Blighters
Dear Captain (or Sergeant),
Last week, I was sent U.S. Army Martin Dempsey’s reading list. Intended as something of a blueprint for a professional soldier’s education, the Chief of Staff of the Army (and incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs) freighted it with middlebrow books of a recent vintage, pulp paperbacks you can buy on your own and digest in an afternoon between flights if you wish.
This insulted me and it likely addled you, too. You’re a thinking soul and have by now experienced multiple deployments overseas. Unlike Gen. Dempsey, you came of age during an era of protracted war, and this likely has meant burying decent men or women in your command and learning a few disturbing lessons about life and loss along the way.
The hard slaps of that reality shall be neither articulated nor softened by reading Tom Friedman, even if publishers fattened his journalism into book form, and you know this even if the CSA doesn’t.
Let me be blunt. A late Baby Boomer generation of politicians, bankers, reporters and generals has formed into a cancer inside this democracy, and their tumorous leadership won’t be kind to your future.
Because of their incompetence and feckless folly over the past decade of war, your career in uniform shall prove quite different from that which Dempsey and his peers experienced – sparer training, slower and more competitive promotions, long bouts of desultory garrison duty as you greet younger but increasingly fewer volunteers who bear no memory of war, attracted to service only by Hollywood’s neon rumors of battle.
And then more war because there shall always be war. Have no illusions of that.
You’re already the living repository of all our experiences in combat. But we’re not so rich a nation now. Other powers have increased at our expense. There shall be fewer of your kind, and you who remain must become reflective, learning souls in order to preserve — if for only a few moments more – the twilight of American power.
One author on the CSA’s list, Sun Tzu, once cautioned the professional soldiers of his day to “know your enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a thousand battles without disaster.” Or, at least, that’s how the famous translation put it to a different generation of young leaders in Vietnam.
And they lost, of course, their older generals and political leaders failing to understand either the nature of the war they fought in Asia or the limits of their own democracy’s patience.
I conjure no special necromancy that shall order the number or nature of our future foes. I render to the Pentagon that dismal duty.
But I know that you shall face many enemies and — as you have learned by now — they can prove to be the most enterprising of murderers. How you might murder them in turn will be covered in your training academies and military education, so I won’t waste your time with the books of tactics and strategies you shall encounter there.
Instead, here we shall begin a weekly discussion about how one might know one’s self.
I don’t presume to know who you are specifically. I’ve obviously fancied you as a sergeant or captain, an E-5 or O-3 or thereabouts, but I won’t condescend to your rank, gender, race or MOS.
Your rank likely is farther up the rungs than I ever climbed in the Marine Corps or the Army anyway, and the infantry is the only branch I’ve ever known, so I’m a bit parochial, right?
But none of that matters. I care only of your soul and how it might be fired in the smithy of this blog and then hammered by your experiences in the coming years.
We therefore shall read not to learn about others so much as to rediscover ourselves, an act at once radical and ennobling because no general is going to tell you why these works are important, just me.
And unlike Dempsey, I don’t care if you tell me to go to Hell. It’s not like you’ll get UCMJ for it.
*****
When I drew up my list of 50 or so memoirs, histories, poems, novels and films we might consider, I settled on those of a modern age.
You are modern men and women.
Which is to say, you see yourself as a complex person sculpted by complicated social forces, so complicated that they often appear random and disorienting. You tend to question institutions, even that of the military, because the received wisdom forced upon you often fails to define the realities you confront, most especially on the battlefield.
You’re introspective, and this inward looking perspective has given you a profound appreciation of the ironic, the moment when you realize that what is being said or done is challenged by how it actually ends or appears or is rationalized by those forcing the action.
And war, if nothing else, is ironic action. Or, as cultural critic and former World War II infantry captain Paul Fussell put it, “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.”
Shall we even count the ironies of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
In Iraq, the war was sold as a quest to find weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, then later as a liberation of Iraqis, freed men who descended into a civil war so savage that it might have killed more souls than the dictatorship we scrapped on their behalf.
In Afghanistan we sought to punish al Qaeda terrorists and then had to wait nearly a decade to kill their most prominent leader. In the meantime, we found ourselves building a nation for sullen Afghan peoples and their kleptocrats who have fleeced our pocketbooks. We continue to do most of their fighting for them, but it’s very rarely al Qaeda who kills our decent men and women.
