War Post

"The war was a horrible thing, but there was something tremendous about it too. I didn’t want to miss it at any price. You have to have seen human beings in this unleashed state to know what human nature is… I need to experience all the depths of life for myself, that’s why I go out, and that’s why I vontunteered." - Otto Dix, from Matthias Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beckmann, Schlemmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

Otto Dix, A Dead Horse, 1924.

Otto Dix, Flanders, 1934-36.

Otto Dix, Storm Troopers during a Gas Attack, 1924.

Otto Dix, Mealtime in the Trenches, 1923-24.

Installation view of Hans Haacke’s State of the Union at Paula Cooper Gallery,
New York, 2006. Via Art Info.

Hans Haacke, Collateral, 1991. Via Artnet.

 
December 3, 2003
Andy Carroll, founder and director of the Legacy Project, chats about the literary and historic value of soldiers’ letters home with Spc. John Sainato, a heavy equipment transporter, or HET, driver for the 11th Transportation Company. (from Army Images)

Besides the NEA’s Operation Homecoming and the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s online exhibition, there are other accessible online archives of war letters. Andrew Carroll, editor of War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars and, more recently, Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters and One Man’s Search to Find Them, has been running the Legacy Project since 1998 - "a national, all-volunteer effort that encourages Americans to honor and remember those who have served—or are currently serving—this nation in wartime by seeking out and preserving their letters and e-mails home." PBS produced a documentary, "War Letters," based on Carroll’s book, as did the History Channel, though "Dear Home" was based exclusively on the Legacy Project’s WWII letters. The writing collected through the NEA’s Operation Homecoming will be released as a book, edited by Carroll, this September.

Here’s one of the letters featured on the PBS site and from Carroll’s book War Letters. It is a letter by Dan Welch, a Staff Sergeant from Maine who served in Operation Desert Storm.

March 8, 1991.
"I can’t describe it. I mean the scene on the highway. We all just looked at it in the moonlight as we drove through the now silent carnage going God damn, God damn… There was a dead Iraqi in a car, eyes wide open, frozen in a silent scream… I guess I’ve played it so much for the last ten years that it just didn’t seem much different than the training. I’ve had field problems that were tougher. The waiting and worrying before we did it were worse than doing it. …It’s only been the last couple of days that I’ve come to realize the horror that has taken place here. …And I think it’s taken so long because with only the small number of exceptions on our part, it was almost entirely theirs…"

After the war, Welch developed asthma, memory and equilibrium problems. He has since retired from the military.

When I was a child I never wrote a message on a bomb. This week Israeli children are scrawling messages - much like American soldiers after 9/11, before the bombardment of Afghanistan - on bombs bound for Lebanon. The bombs won’t go very far away: up in an F-16 (can an Apache helicopter drop bombs?), rising thousands of feet above the dry land, until falling on Beirut, or Tyre, or a village in Southern Lebanon where "enemies of peace" live. Those bombs will fall from hot, clear skies onto the houses and apartment buildings of families who, because they are Shi’ite, or because they live in Beirut’s suburbs, or because they are Lebanese, are targeted sympathizers of Hezbollah. In Ehud Olmert’s words, the Lebanese children killed by bombs covered in the writing of Israeli children are true "enemies of piece." It’s Israel’s "moment of truth." That is why they have to die. That is why, by today’s count, almost 300 Lebanese have died.

The bombs that are covered in Hebrew with Sharpies are American-made. The warplanes and helicopters they are loaded into are American. But there is a collective shrug in our country as the government and the media distort and downplay the killing, printing headlines that endorse Israeli mathematics and count the precise number of rockets "raining" down on Haifa. They are more general, far less precise, in reporting how many died in Beirut, or Tyre, or Tripoli, or a small village whose name most American newscasters can’t pronounce.

When I was a chid I never wrote a message on a bomb. This summer I’ve been writing and documenting the current war and its historical base on this blog. In keeping a war blog for the summer, I have become obsessed with the war. If those little girls who write on bombs bound for Lebanon are obsessed with war, we’re not so different are we? My obsession involves finding more letters about Indian soldiers eating horses in Iraq in 1916, and then trying to find a military blog that will really explain how a soldier from Texas, or California, kills an Iraqi and then orders Burger King when he gets back to the base.

