Memorial Day: Remember Those Who Fought (for our right to torture)
Once upon a time, in a fantasy land far away, I took a girl I loved to see a movie I loved, a fabulously hilarious film by Terry Gilliam called "Brazil", which as you might know if you've heard about it is loosely based on the story 1984 except that it's *funny*. (I grabbed a Munich newspaper the other day to find the front page emblazoned with Nazi babes in short-shorts singing "Springtime for Hitler" from The Producers, so yes, anything is possible).
So waiting in the dark for a bang-up good time, to share one of my favorite movies, holding back my laughter so I could look over and see my girl laughing too, except something went horribly wrong - she was crying. I asked her what the matter was, and she looked at me and said, "That's how it was. My whole time growing up." See, I'd forgotten that she was from behind the Iron Curtain, that for her these nudge-nudge-wink-winks weren't nudge-nudge-wink-winks, they were her boyfriend getting fingers broken by the secret police, they were her parent pulled from a job and forced to work on a farm commune, they were people tossed out of school for the wrong comments, there were pressures every day to wave the flag at the right time, to wear the right scarf, to show the right support for the party, to not say anything that could and would be used against you, in a court of law or otherwise.
I've met some interesting people along the way - went to school with children of German rocket scientists, met the guy who interviewed Pol Pot last, hung out a bit with a Vietnamese guy who spent a year walking across Cambodia as a kid to escape to freedom, meaning Thai refugee camps for a year before release to America. I know a Southerner whose life ambition was to spit on Sherman's grave, but who couldn't do it because there were women and children buried there. An Italian friend still tells me about his Uncle Looie, a soldier who was placed in a POW camp in Mississippi, who to his dying day remembered and was grateful for how well he was treated, how much he came to love America. Those German kids, I don't recall thinking how maybe they were a Fifth Column, still wanting to sabotage like Germany's Operation Werewolf after the war, even though we jokingly played world domination before Risk became popular. That Vietnamese kid, maybe he was expecting years of work ahead, but I somehow can't imagine his father setting him on an escape route that led to the values we now think are values. How many water boardings would Uncle Looie or Student Pham have needed to end their love affair with America permanently? One? Two? A dozen? Those hundreds of thousands of Southern soldiers after the war, especially ones kept in the horrible camps at Andersonville [okay, Rock Island for the Southerners] - how were they rehabilitated to not pose a threat to the Union?
Nelson Mandela fought his country's occupiers, oppressors, with every bone in his body, and after 21 years of incarceration still refused easy release unless unconditional, delaying his eventual freedom by 9 years. Kenyatta had a similar story in Kenya, writing his opus, "Suffering without Bitterness" after his release, while Gusmao from East Timor has disavowed his Marxism as an understandable mistake, and the actions of America against him unfortunate but still understandable. We are in talks with Cuban leaders who we have fought in words and proxy wars for 40 years, partners in incarceration now with a Libyan who bombed our troops and brought down an airliner, partners in government with Iraqis who can easily shift over to anti-American insurgency at any moment and who carry decidedly un-American values, partners with China and Russia in helping them keep a lockdown on Xinjiang (home of the Uyghurs) and Chechnya, while running military exercises with those who threatened to obliterate us for 40 years.
Yet here we are, scared of a few Arabs and Pashtuns from the field - many of them Uncle Looies, caught up in what seemed like a good cause (and defending your religion and homeland have been "good cause" for all of our history), and while certain that while murderers can eventually be paroled if they tame enough pigeons and read the Bible and say Hail Maries often enough, these Muslims are simply unrepentant, superhuman killing machines who pose a danger in anything less than Krypton-sealed enclosures. Despite all the sworn enemies who now sit down with us at State Dinners and UN Conferences at Davos, we seem to have identified a class of people who are too dangerous for American values, requiring an asterysk in the Constitution just as Roger Maris needed one in the baseball rulebook so long ago.