No, that dubious honor goes to many sorts of Taliban and criminal syndicates financed by the very warmaking and nation building we’ve unleashed.
Or that we launched both wars to preserve and extend American security and they’ve seemed to have ultimately hurt our ability to wage war and, well, made us less secure.
Coming to terms with these ironies isn’t easy – I know because I must do so with my own service in Iraq. And yet as you mature, especially after these wars end and you are left to mull the memories of them, you will have to confront these ironies and your own place within the melodrama of war.
Just as the vagaries of war seem random, so I suppose is the reading list I’ve drawn up. In order to make it more random still, I decided to take the authors and filmmakers as they came by honoring their birthdays or, if unknown, the day they died.
The first on that list therefore is Siegfried Sassoon, born in rural England on Sept. 8, 1886.
Well, how ironic.
*****
Ironic, I say, and not merely coincidental because I don’t believe on my own I could’ve started with a writer better at exploring irony and war.
Despite the Teutonic name, Siegfried Sassoon was the product of a disinherited – but quite wealthy – Jewish father, who died while the author was young, and a Catholic mother, herself from a prominent family of London artists.
In the tradition of his caste, young master Siegfried was educated in boarding school and later Cambridge, where he studied history but left before taking a degree, idling his days hunting foxes and scribbling mediocre poetry.
When war came, Sassoon enlisted, took a commission and after mending from a riding accident entered the trenches in late 1915 with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. By all accounts, he proved himself exceptionally brave, almost foolhardy in his courage, to the point that his troops nicknamed him “Mad Jack.”
His Military Cross citation of 1916 speaks of the lieutenant braving nearly two hours of constant bomb and rifle fire to collect the wounded and the dead, the torn men Sassoon’s verse came to call his “glum heroes” sent to their destruction by the “scarlet Majors at the base,” HQ staff officers marked with their uniforms’ crimson adornments and a certain callousness for casualties.
The poems and diary entries Sassoon kept writing between battles reflect a growing revulsion not only for a stupid, unending war that promised no victory – or one worth winning, anyway – but also the hapless generals, dissembling and craven journalists and clueless civilians who had escaped the horrors of the trenches but were willing to keep sending boys in the millions to fill them with blood.
To show you how out of touch British society – especially high society – was from the ongoing slaughter, several reviewers in 1917 of his wartime poems, collected as The Old Huntsman, thought the carnage he described to be merely lyrical or, worse, humorous, as if penned in jest.
Sassoon read those lamentable reviews, perhaps the worst by the celebrated critic E.B. Osborn, while convalescing from wounds that took him from Denmark Hill military hospital in London to a home for the sick in Sussex and then to his own abode in Kent.
Here’s a taste of Sassoon’s increasingly mature verse, a poem he titled “Blighters.”
The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
‘We’re sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!’
I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, sweet Home,’
And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.
Unable to grasp that poisoned satire, patriotic critics of Sassoon’s day thought words like those quite jovial. I fancy they guffawed after finishing them, imagining as they did the British Tommy to be a happy lad in the healthy French countryside, doing his lot for God and country against the Hun.
But “Blighters,” you see, is slang for those people one holds in contempt, just as “Blighty” was a term soldiers used both to describe the homefront and a wound that could take you there on medical leave.
So I ask how you imagine the slur “Blighters” is used here – as the sorts of souls one would’ve met in the music hall or tavern, talking loudly of how the tank (or the F-16) shall do to the Kaiser’s soldiers (or the many Taliban or the 1920 Brigades)?
Or is the contempt visited by society upon the man who witnesses those “drunk with din,” chirping cheaply that which they’re unwilling to spend with their own blood? What would be more contemptuous of the tortured combat veteran than to think that he scribbled those words as a bit of chuckling trench satire?
How wounding is that blighty?
Tell me that you’ve never wanted an Abrams to turn its gun on the slap-your-back patriot who never enlisted himself. What about when he asked you if you had “ever killed anyone” before assuring you that he knows of war because his father was in Vietnam or his grandfather in Okinawa? Or perhaps he cheapened you a touch more by comparing your days in Ramadi or Korengal to something he saw on Black Hawk Down or a videogame his kids play?
