by Tom Palaima

American soldiers have been risking and losing their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan for seven Memorial Days, longer than any American war except Vietnam. Omar Bradley’s wisdom “nothing succeeds like excess” only applies to conventional warfare. Our overwhelming advantages in mobility, manpower and firepower are negated in guerilla wars of insurgency. Why have we let this happen?

In “Just How Stupid Are We?,” historian Rick Shenkman cites John F. Kennedy: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

Shenkman offers doses of cold, uncomfortable truth on many topics, but especially on our collective willingness to believe the myths surrounding our ongoing use of preemptive military force in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For example, the 9/11 Commission reported in July 2004 that Saddam Hussein had not supported al Qaeda. Yet a Newsweek poll in September 2007 found that 41 percent of Americans still believed “Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11.”

Since we are trying to extract our fighting men and women while believing in the Iraqi version of the myth of Vietnamization, I recommend Larry Engelmann’s “Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam.” Read Pete McCloskey’s sobering account of the congressional delegation sent out in February 1975 to see whether we should pour our money to sustain the illusion that South Vietnam was ready to wage war successfully on its own as a stable western-style democracy. McCloskey saw the handwriting on every wall he looked at, and he firmly believed then that U.S. officials had to know that “the south Vietnamese were going to collapse.”

Another antidote to myth-induced political myopia is World War II veteran Edward W. Wood Jr.’s “Worshipping the Myths of World War II: Reflections on America’s Dedication to War.” It was sent to me by another WWII veteran, who, like Wood, believes that we have been seduced by the myth of the “greatest generation” into believing we can and should spread our versions of justice, government and freedom by using major military force. Wood devotes a full chapter to how the greatest-generation myth clouded our judgment after 9/11.

Lastly, I recommend Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, sent by yet another WWII veteran. Eisenhower enunciates five principles that we should follow in pursuit of a just world peace. We have violated all five since 9/11, including Ike’s fourth principle: “Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.”

Eisenhower also warns that using the weapons of war has a terrible cost: every gun, warship and rocket is “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed”; a modern heavy bomber is “a modern brick school in more than 30 cities”; and “we pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat.”

Our soldiers pay, too, with their lives, bodies, minds and souls.

Here is one moving passage by Brian Ellis, then of CBS News, from Engelmann, Tears Before the Rain, p. 197. It reminds us that our wars, really all wars, are fought largely by college age kids. The Greeks called them ephebes, literally those who are at the point of blooming. As Eisenhower cautioned, we should send them out to risk their lives and their well-being for better reasons and as a last resort.

The first time I went down to see the Vietnam memorial, I was with a Vietnam vet. Most people think Edward Alvarez was the longest-held POW–but there’s another guy who was held a lot longer than he was, who lived down in Key West. And he suffered a stroke not too long ago. When I was doing the program in 1985 I was looking for POW’s to go back to Vietnam, and I had not been to the memorial until then. Anyway this fellow came to Washington, and I met him in a restaurant. It was obvious that i couldn’t interview him because he had trouble, speech was difficult for him. And I said, “Tomorrow would you like to go out and look at the memorial? … Have you ever seen it? And he said,” No.” I said,” Would you like to go out?” He said, “Yeah.”

He was wearing his uniform. He had not worn his uniform in i don’t know how many years, but he felt like he should wear his uniform to the monument. We walked down there. It just seemed like a wall with names. I really wasn’t struck too much by it. We walked by it and he kept looking at it. He kept shaking his head, saying, “All those names, all those names.” Then we got to the statue, and he stood there and kept looking at it. And he started crying and said, “They were just boys, good boys.” And the suddenly it hit me what he was saying, they were just boys! You kind of separate soldiers–men who are paid and trained to go out and kill–from kids. But these were just kids. It was at that moments, I guess, that it really came home to me and I realized they were just a bunch of boys on that wall. It struck me. here’s a guy who spent almost fourteen years in a prison camp, and he felt sorry for them. The guy stood there, tears rolling down his cheeks. and since then I’ve gone back a number of times.

NOTE: I believe Ellis is speaking of Col. Floyd James Thompson who was a POW from March 1964 to March 1973, nine years, not fourteen.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-pre-empted-by-the-war-in-iraq-586277.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Pre-empted by the war in Iraq

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, April 19, 2010

There are many ways we can begin looking at the likely legacy of what we have done through our pre-emptive use of military force in Iraq. We are in an end game achieved through a temporary upscaling of military force combined with making payments to factional leaders not to unleash violence.

This so-called surge of men and money was a temporary measure. It is hard to understand why its success is being taken as predictor of any long-term stability.