In some ways it's too bad we fought World War II, because it indeed was the most selfless military act we've ever done, followed by the Marshall Plan, the most selfless humanitarian act we've ever done. It's a long climb down from that mountain, but we seem to have rappelled it rather rapidly, so that now we're back to a rather glibly defined model of civilization where indefinite detention, disappearing, and drowning are simply collaterals of never-ending warfare, not just something they do "over there". Seems like we could just annex Venezuela under our newfound "morality". Exactly what problem would Mr. Obama have with the Argentinian Junta's actions during the Dirty War - secreting protesters off to football stadiums, the beatings and other torture, the indefinite detentions in solitary or small groups, eyes gauzed shut, or only the drop from helicopters? Or even that?
Certainly our soldiers have committed atrocities in the field during all of our wars - those in the Mexican-American War perhaps being the worst, and while only a few are revealed to condemn now, we can still say that they're part of the field of battle, that there is a certain amount of condemnation whatever the expediency. The Toledo reports, Mai Lai, the ones from Korea, along with ones committed against US troops. That we hide the WWII atrocities and don't parade them gives an idea of their unacceptability, even in the face of Hitler and his madmen.
But now? Never before have we had such luxuries that we used as excuses. Here we have the civilians behind the Washington generals fighting a non-critical police/occupation action with relatively little loss of life compared to the millions of civilians killed in Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia and WWII, and yet we've upped the ante for these soft puffy-handed "strategists" so they can dumb down the definition of torture just to make their lack of ability and creative intellectual resources acceptable.
Once upon a time, we had soldiers in Korea when a million Chinese came across the border, and they had the horrible luck of survival and fight back at whatever cost, that "oh shit" moment I can only barely imagine. We had troops who for months fought their way across Northern Africa and up the Italian peninsula and got dropped suicidally on a beach underneath cliffs, fighting for any toehold under horrendous fire power. We had troops who island hopped across the Pacific, fighting brutal battles, suffering torture and death marches and horrible prison camp conditions. We had troops stuck in Vietnam, fighting a confused mission to preserve colonialism and fight off communism at the same time, with no obvious moral certainty but the order to persevere with no end goal. We've had troops on a myriad of missions, from bringing order to Bosnia and Haiti, to rescuing hostages in Iran, to small missions in Somalia and Grenada and Panama, to background actions in Angola and 1979's Afghanistan, the Berlin rescue, the Soviet overflights, the background operations in others' turf wars, and now we have the military carrying out the politically-bastardized US goals in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. We know the difference between when the stakes were critical, when the pressures were overwhelming, the potential repercussions enormous and the time for decisions non-existent, as well as when the operations were simply routine or difficult, with breathing room to spare. We shouldn't confuse the two, especially now that we know to train our soldiers not just in split-second reaction, but more and more in split-second judgment, tied into information systems and webs of shared insight. We can't grow up and remain as children at the same time. Our modern warfare creates abilities and potentials that didn't exist before, more and more college-educated soldiers, tech-savvy enlisted, battle field simulations and psychological evaluations, of the enemy and ourselves. You can't scrunch down morals and human conscience within this framework and call it a day. They all go together - more responsibility and authority and capability means across the board. There's been some railing against "humanitarian missions" as if soldiers didn't always have non-soldierly tasks to help with - from the far outposts of Rome building aqueducts for civilians to guaranteeing resources for catastrophe-endangered areas, to prevent revolt if nothing else. Killing in the battle field is only one of the soldier requirements throughout all of history.