Maybe the man’s wife trafficked in the easy hippy pity that comes from people who don’t understand that you’re a professional, who assume that you were cheated in the wager of war, even if you think often of how you’ve protected and nurtured your troops and don’t necessarily agree with her.
Or perhaps you overheard her tell a chum that they’re very proud of you but they “wouldn’t want our children to do that sort of thing. Of course.”
You gritted your teeth and politely chattered along with him and her, right?
And when you drove home you flinched at roadside litter and your wife told you that you had changed and then some paid retired general mouthed on CNN bland assurances about a “Surge,” your mate sleeping, you drifting into the dreams of bodies jigsawed by Muj.
Or perhaps in your tossed awakening you thought Muj was dreaming you, foretelling your fate when you returned to him on the next deployment. Insh’Allah.
You kissed your sleeping wife, you petted the cat and you twitched, praying that you weren’t going “dotty,” as the British might say. It doesn’t matter, you told yourself in the dark.
*****
Except that it does matter. The question becomes how you deal with the pain of memory and the inconstancy of a stupid nation that sends you to stupid unending wars, surely without fathoming what you encountered and possibly cheapening your sacrifice with an insincere or mercantile patriotism.
And even if you and your spouse are cool with it, I don’t need to tell you about the marriages swiddened by these wars, the escalating rates of mental illness in the ground forces or the alcohol and drug abuse of your peers and subordinates, traumatic brain injury, PTSD – all that people try to stuff into the body bag of the “new normal” or overcome with “resiliency” training.
Sassoon dealt with it by ripping off his Military Cross ribbon and drowning it in the River Mersey. He sojourned from his home in Kent to the country house of Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell, an oasis for conscientious objectors where they wrote A Soldier’s Declaration. Sassoon put his name to it, Parliament debated it, the police seized copies of it as radicals circulated it and The Times and the Daily Mail eventually published it and I put it into American English for you here:
I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.
Was A Soldier’s Declaration an act of treason? Evidence for court martial? The ravings of a shell-shocked soldier? The conscientious stand of a war hero who’d come to understand the nature of the war that shredded his body and soul? Honesty put too bluntly — right conclusion, wrong action?
All of these things? Some or none of them?
Well, I don’t have the answer for you. This is a question you must put to your self, not mine, just as only you can whisper an answer.
What I can tell you is that an army medical board sent Sassoon not to prison but rather to Craiglockhart, a special hospital for the shell-shocked that its patients, including the great but doomed trench poet Wilfred Owen, termed “Dottyville.”
And I also should mention that Sassoon left the mental sanitarium and returned to war, initially in Palestine and then back to France. There, one of his own sergeants accidentally shot him in the head while Sassoon returned from No Man’s Land.
Unlike Owen, Sassoon survived the war. He was invalided out again and for eight years after the Armistice could barely write anything consequential.
And then he began to explore his soul. And that’s why you’re still reading this because so are you.
*****
All works of memoir – well, all the best of them anyway – are really pieces of fiction. Sometimes in the hands of very fine writers such as Sassoon this is intentional, but often our memories order experiences differently than they actually transpired, a trespass our minds make naturally and which I, and you, should forgive.
For the rest of his life Sassoon would work and rework those eel-like memories to better understand who he was before the war and better still the man who emerged on the other side.
Unlike the CSA who fancies Tom Friedman as your literary lodestar, my reading list would include three of those volumes by Sassoon, and they’re presently squatting — a bit dusty I concede — next to my laptop: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936).
While this posting marks the beginning of a year of critical reading it also must betray something of an end because I can’t write about Sassoon forever . There are many blog postings to do before I sleep, so end this I must.
In homage to endings, I thereby shall give you in snippets the final paragraphs of two of Sassoon’s slim trio, books so effortless to read that you could finish all three in as many days between duties.
