Monday, May 27, 2024
Memorial Day
In bed by 9:30 and up at 2:20 a.m. to turn the slow cooker down to "warm." By 3 a.m., Lilly emerged from wherever she had been sleeping to be let out. I did some shoulder exercises while I waited for her customary long standing still on the sidewalk letting her eyes get accustomed to the dark before doing her business, after which I gave her a treat and refreshed her water bowl. At 4 o'clock, I took my 20 mg. pill and ate my oatmeal & berries.
Prednisone, day 15. I took my 10 mg. pill a little late after our dinner of pizza last night. I see that I'm less reliable about remembering to take that evening pill than I am w/r/t the morning 20 mg. pill I take with the overnight oatmeal. My shoulders were a bit achy yesterday and remain so this morning, with an achiness that seems focused on the joints rather than on the surrounding muscles. I continued to eat like a horse yesterday, satisfying a tremendous appetite brought on by the prednisone With my weak legs and balance/unsteadiness challenges, weight and glucose increases are a real danger.
I'm grateful that I have become accustomed and comfortable with being awake in the middle of the night with about 5 hours of sleep behind me, knowing I will probably be able to get more towards morning. I light my Kitty candle votive light and recall my mother's advice and Bing Crosby's song Count Your Blessings. "When I'm worried and I can't sleep / I count my blessings instead of sheep / And I fall asleep counting my blessings. / When my bankroll is getting small / I think of when I had none at all / And I fall asleep counting my blessings
In any case, as I sit alone early in the morning on this Memorial Day, I'm thinking of the two friends who died in Vietnam, Bill 'Moon' Mullen and J. Forrest Trembley, both pilots. Bill was an A-4 pilot and the G-2 Intelligence Officer at Wing Headquarters in DaNang. He was shot down on April 29, 1966, over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, two weeks before he was scheduled to return to the States. "J" was one year behind me in the NROTC Unit at Marquette. He became a Navy A-6 pilot and was shot down over China, returning from a bombing mission north of Hanoi on August 21, 1967. Both Bill and "J" were reported as 'missing in action' since their bodies had not been recovered. Bill's wife, Barbara Mullen, wrote a book, Every Effort, about her terrible experiences trying to get information about her husband and about living with their two sons not knowing whether Bill was alive or dead. Bill's remains were never discovered. "J's" partial remains (and dog tags) were repatriated in March 2005 following identification by mitochondrial DNA and were buried in Arlington National Cemetery on June 1, 2005.
I think now of how few people I know that have served in Vietnam. Geri's dear cousin Michael McHale, another Marine, who fell in a punji pit and was poisoned and otherwise injured on patrol and suffered terribly thereafter, as did his parents, especially his mother, Geri's Aunt Evelyn. My law faculty colleague Tom Cannon, another Marine, was stationed very near the DMZ and North Vietnam border. Who else? I can't think of anyone. We're a dying, vanishing breed. In my last entry in yesterday's journal, I wrote about being 'anxious and uncertain'' at the end of my tour of duty overseas. Here is what I wrote in my memoir about that time:
I was finally going home and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It had been a year since I had seen your mother and her family and my family. I had spent a year in the company of men, not just men, but Marines. I had lived in a tent, a ‘tin hut’ and BOQs and spent just about every night I wasn’t working at an officers’ club smoking and drinking and gambling and week by week becoming more skeptical of the likelihood of achieving success in our Grand Mission and more contemptuous of our government. I hadn’t been engaged in close combat, like the grunts and the pilots, but there was no pretending that we were not engaged in the death and destruction business. I was not a different person from the one who had left a year before, but I was surely a changed person. I was sadder inside and deeply cynical about our government, its truthfulness and its competence, its good will and its good faith. I had no faith in the war or in our government or in the government of South Vietnam, even in the middle of 1966. I still had a deep sense of identification with the Marine Corps, or perhaps more accurately, with Marines, which I have even to this day (‘Once a Marine, always a Marine’ and all that), but I increasingly despaired that any good would come from all the killing. And, of course, I had just learned that Moon Mullen was (or was not) dead. I was not ebullient as I left Camp Schwab to return to the States – unsettled and anxious would better describe how I felt.
Memories on this Memorial Day. Further your affiant saith not.