Being a professional force, our military doesn't have the luxury of rationalizing the mission. Any thinking person knows that sometimes we'll get it wrong, sometimes right, but the men or women in the field will need to kill, destroy, rebuild, help, whether they would personally loathe or love the designated enemy or ally. Patton wanted to overrun Russia, MacArthur wanted to take it to China - both were removed. The generals that opposed our folly in Iraq were removed. It's civilian rule, and it's up to civilians to elect wise leaders, remove unwise ones, and keep up wise pressure in any case. It's a peculiar instinct to enjoy your job under these kind of perverse pressures, and I applaud those who keep it up. I'm saddened by the increased politicization and polarization of the military, including where military leaders have let themselves be dragged into these partisan lines. The choice between engaging and abstaining and in what way is seldom clear cut, and our romance with blood on the movie screen doesn't translate very well to real life. I'm horrified by the tens of thousands of maimed and psychologically scarred veterans that have come home in the last 8 years that have been relegated to anonymity. We have a quasi-war with no parades, no homecomings, no recognition, no battles, no markers, just an endless movement of troops, small newspaper articles of minor engagements, with theories and strategies and rationales and justifications, and a faceless enemy that we haven't quite defined. I don't know how the troops do it, though it seems the number of suicides shows one way out. I went through an airport the other day and was amazed by the thousands of soldiers moving through - been a while for me in an airport, but I've never seen a 10th as many soldiers on travel. "Nothing special, just weekend leave, moving around", they told me. I guess. With $12 billion or so a month on war spending, troop movement is just one of the signs. But where does it end? Our leaders just declare, "prolonged detention" and a country-hopping strategy that makes the Domino Theory look super sane by comparison.
I had a conversation with a Dutch Jew the other day, with him telling me about his time in the Israeli military facing down the Hezbollah. "You can't understand until you've been there", he told me. A dangerous conceit. Of course I don't understand water boarding quite until I try it, as a few surprised conservative commentators have done lately. I don't quite understand space travel because I haven't been there. I don't quite understand issues particular to women because I'm not a woman. I don't understand a shell fired toward my position exactly, but I understand a bit about fear, a bit about danger, a bit about right and wrong. I can come close through various mental and physical exercises, if I choose to try to understand. One of the great attributes of humans is their ability to empathize, make analogies, generalize and synthesize rather than just rationalize and divide, to understand what doesn't quite exist for them.
222 years ago, we came up with a Constitution that surprised - from its conciseness and clarity, from its concern about citizen rights (partly pasted on 2 years later with the Bill of Rights), from its civilian government and disavowal of monarchies and relegating of the military to a subservient, supporting role, of its balanced nature that rests on 3 competing and cooperating branches of government, as well as a public that stays engaged, that has relatively equal claim to redress of grievances on all levels. While I don't believe the Constitution explicitly addresses a free press [okay, it does guarantee it, my bad], the support for free speech certainly supports it, and citizen pamphlets and newsletters were certainly important in the run up to and aftermath of American Independence. It is this Constitution that the President is sworn to uphold, as are all members of the military. Take a moment to peruse this oath if you've never seen it:
So in honor of Monday's holiday, to remember those who have died or been wounded for the American cause and those who have fought and continue to fight for it, this is my long and convoluted way of saying thanks, that I think we're supporting the same values, the same causes, the same primacy of human conscience, that with my many degrees I don't look down at your work as lesser, just as I don't look at my bosses with only a high school degree as unworthy - that we all come to our tasks with different perspectives and preparation, and the main issue is performance where it counts. And while I value the military work, I understand it as one piece of the American mosaic that expresses similar issues of God, duty, country, honor, mission, on all levels. That unless we do our jobs as civilians, even as a loyal opposition where necessary, you can't do your job as the military, and in the reverse. We reflect on each other. The last time an empire successfully represented itself through its military was Rome, and we're 2000 years past those values by now. So to our brave and hard-working civilian military, hats off.
PS - re-reading this I don't mean to make anything less of the dangers in Iraq - extremely dangerous roadside and barricade car checks, scouting expeditions in Anbar designed to draw fire (i.e. at some poor soldier's head) as much as anything, and a variety of other hazards from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan. For many, every day means risking life or a lifetime of painful injury, and while the manslaughter in our larger engagements may have been much greater, that doesn't make dangers in individual actions less perilous, whatever the war.
