grim account of life in a Civil War prison camp written by a 20-year-old northern soldier. Why? Because all soldiers in combat feel like prisoners of war. And most of them are young.

No matter how good and just the cause, how dedicated the individual soldiers, how evil the enemy, in all firsthand accounts of war written by the soldiers who are actually fighting, at some or many points the objectives for which they are asked to risk their lives seem, and in many cases actually are, senseless – i.e., literally not worth dying, or even killing, for.

Such feelings of helpless imprisonment are captured vividly in Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” The hero Yossarian’s plight – as he tries to escape being manipulated by remote higher powers into serving beyond the fair and stipulated number of bombing runs – has become a Jungian archetype. He captures the sense of betrayal that common soldiers feel when government authorities do not hold up their side of the moral bargain; when the officers commanding them are motivated by their own career goals, their own egos or in some cases their own venality, incompetence or cowardice; when doctors despair that their interventions can’t do any good; when chaplains are naive, weak or platitudinous; when God seems to be sadistic or off on holiday.

If you think Heller’s work is pure fiction, or an aberrant view of the greatest generation’s achievements in World War II, read Studs Terkel’s oral history, “The Good War,” (the ironic quotation marks are part of the title) and Paul Fussell’s “Wartime” and “The Boys’ Crusade.” The fierce anger in Fussell about how working-class infantry recruits were expended during the last months of the war in Europe still rages almost 60 years after his own firsthand experience.

There is no other job in our society where we can be ordered to put ourselves at mortal risk and where we have to serve out our “commitment” under penalty of imprisonment or worse. Under such circumstances, it is absolutely imperative that the authorities who control the lives of citizen soldiers scrupulously uphold all terms of the social contract. The consequences of failing to do so are dire.

After all, Veterans Administration psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has argued persuasively that the fundamental cause of post-traumatic stress in combat veterans is “betrayal of what is right,” usually by authority figures whose job it is to do the right thing. Likewise, those same authorities are under a strict obligation to make sure that all those who commit themselves to military service do so as true volunteers – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and socially.

In a re-enactment of “Catch-22,” our government is now using stop-loss orders to compel soldiers to serve in Iraq beyond their discharge dates. It is also manipulating back into combat veterans who thought that their full active and reserve service had been fulfilled. Both these practices are simply immoral. They are clear betrayals of what is right and should not even be prettified with the euphemism “back-door draft.”

You might have seen the “60 Minutes” segment about the 4-foot-8-inch, 55-year-old female veteran, the disabled male veteran and the veteran who is now a mother of three young children who all have been called back to fight in Iraq.

How does the military justify this? By a “six-digit reference to an Army regulation . . . in a remark section” on the recruiting agreements these veterans all signed long ago. A West Point graduate and former judge advocate general says this “borders on being a deceptive recruiting practice.”

It is worse than that. It is an outright swindle.

On stop-loss, eight soldiers have now begun legal actions against the U.S. government – and rightly so. How can our commander-in-chief, a veteran war-time National Guardsman himself, countenance policies that make a mockery of the term “all-volunteer army”?

On the other side are the new soldiers in our armed forces. In my opinion, there are questionable moral practices in how they are recruited. More about this next time.

For now, please read what the ground war in Iraq is really like and imagine being called back into this maelstrom after you had already devoted eight years of your life to our armed services.

Then think of your own adjective to describe what our government is doing. Mine is “immoral,” at least in polite company.

Palaima teaches classics and war and violence studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

http://hnn.us/articles/8945.html

Monday, December 20, 2004

What Military Recruiters Are Doing to Fill the Ranks
Tom Palaima

Mr. Palaima, recipient of a MacArthur genius award, teaches war and violence studies and ancient history at the University of Texas at Austin. He thanks Mr. David Hill for the reference to “The Recruiting Sergeant.”

Good morning, good morning, the Sergeant he cried.
And the same to you, gentlemen, we did reply,
Intending no harm but meant to pass by,
For it bein’ on Christmas mornin’.

But, says he, My fine fellows, if you will enlist,
Ten guineas in gold I’ll stick to your fist,
And a crown in the bargain for to kick up the dust,
And drink the king’s health in the morning.

