It’s Not Pretty
I always visit my books on Veterans day, writings about men at war. Granted, I enjoy seeing all the pictures of fresh-faced soldiers, my parents and grandparents included, but they only tell part of the story. The other part is a bit messier and needs remembering, too. But talking about it is like reminding people that to get bacon you have to slaughter a hog. It’s usually ignored. My interest in the subject of steel meeting flesh grew out of my degree in literature and my time in service during the Vietnam conflict as a hospital corpsman, stateside, to be absolutely clear. Although, I suppose my first exposure was everyone’s first exposure in America, the Red Badge of Courage. Anyway, back to the books.
I started out going for the fiction, Hemingway, Mailer, Jones, Elliot, all the literary flowers that grew out of the mud and blood. Then I segued into history. I was lucky. A gentleman named Donald Morris, author of The Washing of the Spears, a history of the Zulu nation was working at the Houston Post. I read his book, he gave me a list of authors, and I was off. I have three favorites. First, is John Keegan and The Face of Battle. He profiled what soldiers endured at Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. It’s sobering reading for anyone who thinks combat is poetic. Next up is Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, in which he details the lasting impacts on modern society and literature of World War One and life in the trenches. Finally, there’s Dispatches by Michael Herr, brief, terrifying portraits of Vietnam.
All the books boil down to one thing, soldiers, doing and dying. Like the ones in the picture that goes with this post. I hope somewhere there are picture of them fresh-faced and smiling because I hate to think what it was like as they came to this end. They fought at Antietam in the Civil War. No one knows their namea, which is pretty much how it goes with war and men in combat. The survivors write books, some of them warning us off and some celebratory, and the others are unknown or get their names carved in stone. And the rest, like me, go home and live their lives, relatively untouched by the terror visited upon their brothers. And I don’t know anyway to end this, but to just stop.