Reinhard Heydrich was raised a Catholic. He was an altar boy, like me, and a regular Mass attendee. He came from a reasonably wealthy, highly cultured, musical family. He was a talented musician himself. After World War I, he joined various anti-communist and anti-semitic organizations and ultimately the Nazi Party. When the Nazis took over the government, he ultimately rose to lead the Gestapo and hold high rank in the SS. He was a moral monster, one of the world's worst human beings. On this date in 1942, he was the victim of a grenade attack by Czech rebels resisting German occupation. He died of septicemia from his wound a week later. In retaliation, Hitler ordered that 10,000 Czechs be murdered. He later decided simply to annihilate the town of Lidice, thought to have some connection with Heydrich's assassination.
On the night of June 9–10, German police and SS officials surrounded Lidice. They ordered the approximately 500 residents to gather in the village square. Once the townspeople assembled, members of the SS and police separated men and boys fifteen years and older from the women and younger children. Almost immediately, the Germans shot 173 men and boys at a local farmstead. They then razed the town to the ground. In the following weeks, the Germans executed more than 20 other townspeople from Lidice at a shooting range in Prague.
A different fate awaited the women and children of Lidice, who were sent to a nearby town. There, they were again separated. Most women and girls 16 years and older were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Of the 203 women from Lidice, 53 died in the Nazi concentration camp system before the end of World War II. Seven women were shot alongside the men of their families.
Most of Lidice’s children were sent to Lodz (Łódź), a city in German-occupied Poland. There, SS personnel from the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt, RuSHA) screened the children for what they considered to be racial characteristics. They determined that nine of the children had a supposedly Germanic racial background. Selected for Germanization, these children were sent to a group home in German-occupied Poland. There, they were given new German names and taught to speak German. Officials from the Lebensborn program then placed them with adoptive German parents.
The Germans murdered the approximately 80 other Lidice children whom they had not selected for Germanization. Evidence suggests that this group of children was gassed at the Chelmno killing center.
A few Lidice children were not sent to Lodz (Łódź). Seven children under the age of one were sent to a German orphanage in Prague. Another seven Lidice children were born in the months that followed the town’s annihilation. Most of these newborns were also placed in orphanages. Of these fourteen very young children, eight survived the war.
The Nazis annihilated the town of Lidice and destroyed the families who lived there. Not a single Lidice family survived the war without experiencing devastating loss.
I wish I could encrypt this journal entry so only I could read it because I am doing what, it is said, should never be done: thinking of Israel's actions towards Palestinians and comparing them with those of the Nazis. Verboten. Taboo. Almost blasphemous, but hard to resist looking at Israel's long history at least since the Nakba in 1947-48, the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in 1967, the war in Lebanon in 1982, and the wars on Gaza, especially the current one.
What strikes me about the connection between Hitler's wishes to murder 10,000 innocent Czechs because of the attack on Heydrich, and the annihilation of Lidice, and the current war on Gaza is the relevance of the principle of Proportionality in the law of war and international humanitarian law.
International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is built upon certain core principles: military necessity, distinction, humanity, and proportionality. The principle of proportionality, along with these other core principles, is part of customary international law applicable both in international and non-international armed conflicts. The test for proportionality has been codified in Article 51(5)(b) of Additional Protocol I, which prohibits indiscriminate attacks that: “may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” Additionally, the requirement to implement feasible precautions to mitigate risks to civilians in armed conflict is included with these core principles, which are universally recognized as the baseline framework for regulating armed conflict. [From Just Security: The Principle of Proportionality in the DOD Law of War Manual]
There is a lot written on The Principle of Proportionality, both regulatory and interpretive and there is no point in my wallowing in the weeds on the legalities and legalisms. What is clear is that the government of Israel has chosen to destroy, in very large measure, the entire civil infrastructure of Gaza and, in the process, to kill, injure, maim, dislocate, and otherwise harm tens of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Hospitals, schools, universities, places of worship, power plants, clean water facilities, you name it - Israel has destroyed it to make Gaza unlivable and its people devastated by starvation and disease. Only God knows how many thousands of Gazan civilians have been killed in this war, and how many civilians are buried under Gaza's rubble. Israel's defenses are (1) actually we are being very careful not to do what you plainly see us doing, and (2) what about what Hamas did to us on October 7th? The first is a form of 'I'm not pissing on your shoes; it's raining out" and the latter is classic whataboutism. Virtually no one takes issue with the judgment that what Hamas did on October 7th was horrific, criminal, unjustifiable under any theory, and justified a retaliatory defensive and protective military response. Virtually no one denies Israel has a right to defend itself and its people. The issue is whether Israel's cataclysmic response to October 7th has been, as President Biden admitted, "indiscriminate" and "over the top." In the judgment of most of the world, the answer is "Yes." Only Israel, the United States, and perhaps a handful of outliers say "No." Sometime in the next year or so, the International Court of Justice will render a judgment on whether Israel has violated the International Genocide Convention. Sometime in the future we may (or may not) have a judgment on whether Benjamin Netanyahu and/or his defense minister Yoav Galland have violated the international laws of war. In the meantime, perhaps one may be forgiven for thinking of Israel's war on Gazan Palestinians on this anniversary of the assassination attack on Reinhard Heydrich and Hitler's idea of the Principle of Proportionality.