For a soldier, he leads a very fine life,
And he always is blessed with a charming young wife,
And he pays all his debts without sorrow or strife,
And he always lives pleasant and charmin’,

And a soldier, he always is decent and clean,
In the finest of clothing he’s constantly seen.
While other poor fellows go dirty and mean,
And sup on thin gruel in the morning.

Says Arthur, I wouldn’t be proud of your clothes,
For you’ve only the lend of them, as I suppose,
But you dare not change them one night, for you know
If you do, you’ll be flogged in the morning.

And we have no desire to take your advance,
All hazards and dangers we barter on chance,
For you’d have no scruples for to send us to France,
Where we would get shot without warning. (© Bob Dylan 1992)

The traditional Irish folk song”Arthur McBride” was written down in Limerick in 1840 and made popular again by Bob Dylan in 1992. In it, the young hero refutes and resists a military recruiter’s false promises.

In mid-19th-century Ireland, recruiting sergeants preyed upon poor Irish boys, promising them adventure, honor, fine clothes and romance instead of pre- and post-potato-famine destitution. Poverty and ignorance have always been the military recruiter’s best friends.

Irish recruits in the 1800’s had to serve as battlefield fodder in the British army for eightpence a day. They were subject to cruel discipline, receiving 25 to 1500 lashes with a cat-o-nine-tails for offenses like changing out of their uniforms. Still for many, military life was better than starvation.

Seventy-five years later, little had changed. The British were now recruiting in Ireland for the war to end all wars. This inspired another anti-recuiter ballad entitled”The Recruiting Sergeant” written by Seamus O’Farrell. It was covered recently by the Pogues:

As I was walking down the road a feeling fine and larky oh
A recruiting sergeant come up to me, says he”you’d like fine in khaki oh
For the King he is in need of men, come read this proclamation oh
A life in Flanders for you then, ‘t would be a fine vacation oh”

“That may be so” says I to him”but tell me Sergeant deary-oh
if I had a pack stuck upon me back would I look fine and cheery-oh
For they’d have you train and drill until they had you one of Frenchies
oh it may be warm in Flanders but it’s draughty in the trenches oh”

The sergeant smiled and winked his eye, his smile was most provoking oh
he twiddled and twirled his wee moustache, says he”You’re only joking oh
for the sandbags are so warm and high the wind you won’t feel blowing oh
well I winked at a caitlin passing by, says I,”What if it’s snowing oh”

Come rain or hail or wind or snow I’m not going out to Flanders oh
There’s fighting in Dublin to be done, let your sergeants and your commanders go
Let Englishmen fight English wars, it’s nearly time they started oh
I saluted the sergeant a very good night, there and then we parted oh

Recruiters nowadays use the same techniques, but with a new sophistication that aims at making their targets more pliant and susceptible to their sales pitches. The hard sell and the gaps between promises and realities are still there. And our national economic policies ensure a steady supply of young men for whom the military is the main route out of poverty.

So long as that supply line exists, disapproval of our foreign wars will never reach the intensity of the Vietnam War period. Back then, even wealthy young men like our current president had their lives affected by the universal draft.

Austin American-Statesman reader Vic Blackburn (1LT, 82nd Airborne Division, 1968-1970) recently reminded me of Col. (ret.) David Hackworth’s views on this subject:”Most recruits in the All Volunteer Force come from non-vocal, working-class families–a disproportionate number from the poor and from minority groups–while more privileged Americans are conspicuous by their absence.” Soldiers drawn from a universal draft”keep all our citizens more closely involved and invested; they are our bottom-line deterrent to war.”

While most parents of teenagers worry about sex, drugs, alcohol and music, parents in certain neighborhoods and school districts also worry about recruiters.

Army Adventure Vans: They’re Flashy. They’re Dangerous. They’re Targeting 500,000 students. They’re Coming To A School Near You. Marguerite Jones of Austin, Texas does. She called me about the sleek, two-million-dollar 18-wheeler military Cinema Van that pulled up outside Travis High School around Veteran’s Day. In a scene resembling playground drug-pushing, her son William and his freshman peers were lured on board and offered free access to the most sophisticated high-tech battle-simulation computer games. All they had to do was give the recruiters their personal information. The kids were told by their school that they had to sign up to get credit for PE class. Meanwhile the recruiters said they needed the information to prove to their superiors that they had been doing their jobs. Indeed.

