Strange the bits of conversation you'll overhear in passing. Especially as
you grow older and hearing begins to fade. This one came from a lady talking
about a book she'd read about the war in Iraq. She liked it an awful lot.
Stayed up reading it till the early hours of the morning. Then I thought I
heard her say, "Seventeen lost in one day. It was the worst loss in American
history."
Surely I misheard. But the comment kept running through my mind as I left
the bookstore and got out into the fresh air and the hard, cleansing rain
that day. I kept shaking my head slowly, half in amazement, half in dismay,
but what she'd said wouldn't wash away. The worst loss in American history?
So much for the first day on the Normandy beaches. And the Battle of the
Bulge. Iwo Jima and Okinawa. I tried to dredge up others further back:
Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. All the way back to Gettysburg and Cold
Harbor, where the casualties on both sides
were American.
And the sunken road at Fredericksburg, which sent me to a Civil War memoir:
"I never realized before what war was. I never before felt so horribly since
I was born. To see men dashed to pieces by shot and torn into shreds by
shells during the heat and crash of battle is bad enough God knows, but to
walk alone amongst (the) slaughtered brave in the 'still small hours' of the
night . . . God grant I may never have to repeat my last night's
experience."
That was Col. Samuel Zook of Winfield Hancock's 2nd Corps writing home after
walking amidst the carnage left by one of the many futile charges that day
against the Confederates' impregnable position. The Rebs fired at will,
crouched behind the stone wall that ran along the old road. And still the
Yankees kept coming. Till they stopped. And only death was left.
Every one of those 17 troopers lost that one terrible day in Iraq will leave
a gaping wound in their family, in their unit, in what Edmund Burke called
the little platoon of society to which each of us belongs. But to think of
their loss as unique, as the "worst loss in American history," is to shrink
that history, and lose touch with the terrible sweep of the past.
Row after row with strict impunity/The headstones yield
their names to the element,/The wind whirs without recollection . . . - Allen Tate, "Ode to the Confederate Dead"
The ahistorical think of peace as the normal state of man, rather than a
prize won for a precious time by war. In amnesiac America, war is assumed to
be the unnatural aberration, an interruption of the normal course of things,
rather than a state as old as man himself. Every loss - indeed, every war -
becomes "the worst in American history."
It is good to live in the present, but to live only in the present is to
deprive it of proportion, perspective, meaning. Without some appreciation
for the past, we cannot live fully in this present. We reduce it to one
dimension. And everything that happens seems to be happening for the first
time.
No wonder we are always taken by surprise. We forget we can be awakened from
our happy dream at any moment. On any day of the calendar. Like September
11. Or December 7. And we are regularly shocked. Imagine: There are people
in the world who wish us ill, who are willing to spend years to carry out
one devastating attack, who live to die. And kill. Unimaginable. Unless we
have some sense of history and our place in it.
Learned fools write impressive books about The End of History, but it
refuses to end. It goes on producing one shipwreck after another, but some
of us are genuinely astounded, and angered, to discover that we're not on
some luxury cruise. War? There must be some mistake. Or a conspiracy. This
isn't what we ordered, waiter, this isn't what we ordered at all. Can we
send it back?
We'd all prefer to be tourists in history rather than participants. Who
wouldn't? But just because we're not interested in war doesn't mean war
isn't interested in us. And one day, one perfectly ordinary day, the
passenger planes go crashing into the New York skyscrapers, or the Zeros
come in low over Pearl Harbor. And we are all so surprised. Again.
I once took the popular cemetery tour down in New Orleans. The pre-Katrina
New Orleans, before history struck there, too, three years ago. It was
peaceful in the cemetery, lulling. All the love and loss recorded on the
cracked old tombstones was so long ago, the pain had faded. Only the fading
inscriptions remained. One felt history there no more than the chipped
angels on the stone monuments might have felt a mother's pain. It was just
an afternoon's entertainment.
Then I got to a little section of plain white, government-issue tombstones,
like the ones, row on row of them, at the National Cemetery on Confederate
Boulevard here in Little Rock. But all of these bore a single date: June 6,
1944. The Normandy beachhead.
Realization struck: All of us wandering around the old cemetery were
breathing free because these men, some of them just boys, really, had died
that day. And so many before them, and to come. It was noon in New Orleans
under a bright sun, but I felt the shadows lengthening. I felt history
beckoning, and realized anew that those who decline to shape it will, one
perfectly ordinary day, be unable to escape it.