I wonder how the Israeli girls who write on bombs that kill Lebanese girls, and their mothers and old grandmothers, would explain their war obsession. The girls’ doting mothers take cute photos of them with digital cameras: soccer moms next to tanks, the healthy-looking women crouching to catch this moment in their daughters’ young life. Maybe they talk about this moment at dinner, at night. Maybe they try and tell the daughters that it’s fine to be obsessed with war, to write on bombs, since all they want is peace. Maybe they tell their daughters who the bombs kill, before reminding them to eat their beans. 

I’ve never written a message on a bomb. I’ve just been keeping a war blog this summer, and being obsessed. Maybe the little girls, when their 18 or 20, and in an American college perhaps, will spend a summer with their own war blog, fleshing out their obsessions, reflecting on the bombs they scrawled on.

Photos from the Associated Press

The methods of soldier etiquette were revealed earlier this week on Slate. My favorite from this Smart Card for the soldiers: "Don’t praise an Iraqi’s possessions too much. He may give them to you and expect something of equal value in return.

I just discovered Stephen P. Cohen’s The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation, which offers glimpes of Indian home life during the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force. Most of all, the British Government of India wanted men, more and more of them, to send off to the desert plains of Iraq or the squalid trenches of France. Here Cohen portrays the rectruitment center of the Punjab.

The final two years of the war brought enormous pressure upon civilian and military officials to speed the flow of recruitment of the Punjab. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, toured the countryside from division to division, district to district, exhorting the youth of the martial classes—especially the Sikhs—to come forward. In numerous speeches he argued that India’s cause was that of Britain: therefore India should contribute a proportionate number of soldiers which we calculated to be three million. He threatened that conscription would be necessary if Indians would not volunteer. A quota system was informally introduced and the threat of conscription was used as an incentive. O’Dwyer praised the districts whcih had contributed large numbers of troops and shamed those that did poorly, especially with the taunt that Bengal had provided a "keen and capable" unit. 

And now, from Anthony Swafford’s Gulf War memoir Jarhead (a jarring, useful source, regardless of its film version), a description of idle Marines being interviewed by newspaper reporters. "They shake our hands and urge us to speak freely, but they know we’ve been scripted."

"I’m from Texas, ma’am. I joined when I was eighteen rather than go to jail for a few years. Petty stuff. I finds out later my dad talked to the judge the night before and set the whole thing up. How ’bout that shit? But I’m proud of what the Corps has made me."

…I’m proud to serve my country. This is what I signed for. I’m gonna make my mom and pop and my girl proud. I come from a little town in Missouri. They’re gonna make a parade for me, they got the ribbons up already. My mama says the whole town is behind us."

The photo is an undated inspection of Indian troops, perhaps in India, or France.

 
The National Endowment for the Arts’ Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Exprerience will eventually include a literay anthology and an active archive of soldiers’ narratives of war. For now, their website includes a few sample wartime letters, memoirs, and poems, plus plenty of copy about the writing workshops of the past two yeasr that were led by Richard Bausch, Tobias Wolff, Andrew Carroll, and others distinguished writers. Last year, the NEA promoted Stephen Lang’s one-man play, Beyond Glory, an off-shoot production for Operation Homecoming, where Lang presented the voice and characeter of eight decorated veterans from World War, Korea, and Vietnam. Based on Larry Smith’s book Beyond Glory: Medal of Honor Heroes in Their Own Words, Lang’s play was performed at bases across the globe, including American ships in the Persian Gulf.

There are a few letters, memoirs, and poems available at Operation Homecoming, which supplied The New Yorker with the letters it ran in its "Life During Wartime" issue earlier this summer. 

Baghdad’s North Gate War Cemetery, where thousands of British soldiers are buried.  

While I agreed to steer away from New York Times war coverage for a few days - admittedly it dominates other news links on this site - there are two articles from the past two Sundays that I want to include here. The first, from two Sundays ago, is an article where Dexter Filkins goes searching for Gertrude Bell’s tomb, and finds the old British diplomat buried with other foreign workers and soldiers in a British cemetery in Baghdad. The North Gate War Cemetery, described in detail in Jon Lee Anderson’s The Fall of Baghdad, is a strange scene: thousands of British soldiers, plus a few British diplomat-types (Britain’s 1920s version of the Coalition Provisional Authority), buried in a cemetery that, despite the presence of devoted caretakers, is always described as aged and overgrown. There are five other British war cemeteries in Iraq, and Filkins explores most in this article, stopping for a while at Kut, the site of the disasterous seige of 1916. Here’s Robert Fisk’s own description from the early days of the current war.