There are permanent legacies of the commanders in the field and the political leaders in Washington who sent them forth. These have to do with real soldiers and with contractors in charge of rebuilding the infrastructure in Iraq at great expense.

Recently my colleague, Tarek El-Ariss, a professor in Middle Eastern Studies, turned the attention of our Humanities Institute seminar to a blogger, ‘river’ at Riverbend, a young Iraqi woman who wrote for four years – from Aug. 23, 2003, until Sept. 6, 2007 – from Baghdad. She describes in 2003 the immediate impact of the American invasion: a rapid influx of terrorists and religious extremists who flourish “in times of chaos and disorder.” The repressive measures of the extremists undo the existing western-style tolerant harmonies among “moderate Muslims who simply believe(d) in ‘live and let live’.”

Sunnis and Shi’a, Muslims, Christian and Jews had gotten along with one another. Half the college students and more than 50 percent of the work force were women. The war destroyed that society and took away freedoms from many women, freedoms that have not been restored.

Then the rebuilding began. Iraq had 130,000 engineers, mostly trained in Germany, Japan, the United States and Britain. They knew how to build good bridges using Iraqi labor and materials quickly and cheaply. They had rebuilt bridges destroyed in Desert Storm. The local cost estimate, generously calculated, for the new Diyala Bridge was $1.2 million. The bid by an American contractor was $50 million.

When her family left for Syria, in September 2007, “the dirty streets, the ruins of buildings and houses, the smoke-filled horizon all helped (her family) realize how fortunate (they) were to have a chance for something safer.” The Iraq they knew was long gone, up in smoke.

At the same seminar meeting we watched Nancy Schiesari’s magnificent documentary “Tattooed Under Fire,” filmed at the River City Tattoo Parlor in Killeen. There soldiers returning from and deploying to Iraq get tattooed and tell their stories to the husband and wife parlor owner-operators.

If you think there is glory in the kind of fighting our men and women did or that they feel they accomplished something noble, listen to them explain why they want a tattoo of the grim reaper as a young child, or of a baby in a blender. See where they are going to put the last four digits of the social security numbers of the buddies killed before their eyes.

One medic speaks of the stress of constantly turning off and on the kill/save switch and of the two fellow medics he saw shot down by snipers while handing out soccer balls to kids. He recalls another soldier who died in his arms after having his legs blown away. That soldier said he wished he had made it home to see his daughter. One soldier who is deploying for the fifth time to Iraq declares a clear truth: “The more times I go over, the more of Iraq comes back with me.”

You’ll notice how young these soldiers are. As Schiesari poignantly remarked, referring to the heinous practice in some areas of the world of using children as young as 11 and 12: “Given how sheltered American kids are from the hard realities of life, these 18-year-old soldiers are our child soldiers.”

Ninety-five percent of current soldiers have tattoos. This is one tattoo parlor in one Texas town at one time. The lasting pain and trauma are palpable. Extrapolate and you have another legacy of our pre-emptive war. It has pre-empted for honorable soldiers like those in Killeen the normal joys and sorrows of being young and open to what life has to offer.

Palaima is a professor of classics at the University of Texas; tpalaima@sbcglobal.net

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-history-gives-us-guidance-in-dealing-with-1862859.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: History gives us guidance in dealing with national tragedy

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Saturday, September 17, 2011

The cover of the Sept. 12 Newsweek shows a solitary plane in the kind of spacious blue sky we praise in “America, the Beautiful.” On this background in white letters we read: “9/11 Ten Years of RESILIENCE.” Three words in black, “FEAR GRIEF REVENGE,” are placed vertically above the much larger word “RESILIENCE.”

This image conveys one take on a national moment of suffering and how we have lived through 10 years of history in reaction to it: the color-coded dark emotions of fear and grief fueling the equally dark human instinct to take vengeance. The Newsweek editors believe what we ourselves want to believe about what we have been through and where we are now. We are resilient. We have bounced back to where we were before.

I think all Americans have their own ideas about where we stand a decade after 9/11. Our opinions probably differ about whether we took the right paths as individuals or as a nation. Rather than discuss such potentially polarizing matters, I want to make some observations on how we use history and historical memory to deal with tragedy and the grief that stems from it.

It is a tricky subject. A senior honors thesis student, Abraham Callahan, recently asked me why Thucydides, the father of scientific history, had bothered analyzing the motives and causes of mass killings of human beings in civil wars and political revolts. Thucydides asserts that human nature is constant and will lead to such things happening again, presumably no matter how much history people have read.

Fortunately, intelligent human beings, from the Greek soldier-playwright Aeschylus to leaders of our nation after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., have thought about the nature of collective grief after violent public acts, where our emotions want to take us, and what happens if we let them take us there.

