Time Travel – 9/11

Shortly before 9:00 a.m.  on September 11, 2001, the guy across the passage came into my office, and told me that a friend of his had just called him with the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Since Chris specialized in broad irony and kidded a lot, I snorted. He said, no, he was serious. I turned to my computer and attempted to pull up CNN, then several other news sites. No dice. As I began to realize that this was serious, my beloved Barbara called me from her office, where they had a television, telling me that both towers at the WTC were burning furiously on very high floors. The second  plane had just crashed into the South tower. Barbara had seen that impact live.

We had no television in our department, so I headed upstairs to the only cable TV in the building, in the Executive Director’s office. I met my boss, the deputy ED, on the way, bound on the same mission. She entered the office and asked the ED if we could turn on CNN, and he grudgingly acceded. As Betsy surfed the channels looking for CNN, she passed the Cartoon Network. The ED grumped that watching cartoons was a waste of time. Once Betsy found a news channel, the program held us horrified, awed, transfixed. The ED remarked that we could do nothing about the events, so it was a waste of time to watch. I took the hint and returned downstairs, spending the next several hours gleaning news from calls to Barbara and other interested parties outside the range of the ED’s influence. I went home for lunch and watched some more.

This morning I caught up on that morning’s events by way of a broadcast on MSNBC of the Today show’s tapes of their broadcast that morning. The tapes began at 8:45, the time of the first impact, and continued uninterrupted through the report from Pennsylvania of Flight 93 crashing. I quit watching after that.

In an way, viewing the taped show eight years after the fact gave me a sort of eerie prescience,  listening in dread to Jim Miklaszewski talking from the Pentagon, right up to the impact of flight 77, on the opposite side of the huge building from his office, fortunately, so that he felt only a short shaking of the windows and a dull thump. I felt like a time traveler, looking over the shoulder of real-time participants in events I already knew in complete detail. The weight of that knowledge was increased by the events and revelations of the past eight years, of course, war and deaths and revelations of the how and when of those terrible events.

Once again, all I can say is, God’s mercy on the victims and their families.

V-J Day

On this day, in 1945, Emperor Hirohito of Japan announced the acceptance by his government of the Potsdam Declaration, and the unconditional surrender of Japan. The war in the Pacific was over, as the war in Europe had been since 8 May. Hundreds of thousands of United States Naval, Marine and Army forces were spared the bloody assault on the Japanese homeland.

My father, Fegi as the family called him, was among that host of potential casualties, a young Lieutenant (JG) in the Navy. I was sixteen months old, toddling around my grandparents’ house in Arlington, Virginia. Fegi would be coming home to begin his life as a father, and I would know him. My sisters later would be born in their turn, so V-J Day is of inestimable importance to my family.

Another who counts this day crucial to his life spoke of its importance on MSNBC  this morning.  Jon Meacham, a native of Chattanooga, now Editor of Newsweek magazine, observed that he might not have been born had invasion of Japan been necessary. His grandfather, in the Navy in the Pacific on that day,  survived to return home and have a son, who in turn fathered Jon.

The incremental consequences of that surrender still resonate in the generations then unborn. Thank you, veterans who were spared to return, and those who left their lives ended early in the Pacific, and elsewhere.

My father had a long life, it was to be 55 years before we sang the Navy Hymn at his funeral:

Oh hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea! Amen.

Sometimes our cry is heard.

Fading: The Greatest Generation

Two sixty-five year marks were reached this year, one broadly historic and social, another purely personal to me. A couple of months ago, I observed my sixty-fifth birthday. Today, it has been sixty-five years since the massive invasion of Europe set in motion the last eleven months of the Third Reich.

The first two months of my life were spent in a world consumed in a colossal struggle between Allied forces and the Nazi and Japanese military machines, with most of Europe and Asia dominated by our adversaries in each theatre. Millions of men and women, including my young father, were thousands of miles away from home, forged into armies and navies contending for the future of freedom as defined by the western democracies. Truly, these millions earned the later descriptive title of “The Greatest Generation.” They fought and died and suffered wounds, prevailed in battle and returned home to build lives and a peacetime rebirth of those nations their enemies sought to destroy.

This morning, newspapers and broadcast programs reported once more on the accomplishments of this band of brothers and sisters. As has been the case increasingly over the past decade or two, mention of the thinning ranks of living veterans sounded an elegiac note. The youngest of still living veterans from that cataclysmic war are in their early eighties. Stories this morning all told of how few were still able to gather at any distance from their homes, much less re-visit the far scenes of their struggles, or the foreign cemeteries where many of their comrades have lain since after the war.

A day will come when there shall no longer be any survivors of that war, as it came for veterans of World War I, and all the other wars before. Their names will become legend, their personal memories preserved only in their families and friends left behind, for a little while.

Selah, good and faithful servants – thank you all.

Memorial Day Holiday

Words are weak when trying to honor the veterans, those still living, and those gone on the Long March before their comrades. Found this video of Vets at the World War II Memorial.

Inauguration Day

Barack Hussein Obama becomes the first President of the United States of African descent today.

Let Freedom Ring.

Dates that Change You

It has become a commonplace over the past forty-some years to compare traumatic national events to the shock that stopped all ordinary concerns in 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Every member of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation could remember precisely where they were and what they were doing on December 7, 1941, early in the afternoon in the eastern U.S. when the radios began to tell of the attack.

