Ash Wednesday

 On Ash Wednesday, 2003, the eve of America's invasion of Iraq, I wrote in one of my quarterly letters to the supporters of the House of Peace, where I then worked:

"Fifty-eight years ago today, my father was a 24 year old Marine private on Iwo Jima.  In a battle that lasted little more than a month on an island about 1/3rd the area of Manhattan, almost 7,000 Americans and more than 21,000 Japanese were killed.  It remains the bloodiest, costliest battle in Marine Corps history.

Thirty-seven years ago today, I was a 24 year old Marine first lieutenant stationed in Vietnam.  The following year brought harder duty, as ‘CACO’ or Casualties Assistance Calls Officer in the Philadelphia area.  Vietnam was not my sternest test; it was Philadelphia, for every six days I was on call to notify next-of-kins, usually poor or working class people, that their son or husband, father or brother, had been killed or wounded in Vietnam.  A national mission that had started out in March, 1965, as fending off invading North Vietnamese shifted to “winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people,” and ended – unsuccessfully – as simply trying to avoid military and political defeat by a Third World opponent.  At the end of America’s longest war, there were 47,378 American KIAs (plus almost 11,000 non-hostile deaths), 304,704 WIAs and 2,338 MIAs.  The numbers of Vietnamese men, women, and children killed, wounded, and missing were many times higher.

My father returned from Iwo Jima and I returned from Vietnam with campaign ribbons, but no Purple Hearts.  We are not listed among the casualties of World War II or Vietnam.  Nonetheless, my Dad knows and I know that our lives, like those of millions of others who don’t show up in casualty statistics, were forever affected by the war experience.  Wartime casualty statistics always lie; the suffering and devastation wrought by the unimaginable violence of war can never be accurately measured: not only for the vanquished, but also for the victors; not only for the combatants, but also for their families.

I was writing from personal knowledge.  The Battle of Iwo Jima horribly wounded my father and, through my father, it injured his wife and his children.  To the extent that I developed bad coping behaviors in dealing with him and his condition after the war, it impacted me and, through me, my family.  Thus, in a very real sense, wounds from that battle 60 years ago are still felt in our family.

In March of this year [2003],  I drove to Florida to visit my Aunt Monica and my Dad who was visiting her.  Both are now dead.  On the way, I listened to a ‘book on tape’ by Farley Mowat entitled “And No Birds Sang.”   The book describes the author’s service in the Canadian Army in the Italian campaign of World War II.  In it, he quoted a letter he received during the war from his father, himself a World War I veteran:

'Keep it in mind during the days ahead that war does inexplicable things to people and no man can guess how it is going to affect him until he has had a really stiff dose of it.  The most unfortunate ones after any war are not those with missing limbs.   They’re the ones who have had their spiritual feet knocked out from under them.  The beer halls and gutters are still full of such poor bastards from my war and nobody understands or cares what happened to them.  I remember two striking examples of two men from my old company in the 4th Battalion, both damn fine fellows yet both committed suicide in the lines.  They did not shoot themselves.  They let the Germans do it because they had reached the end of the tether.  They never knew what was the matter with them.  They had become empty husks, were spiritually depleted, were burned out."

In another book, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins discusses Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or more accurately, Remarque’s psychological and spiritual condition after the War to End All Wars.  He describes Remarque as

". . . a deeply disconsolate man, searching for an explanation for his dissatisfaction.  And in his search, Remarque eventually hit upon the Kriegserleben, the war experience. . .  “All of us were”, he said of himself and his friends in an interview in 1929, “and still are, restless, aimless, sometimes excited, sometimes indifferent, and essentially unhappy.”"

  . . .

Remarque himself stated the purpose of All Quiet in a brief and forceful prefatory comment:

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure . . . It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war."

On this Ash Wednesday in 2022, as Vladimir Putin's patriotic troops march on Ukraine to kill, and maim, and terrify Ukraine's patriotic troops and civilians, I think of other Ash Wednesdays, and of Iwo Jima, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the wars the great powers have waged.  I think of all the children who will suffer, all the parents, the wives (and husbands,) all the others who will suffer along with the Ukrainians and, yes, the Russian soldiers who are Putin's pawns.  I think of ashes smeared on foreheads and of the reminder "Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris."   And I think that wars are never truly "over."  The awful effects carry on in the lives of the survivors on all sides of the evil exercises, from generation to generation, in saecula saeculorum.