One way we might confront an atrocity like the Holocaust is by placing it beyond human understanding. Claude Lanzmann, whose long documentary about the Holocaust, “Shoah,” focuses on personal testimonies from witnesses, does this, quoting the response of an SS guard at Auschwitz to Bruno Levi. Levi had broken off an icicle to slake his unbearable thirst. The guard took it away. Levi asked, “Why?” The guard replied, “Here, there is no ‘why.'”

The assassinations of John F. Kennedy and King take us back to early Greek thought through the mind of Robert F. Kennedy. He spoke to a crowd in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, the day King was assassinated. Many African Americans were there. Kennedy’s heartfelt words are worth hearing:

“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling.

“I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'”

By spring 1968, Kennedy had more than four years to figure out how to live with the killing of his brother. He decided to stay involved in politics, and he dedicated himself to furthering the goals in domestic and foreign policy that still constitute his brother’s legacy.

The responses of Kennedy and Aeschylus give us no “why.” But they tell us that immersing ourselves in grief will cause pain, and that the pain, pondered in our minds and hearts over time, might lead to wisdom. If these great men were here today, they might ask us, “Have you found wisdom yet? Have you chosen your paths wisely? Where will you go now?”

Palaima, tpalaima@sbcglobal.net, is classics professor at the University of Texas.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/remembering-origins-of-veterans-day-1957502.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Remembering origins of Veterans Day

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Tuesday, November 8, 2011

How many Americans know why we observe what we now call Veterans Day on November 11th? How many know what this national holiday originally commemorated? How many read the presidential proclamations issued yearly to guide our remembrance?

World War II veteran Paul Fussell wrote in his award-winning 1975 study of the human significance of World War I, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.” The supreme irony is how easy it is for those of us who are not veterans or do not know veterans to hold onto unrealistic expectations about war.

On Oct. 8, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Proclamation 3071. It informs us that on June 4, 1926, Congress passed a resolution that Americans should observe the anniversary of the end of World War I, Nov. 11, 1918, with appropriate ceremonies. In 1938, Congress made Nov. 11 a legal holiday called Armistice Day.

Eisenhower changed Armistice Day into Veterans Day because of “two other great military conflicts in the intervening years,” World War II and the Korean War. Eisenhower declared these wars necessary “to preserve our heritage of freedom.” He called upon us as American citizens “to reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that (the) efforts (of veterans) shall not have been in vain.”

Ironically, two years later we began promoting enduring peace with 58,178 official American military casualty deaths in the Vietnam War between June 8, 1956, and May 15, 1975. The start is ironically hard to pinpoint because there was no formal declaration of war. The last casualties occurred two weeks after the war ended with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

As our troops pull out of Iraq, there will be ironic deaths like these and like British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen’s. Owen voluntarily returned to the fighting in France in July 1918 so that he could write about the realities of trench warfare. He was killed on Nov. 4, a week before the armistice. In the preface to his poems, Owen wrote, “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” Their realism strips away the lofty sentiments about noble sacrifices in most presidential Veterans Day proclamations. His poems and his death remind us instead how long it takes and how much it costs to stop wars once we start them.

The very word “armistice” offers a strong warning. It means “a temporary cessation of the use of weapons by mutual agreement.” It reminds us that no war will end all wars.

Indeed, Kurt Vonnegut, who as an American POW survived the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, grasped the irony of doing away with Armistice Day. Born Nov. 11, 1922, he recalled that, when he was a boy, “all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the 11th minute of the 11th hour of Armistice Day,” the moment when “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.” Veterans told him that on the battlefield, “the sudden silence was the Voice of God.” So it must have seemed.

Obscenely ironic was that, after the armistice had been generally announced at 5 a.m., generals still ordered soldiers into battle. The 11,000 casualties suffered in the war’s final six hours exceeded those on D-Day. Henry Gunther, a U.S. Army private from Baltimore, was killed at 10:59 a.m.

These stories don’t tell us everything about what makes war so traumatic for veterans. But they continue a long tradition of soldiers trying to tell us. At the start of this tradition, Homer and the Greek tragedians distilled the essence of what veterans have to say: Owen’s pity, Fussell’s irony, Vonnegut’s deep feelings of senseless absurdity and Eisenhower’s sincere longing for an enduring peace.

On Thursday from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., noted director and translator Peter Meineck will bring his national initiative, Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives, to the University of Texas at Austin with a free program of readings from ancient texts about war designed for veterans and the concerned public. A dialogue discussion will follow with Sharon Wills, Team Leader for the Postraumatic Stress Disorders Clinical Team at the Austin VA Outpatient Clinic.

See http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/classics/events/20475 for details.

At 11 a.m. Friday, the opening of the University of Texas at Austin’s Student Veteran Center is scheduled.