The U.S. Army sponsored game”America’s Army” and Kuma Reality Games use military battle simulation and retired military consultants to transport their targeted youth audience of 12- to 15-year-olds right into the Battle of Fallujah, Operation Anaconda, and Uday and Qusay’s Last Stand. These games are exciting and ultra-realistic, except in representing the real finality if the American soldier avatar should get himself killed or severely wounded.

At a recent week-long conference I attended at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a video-game expert spoke of playing the Battle of Fallujah online while watching Marines on CNN do battle on the exact same streets. The video game Full Spectrum Warrior asks youths,”Do you think you have what it takes to become a nationally renowned squad leader?” (Note: How many squad leaders from Iraq or Afghanistan do you think the average American can name?) It also touts the fact that it is based on a game commissioned by the U.S. Army.

The web sites that offer such games for a $9.99 monthly fee have direct links to military recruiting web sites. Imagine the lure of the plush van and sophisticated equipment for kids from homes that cannot afford computers.

Students in targeted schools are further invited to join Junior ROTC. Austin has Air Force Junior ROTC at Reagan, Akins, Westwood, Bowie and McNeil high schools, i.e., the lower-income, predominantly minority schools. The same pattern holds true acros the state, with Junior ROTC’s in traditionally minority regions or areas of urban and rural economic stagnation.

The Army Junior ROTC web site calls its version a”Character and Leadership Development Program.” We might wonder why affluent suburban high schools like non-minority urban high schools do not need to develop these same civic virtues.

Further preying upon teenage insecurity and parental anxiety about their children’s future, the military has devised the Delayed Entry Program. Seventeen year-old kids can sign up for military service, ostensibly to gain credit towards higher rank in the year or more before graduation and basic training. There are a number of specified reasons that legally permit these teenagers later to opt out, but recruiters have been known to misrepresent and high-pressure reluctant graduates or non-graduates into”living up to their commitment.”

Military recruiting then starts with underprivileged twelve year-olds and never lets up. It is supported by money-making video-game manufacturers and schools that are obliged to allow recruiters access to students and student information or lose funding under the provisions of the federal No Child Left behind Act.

I proposed in another recent essay that stop-loss orders and veteran call-backs, while perfectly lawful, were immoral. Austin American-Statesman reader Vic Blackburn disagrees. He calls them and current recruiting practices criminal. What do you think?

A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Austin American-Statesman (12-15-04).

COMMENTARY
Palaima: ‘The Iliad’ doesn’t flinch from war’s brutal truths
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, September 19, 2005, p. A11

Three and a half years ago, when U.S. soldiers were only fighting in Afghanistan, I wondered in a column when we would finally have an American “Iliad,” a work that would reveal the costs, necessities and realities of war.

Natural disaster in New Orleans and Mississippi has pushed the wars our troops are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan off the front pages, except when suicide bombers rack up large numbers. And we focus now on the dodge or half-accept-the-blame game for the poor response of our down-sized and out-sourced federal and state governments to this large-scale crisis.

We also have been seduced into believing that a down-sized, all-volunteer army – recruited by sophisticated advertising appeals to patriotic fervor or to military service as the one possible route to college funding, job skills and a better future – can win wars most of us really don’t want our own loved ones to fight.

Ironically, prominent historians of classical Greek warfare such as Victor Davis Hanson and Donald Kagan have argued for preemptive warfare and unilateral assertion of power, in direct contradiction to the lessons that most thinking human beings derive from the fate of classical Athens in the second half of the fifth century B.C.E. And they, like us, have not addressed what damage an all-volunteer army – something tantamount to a mercenary force and rightly unimaginable in the ancient Greek city-states – will eventually do to our country’s social and political fabric.

We really do need an “Iliad” to bring us back to reality. The movie “Troy” held promise, but its director thought that the key to understanding the meaning of the quintessential Western story of war was that Achilles is Superman and Hector is Batman. So “Troy” gave us entertaining costume epic and soap-opera emotions and special effects.

