A semi-heartfelt post from somewhere near the semi-heart

Anarchistrabbi had a really good post I enjoyed. It got me thinking about my own family's experiences with war.

The earliest encounter with the military we know about happened in the 1870s- we don't know the details, but apparently one relative, Icyk, was in the Russian army for a while; I don't know if he pissed someone off or what, but apparently his tour took him near Zhitomir where his first kid was born, which, incidentally, was about 500 miles from his home town. Eventually Icyk managed to get himself and his family back to good ol' home base and had some more kids- though for about five years, his occupation was listed as "temporarily discharged soldier". I don't know if that means he was at risk of being recalled (sound familiar?) or couldn't get a job (see previous comment). In the 1890s one of Icyk's nephews got drafted. We don't know if he served or not, but that seems to have been the start of the family immigration. I'm guessing it's around this time my g.grandfather Harry changed his birthday from mid-January 1880 to Dec 31, 1881- I'd bet almost anything this was draft-dodging related (maybe so no one would get suspicious that his brother was born 1882?) In any event, Harry got the hell out of dodge, and the rest of the family followed him. That was in 1901 or so and they kept coming until Ellis Island closed the doors because the WASPs and German Jews were getting uncomfortable what with all those Asiatics hanging around.

Thus began a very, shall we say, mixed family tradition. Sure, we had a lot of folks fight in WWII, and one or two in Korea (one uncle was really gung-ho about getting drafted for Vietnam but had fucked his knees playing football so they sent him home- he later told me they should have nuked the place and gotten it over with.)

But Sholom mentioning PTSD made me think about another war...

I had two g.g.uncles fight in WWI. Morris was either a super-Zionist or had a real hard-on for the war because he enlisted in the Jewish Legion before America was even in the fight. I don't know if he ever got to Israel, though. Nathan got drafted into the US army and got PTSD (don't know where).

Morris got sent back to the US on a nice steam liner (guess he wasn't such a Zionist after all), all expenses paid by the Brits; Nathan worked his way back to NYC as ship's cook on some shithole barge from Cuba- God knows how he got from Europe to there.

Morris got a nice little job working in some garment district sweatshop, got married and had kids and lived happily ever after. Nathan couldn't work and lived in a group home for the rest of his life. They let him out for holidays and birthdays.

War's a bitch.

This is partially why I have such distaste for the whole "I'm a veteran, I'm from a military family, you're disqualified from saying anything about anything." That's a load of crap. Most people in this country have some vets in their family if they've been here long enough. And if you try really hard, you can probably drum up some emotion (real or manufactured) about just how bad it must have been for whichever poor bastard of yours or mine or whoever's got stuck manning a gun. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I think the military is automatically bad (I have plenty of critiques with it), nor the people working in it (particularly the lower eschelons of it), and I do have a degree of respect for people who volunteer for a cause they believe in, especially if that cause is anything close to the really altruistic crap fed to you by all those ARMY/Navy/Marine/Coast Guard/Park Ranger ads. I'm happy someone else is fighting over in God-knows-where instead of me, and I'm grateful. At the same time, not every person in the military is a super-patriot; not every grunt decides to join up after a prolonged philosophical introspection on ethics, nationalism, and self-defense. John Kerry's "joke" might have pissed people off, but there's something to the observation that some people end up in the military out of a lack of better options. To claim that everybody in the military must WANT to be there because it's volunteer misses the fact that it's also the intersection point for a lot of different agendas, a bunch of which have much more to do with pragmatism than military appreciation (especially during peace-time).

I'm not suggesting that one guy in Iraq who wants to help people is better than his buddy who's just there for the college money, but I think it's a problem when we start thinking we can assume people's ideology or motivations simply by the fact that they're there. If anything, part of the appeal of a volunteer military is because it implies the existence of a broad cross-section of people in it- including ideology and reasons for being there.

I only know of one relative who died in a war- my great-uncle Bill. He was younger than I am now and, by all accounts, never really gave a shit about much. He could have stayed out of WWII (at least for another year or so) if he had stayed in school, but he simply didn't care. He dropped out and the army got him. He got sent out to the South Pacific and on his first mission, the ship got torpedoed. Supposedly he made it to shore with some of his unit, where he was promptly shot by a Japanese sniper and buried on the beach by his buddies.

For a long time Bill was listed as MIA, and so they kept hoping he was alive somewhere. My grandfather tried to enlist, thinking he'd go "find" his brother. Turns out flat footed, only surviving sons with dependents, Messiah complexes and who have trouble following orders and getting along with others aren't in much demand, even in war time. Grandpa built Liberty Ships during the war instead, pretending like he was helping somehow.

Finally word came in that Bill was dead. His immigrant parents were crushed. They were Yiddish Communists, for crying out loud! I can't imagine what their thoughts about the whole mess were. My g.grandpa, Zaideh, insisted on the body being sent back, even though his daughters begged him to let him stay in peace. Zaideh always got his way.

Bill's body came back- the day before his sister got married. Zaideh figured out a solution: no one told her. She got married and they held the body. The next morning, she went on her honeymoon and the rest of the family went to Staten Island for the funeral and 21-gun salute.

Baba (g.grandma) never saw the body, so she always claimed that he wasn't really dead. Forty years later, she would still do this. It must have just killed them.

And even though they were Communists, they must have felt some attachment to America, otherwise they wouldn't have stayed. And I know they kept all of Bill's war stuff (I have his Purple Heart). So there's some feeling there.

But was Bill a patriot? Was the fact that his Mom became a Gold Star Mom, that she sacrificed a son, did that change her American-ness? (It doesn't seem to have changed her ideology- she was a raving Pinko all through the 50s and 60s, and apparently her kids were scared shitless in the McCarthy days that she was going to get them all deported.) I'm really not sure. What does seem clear is that Bill didn't die for a damn thing- he had no cause. It doesn't sound like he really had any ambitions at all, and that was part of why he didn't care when he got drafted. He was just a kid, and a nonentity at that. Which is what makes it all the more egregious when men like him are retconned to fit someone's idea of what a warrior, or a war hero, should be.

Bill got an American flag, but I don't think he died for it. He probably wasn't even fighting for it. He had just happened to wind up in a shitty situation and was dealing with it. And even though that might not be particularly romantic, I think it's a lot more honest than a lot of the language we get about war in this country.

Everyone's got the right to their opinion. But I wish people would stop speaking for the soldiers when it comes to what they're fighting for and why they're there (and not just because it doesn't have any practical changes; it's not like the Chiefs of Staff are going to give people shorter tours because theyre disillusioned with the insurgency).

We should let the soldiers speak for themselves, and if there are some who can't or won't speak- then we should shut the hell up all the more. Because silence says something, too.