See http://www.texvet.org/event/2011-11/grand-opening-university-texas-austins-student-veteran-center.

Make Veterans Day meaningful wherever you are.

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas. tpalaima@sbcglobal.net

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/shootings-in-afghanistan-have-roots-in-our-history-2248005.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Shootings in Afghanistan have roots in our history

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, March 19, 2012

If you live long enough, one sure fact of life is that history will repeat itself and pose questions about who we are and try to be as civilized human beings.

Earlier this month, in southern Afghanistan, a 38-year-old U.S. sergeant with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a veteran of three tours of duty in Iraq, slipped off base and into two villages and killed at least 16 fellow human beings in three homes. Among the dead were nine children and three women. He set 11 bodies on fire. He apparently acted alone and surrendered upon returning to his base.

Reactions bring a sense of déjà vu to anyone familiar with the wars American soldiers have fought in the past 50 years. Even guarded official responses are in their own ways sincere and true.

A mother is reported to have opened the flowered blanket in which her 2-year-old daughter’s dead body was wrapped and asked, “Was this child Taliban?” Of course, she wasn’t. The woman’s daughter’s death is unholy. It offends our moral and religious codes, our deep-rooted instincts to protect the young and innocent.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the killings were “acts of terror and unforgivable.” Of course, they look like acts of terror to people who know firsthand what terrible acts terrorists commit. Forgiveness should be sought from the hearts of those who loved the victims.

President Barack Obama issued a statement that mostly rings true, “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the people of the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”

Of course, mass killing of defenseless innocents by an experienced soldier is beyond tragedy.

There is no question that American soldiers are well-trained and learn rules of engagement to follow even in environments where the enemy is hard to identify. Most Americans do not lack respect for the people of Afghanistan, even if few of us have personal ties with Afghans or can even locate their country on a map.

The deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, declared, “I cannot explain the motivation behind such callous acts.” He probably cannot. But I bet he could begin a list of factors that would lead an experienced soldier, a married father of two, to do what he did on that morning.

Online, opinions are varied and less guarded, as we also might expect. Many see the killings as understandable, though not condonable – a product of the stresses our volunteer soldiers now face in the formally undeclared wars we are now fighting. They point out that our soldiers serve too many tours of duty and that veteran suicides have reached record rates. They call for us to pull our troops out of Afghanistan and not send them anywhere else. They wonder how soldiers operating under constant strain can hold themselves together while overseas and return as psychologically healthy human beings.

One spouse of a Special Forces veteran writes eloquently that this kind of brutal murder “is not what (Special Forces) soldiers are trained to do. The Special Forces code is ‘free the oppressed’ and that is what they are trying to do. The danger that they put themselves in to bring freedom for these people.”

Indeed, Obama stresses, “In no way is this representative of the enormous sacrifices that our men and women have made in Afghanistan.”

Finally, Obama was asked point-blank whether this incident in Afghanistan was comparable to the My Lai massacre that took place, uncannily, five calendar days later, March 16, 1968. He dismissed the comparison, saying in Afghanistan “you had a lone gunman who acted on his own.” But we should remember that, controversially, only Lt. William J. Calley was convicted on the charge that he did “with premeditation murder Oriental human beings, whose names and sex are unknown, by shooting them with a rifle.” Yet more than 500 women, children and old men were killed on that single day.

Seymour Hersh, who won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking the My Lai story in November 1969, will deliver a public lecture on Thursday at the University of Texas.

Make an effort to come to listen to what he thinks about the history he has lived through and sees now. History, unfortunately, will just not go away.

Palaima is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin: tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.

Learn more

Seymour Hersh speaks at 7 p.m. Thursday at UT’s AT&T; conference center. Information: www.utexas.edu/know/events.

Addendum

The initial charge against Calley as reported by Mr. Hersh was as reported here with the total number dead adding up to 109.

In the event, Calley was charged with four specifications alleging premeditated murder in violation of Article 118 of Uniform Code of Military Justice:

Art. 118. Murder

Any person subject to this chapter who without justification or excuse, unlawfully kills a human being when he– 1) has a premeditated design to kill; 2) intends to kill or inflict great bodily harm; 3) is engaged in an act which is inherently dangerous to others and evinces a wanton disregard of human life; or 4) is engaged in perpetration or attempted perpetration of burglary, sodomy, rape, robbery, or aggravated arson; is guilty of murder, and shall suffer such punishment as a court-martial trial may direct.

The specifications:

Specification 1: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr. …did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder an unknown number, not less than thirty, Oriental human beings, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown, occupants of the village of My Lai 4, by means of shooting them with a rifle.