A few years back, some of us hoped “Saving Private Ryan” would be our “Iliad.” Steven Spielberg had laudable intentions. “I didn’t want to make something it was easy to look away from,” he said. And indeed the opening scenes fulfilled this promise.

But the movie soon swung around to a typical John Wayne script. So much so that World War II veteran and war writer Paul Fussell said, “I’d like to recommend the retention of and familiarity with the first few minutes of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ depicting the landing horrors. Then I’d suggest separating them to constitute a short subject, titled ‘Omaha Beach: Aren’t You Glad You Weren’t There?’ – which could mean, ‘Aren’t you glad you weren’t a conscripted working-class or high school boy in 1944?’ The rest of the Spielberg film I’d consign to the purgatory where boys’ bad adventure films end up.”

“The Iliad” gave the Greeks war and made it unforgettable. In fact, the Greek word for “truth,” alethes, means just that. Whatever it modifies “cannot escape notice,” “cannot be forgotten.”

“The Iliad” gives an honest picture of all aspects of warfare: betrayal of “what is right;” egotistical high command foul ups and their consequences for the common troops; a wide range of behaviors, from cowardice to courage; the tragedy of war for civilians in a city under siege and ordained to be taken and destroyed; “berserker” rage; fellow feeling for the enemy, most famously in the private “truce” between the Trojan ally Glaucus and the great Greek warrior Diomedes; the truly human affections of a king named Priam and a queen named Hecuba for their son Hector, affections that are publicly displayed in gut-wrenching personal terms with no thought for political delicacy or spin; the love of Hector, whose very name means “holder” or “preserver” of his city, for his son Astyanax and his wife Andromache – and her fierce attachment to Hector; the gory, clinically accurate violence of over 200 detailed combat deaths; war for less than noble purposes; betrayal by the gods and the ineffectuality of piety; the joyful pleasure battle can give some men; the role of blind luck in combat; and even what von Clausewitz, more than two millennia later, called the “fog of war.”

“The Iliad” is the quintessential myth of war, even if it doesn’t have Brad Pitt. It is not propaganda. Achilles, the noblest Greek warrior, is alienated by his commander-in-chief Agamemnon and withdraws himself and his men from the Greek coalition.

And the noble Hector admits to feeling public shame for having squandered a good part of the Trojan army through his own mistaken strategy. And when Hector finally faces Achilles, he runs as fast as he can and only stops running when he is deluded by the goddess Athena. Ironically, none of this truth ever stopped Greek citizens from fighting bravely for their city-states.

We do not have an “Iliad.” So why not come and hear master translator and scholar Stanley Lombardo perform from Homer at 7 p.m. today in Jessen Auditorium, Homer Rainey Hall, at the University of Texas? It will be unforgettable, I promise.

Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. See www.utexas.edu/cola/plan2/news/05_lombardo/

COMMENTARY
Palaima: What’s the truth of war?

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Saturday, May 27, 2006

http://www.statesman.com/search/content/editorial/stories/05/27palaima_edit.html

It took Kurt Vonnegut nearly 20 years to figure out how he wanted to memorialize his own experiences of World War II. Erich Maria Remarque took almost a decade to memorialize the suffering of German and French soldiers in World War I. And Rolando Hinojosa-Smith memorialized the frozen carnage of the Korean War 25 years after he left Korea.

My friend Chuck Patterson knew right away some of what he wanted to memorialize about his friend and fellow Marine, Marion Henry Norman, who died at Khe Sanh on March 30, 1968. But it took him 15 years to write the rest of his poem about “laughing, smiling Hank.”

It is hard for veterans who come back from war to know what to say to civilians about their experiences. But what do those who died at war want to say to us?

This Memorial Day will be the first since my former student, good friend and scholarly collaborator, Col. Theodore Westhusing, died outside of Baghdad last June 5. He was 44 years old. Ted left in unimaginable grief his wife of 17 years, their three young children, his parents and his brothers and sisters.

