I appeared in the paper today. The second time ever. (The first involved being at a bar to watch the Badgers in a bowl game with my drunk friend raking on Mormons to the reporter. Then Chris Farley showed up...) The Wisconsin State Urinal printed that letter to the editor that I whisked off a couple days ago. It was, of course, bastardized and, to my eyes, barely recognizable and nearly unreadable. They kept the first and last paragraphs and even they were trimmed. While my general point got across, readers were deprived of my wonderful prose. I crafted an astute letter with each paragraph wielding metaphor and simile to compare the editor's view to that of the habits of children while the great librarians were akin to loving, knowledgeable parents. And the fuckers eviscerated it! At least they corrected my spelling faux pas.
Dinner turned out pretty well. My landlord really like the black beans. There is precious little foodstuff that bacon cannot in some way enhance. Yes, that wonderful, magical animal.
I think something is wrong with me. Different at the very least. My landlord and I were talking about Dean's speech and the conversation turned to speeches generally. I asked him if he'd ever heard the Great Speeches of the 20th Century set. He hadn't. So I grab the box and show it to him. He was enthralled. It's a 4CD set collecting bits of great speeches from - you guessed it - the previous century. So I listened to some of the tracks. Lou Gehrig's farewell speech, FDR declaring war on Japan, Ronald Reagan on the Berlin Wall. The very recent ones have great fidelity but are somehow not as appealing to me as the ones from the early 1900s such as Woodrow Wilson addressing the American Indians. The voices are tinny and sound as if they're struggling to get out of the speakers. But these are the ones that capture my imagination. I suppose it's because the I watched the ones from the 1980s and 90s on TV. They have been soundbyted to death and have lost their impact on me, in a sense. But hearing Hitler speak about the German occupation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia just takes me into terra incognita. As I've had some German, I understand bits & pieces but I mainly listen to the tone of his voice, his enunciation. I try to relegate history to the back of my mind but it's difficult. Pogroms and fire bombings. Children being vaporized in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Bataan Death Marchers who dug graves only to be buried alive in them. I manage to shove the images of these things into some recess and keep them at bay for a little while so I can listen to Hitler as someone who could not imagine the horrors he would sanction. To hear a dictator in the making as opposed to a personification of Lucifer.
World War II occupies this weird spot in my brain. As far back as I can remember, my father has been fascinated by it and he reckoned himself an amateur historian. We had shelves and shelves of books dedicated to nearly every aspect of the conflict. He had most volumes of History of United States Naval Operations in World War II by Samuel Eliot Morison. If had wanted to know all the details of the war in North Africa, it was there. Books documenting tanks, planes, guns, uniforms - it was a mania. My dad would go to bars and strike up conversations with any WWII veterans he met and was especially keen on guys who saw action in the Pacific theater and even more so about those who were at Iwo Jima. While he met former Marines who said they were there, none of them would talk about their experiences. Who can blame them for not wanting to relive the carnage in public?
"The Marines worked together to drive the enemy from the high ground. Their goal was to capture the area that appropriately became known as the 'Meat Grinder'...The 36-day assault resulted in more than 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 dead. Of the 20,000 Japanese defenders, only 1,083 survived...Historians described U.S. forces' attack against the Japanese defense as 'throwing human flesh against reinforced concrete'...Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded to Marines and sailors, many posthumously - more than were awarded for any other single operation during the war."
Iwo Jima is only 8 square miles of island and in March of 1945 it had 25000+ corpses littering it. I can still remember this picture in one of my dad's books. It showed the charred face of a Japanese soldier. The Japanese were dug in and lived in a series of pillboxes and tunnels. American G.I.s emptied these tunnels one by one with grenades and flame-throwers and the picture in my head is of a Japanese soldier who was emerging from one of these tunnels when he had a stream of flaming oil shot at him. Not sure why that image is burned into my memory but it is.
So I grew up and started going to bars and met veterans myself. Mostly from Vietnam but a couple from Korea. Two or three sobbed uncontrollably as they told their stories of having a friend die in their arms. I used to work with a Vietnam vet. The shit he did, the hells he endured boggle the mind. Shooting 2 old ladies in the head as per his COs orders. Being alone in a foxhole for nearly 2 weeks. Killing (and gutting) a teenage boy who attacked him.
It's funny in only the saddest way how history repeats itself.
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