Specification 2: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr…did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder an unknown number, not less than seventy, Oriental human beings, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown, occupants of the village of My Lai 4, by means of shooting them with a rifle.

Specification 3: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr…did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder one Oriental male human being, whose name and age is unknown, by shooting him with a rifle.

Specification 4: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr…did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder one Oriental human being, an occupant of the village of My Lai 4, approximately two years old, by shooting him with a rifle.

By Tom Palaima

Posted Sep 1, 2012 at 12:01 AM

Updated Sep 27, 2018 at 3:49 AM

On the weekend after Memorial Day, I asked myself some questions and got an answer I did not expect in a place where I did not expect to find it.

I was in Los Angeles as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Aquila Theater’s Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives Project that has been sponsoring readings and discussions for nearly a year in locations across the country about ancient Greek drama and literature pertaining to war.

On that Saturday at the Los Angeles Public Library, professor Larry Tritle, a Vietnam veteran and professor of ancient history at Loyola Marymount University, and I talked about the comedies of Aristophanes, the Athenian playwright whose works were performed at public religious festivals throughout one of the longest and most devastating wars in world history, the Peloponnesian War that lasted from 431 to 404 B.C.

We have nothing equivalent to Aristophanes’ plays in our culture.

They blend X-rated sexual and bodily humor with scathing satire of political figures and policies and plots that make Kurt Vonnegut’s works seem plodding and pedestrian.

Aristophanes’ straightforward criticism of the ongoing war, why it started in the first place, what costs it had for the common citizens and soldiers, how political and military leaders and members of the upper class did not share in their suffering, and the wisdom and morality of the way the war was being conducted was presented to audiences made up of 6,000 to 7,000 adult male citizens who were the very soldiers who had fought or were fighting the war and the very leaders who were responsible for how it was being fought.

Aristophanes’ “Acharnians” was produced in 425 B.C., six years into the war.

Athenian hopes for a quick end to the war had been dashed. The city center, packed with refugees called in from the countryside by strategic plan, had become an unsanitary breeding ground for sickness, plague and human misery.

The play is named after the citizens of the town in Athenian territory that was most devastated by regular invasions of the army of the Spartans and their allies. The main character, Dikaiopolis (“Mr. City Justice”), decides to enact a separate truce with the Spartans.

This kind of fantasy and its accompanying political bite are no more outlandish than what we read in fantastic treatments of the human costs of World War II or Vietnam and now Iraq and Afghanistan, like Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” Tim O’Brien’s “Going After Cacciato” and Ben Fountain’s recent “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” These works ask readers who have gotten used to war, consider it the norm or perhaps do not think about it much at all to take a look at its consequences and imagine what their lives might look like if their nation were at peace.

On late Sunday morning, the day after the National Endowment for the Humanities-Aquila event, my fiancée and I went to the historic Santa Monica pier, which for over a century has been offering visitors amusements — thrill rides, a carousel, dance halls, portrait artists, musicians, restaurants, fishing spots, bait shops, arcades, an aquarium — and spectacular elevated views along a beautiful sandy shoreline.

Below the pier, spreading out along the beach, as on every Sunday, Veterans for Peace had set up what they call Arlington West, a cemetery of crosses representing soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq (white for one soldier, red for ten soldiers), laid out as in American military cemeteries.

There are also flag-draped coffins. Mementos, photographs and fresh-cut flowers were placed at some crosses.

When we were there, one lone man, most likely a veteran, very tall and moving with crisp formality, marched up, stood at attention and called out his respects to the fallen soldiers. He then turned and strode away and out of sight.

He went virtually unnoticed by the crowds of people on the pier, distracted as we were by the sounds and sights of the diversions that had brought us to the pier.

I still had Aristophanes’ questions in my mind. Who fights our wars? At what costs to them and to us? For what reasons? Who cares?

As veteran Timothy Kudo put it in a New York Times article (Nov. 8, 2011) about his experiences in our current wars: “It’s not the sights, sounds, adrenaline and carnage of war that linger (for veterans). “It’s the morality. … I thought my war was over, but it followed me back.”

That lone veteran on the Santa Monica Beach gave me the same answer.

Regular contributor Tom Palaima is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin: tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.

By Tom Palaima

Posted May 30, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Updated Sep 25, 2018 at 12:58 PM

Memorial Day is now behind us, but not for many soldiers and veterans of our country.

My friend Charles E. Patterson is now senior counsel with Morrison Foerster law firm in Los Angeles. His online biography tells us that he served “as an officer in the United States Marine Corps at various duty stations, including the Republic of Vietnam, 1966-1969.” What that matter-of-fact description and Chuck’s extensive legal résumé do not reveal is the memorial that he, like other veterans, carries in his heart to those who served alongside him.