Second only to that moment for these older folk was the news of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. Not everybody in my family admired FDR, but almost at the end of the European War, his death was a shock. For my generation the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the pivotal event. To some extent, it also affected my parents and grandparents, but Pearl Harbor had made this later tragedy seem lesser than it appeared to my sisters and our friends. Other assassinations followed, M.L. King and Bobby Kennedy within two months of each other in that calamitous year, 1968. These were further shocks, but at least for me, the effect was similar to the lines in Dylan Thomas’ poem, “The Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”: After the first death, there is no other. I did write a young man’s self-righteous letter to the editor of the Chattanooga Times on Bobby Kennedy’s death, but the shock to me was nothing compared to hearing of his older brother’s murder.

Today is the anniversary of the entry of the United States into active participation as a target of Middle Eastern terrorists. The internet was so overwhelmed with hits on every news site, that in our television-less offices, we, like our parent’s generation, listened to radio for the first news. Later we would go to lunch and visit restaurants with live TV broadcasts. Not only do I remember each moment following the appearance of one of my employees in my office door, announcing that planes had crashed into the Towers, but I remember my visceral reaction, voiced internally something like, “Now we will know how the Israelis live.” It was immediately apparent, long before details began to filter out, that the highly organized attacks on such a symbol of our, and the Western World’s economic power had its genesis in the festering hatreds of the Middle East. Thirty years of distant Palestinian terror had prepared us for that conclusion, if not for the terrible shock of the real thing.

So we remember the dead of Manhattan, Washington and Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and wonder if the intervening seven years of war and rhetoric have changed anything. The upcoming Presidential election takes place in a post-9/11 world shaped by that event and the events following. But for today, we remember the dead, we recall the heroics of the searchers in the rubble, and we steel ourselves for another seven years for which the history is a murky text too hard to read.

Our Debt to the French

An article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press this morning has reminded me of the true, non-polemical nature of our relationship with the French people. A man whose father was rescued from execution by the Germans in World War II by troops from the United States journeyed to Chattanooga to honor our role in delivering France from German occupation.

The story reminded me of a letter I sent to the TFP a few years ago, touching on the burial of my father’s first cousin Miller Smith in French soil, after dying in the campaign to free France, a campaign aided by many French citizens. Below is a relevant excerpt from my letter:

Ironically, in light of heated exchanges between former allies in World War II, thousands of Americans, including Miller Smith, are buried in France. The recent, more rancorous comments on France’s opposition to war on Iraq ignore French contributions over the past two hundred plus years. British General Cornwallis would certainly be surprised at the depth of anger towards the French, coming from those who arguably owe their independence to French assistance in 1781. Our war dead lay beside their French comrades in two World Wars, from Normandy to St. Avold, where Miller Smith is buried.

A very disturbing facet of political polemics in this country in the past decades has involved ridicule of the French people in regard to their honor and courage facing the German Occupation. Useful to put this extreme view in perspective with such stories as the TFP published this morning.

 

My War: Part II

Back in the summer of 2004, when the Iraq war was just over a year old, I encountered a blog by a soldier in Mosul, Colby Buzzell, whose prose style and descriptive powers gave a grunt’s-eye view of the war. The blog, titled My War: Fear and Loathing in Iraq, had a two-month window of freedom from attention by Higher Authority, then Buzzell was restrained by his superiors from the vivid accounts of the war that had gained the young “trigger puller” quite an audience. Buzzell finished his tour, a bit longer than he had expected, due to the various measures the Army deployed to keep boots on the ground until replacements could be sent.

Home, Buzzell finished his time in the Army, whipped his blog posts into a book published the next year, and embarked on a new career as a free-lance journalist, primarily for Esquire. In an entry in his blog (continued post-Army as My War: Killing Time) Buzzell reports that he has been ordered back into active service, and will return to the war. While acknowledging that he is not alone in being caught up again, and that many have had repeated tours in Iraq, Buzzell is anything but happy.

I wish him good fortune and a safe return. I wish the same for all the troops in this sad and mismanaged war. Military blogs in general have given us at home a deeper perception of what war is really like. The difficulty of the military in gaining new recruits likely flows from that wider understanding, and is why Buzzell and many others find themselves in repeat performances in that Killing Time.

This Woman’s Army

This Man’s Woman’s Army, the subject should read. On this three-day-weekend version of Memorial Day, I have been listening to quite a bit of commentary on things military. A short while ago, on NPR, there was a story on the quandary of female soldiers who want to raise a family while serving. Currently the Army gives a postpartum soldier twelve weeks leave. In a volunteer, career-oriented military, this is a serious obstacle to signing up for many women who expect to begin childrearing during their career.

A subject which fires up the debate, always simmering, between those who think women should be afforded equal opportunities in the military and those who feel that facts are facts, women should not be soldiers, and soldiers should certainly not be mothers.

Men are permitted to go off to war, to encounter the likelihood of injury or death, but to bear life into the world, and spend the time after the birth of a child necessary to bond mother and child completely, that is a right inimical to duty, honor and country.

I don’t think so.

Service is service, so accommodations for biology are as appropriate as those for any other physical condition.

Bombs and Fanatics

Cross-posted, with edits, from Chattanooga Message Forum.

Much heat and countless words are now being expended on the policy towards Iran regarding its potential nuclear capability and how to contain it. Historical citations of our “guilt” in launching the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki fuel some of the discussions.

As to our use of nuclear weapons for the first (and second) times, I have always felt that our use of the first two bombs was justified to bring Japan to surrender, avoiding further attrition. The recent series on PBS dealing with WWII, The War, graphically reminded us of what the endgame in the Pacific was like. The Japanese were not going to surrender as easily as the Germans.