Re: Hurtgen forest

Thanks for the clarification. On that level I can agree with you. War puts
the individual face to face with death and forces them to act against their
very own instinct for survival. I can see the intensity of the experience,
and its life-changing nature, being some looked back upon even with some
reverence.

I still don't think at least some of the WWI poets spoke of it in quite those
terms :). But then some of them were writing from the trenches themselves
and never made it out of them alive.

And I'm certainly in no position to argue. I'll let your Scot buddies argue
with Sassoon and Owen and Brooke, and those three argue with your Scot
buddies.

The Vietnam Vets I've spoken with over here either didn't like talking about
it, or didn't talk about it very pleasantly. One guy told me "you don't know
fear until you've been wading through water in the middle of the night with a
rifle held up over your head and can't see your hand in front of your face,
but know they're out there ready to shoot you."

He wasn't crazy about the experience and didn't seem to think he got anything
out of it but psychological scars that lasted years. He was hardly a whimp
-- but he did say until about three years prior he carried a pistol
everywhere he went and slept with one under his pillow.

Another guy said he used to take Vietnamese hookers out into the forest and
enjoy their services, shooting them in the head when he was done. He spoke of
it with a great sense of shame, saying that you really couldn't tell
combatants from non-combatants in that war. Buddies you drank with and
whores you slept with one night were planting bombs the next.

Another guy was a carpet layer. Around about 1986 I had the pleasure of
doing the electrical work on a house where he was laying carpet. I poured
some PVC glue into a bottle cap and put a .22 caliber shot (dummy) into it,
then set the glue on fire. I set the whole thing on a window sill in the
room in which he was working.

Needless to Say he jumped out of his skin :). Everyone does. But this guy
REALLY did and didn't quite get back into his skin for several minutes
afterwards. He explained to me he was a Vietnam Vet and had just stopped
having horrible dreams about 2-3 years before (this was mid 80s too) so would
I PLEASE not screw with him in at least that particular way :).

ANYWAY, I don't think any of these three individuals would speak of war the
way your Scot buddies did. That's not to invalidate the experience you've
heard related, but to add to it.

Things don't always work out that way.

Jim

Scottie Bowman wrote:

>
> Jim,
>
> When I wrote: 'gloried in war' I was laying myself open
> to the interpretation that I took these great writers to be
> exalting the 'glories' of war - the pro patria mori,
> the crowning with laurels, the exaltation of the charge,
> the triumphs ... & the rest.
>
> Not really. It derived, rather, from a (possibly) Scots
> usage where 'glorying in' implies an endless, thrilled
> obsession with something. I could simply have said:
> 'they loved to talk about it ...' As indeed they did.
>
> I can only repeat that the veterans I've known personally
> enjoyed a sureness & sense of priorities, an intense
> savouring of life which, in their moments of more intimate
> self-revelation they attributed to having once faced 'real bullets'
> - not just letters from the bank manager; having once shared
> the brotherhood of men who had risked their lives for each
> other - not just tramped the same golf course. They did, indeed,
> like Wendell Holmes, appear to look on the experience as
> something incommunicable & uniquely valuable.
>
> I envied them & still do. Physical courage has always been,
> for me, the gold standard. Risking unpopularity by standing
> up before the local school board to defend some curricular choice
> or other will never be in the same league as jumping out into
> the darkness with a platoon of airborne. Facing this extremity
> in the context of war is such an ancient, central component
> of a man's experience on this earth that I don't really see how
> a serious writer could allow himself to ignore it.
>
> I have nothing to add to your own remarks on war as policy.
> It will always be one of the options, depending on the circumstances,
> sometimes taken, sometimes rejected. Pacifism is not a policy.
> It's a posture - to be indulged in a college debate, perhaps,
> but not really available to someone whose land has just been
> invaded or who has watched his parents shipped off to Treblinka.
>
> Scottie B.
>
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