Veteran's Day

I am sorely conflicted about Veteran’s Day.  I honor the service and sacrifice of my parents—both who served in World War II.  I recognize the suffering of veterans who are returning today with terrible wounds, physical, mental and spiritual.  But I can’t buy the line that our military is “fighting for our freedom”, and that we should therefore support whatever war effort we happen to be about.  I can say that in World War II, freedom was at stake.  The Civil War.  The Revolutionary War.   But where was our freedom at stake in Viet Nam, in Mexico, with Spain, let alone in Grenada, Panama or the many proxy wars we funded and directed in Central America?

During the lead up to the second Iraq War, I was living in Philadelphia. We were supposedly debating as a nation whether to go to war at all (something we know now was a lie), and in the last week before the vote in Congress, there were two different sets of rallies.  There were rallies against the war.  And then there were rallies to “Support the Troops”.   Before any of our troops were engaged in a war we had not yet begun.  Before we officially made the decision to unleash destruction on a nation poorer than ourselves.  A war that killed tens of thousands of civilians, and God knows how many troops on both sides (or all sides, as the civil war was unleashed).

It makes supporting our troops much more complicated, doesn’t it?  We want to help the returning veterans, who have been victimized by the war.  But they—and, more importantly, we (who paid for the war and did not stop it)—are also perpetrators of the violence.  They are complex human beings, many of whom have experienced horrible things, and many who have done horrible things. Reducing them to simply heroes diminishes their humanity. As does reducing them to simply victims, or reducing them to simply perpetrators.

How do you love and support someone with that weight of humanness about them?  We can’t really ask that question until we ask ourselves a similar one: how can we live with ourselves, as individuals and as a nation, we who carry that weight of evil and good in us? 

In my spiritual tradition, the way commended and commanded is reconciliation, and oh, what a beautiful word and terribly hard way it is.  We have reduced that way too often to saying “I’m sorry” and the other deciding whether or not to forgive.  But the places where true reconciliation has been tried—I’m thinking of South Africa, North Ireland, Argentina—it means being fearlessly honest and public about what has happened.  And then facing the pain of finding a way to live together again.   Will we ever seek reconciliation with the people of Viet Nam or Iraq?  Will we ever be able to seek reconciliation in our nation, we who are so polarized over so many things?

My parents were of the generation that didn’t talk much about the war, although little bits of it leaked out from time to time.  More than ten years after my father’s death, my older brother and I realized that our father had told each of us stories about the war that he did not tell any other of his children.  This poem is about the one he told me.  It’s helpful to know that my father grew up speaking German at home, and had the misfortune to go to kindergarten in 1917, when we were at war with Germany, and children were told they would be hit if they spoke it at school.  Later, he served in the US Army Air Corps during the war and occupation in Germany, where his native tongue was an asset to his native land.  

 

FATHER, WHY ME?

A man hung from his parachute

like a seed softly whirligigging down,
shouting “Don’t shoot—I surrender!”                       
in the tongue of the enemy, your first tongue.
He had no way to reach
his weapon, but the men under

you did, and in a minute—though your voice
was raised and your rank commanded
obedience—it was the county fair
in Shreveport, in Pembina, in New Ulm                    
and New Prague, step right up, everyone                  
wins a prize, the lights flashing,
the girls all giggles, and bullets
and a ribbon for the man who hits the nose.

Then, silence, the head of the boy

on his chest, his body limp
in its harness, gravity doing
its work.  The son of German cousins—
perhaps the grandson of your grandfather’s friend—
spoiled blood over his uniform. Father,

why did you tell me this story

and not my brothers?
Your memories are like your hands:
big, calloused, open.

His boots newly shined, pulled him

down to the earth he finally
met as a shroud, a nothing,
a home. Your men did not speak.
They held their rifles across
their chests, as if bearing sick children.

My mom also served in the war, and although she did not see combat, she worked at an air force base where pilots where French and British young men were trained as bomber pilots.  I’ve often wondered how many of those French pilots died bombing their own country, in order to free it.  The impetus for this poem came from seeing a photograph of my mother in uniform at the base.  The indented stanzas are spoken in a different voice than the narrator of the poem.  The voice is not a specific person, but more the voice of the air base itself.

YOU STAND TO THE SIDE, MAY 1944

in your WAC uniform,                                               

cap just a bit jaunty,
your smile aching to discharge.
You’ve seen the future
from this air base in Georgia
and you want to get out.                                

            The German prisoners shouted

            and beat on the walls
            all night, until the commander
            sent men down with sticks
            to quiet the faces. Soon after,
            the southern birds began to chirp…

No one can know a woman   

who knows she is going
back to live with her parents,
work all day at Kresge’s,
come home and clean.
No one touches the skin under the skin.
 
            The French pilots peed off the plane, singing
            ‘Oui-oui on the runway’, their boyish faces
            ruddy in the round wind.  We knew
            their deaths before they died, we

wondered if any last words

passed between them

and their loved ones,

            waiting in the houses and towns

            for the freeing bombs their boys dropped…

 It was your first foray into you:

your self away from family,
deaths only you could know.
Day after day, you watched the pilots
from your tower, called out their numbers
with your radio, tried not to imagine
them slowly drifting to earth
in a silk parachute, their eyes
and hands and shoes shot off.
 
            The men who were due to ship out flirted

the most; their eyes seemed to leak

sunshine. At dusk, they would fly

their planes at treetop, as if

            by defying death in practice,

            they could defy when it came

blasting from a Krupp Flak 36,

the deadliest tall gun the Nazis had.

You came back to Austin

in one piece, your uniform stashed
away, the letters burned
with the trash.  You took up
your old job, counting the numbers
every day, then walking home
to eat supper, wash dishes,
make the beds of the roomers,
listen to Grandma’s rants,
pray the Rosary on your knees,
hope for a life outside your own.
 
            When the war was over

            the equipment shipped out,

            and the paperwork filed,

            we disinfected the barracks:

            walls, floors, the slats

            that held the mattresses.

            We heard they were going to convert

            it to a prison, a dormitory for

            migrant peach pickers, some kind

            of training camp for boys coming home

            with less than two arms or two eyes…

 Like Dad, you didn’t talk much

about the war.  If you mourned
the men you hand known, or missed
your fellow WACs smoking cigarettes
outside the barracks, you kept
it hidden from your children
like the Easter chickens you kept quiet
until the morning we received them: birds
dyed pastel blue, red, green and yellow.
But the way you laughed when
we saw the photo, the way you
would pick it out of the album
and hold it close to your face
meant someone else was standing there:
who were you posing for, mother,
on that winter day in Georgia,
your hair peeking out from under your cap,
your painted lips ready to speak?

 

Be justice. Be beauty. Be reconciliation.

Patrick