In 1983, Ted graduated third in his class from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A friend recalls that Ted lived his life with ” ‘Duty, Honor, Country’ always echoing in the background.” In the time I knew him, Ted often placed these principles squarely in the foreground, in what he thought and said, and in how he lived. Duty called Ted voluntarily to take a leave from his position as an academy professor at West Point and go to Iraq as senior adviser in counter terrorism-special operations.

I think of Ted every day. The card from his memorial service sits on my bookshelves at home. A photograph of his soldier’s memorial in Iraq (his boots, rifle and helmet) faces me as I sit at my desk at the University of Texas. They help me remember his sacrifice and our loss.

A month ago, I was asked to speak at the unveiling of a Texan Fallen Soldiers Mural in the School of Social Work building at UT. There is a long tradition of speaking at soldiers’ memorials. Each year in ancient Athens, a single individual was chosen to speak about the honor fallen soldiers had conferred upon their city and their families. All adult male Athenian citizens were soldiers. They expected to hear praise and hear truth.

I thought, “What would Ted and these fallen soldiers from Texas want me to say?”

Fortunately, Ted had already answered my question. He once told me, “If you want to know what soldiering is about, read E.B. Sledge’s ‘With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.’ ” He then sent me a copy, with a hand-written dedication that I cherish now, despite its hyperbole: “To Professor Palaima – One of the ‘Old Breed’ of teachers.”

John Keegan, the great modern historian of war, says that “With the Old Breed” “will be read and cited as long as the Pacific campaign is remembered.” Combat veteran Paul Fussell, who has written award-winning accounts of World Wars I and II, calls Sledge’s book one “of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war.”

Ted obviously agreed. But what did he want me to know? Probably some kind of truth. What is Sledge’s truth?

Fifty years after his fighting ended, Sledge was still having nightmares about Okinawa, which he calls “the most ghastly corner of hell I had ever witnessed.” He speaks with unapologetic honesty about “the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue and filth that was the infantryman’s war.” And he says, “I don’t like to watch television shows with violence in them.”

Most poignantly, Sledge writes, “There was nothing macho about the war at all. We were a bunch of scared kids who had to do a job. People tell me I don’t act like an ex-Marine. How is an ex-Marine supposed to act? They have some Hollywood stereotype in mind. The only thing that kept you going was your faith in your buddies. It was stronger than flag and country.”

This Memorial Day, think hard about what American and other soldiers have gone through – both those who came back and those who never will.

Palaima teaches Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. View his “Stories of War” at www.utexas.edu/inside_ut/take5/palaima/.

Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.

History News Network
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/46981.html

Tom Palaima: What we’ve lost in the Iraq war

Source: A version of this commentary first appeared in the Austin American-Statesman January 31, 2008. (1-31-08)

It is said that the first casualty of war is the truth. I am not so sure we can identify the first casualty of Operation Iraqi Freedom so easily.

According to the Center for Public Integrity, truth was a casualty well before our soldiers crossed into Iraq on March 20, 2003. By its reckoning, 935 times the Bush administration “methodically propagated erroneous information” leading to our military action.

We have also lost historical memory.

Do you remember the name of the first casualty of war? If not, visit icasualties.org/oif and scroll down the long and sorrowful Department of Defense Confirmation List, from the six dead of Jan. 27 and 28, 2008, to the first casualty, 2nd Lt. Therrel S. Childers, 30, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, on March 21, 2003.

Scroll slowly and think about what Walt Whitman told us 145 years ago, reporting from the deplorable Civil War field hospitals outside Washington. Each individual casualty is gone and at rest. But those who remain behind suffer. Wives, mothers, children, fathers and “musing comrades” suffer inexhaustible grief.

We were not given the truth about how Childers died. Embedded reporter Gordon Dillow wrote then in The Orange County Register that Childers died bravely leading his men against a thinned Iraqi army brigade at an oil pumping station. He was killed, Dillow told us, by a half-dozen Iraqis, some of them elite Republican Guard, wildly shooting an AK-47 out of a speeding Toyota pickup. Childers was heroized, made the subject of a book, Shane Comes Home by Rinker Buck, and honored with an official decree by the Mississippi Legislature.

Two tellings later, however, in an oral history of embedded reporting, Dillow gave us something closer to the truth. Childers and his Marines were facing no opposition. They were standing by the side of the road when a civilian vehicle incongruously started driving toward them. They were baffled.