Two fellow soldiers Patterson remembers vividly are Lance Cpl. Manuel Pina “Manny” Babbit and 1st Lt. Henry Marion Norman. Both served with Patterson among the Marines besieged for 77 hellish days at Khe Sanh in 1968.

Norman died at Khe Sanh on March 30, 1968, at age 28, “due to a mortar, rocket, or artillery incident.” Manny Babbitt died on May 4, 1999, one day after his 50th birthday. He was executed by the state of California by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison.

During the long siege at Khe Sanh, Babbitt received a head wound from rocket shrapnel. He was under frequent artillery fire from the enemy. He felt the thunderous force of 100,000 tons of bombs dropped by the U.S. Air Force around the Marine base. He later fought in five other major campaigns in Vietnam.

Babbitt grew up in an environment of poverty and physical abuse. He was 17 when he quit school in the seventh grade When he came back from Vietnam, he would have been a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder, only at that time there were no posters for PTSD. Its severity and prevalence among veterans were not yet recognized.

Still, Babbitt was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, dissociative reactions and periods of amnesia. He became a street person, “the town crazy.” On a foggy night in December 1980, Babbitt killed a 78-year-old woman in whose house he had sought shelter. Patterson believes Babbitt acted in a flashback, thinking he was under siege.

At Babbit’s trial in 1982, according to a New York Times report, his court-appointed lawyer “never called witnesses who had served with Mr. Babbitt in Vietnam, never documented his family history of mental illness, an aggravating factor in the post-traumatic stress, and never sought Mr. Babbitt’s Vietnam medical records.” The lawyer later admitted that he “failed completely in the death penalty phase” of the trial. On May 14, 1982, the jury imposed the penalty of death on Manny Babbitt.

In March 1998, Babbitt, on death row, received a Purple Heart for wounds suffered at Khe Sanh. Four fellow veterans of the siege stood by. Patterson filed the forms that made sure Babbitt received the medal he had earned in service of his country. Patterson and his firm also put in thousands of hours pro bono from 1997 to 1999 in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to have Babbitt’s sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

At the time, Patterson said, “Manny’s a Marine. He was in Khe Sanh. I know I could depend on him to do what he could to save my life. He should be able to depend on me to do the same thing. There’s that obligation.” He and Babbitt both had scars from exploding shrapnel.

Patterson expressed the deep injustice done to Babbitt in his legal writing. He expressed the injustice done to Norman in his poetic writing.

“Marion Henry Norman Khe Sanh, 1968”

They took your life

As if it belonged to them.

If only they had told me

They needed a life,

I would have given them mine.

I wonder

What they did with your life?

Perhaps,

If they don’t need it now,

They’d give it back.

—Ca Lu, March 1968

I saw you dead

But never buried.

In my heart you’ve lived,

Laughing, smiling Hank.

I would keep you there forever,

In a memorial more perfect

Than hands could build.

Finding an end to my war

I can mourn you now.

And, in sadness, leave

This loving, painful,

Magic caretaking,

So I may live

At peace.

To celebrate your death,

To elevate your life,

And its conclusion,

Which was neither sweet,

Nor fitting, Duty’s harshest price

For which the consideration

Should have been honor.

—The World, 1983

For veterans, every day is Memorial Day.

By Tom Palaima

Posted Mar 18, 2014 at 12:01 AM

Updated Sep 25, 2018 at 7:52 PM

We owe it to the shrinking percentages of American men and women who now fight our wars to practice what Phil Klay, a former Marine who served in Iraq, preaches in a recent commentary. Klay encourages nonveteran civilians to use our sympathetic imaginations and our own experiences of trauma to take in what those who have been through war have to say about it, despite the widely acknowledged “divide” between soldiers and civilians.

In World War I, 23,000 Australian soldiers were killed in six weeks during the Somme Offensive. One Aussie soldier cries out to us still, “For Christ’s sake, write a book on the life of an infantryman and by doing so you will quickly prevent these shocking tragedies.”

You might reply cynically that plenty of books have been written about the war to end all wars, yet wars continue. But ask yourself what stories get told? And how many of us listen in the right way?

We have a great chance right now to experience a war and the telling of a war start to finish. Set aside about three hours. Go to the exhibition The World at War, 1914–1918. It runs free and open to the public until August 3, 2014 at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Meditate upon the items that curators Jean Cannon and Elizabeth Garver have put on display.

Notice what is there and what is missing in the newspaper clippings, manuscripts, photographs, recruiting and movie posters, official leaflets, letters, and books. Listen to the audio readings by members of Actors from the London Stage. The Great War is laid out, from the prophetic words of Otto von Bismarck circa 1897 that “the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” to facts about operations on facial disfigurement performed in Kent, England on 5,000 patients between 1917 and 1925. One photo shows us what mechanized warfare did to human faces.