Some of Anderson’s description of the North Gate War Cemetery:

"Some of the headstones had broken off and lay toppled and neglected. Those still standing were etched with Christian crosses and the insignias of the dead men’s regiments: an elephant and palm for the Ceylon Sanitary Section, a castle standard for the Essex Regiment, an a stag’s head for the Seaforth Highlanders. On the headstone for 201775 Private S. Brown of the Dorsetshire Regiment, who died on September 28, 1917, at the age of twenty-five, were carved the words,"Peace, Perfect Peace." Many of the graves were anonymous and inscribed with the same message: "Four Soldiers of the Great  War—Known unto God."

Yesterday, Sabrina Tavernise documented the injured civilians of Baghdad, whose numbers, stories, and suffering are never clearly presented, not least in the American media. First Filkins starts a thread of compelling, death-of-a-soldier stories, and now the Week in Review shows the Iraqi version of Eugene Richards photos for the Nation. The photographer of these Iraqi casualties is Farah Nosh of Getty Images. Included in the online post of "The Instant When Everything Changed" is a long slideshow of images and interviews (somehow I can’t lift a photo of a slideshow, or I’d include one here).

Steve Mumford, Kids Scrambling for Candy, Bagdad, 2004. 

Steve Mumford, Soldiers and Bathers, Tigris River, 2003. Many more of Mumford’s drawings, all part of his Baghdad Journal, are available through artnet.

World War I

1. "Mesopotamia," Rudyard Kipling
2. "Smile, Smile, Smile," Wilfred Owen 
3. "IV: The Dead," Rupert Brooke 
4. "Returning, We Hear the Larks," Issac Rosenberg 
5. "Does it Matter," Siegfried Sassoon
6. "This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong," Richard Thomas
   

Many World War I poems are widely available online, and most of these come from this Oxford online seminar on British poets of the Great War and this site at the BBC. The Oxford seminar is also connected to the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive, which includes manuscripts and letters of the British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen, plus a wealth of World War I archive photos, video footage, and interviews, presented with the help of theImperial War Museum. 

Iraq, Now 

1. "American Football (A Reflection on the Gulf War)," Harold Pinter
2. Selections and Readings, Brian Turner (Army veteran, Operation Iraqi Freedom) 
3. "The War Works Hard," Dunya Mikhail
4. "Soldier" & "Village," Joop Bersee
5. "State of the Union 2003," Sam Hamill
   
6. "Statement of Conscience," Robert Pinsky
7. "The School Among the Ruins," Adrienne Rich
   

For more contemporary war poems, check out Poets Against War, the source of many of the poems on this short list . 

The rape and murder plot of Steven Green and five others from the 101st Airborne; the Southern Poverty Law Center study of white supremacists in the military; the continued misconduct of seemingly unsophisticated soldiers.

How did the British-Indian army in Iraq 90 years ago compare to today’s American force? One can’t offer a full sweep, but this excerpt from Radhika Singha’s 2004 article for The Hindu Magazine reveals some of the composition of the British-Indian force based in Basra during World War I.

Basra had to be transformed into a port from which a major military campaign could be conducted. Roads, bridges and railways had to be constructed, unreliable rivers and water channels harnessed for transport and irrigation. The army command sent telegram after telegram pressing for labour from India to construct wharfs, quays, barracks, and storage units, and to provide a myriad other services. This could mean literally, like the Hebrews of old, digging into the mud of Mesopotamia to mould bricks for construction material. Porters were also needed to unload coal, munitions, food, and construction material and re-load it to send up river. Local labour was scarce, and the Arabs who were being "rescued from Ottoman tyranny" were usually described as vicious marauders or treacherous informers. Often a village or two or more was/were levelled to keep the locals in line.

