| Mar. 25th, 2003 @ 07:42 am Supporting The Troops |
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I got my first camera when I was about 13 and my first ever photo album ends with a montage from our 8th grade trip to Washington, D.C. Even at that tender age I was making an effort to be amusing with the captions, most of which poke fun at my inept efforts at photography along with the solemnity of the monuments we were visiting (sample indication of quality and tone: a picture of the Lincoln Memorial with the caption, "Jefferson at least stood up for us"). The exception is the final photo, which is a picture of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery, with a caption which I went to the trouble of doing in calligraphy, reading "Known But To God."
So, even when I was that young and obnoxious, I was highly susceptible to the mythos of the sacrificed soldier. I still am, despite the amount of intellectual work I've done investigating how and why this all-powerful and unassailable reverence for the fallen soldier is generated and whose purpose it serves. Knowing that my emotional response to things like the tomb of the unknown soldier or an NPR story on the Gold Star Mothers (an organization for American women who have lost sons in combat) has been produced and manipulated doesn't really make it less powerful. If contemplating the death toll amongst Iraqi civilians makes me ill, thinking about the American soldiers who are dead, dying, or in captivity is just as upsetting. I am, after all, the one who started crying watching the footage of Gulf War soldiers rushing across the airstrip into the arms of their waiting loved ones while viewing the shamelessly propagandistic "Enduring Freedom" video they show you in the forward aircraft elevator at the U.S.S. Intrepid in New York. Course, I was really already crying by the time I got there; what set me off was a 2-second clip of an American plane releasing a load of bombs over an unidentifiable landscape.
To some extent this is just how my emotions work: thinking about anyone not coming home to their people gets me going, because I can imagine what that would feel like. But there is an extra layer of sentimentality that has been generated around soldiers, largely to help the rest of us make our peace with the fact that they have to risk their lives while the rest of us sit at home and reap the purported benefits--and when I say 'the rest of us,' I'm not just talking about all us malcontents who protest, I'm talking about the crowd in the White House, most of whom have never served in combat but feel just fine about sending other people to do it, with or without a good reason. It's not that American soldiers who die in battle don't deserve the respect with which they are treated; but I find it more than a little suspicious that dead soldiers are often treated with greater respect than surviving veterans.
I first started wondering about this when I was in college and our band went on a tour of Italy. The high point and low point was our visit to Nettuno, a seaside town that was the site of the biggest and nastiest battle on Italy's soil during World War II. The Nettuno municipal authorities treated us with a strange mixture of courtesy and contempt. True, we did end up performing in a parking lot at a marina swept by the Mediterranean winds, with almost nobody there to hear us due to almost no local advertising; but they also specially kept open a museum exhibit about the American landing at Nettuno that was due to close a week earlier, and the American military cemetery, so that we could see them.
The American military cemetery at Nettuno had a lasting effect on me. I'd been to Arlington, of course; and I had seen how big it was. But the cemetery at Nettuno is pretty damn big--and it is sobering to reflect, as you stare around you at the vast sea of identically shaped white marble tombstones arranged in neat geometric patterns, that this represents the casualties from *one* battle--on *one* side. I remember running into a friend of mine in the saxophone section, who was similarly affected, and who said, "There's, what, 80 people in this band, and they're all spread out now...and every single one of them is just surrounded by death."
It was at Nettuno that I started asking myself why the military goes to all this trouble to take care of its dead, and began to be convinced that it was at least partly strategic. Because that cemetery at Nettuno is a beautiful place. It really is. So's Arlington. However, when Nettuno was a battlefield, it must have been unimaginably ugly. The beauty and ceremony of a place like Nettuno is partly compensation--the Army's attempt to make up for the unforgivable sacrifice it has demanded. Same with the aura of nobility and heroism that invariably attaches to those who die in battle: it produces the impression that all of these dead gave their lives willingly and gladly for their country. No doubt many of them did; but the reality is that in most wars, a lot of the people who die in combat didn't want to be there. They were drafted, or they went into the army because they couldn't afford an education otherwise, or it was one of the few careers available to them. Even those who enlisted voluntarily were probably hoping they would come home alive. Death was a risk they were willing to run, not something they welcomed with open arms; and when it came to them it came in blood, pain, and terror, none of which is represented by those chaste white headstones at Nettuno.
You see the same thing going on with the "support the troops" rhetoric now circulating in America. We are being asked to "support the troops" by doing what the Nettuno cemetery does: ignoring the messy realities, and responsibilities, of warfare by focusing on the symbolism of it. In the name of "supporting" the men and women who are out there running the risks, we are being asked to stop demanding that our president provide a valid and compelling *reason* to put them at risk in the first place. We are being asked to "support the troops" by accepting uncritically the proposition that they are dying "for our country," for freedom, for democracy, for our national ideals--instead of calling this war what it is: an unnecessary and therefore monstrous and sacreligious waste of the lives of the American soldiers who are fighting it. We are asked to forget that they are dying not for "our country," but for a small cadre of ideologues who are interested in transforming our republic into an empire, and of course growing fat off the profits.
It's easy enough to say "OK, I support the troops--so bring them home, already." I've said it myself, and plan to go on saying it. But it is important to understand the logic behind that, too. It is in no way "supportive" to send people that you are supposed to be governing off to suffer and die a war that will not benefit their families, their country, or their world. This war, like many of the people who have ordered it--one remembers Rumsfeld's comments about the worthlessness of draftees, for instance--is, in fact, grossly disrespectful of the human beings who are being asked to fight it, and the best thing we can do to "support the troops" is to fight as hard as we can to make it difficult for this administration to start the next gratiutous war.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder |
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I hate to say it, but even as we try to wash our hands of the consequences of our leaders' actions, the blood is not going to come off that easily. We elected these people, or by our inaction allowed the conditions to arise that meant that they could steal the election, take your pick. Okay, there's not that much blood on our hands, but, for most of us, it's still there.