So waiting in the dark for a bang-up good time, to share one of my favorite movies, holding back my laughter so I could look over and see my girl laughing too, except something went horribly wrong - she was crying. I asked her what the matter was, and she looked at me and said, "That's how it was. My whole time growing up." See, I'd forgotten that she was from behind the Iron Curtain, that for her these nudge-nudge-wink-winks weren't nudge-nudge-wink-winks, they were her boyfriend getting fingers broken by the secret police, they were her parent pulled from a job and forced to work on a farm commune, they were people tossed out of school for the wrong comments, there were pressures every day to wave the flag at the right time, to wear the right scarf, to show the right support for the party, to not say anything that could and would be used against you, in a court of law or otherwise.
I've met some interesting people along the way - went to school with children of German rocket scientists, met the guy who interviewed Pol Pot last, hung out a bit with a Vietnamese guy who spent a year walking across Cambodia as a kid to escape to freedom, meaning Thai refugee camps for a year before release to America. I know a Southerner whose life ambition was to spit on Sherman's grave, but who couldn't do it because there were women and children buried there. An Italian friend still tells me about his Uncle Looie, a soldier who was placed in a POW camp in Mississippi, who to his dying day remembered and was grateful for how well he was treated, how much he came to love America. Those German kids, I don't recall thinking how maybe they were a Fifth Column, still wanting to sabotage like Germany's Operation Werewolf after the war, even though we jokingly played world domination before Risk became popular. That Vietnamese kid, maybe he was expecting years of work ahead, but I somehow can't imagine his father setting him on an escape route that led to the values we now think are values. How many water boardings would Uncle Looie or Student Pham have needed to end their love affair with America permanently? One? Two? A dozen? Those hundreds of thousands of Southern soldiers after the war, especially ones kept in the horrible camps at Andersonville [okay, Rock Island for the Southerners] - how were they rehabilitated to not pose a threat to the Union?
Nelson Mandela fought his country's occupiers, oppressors, with every bone in his body, and after 21 years of incarceration still refused easy release unless unconditional, delaying his eventual freedom by 9 years. Kenyatta had a similar story in Kenya, writing his opus, "Suffering without Bitterness" after his release, while Gusmao from East Timor has disavowed his Marxism as an understandable mistake, and the actions of America against him unfortunate but still understandable. We are in talks with Cuban leaders who we have fought in words and proxy wars for 40 years, partners in incarceration now with a Libyan who bombed our troops and brought down an airliner, partners in government with Iraqis who can easily shift over to anti-American insurgency at any moment and who carry decidedly un-American values, partners with China and Russia in helping them keep a lockdown on Xinjiang (home of the Uyghurs) and Chechnya, while running military exercises with those who threatened to obliterate us for 40 years.
Yet here we are, scared of a few Arabs and Pashtuns from the field - many of them Uncle Looies, caught up in what seemed like a good cause (and defending your religion and homeland have been "good cause" for all of our history), and while certain that while murderers can eventually be paroled if they tame enough pigeons and read the Bible and say Hail Maries often enough, these Muslims are simply unrepentant, superhuman killing machines who pose a danger in anything less than Krypton-sealed enclosures. Despite all the sworn enemies who now sit down with us at State Dinners and UN Conferences at Davos, we seem to have identified a class of people who are too dangerous for American values, requiring an asterysk in the Constitution just as Roger Maris needed one in the baseball rulebook so long ago.
In some ways it's too bad we fought World War II, because it indeed was the most selfless military act we've ever done, followed by the Marshall Plan, the most selfless humanitarian act we've ever done. It's a long climb down from that mountain, but we seem to have rappelled it rather rapidly, so that now we're back to a rather glibly defined model of civilization where indefinite detention, disappearing, and drowning are simply collaterals of never-ending warfare, not just something they do "over there". Seems like we could just annex Venezuela under our newfound "morality". Exactly what problem would Mr. Obama have with the Argentinian Junta's actions during the Dirty War - secreting protesters off to football stadiums, the beatings and other torture, the indefinite detentions in solitary or small groups, eyes gauzed shut, or only the drop from helicopters? Or even that?