The exhibition helps us see how the war was “marketed” in official propaganda. The British relied on an all-volunteer army until May 1916. A recruiting poster from 1915 proclaims “Step Into Your Place.” Its drawing shows a long line of men snaking off into the distance. At its front, healthy soldiers march in crisp uniforms and helmets, rifles on their shoulders. At the rear, stepping into line and blending with soldiers are civilians with different attire and accessories: top hat and tails, barrister’s wig and robe, briefcase, pickax, farming fork, a miner’s tool kit, even a golf club. Nowhere are we told that 1 out of 3 of those who joined the line were killed or wounded, about 3 million total.

If you have read the poems of British officer Wilfred Owen or his letters, you will never forget that these once healthy men a short time later cursed through a sucking octopus of mud, moved like old beggars under sacks, drowned in water- filled shell holes, and coughed to death like hags from poison gas. A German poster from 1917 encouraging book donations shows jolly, clean–shaven, clean- dressed soldiers lazily reading in a tidy trench with books stacked neatly on a crate as if by a librarian. The newspaper photos of the dry trenches look like they were taken at a Boy Scout camp. That’s what the people back home saw of the war.

Only one photo in the exhibition shows what might be a dead soldier. But the Allied and Central Powers, by the war’s end, produced more than 13 1/2 million corpses. The war also produced 21 million wounded. Yet a photo of the wounded from the “New York Journal American” shows fifteen soldiers relaxed and smoking on an open hillside. Three have neat head bandages. Three have arms in slings. None is an amputee.

A counter–balance to this public face of war is offered by Hugh Walpole’s letters of June 1915, written while he served in the Russian Red Cross in the Balkans: “Every kind of horror. Wounded on both sides of the road in the wood crying and screaming. ... Day before yesterday eight hundred wounded in twelve hours. I cut off fingers with a pair of scissors easy as nothing!′

Ernest Hemingway, if he were alive today, might advise you to read the letter of Henri de Lallemand at the Ransom Center. Then go home and read Hemingway’s poem “Champs d’Honneur.”

And think.

By Tom Palaima

Austin American-Statesman || Direct URL
Posted Sep 12, 2014 at 12:01 AM
Updated Sep 25, 2018 at 5:53 PM

“You asked if we’ve got enough cannons.

They laughed and said: More than enough

and we’ve got new improved antitank missiles

and bunker busters to penetrate

double-slab reinforced concrete

and we’ve got crates of napalm and crates of explosives,

unlimited quantities, cornucopias,

a feast for the soul,

like some finely seasoned delicacy

… and we’ve got cluster bombs, too,

though of course that’s off the record.”
–Dahlia Ravikovitch, “The Fruit of the Land,” translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.

A friend of mine asked me a few weeks back — when Israeli airstrikes in Gaza were confined to blowing up cross-border tunnels and had not yet shifted to destroying high-rise apartment buildings of middle-class families, and associated offices and shopping malls — what book to read about the continuing conflict there.

What book can explain the history of violence and hatred in a way that makes sense of the logic of directing violence at mothers, fathers and children in order to get those then-homeless and traumatized people, and others who care about them, to put pressure on a duly elected terrorist element (Hamas) in their government to stop their acts of violence against Israeli soldiers and civilians?

Who makes such choices? On what balance scales do they weigh what they call the accidental deaths of women and children, the displacement of families and the destruction of schools and hospitals? How can we look at news images of these attacks so unimaginatively, just as we once looked at footage of the bombing of Hanoi or Tokyo, and the smart bombs we dropped ten years ago on buildings in Baghdad trying to kill the sons of Saddam Hussein?

One quote from a 38-year-old engineer who escaped with his four children and aged mother calls into question the strategy of violence. He would speak, I guess, for tens of thousands whose lives will never be the same: “I have become homeless, my children’s fear will never be soothed, and something new has now been added to our feelings toward Israel and all the world, which has been looking on without doing anything.”

His words seem powerless when the violence on both sides is so deadly and taps into deep human feelings that terrible wrongs have to be righted. They reveal how the suffering of normal human beings can go unrecognized, or worse yet, be noticed and justified by desire for vengeance: We cause suffering because they caused suffering.

I answered my friend eventually that we might read what people with poetic sensitivities have to say. Maybe it’s better, I thought, to feel raw truths than to try to make sense of what is senseless. So I wrote to Naomi Shihab Nye and Chana Bloch for their advice. I have now read a selection of what they recommended: “Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments” by Oz Shelach; “Does the Land Remember Me?” by Aziz Shihab; Dahlia Ravikovitch’s collection of poems “Hovering at a Low Altitude;” and more broadly, Nye’s collection of stunning poems written by many ordinary people on the question that is its title: “What Have You Lost?”