A telling story in this morning's WaPo: Far-right Israeli settlers step up attacks on aid trucks bound for Gaza: The settler groups use a web of publicly accessible WhatsApp groups to track the trucks and coordinate attacks, providing a window into their activities. By Loveday Morris
Spoon River Anthology. I've been re-reading and re-enjoying Edgar Lee Masters' masterpiece. It's the main reading in my Throne Room Collection. Masters was a lawyer and the son of a lawyer. Indeed, he practiced for years in Clarence Darrow's firm. His lawyer and judge epitaphs reveal that he didn't find anything sanctifying or ennobling in a life in Law. For example, consider my favorite, John M. Church, who, like the profession as a whole, serves mainly the monied interests of their world in retaining and augmenting their wealth and power, not to pursue justice.
I was attorney for the "Q" / And the Indemnity Company which insured / The owners of the mine.
I pulled the wires with judge and jury, / And the upper courts, to beat the claims / Of the crippled, the widow and orphan, / And made a fortune thereat.
The bar association sang my praises / In a high-flown resolution. / And the floral tributes were many
But the rats devoured my heart / And a snake made a nest in my skull!
or the tiny tyrant of the County Courthouse, Judge Selah Lively, who used his judicial power to gain revenge for his prior insignificance:
Suppose you stood just five feet two, / And had worked your way as a grocery clerk, / Studying law by candlelight / Until you became an attorney at law?
And then suppose by your diligence, /And regular church attendance, /You became attorney for Thomas Rhodes, / Collecting notes and mortgages,
And representing all the widows / in the Probate Court? And through it all /They jeered at your size, and laughed at / your clothes / And your polished boots? And then suppose
You became County Judge? / And Jefferson Howard and Kinsey Keene, / And Harmon Whitney, and all the giants /Who had sneered at you, were forced to stand /Before the bar and say "Your Honor"—
Well, don't you think it was natural / That I made it hard for them?
or the perfidious Circuit Judge:
Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions / Eaten in my head-stone by the wind and rain i
Almost as if an intangible Nemesis or hatred / Were marking scores against me, / But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory.
I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches, / Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored, / Not on the right of the matter.
O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone!
For worse than the anger of the wronged, / The curses of the poor, / Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear, / Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer, / Hanged by my sentence, / Was innocent in soul compared with me.
On the other hand, there was the self-righteous, puritanical State's Attorney Fallas, redeemed and become merciful through a terrible accident:
I, the scourge-wielder, balance-wrecker, /Smiter with whips and swords; / I, hater of the breakers of the law; / I, legalist, inexorable and bitter, / Driving the jury to hang the madman, Barry Holden,
Was made as one dead by light too bright for eyes, /And woke to face a Truth with bloody brow:
Steel forceps fumbled by a doctor's hand / Against my boy's head as he entered life /Made him an idiot.
I turned to books of science / To care for him.
That's how the world of those whose minds are sick /Became my work in life, and all my world.
Poor ruined boy! You were, at last, the potter / And I and all my deeds of charity / The vessels of your hand.
Major accomplishment: I took Rachel out for a walk from the house to the cul de sac, my first walk down our street in probably more than a year. The real accomplishment was getting over my false pride and embarrassment about relying on a rollator. Or was it simply laziness, lethargy, and/or lassitude that has kept me indoors in my chair for so long? In any case, it felt good to be out walking and it reminded me again of what an upper-class neighborhood we live in, with large houses on large lots that are beautifully landscaped, a treehuggers eden.