Searching for this story in the National Archives I came across an urgent letter from the British military command in Mesopotamia asking for 450 latrine sweepers from India. This was followed by a flurry of telegrams pressing the issue. To put it impolitely, the s*** was piling up in Basra. But why was this correspondence put into a confidential file? Sweepers in the bazaars of India had heard enough about conditions in Mesopotamia to resist going overseas. The military and civil authorities were discussing whether they could impress this labour. There was another reason for discretion. Cholera had broken out in Basra, a fact which had to concealed from public knowledge, especially from those who were being sent unawares into this epidemic front. One suggestion was that the so called "criminal tribes", always under the shadow of the police, could be given a choice between some form of internment or going to Mesopotamia. The solution finally chosen was to recruit in jails, persuading low caste prisoners to become latrine sweepers for a remission of sentence.

… One strategy was to try and transform the stigmatising disciplines of jail into the honourable disciplines of the military. The men sent as sweepers began to refuse to clean latrines, saying they would only clean away mule droppings. Some of those in the labour corps began to fashion head gear and clothes resembling the soldier’s uniform. They would cultivate a military bearing, trying to take a disciplinary flogging with manly indifference, and giving a smart salute after it. Prisoners appointed as overseers asked for the designation havildar, evoking police or military service, instead of the jail designation — daffadar.

To be sure, Blackfive is a conservative military blog - heavy on the spreading of freedom, the horrors of sharia and Islamic paradise, and the horror of Democrats. But it is a very popular milblog, award-winning, and mentioned in nearly every press article I’ve read on the phenomenon of "milbloggers." In fact it might be the most popular, which is why I’m sharing two recent posts from Blackfive, which can be considered soldiers’ and veterans’ documents from war time.

The first, a post today: the Star Wars revelations from "Froggy," a former Navy Seal named Matthew Heidt, on the mounting violence around Israel.

Worst Case Scenario… Coordination
Posted By Froggy

With the now burgeoning war between Israel and Lebanon, things on this planet could get very, very ugly. 

It is well known that Lebanon is a client state of Syria and further, that Syria is a client state of Iran.  There are reports that Iranian defense officials are now in Damascus possibly pulling the strings on a coordinated assault of Israel by Hamas and Hizbullah.  Israel has already buzzed Syria’s dictator’s house, and the leader of the "militant wing" (is there a non-militant wing?) of Hamas is also under the protection of the Syrians in Damascus.  If you think that this is a potential nightmare scenario for Israel and the US, it gets worse.

Remember North Korea?  They are very close with the Iranians as well, and it is postulated by intel sources that they have been sharing nuclear and missile technology for the past two years.  KJI has no cash since we froze most of his assets in foreign banks for running a massive US currency counterfeiting operation, and the Iranians are wallowing in cash and hate the US as much as NK. 

So what if this entire international drama: NK missile launches and Hamas/Hizbullah kidnapping of Israeli soldiers is designed to initiate 2 major and geographically separated wars for the US?  If Israel and Syria end up mixing it up, the Syrians could invoke their mutual security pact with Iran.  In order to defend Syria, Iran would have to traverse Iraq, and then… it is on.  Meanwhile, if the Norkos decide to re-unify the Korean Pennisula at the same time, we would be in quite a difficult position. 

I know it sounds farfetched, but they don’t call ‘em the Axis of Evil for nothin’ now do they?  We could expect exactly ZERO assistance from a NATO that is too pussified to be of any use at this point in the middle eastern front, and besides, the Euros are rooting for the Palestinians anyway.  In NK, we would almost certainly have to go nuclear in order to have any chance of saving the 20,000 US troops and their families in ROK, which would make the Chinese very anxious.  The Chinese might just take the opportunity to retake Taiwan, but you never know.  By the way we have a defense pact with the Taiwanese, so who knows what could happen?

Let me say that I am in no way predicting that any of this will come to pass (please God No!), but I throw it out there for consideration and comment.  Discuss amongst yourselves- topic: the end of the world.  Discuss.  I feel Veklempt, very Veklempt. 

The second: this video clip by "Uncle Jimbo," another contributor to Blackfive, which was linked recently. Jimbo is a Retired Special Operations Master Sergeant whose real name is James Hanson, and somehow he’s an aspiring political and foreign policy writer. The video clip is a reaction to a recent Democractic Congressional Campaign Committee ad that included American soldiers’ coffins among shots of Hurricane Katrina, rising gas prices, and the war in Iraq.

It seems like they’re only making noise, but their voices are among the most popular of the milblogosphere.