Certainly our soldiers have committed atrocities in the field during all of our wars - those in the Mexican-American War perhaps being the worst, and while only a few are revealed to condemn now, we can still say that they're part of the field of battle, that there is a certain amount of condemnation whatever the expediency. The Toledo reports, Mai Lai, the ones from Korea, along with ones committed against US troops. That we hide the WWII atrocities and don't parade them gives an idea of their unacceptability, even in the face of Hitler and his madmen.
But now? Never before have we had such luxuries that we used as excuses. Here we have the civilians behind the Washington generals fighting a non-critical police/occupation action with relatively little loss of life compared to the millions of civilians killed in Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia and WWII, and yet we've upped the ante for these soft puffy-handed "strategists" so they can dumb down the definition of torture just to make their lack of ability and creative intellectual resources acceptable.
Once upon a time, we had soldiers in Korea when a million Chinese came across the border, and they had the horrible luck of survival and fight back at whatever cost, that "oh shit" moment I can only barely imagine. We had troops who for months fought their way across Northern Africa and up the Italian peninsula and got dropped suicidally on a beach underneath cliffs, fighting for any toehold under horrendous fire power. We had troops who island hopped across the Pacific, fighting brutal battles, suffering torture and death marches and horrible prison camp conditions. We had troops stuck in Vietnam, fighting a confused mission to preserve colonialism and fight off communism at the same time, with no obvious moral certainty but the order to persevere with no end goal. We've had troops on a myriad of missions, from bringing order to Bosnia and Haiti, to rescuing hostages in Iran, to small missions in Somalia and Grenada and Panama, to background actions in Angola and 1979's Afghanistan, the Berlin rescue, the Soviet overflights, the background operations in others' turf wars, and now we have the military carrying out the politically-bastardized US goals in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. We know the difference between when the stakes were critical, when the pressures were overwhelming, the potential repercussions enormous and the time for decisions non-existent, as well as when the operations were simply routine or difficult, with breathing room to spare. We shouldn't confuse the two, especially now that we know to train our soldiers not just in split-second reaction, but more and more in split-second judgment, tied into information systems and webs of shared insight. We can't grow up and remain as children at the same time. Our modern warfare creates abilities and potentials that didn't exist before, more and more college-educated soldiers, tech-savvy enlisted, battle field simulations and psychological evaluations, of the enemy and ourselves. You can't scrunch down morals and human conscience within this framework and call it a day. They all go together - more responsibility and authority and capability means across the board. There's been some railing against "humanitarian missions" as if soldiers didn't always have non-soldierly tasks to help with - from the far outposts of Rome building aqueducts for civilians to guaranteeing resources for catastrophe-endangered areas, to prevent revolt if nothing else. Killing in the battle field is only one of the soldier requirements throughout all of history.
Being a professional force, our military doesn't have the luxury of rationalizing the mission. Any thinking person knows that sometimes we'll get it wrong, sometimes right, but the men or women in the field will need to kill, destroy, rebuild, help, whether they would personally loathe or love the designated enemy or ally. Patton wanted to overrun Russia, MacArthur wanted to take it to China - both were removed. The generals that opposed our folly in Iraq were removed. It's civilian rule, and it's up to civilians to elect wise leaders, remove unwise ones, and keep up wise pressure in any case. It's a peculiar instinct to enjoy your job under these kind of perverse pressures, and I applaud those who keep it up. I'm saddened by the increased politicization and polarization of the military, including where military leaders have let themselves be dragged into these partisan lines. The choice between engaging and abstaining and in what way is seldom clear cut, and our romance with blood on the movie screen doesn't translate very well to real life. I'm horrified by the tens of thousands of maimed and psychologically scarred veterans that have come home in the last 8 years that have been relegated to anonymity. We have a quasi-war with no parades, no homecomings, no recognition, no battles, no markers, just an endless movement of troops, small newspaper articles of minor engagements, with theories and strategies and rationales and justifications, and a faceless enemy that we haven't quite defined. I don't know how the troops do it, though it seems the number of suicides shows one way out. I went through an airport the other day and was amazed by the thousands of soldiers moving through - been a while for me in an airport, but I've never seen a 10th as many soldiers on travel. "Nothing special, just weekend leave, moving around", they told me. I guess. With $12 billion or so a month on war spending, troop movement is just one of the signs. But where does it end? Our leaders just declare, "prolonged detention" and a country-hopping strategy that makes the Domino Theory look super sane by comparison.