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man begins in the gadabout days of Sassoon’s youth and ends with him promenading across the duckboards of France, whacking with his knobkerrie stick trench rats fatted with the blood of the dead:
Everything had been very quiet, the bombers muttered …
Back in the main trench, I stood on the firestep to watch the sky whitening. Sad and stricken the country emerged. I could see the ruined village below the hill and the leafless trees that waited like sentries up by Contalmaison. Down in the craters the dead water took a dull gleam from the sky. I stared at the tangles of wire and the leaning posts, and there seemed no sort of comfort left in life. My steel hat was heavy on my head while I thought how I’d been on leave last month. I remembered how I’d leant my elbows on Aunt Evelyn’s front gate. (It was my last evening.) That twilight, with its thawing snow, made a comfortable picture now. John Homeward had come past with his van, plodding beside his weary horse. He had managed to make his journey, in spite of the state of the roads … He had pulled up for a few minutes, and we’d talked about Dixon, who had been such an old friend of his.
“Ay; Tom was a good chap; I’ve never known a better…”
He had said good-bye and good-night and set his horse going again. As he turned the corner the past had seemed to go with him…
And here I was, with my knobkerrie in my hand, staring across at the enemy I’d never seen. Somewhere out of sight beyond the splintered tree-tops of Hidden Wood a bird had begun to sing. Without knowing why, I remembered that it was Easter Sunday. Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen. I sploshed back to the dug-out to call the others up for “stand-to.”
Sherston’s Progress caps the trilogy, taking Sassoon through his days in the sanitarium under the treatment of the psychiatrist Dr Rivers, back to France to get shot, then to a London hospital and the Armistice celebrations under his window.
The final scene swaddles the officer in sheets, alone in an isolated room, “restless and overwrought,” the war over but “its after-effects” stapled to him, sleepless and twitching:
Why hadn’t I stayed in France where I could at least escape from the War by being in it? Out there I had never despised my existence as I did now.
Life had seemed a glorious and desirable thing in those moments when I was believing that the bullet had finished me off, when it had seemed as if the living soul in me also was about to be extinguished. And now that angry feeling of wanting to be killed came over me – as though I were looking at my living self and longing to bash its silly face in. My little inferno was then interrupted by a nurse who brought me my tea. What the hell was wrong with me? I wondered, becoming less irrational and exasperated. And I told myself that if I wasn’t careful I should go from bad to worse, realizing that the sun had been shining in at the window all the afternoon and I’d been lying there tearing myself to pieces and feeling miserable and frustrated. I suppose my nerves really are a bit rotten, I thought, lighting my pipe and trying to be sensible. But I was still worried by feeling so inglorious. I was nearly thirty-two and nothing that I’d done seemed to have been any good.
There was some consolation in the feeling that one wasn’t as old as one’s age, but when I tried to think about the future I found that I couldn’t see it. There was no future except “the rest of the War,” and I didn’t want that. My knight-errantry about the War had fizzled out in more ways than one, and I couldn’t go back to being the same as I was before it started. The “good old days” had been pleasant enough in their way, but what could a repetition of them possibly lead to?
How could I begin my life all over again when I had no conviction about anything except that the War was a dirty trick which had been played on me and my generation? That, at any rate, was something to be angry and bitter about now that everything had fallen to pieces and one’s mind was in a muddle and one’s nerves were all on edge…
Yes; my mind was in a muddle; and it seemed that I had learned but one thing from being a soldier – that if we continue to accept war as a social institution we must also recognize that the Prussian system is the best, and Prussian militarism must be taught to children in schools. They must be taught to offer their finest instincts for exploitation by the unpitying machinery of scientific warfare. And they must not be allowed to ask why they are doing it.
And then, unexpected and unannounced, Rivers came in and closed the door behind him. Quiet and alert, purposeful and unhesitating, he seemed to empty the room of everything that had needed exorcising.
My futile demons fled him – for his presence was a refutation of wrong-headedness. I knew then that I had been very lonely while I was at the War; I knew that I had a lot to learn, and that he was the only man who could help me.
Without a word he sat down by the bed; and his smile was benediction enough for all I’d been through. “Oh, Rivers, I’ve had such a funny time since I saw you last!” I exclaimed. And I understand that this was what I’d been waiting for.
He did not tell me that I had done my best to justify his belief in me. He merely made me feel that he took all that for granted, and now we must go on to something better still. And this was the beginning of the new life toward which he had shown me the way …
It has been a long journey from that moment to this, when I write the last words of my book. And my last words shall be these – that it is only from the inmost silences of the heart that we know the world for what it is, and ourselves for what the world has made us.
