[MD] War Stories

[Arlo Bensinger]

Hi Marsha,

Someone once told me, "a soldier is not a hero because of what he 
does, he is a hero because of what he risks".

I said this to a Marine friend of mine, and he looked at me really 
seriously and said "you'd be surprised how many people, civilians and 
soldiers, don't understand that".

In a song called Red Army Blues (by The Waterboys) the lyrics open with...

When I left my home and my family
my mother said to me
Son, it's not how many Germans you kill that counts
It's how many people you set free.

When we look closely, many times, at the unbridled patriotic 
masturbation of the modern political dialogue, we can see this subtle 
yet profound misunderstanding. And as such we are moving back to the 
pre-WWI idea of "war". This is, as is seen in the following Pirsig 
quote, simply systemic of the overall retreat to Victorianism Pirsig 
talks about later.

"The Victorian social system and the Victorian morality that led into 
World War I had portrayed war as an adventurous conflict between 
noble individuals engaged in the idealistic service of their country: 
a kind of extended knighthood. Victorians loved exquisitely painted 
heroic battle scenes in their drawing rooms, with dashing cavalrymen 
riding toward the enemy with sabers drawn, or a horse returning 
riderless with the title, "Bad News." Death was acknowledged by an 
occasional soldier in the arms of his comrades looking palely toward heaven.

World War I wasn't like that. The Gatling gun removed the nobility, 
the heroism. The Victorian painters had never shown a battlefield of 
mud and shell holes and barbed wire and half a million rotting 
corpses-some staring toward heaven, some staring into the mud, some 
without faces to stare in any direction. That many had been murdered 
in one battle alone." (LILA)

I am convinced the modern war will not end until a draft is instated, 
and all exceptions to it abolished. Too few are sacrificing too much 
for too little. And we are maintaining that disequilibrium by the 
deceitful rhetoric of political ideologues and politicians.


Arlo




At 04:32 AM 10/3/2007, you wrote:

>Greetings,
>
>I think Ken Burn's documentary should be followed by a 12-hour
>documentary of sobbing mothers.  Rational, my left foot!!!   What
>fathers might call rational, mothers may call psychotic.  Justify it
>as you might, rationality is a myth.
>
>Marsha