Veterans’ Days
And nights. Five years, 10 years, 60-odd years in. Here’s the Boston Herald’s Peter Gelzinis with an old vet trying to get it all out.
“It was strange that I was never hit with a night terror until just last year,” Garland said. “I saw this young kid attached to the 34th Division talk about returning to Iraq. We fought alongside the 34th in Europe. That night, I woke up screaming. I dreamed I was riding in a Humvee that had hit one of those roadside bombs.”
Joe Garland of Gloucester finally got his book out, Unknown Soldiers: Reliving World War II in Europe.
Today is the day we recognize all who served, whether they were sent into combat or not. The combat is the part that never lets you stop serving, though, and that works for non-combatants as well.
Another great book, Dexter Filkins’ magnificent The Forever War. It has been favorably compared to Michael Herr’sDispatches, and belongs on the shelf next to it. Not so much a lyrical ode to PTSD as Dispatches, though, more a matter-of-fact, practical guide to how you get it. It is Filkins’ memoir of his extensive time, years, on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, brutally honest and self-critical of his own role, responsibilities and failings, while it also presents what can only be objectively described as crazy self-destructive courage and determination, whether it is his reporting efforts going house-to-house with grunts in Fallujah or trying to stay sane by jogging every day in Baghdad, and contacts with Iraqis at all levels, in all kinds of places. It is an impressionistic groundview that rises above to become an expansive bird’s eye view of the war, and mandatory reading for anyone who tries to understand it. Dedicated to three people who died so he could do his job.
Back in the world, people were serious, about the fillings of their sandwiches, about the winner of last night’s ballgame. I couldn’t blame them, of course. For me, the war sort of flattened things out, flattened things out here and flattened them out there, too. Toward the end, when I was still there, so many bombs had gone off so many times they no longer shocked or even roused; the people screamed in silence and in slow motion. And then when I got back to the world, and the weddings and picnics were the same as everything had been in Iraq, silent and slow and heavy and dead. Your days may die but your dreams explode…
People asked me about the war, of course, They asked me whether it was as bad as people said. “Oh definitely,” I told them, and then, usually I stopped. In the beginning I’d go on a little longer, tell them a story or two, and I could see their eyes go after a couple of sentences. We drew closer to each other, the hacks and the bvets and the diplomats, anyone who’d been over there. My friend George, an American reporter I’d gotten to know in Iraq, told me he couldn’t have a conversation with anyone about Iraq who hadn’t been there. I told him I couldn’t have a conversation with anyone who hadn’t been there about anything at all …
After I got back I called the mother of a marine I’d gotten to know over there, a nineteen-year-old from a small town in Georgia …
After he’d come home, for about six weeks or so, she had him sleep in bed with her, on account of his nightmares. He’d turn in his sleep and sweat and moan, and sometimes scream, and she’d hold him and look at him and try to help him ride out the terrible storms. She seemed kind of embarrassed for telling me that, but I didn’t mind.
The soldiers and their wives and the moms and dads, they wanted to talk. Maybe nobody else did but they did. Back in the world, there was a kind of underground conversation going on … “
Filkins is 10 years in, back to Afghanistan in 1998, and it has been constant, building in intensity for him. He and I just missed each other 10 years ago, when we occupied the same hotel room in Muzzafarabad, Pakistani-held Kashmir, and hired the same Kashmiri translator a week apart. Tariq wanted to know if I knew Mr. Dexter Filkins from the LA Times, a very good journalist who had a satellite phone in a little suitcase that he set up on the balcony, right there. Kashmir was the first time I got mortared or shot at in any way, a brief terrifying, exhiliarating experience, much more so than the other times.
It’s five years on for me as combat goes, which was a considerably briefer and less intense experience than Filkins describes. I never had a single nightmare or dream. Not one. Just waking images, a lot of those, with adrenaline surges and sometimes emotional reactions. Those have subsided considerably in regularity and intensity, though I still think about it all the time. Not my own experience necessarily. Just the thing. Hard not to when it is going on all the time, but even thinking about wars that have been over for hundreds of years can do it. Most of my old friendships are gone. I think that tends to happen in middle age anyway, but the only connection I feel is to people have been part of this kind of thing, even when I argue with them, them and a few people I work with, because daily newspapering is a foxhole of sorts. It’s sort of like being a different species than everyone else, and maybe, with the hard edges you grow, a bit like being a Klingon, which must suck even for Klingons. I’m tired of it, and I’m not even in it any more. Tired of thinking about war, tired of our nation being in war, tired of people being called on to do terrible things and die or get maimed. I wish it could be over and done with. But we don’t get that. Good title, “The Forever War.”
Blackfive with Staff Sgt. Dean the Badass Marine and his badass poem “Free.” It’s a major buckup. As in buck up and get on with it.
Neptunus Lex with more vid: The War Was In Color.
My old war buddy Sig, live from Camp Taji with a 61-year-old vet who just won’t quit.
Mudville with his Veterans’ Day standby. Grandad’s Nov. 11, 1918 letter ”Guns on the Q.T. — Thank God.”
Castle Argghhh!! “Today is my day. Today is SWWBO’s day. Today is my dad’s day … ”
The Beeb is on right now, with a program about how the children of combat veterans are affected. Second-hand mental health problems. Can’t find a link, maybe it’ll pop up.
Winds of Change discusses liberal patriotism with some pals.
Veterans Day linkfest at Malkin.
A Reynolds’ reader wishes Hollywood would get its head out of its politics.
Finally, heartfelt thanks from citizen Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom, where reader Tim McNabb replies with the simple sincerity of a soldier:
Your welcome Jeff.
And to all you douchebags on the left who, in your mendacious fits of juvenile petulance lash and spit at the nation in which you are free to be a lashing, spitting, mendacious petulant, juvenile douchebag, you too are welcome.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:04 am on Tuesday, November 11, 2008
3 Responses to “Veterans’ Days”
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November 11th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
[...] Other thoughts, from J Crittenden. Posted by Jeff G. @ 12:05 pm | Trackback SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “A Veteran’s Day [...]
November 11th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Please add: http://tcoverride.blogspot.com/2008/11/were-broke.html
November 11th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
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