No one had told them this war was going to be like Vietnam, with insurgents, explosive devices, assorted inglorious ways of dying.

“All of a sudden,” Dillow said, “a guy sticks an AK-47 out and starts shooting and hits the lieutenant in his stomach, just below his protective vest.”

Our first combat death was a drive-by shooting.

Does this matter? It certainly doesn’t make Childers any less brave or any less worthy of our admiration, then or now. But if we had known then that the assignment our soldiers had been given would resemble Vietnam more than World War II, it might have changed our readiness to believe that the mission was accomplished by May 1, 2003.

What if we had known what Cpl. Jesse Odom, who tended to his dying officer, later wrote? He heard Childers’ “last words on Earth.” They were: “It hurts.”

Odom continues: “He died a painful death. I was hurt not only because I saw a father type figure go before me, but to see a grown man cry and urinate his pants hit me hard.” It would have hit us hard, too, if Dillow had given us what really happened instead of a tale of battlefield glory.

Odom writes, “In reality the war in Iraq is over for me, but emotionally the war will never end. There will be a sight or smell that will bring me back to the battlefield.”

He mourns Childers and “damn[s] the terrorist for all the hate, fear and sadness.”

Odom’s feelings are sincere. We feel their dignity. But quite another casualty of the Iraq War is the unthinking hatred it has let loose. On YouTube, http://youtube.com/watch?v=iVHK5c_Mnm4 you can view a video song, “We Hate Terrorists,” played and recorded by “members of 1/153rd Infantry Battalion during Operation Iraqi Freedom II.” In it, we get – in images and words – the Quran as toilet paper, a soldier using his rifle as a phallus, and repeated wishes to skin terrorists alive, sodomize them, and kill them all.

Worse still are the six approving comments. Here are two of them:

“yer kill the bastards and make them fuk there alla in the ass.”

and

“Love it! God Bless our troops. and may He screw the liberals”

I am sure of one thing. Childers did not die for an America that writes and approves of songs and sentiments like these.

UPDATE
After the above piece appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on January 31, 2008, I received a message from Nora M. Mosquera, the adoptive mother of Marine Lance Cpl. José Antonio Gutierrez, who also died in action in Iraq on March 21, 2003. Childers and Gutierrez died in different places, and no times of death are given in their official Department of Defense (DoD) confirmation list casualty reports.

Ms. Mosquera has informed me that the U.S. Marine Corps has determined that Cpl. Gutierrez died before Lt. Childers. He is the true first soldier to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

This is a further good example of the difficulty of getting at the truth of what goes on in wars, both because of its complexity and chaos, and because of intentional or careless misinformation.

In regards to the ‘first death’, NPR did an “All things Considered” piece on March 18, 2007 referring to Childers as the first casualty. Rinker Buck’s book Shane Comes Home trumpets the same ‘fact’.

Published reports, including BBC News, refer to Cpl. Gutierrez as the second combat casualty or “one of the first.”

The DoD reports list Lt. Childers first; but his link, and Cpl. Gutierrez’s (he is listed 6th and as a victim of ‘friendly fire’) go to a joint announcement of the deaths of the two soldiers.

The situation is complicated by the fact that they died in different areas: Lt. Childers in the Rumelia oil fields, “a couple of hours after dawn” according to Buck; Cpl. Gutierrez in the port city of Umm Qasr, according to the BBC, in ‘the early hours’ of Operation Iraqi Freedom. His DoD entry lists him as a victim of friendly fire.

This is a disquieting contest, these rival claims as to whose son died first. And it has significant undertones concerning ethnicity, citizenship status and immigration.

Cpl. Gutierrez, who died at age 22, grew up on the streets of Guatemala City, and entered the US military as a step toward earning his green card. He is now the subject now of a much-praised documentary film, “The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez.” See the New York Times review: http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/movies/27shor.html.

Lt. Childers, by contrast, went to the Citadel and is portrayed by Buck and others as a true red-white-and-blue all-American model officer. He died at age 30.

Please send any comments about all this to: tpalaima@mail.utexas.edu.