War is Cruelty

In the Miller Brothers ( a department store, the family business until sold in 1973) warehouse there was a furniture repair/touch-up shop where Mr. Pirkle presided. As furniture came into the warehouse from NC, any damaged pieces which did not qualify for freight line damage claims came to Mr. Pirkle to touch up, repair, return to a saleable condition. At this time Mr. Pirkle was in his middle seventies, drawing Social Security but unwilling to sit at home. Due to his age, he could work as much as he wanted, and not sacrifice his SS check.

Mr. Pirkle had a long and varied work career. During the late twenties and early thirties he had worked in the furniture workshops of the Colonial Williamsburg Restoration. It was in those workrooms he acquired the skills he employed for Miller Brothers in the warehouse. His family had always lived in South Chattanooga and Northern Georgia. One long Monday afternoon, he told me the story his father had told him. In 1863, his father was eight or nine years old. Mr. Pirkle’s father went on a tour of the battlefield at Chickamauga a day or so after fighting had moved off north to Chattanooga. The grandfather of my Mr. Pirkle wanted to show his son what war brought. That afternoon in the warehouse, Mr. Pirkle told of his father’s story, of the many, many bloated horse carcasses they passed. Then the father and son came to a trampled-down area where a pile of amputated arms and legs were piled like a small pyramid. This, they understood, was the site of a field hospital. In the heat and urgency of battle, the universal remedy for a serious limb wound was amputation. The large, heavy, slow-moving projectile commonly fired by Civil War era military rifles was a minie ball, which struck with such accumulated projectile force that bone was shattered into unrecoverable pieces. Faced with an unbridgeable gap in the bone, the surgeons elected to amputate.

This story comes to mind now because of the nature of the casualties in the Iraq disaster presided over by G.W. Bush & Co. The “insurgency,” a.k.a. continuation of the war, features the extensive use of mines and improvised mines to blow up military vehicles full of our soldiers. Because only a minority of these vehicles are armored in any way, a high proportion of the wounds suffered involve amputations. As William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is cruelty, you cannot refine it.”

Salad Days

I read a post this morning on a message board maintained by my friend Wanda. She recounted the day this weekend she and her main man Gregg devoted to their combined children. All day they shared their time and entertained their children. They were tired at the end of the day, but it was a good tired. Wanda closed her post by saying that these were "salad days" for her.

I posted back and agreed. Then I went on to tell her of my "salad days" and how I came to realize when they were.

I had a disturbing dream when my boys were little, in which I was walking my older son into his elementary school. He was nine at the time, and in my dream, I looked at him and with shock realized we were eye-to-eye. He was grown up. I had such a feeling of loss and vanished years I woke up. I got up and walked into the boys' room and stood there listening to them breathe. I did that often in those years. I felt better.

The really good news is that all days are salad days. Just different. Even in the chaos and upsets of adolescence, seeing your children change into adults has something wonderful every day. My boys are men now, and I know now that these are still the salad days, for sure. They are all salad days.

I was just not wise enough to realize that fact when I woke up from the dream back when my elder son was nine.

Beaching the Swiftboats

I am still not enthused by either candidate, but I have been thinking how Kerry could extricate himself from the Swiftboat swamp. I herewith offer a draft of a new stump speech for JFK.

What Kerry SHOULD be saying:

Let us talk, you and I, about the real issues facing our country today. Four years into a new century, we are faced with challenges at home and threats from abroad. Thirty years after the close of a war begun to bring a foreign country into the freedom we enjoy here, we are again at war in a distant land and culture.

Our country faced great divisions and disillusions over the ten years of involvement in Viet Nam. Let us build on those sad years as lessons in the limits of power. Let us consider our place in the world, and remember that we are not alone on this planet. We are one country among 268 nations. We are slightly less than 300 million in a world population of over six billion. Our system of government, our vibrant mix of people and our economic success have made us the last superpower surviving from the century just past. With this great power comes greater responsibility. We must take seriously the roles other countries, other peoples should play in decisions affecting a rapidly more interdependent world.

This country should not have gone to war in Iraq without a consensus of a wide range of countries. Dismissing the arguments of so many of our allies before acting unilaterally makes it more difficult now to tackle the problems not just in Iraq, but in the world. Iraq is torn by factional violence, as is Afghanistan. The spread of terrorist networks into Iraq fuels these problems, just as the stubborn persistence of the Taliban keeps Afghanistan in turmoil.

Our great strength as a nation and a people stem from our liberties and from our just society. Combine this strength with our military power, and extend to the family of nations equal partnership and the respect of consultation, then we will face our challenges with whole-hearted assistance from freedom-loving peoples around the world.

We cannot go back to the time of decision before invading Iraq, any more than we can roll back the years to a time before Viet Nam. We must honor the commitment we undertook in overthrowing Saddam, just as we must work toward a stable and peaceful Afghanistan. Both of these commitments must involve the world at large, through the United Nations and through individual partnerships with other countries. Peace and freedom cannot be imposed with smart bombs and high-tech weaponry. Cooperation and dialogue lead more surely to our goals than "going it alone." Life in the twenty-first century resembles in no way our national myth of the strong, lonely hero taking on evil single-handedly. "Bring it on" is a tag line from melodrama, not a prescription for a healthy country in a healthy world.

So, let us talk, you and I. We have much to talk about over the next two months, we need communication, we need to build consensus without rancor. I ask your careful consideration of the issues facing this nation, and the world. I am confident that we can make the world a safer and better place, and our own country again a light to nations struggling to be free.
****

Hmmm... not yet ready for prime time. But better than endlessly discussing the minutae of ancient battle reports.