Charles Griswold in the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” sums up Plato’s warning about poetry, that poets and their poems “induce a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in the emotions in question (above all, in sorrow, grief, anger, resentment).”

But when the logic of international politics leads to bombings of civilian targets; when reason dictates the targeted killing of leaders of what are called, from our perspective, terrorist organizations; when we feel justified in striking out with violence preemptively, we might be wise to feel the conflicting feelings that sympathetic poets and writers can evoke, the ambiguities that cast doubt on what seem like rational, clear-cut and necessary decisions. Ravikovitch’s poems leave us with feelings of sorrow, loss and waste, no matter which side we favor or at whom we point our blaming fingers.

In “But She Had a Son” and “What a Time She Had,” Bloch and Kronfeld explain, “a grieving Israeli mother loses her son in a questionable military operation.” In “A Mother Walks Around,” “a pregnant Palestinian woman loses her fetus as a result of beatings by Israeli soldiers.” And Shelach gives us this to ponder: “When the undercover squads began operating, we reported the deaths of ‘wanted locals.‘” When it became clear that innocent people were being killed by mistake, “we updated the term to ‘local inhabitants suspected of being wanted.’”

By Al Martinich and Tom Palaima
Posted Jul 19, 2017 at 12:01 AM
Updated Sep 25, 2018 at 11:49 AM

North Korea has warned of a war with the United States and the capitalist “puppet” state of South Korea. President Donald Trump has been bellicose in tweets about North Korea’s missile tests and nuclear arsenal and has spoken of a surgical strike against its bases. Meanwhile U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis warns that North Korea’s response would lead to “probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”

As we suffer through the intense heat of another Austin Saharan summer, how are we as citizens to make sense of all this? How can we really feel what the worst combat will be? We can start by reading “The Useless Servants,” acclaimed native Texan writer Rolando Hinojosa’s remarkable diarylike account of his service as an artillery soldier in Korea in the 1950s. If you do, you will feel the chill and the dread of what even World War II veterans among Hinojosa’s fellow soldiers agreed was the worst kind of fighting in their experiences.

From October 1950 through March 1951, Hinojosa offers many variations on a single theme: Korea is a deadly cold and miserable place to wage war. “Cold, cold days and night.” “Woke up next to guns. Sheet of ice over blankets; gun tubes look like big olive-green popsicles.” “Very cold.” “This wind will cut your soul. It’s a tough place and time for a fight.” “These are
Siberian winds up here and everything freezes.” “North Korea is an icebox.” That’s just late October to mid-November. True winter is still a way off.

Do we really want to wage any kind of war there? At some point, we will have to put boots on the ground — and our soldiers will be wearing them. Do national and international security considerations override concerns about our soldiers and any human beings on the Korean peninsula?

We should think rationally about what war with North Korea would look like. Once Kim Jung Un gets intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching Alaska and Washington State, he is ruthless and reckless enough to start a war — even though it would mean the destruction of his own government.

As bad as that prospect is, we think there is a worse one for the United States: following against North Korea the policy of preventive war that we used against Iraq in 2003. Inflicting enough damage on North Korea to neutralize its army would cause the collapse of its economic and social structure. Available food and health care would go to the military, leaving
millions of starving, homeless North Koreans to flee into China and South Korea. Neither country would be able to handle the influx of refugees — and each would resent the United States for causing the disaster. The refugees would probably not be able to return to their homes for years.

The world at large would likely blame the catastrophe on the United States. The United States could not expect sympathy or aid from other countries, since it has been following a policy of narrow self-interest at least since January. Even assuming military success, we would be morally bound to pay for the needed aid of the refugees we created — and also to
rebuild the infrastructure of North Korea to a quality better than prewar. A devastated North Korea would be the sympathetic victim. North Korea would win by losing.

How might such a disastrous situation occur? If Kim’s inflammatory rhetoric continues to be met with like rhetoric from Trump — and Kim’s intercontinental ballistic missiles create fear in us as citizens, especially Trump’s loyal supporters — Trump may think he has a mandate to attack first. The canny Kim could lure the United States to attack through saberrattling.
Trump would not be the first president whose proud self-image led him to a bad decision.

If the scenario just sketched seems unlikely, there is a kind of precedent: In the 1950s, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, near bankruptcy, attacked the U.S., lost the war, and was financially compensated. It is all set forth in “The Mouse that Roared” by Leonard Wibberley. To paraphrase Karl Marx, history repeats itself — the first time as fiction, the second time as
tragedy.