I had a conversation with a Dutch Jew the other day, with him telling me about his time in the Israeli military facing down the Hezbollah. "You can't understand until you've been there", he told me. A dangerous conceit. Of course I don't understand water boarding quite until I try it, as a few surprised conservative commentators have done lately. I don't quite understand space travel because I haven't been there. I don't quite understand issues particular to women because I'm not a woman. I don't understand a shell fired toward my position exactly, but I understand a bit about fear, a bit about danger, a bit about right and wrong. I can come close through various mental and physical exercises, if I choose to try to understand. One of the great attributes of humans is their ability to empathize, make analogies, generalize and synthesize rather than just rationalize and divide, to understand what doesn't quite exist for them.
222 years ago, we came up with a Constitution that surprised - from its conciseness and clarity, from its concern about citizen rights (partly pasted on 2 years later with the Bill of Rights), from its civilian government and disavowal of monarchies and relegating of the military to a subservient, supporting role, of its balanced nature that rests on 3 competing and cooperating branches of government, as well as a public that stays engaged, that has relatively equal claim to redress of grievances on all levels. While I don't believe the Constitution explicitly addresses a free press [okay, it does guarantee it, my bad], the support for free speech certainly supports it, and citizen pamphlets and newsletters were certainly important in the run up to and aftermath of American Independence. It is this Constitution that the President is sworn to uphold, as are all members of the military. Take a moment to peruse this oath if you've never seen it:
The wordings of the current oath of enlistment and oath for commissioned officers are as follows:
"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).
"I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God." (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)
While the Constitution may be flawed, in many ways it's possibly the best we've done so far on a large practical and long-lasting scale to express our balance of compassion and independence, of freedom and security, of encoding lofty human values into a practical living document. And I commend those who support this ideal even and especially if they choose to help improve it through the glorious art of non-combative argumentation, presuming they actually hope to improve it, whatever their opinions.
So in honor of Monday's holiday, to remember those who have died or been wounded for the American cause and those who have fought and continue to fight for it, this is my long and convoluted way of saying thanks, that I think we're supporting the same values, the same causes, the same primacy of human conscience, that with my many degrees I don't look down at your work as lesser, just as I don't look at my bosses with only a high school degree as unworthy - that we all come to our tasks with different perspectives and preparation, and the main issue is performance where it counts. And while I value the military work, I understand it as one piece of the American mosaic that expresses similar issues of God, duty, country, honor, mission, on all levels. That unless we do our jobs as civilians, even as a loyal opposition where necessary, you can't do your job as the military, and in the reverse. We reflect on each other. The last time an empire successfully represented itself through its military was Rome, and we're 2000 years past those values by now. So to our brave and hard-working civilian military, hats off.
Portia:
The Merchant Of Venice Act 4, scene 1, 180-187
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
PS - re-reading this I don't mean to make anything less of the dangers in Iraq - extremely dangerous roadside and barricade car checks, scouting expeditions in Anbar designed to draw fire (i.e. at some poor soldier's head) as much as anything, and a variety of other hazards from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan. For many, every day means risking life or a lifetime of painful injury, and while the manslaughter in our larger engagements may have been much greater, that doesn't make dangers in individual actions less perilous, whatever the war.
