June 1, 2018
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I know that Memorial Day 2018 already passed, but recently I have been rereading some of Standing Down, and felt the time was right for another moment of appreciation.
War inevitably involves great trauma and loss. As the following quotes demonstrate, wartime changes all races and peoples, ancient and modern. The world is not perfect, and will never be, but it is important to honor those who died for us with some sort of promise, hope or expectation of continual improvement, an effort for what is right, what is best, and what is just. I am not sure if anyone ever comes to terms with the effects of war, but I do believe that in writing and reading, these authors have left some important road maps for us to read. I believe that the passages quoted below cannot be read too often.
“He sat there on the porch reading a book on the war. It was a history and he was reading about all the engagements he had been in. It was the most interesting reading he had ever done…Now he was really learning about the war.” – Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home”
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“When Hector reached the oak tree by the Western Gate,/ Trojan wives and daughters ran up to him,/ Asking about their children, their brothers,/ Their kinsman, their husbands. He told them all,/ Each woman in turn, to pray to the gods./ Sorrow clung to their heads like mist.” – Homer, the Iliad, Book 6
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Talbot: “Thou antic Death, which laugh’st us here to scorn,/ Anon, from thy insulting tyranny,/ Coupled in bonds of perpetuity,/ Two Talbots, winged through the lither sky,/ In they despite shall scape mortality./ O thou, whose wounds become hard-favored Death,/ Speak to thy father ere thou yield thy breath!/ Brave Death by speaking, whether he will or no;/ Imagine him a Frenchman and thy foe./ Poor boy! He smiles, methinks, as who should say,/ Had Death been French, then Death had died today./ Come, come, and lay him in his father’s arms.”
[John is laid in his father’s arms.]
“My spirit can no longer bear these harms./ Soldiers, adieu! I have what I would have,/ Now my old arms are young John Talbot’s grave.” – Dies. – William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part I
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“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” – Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address”
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“When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.
In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgement or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.” – Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
**All citations come from Standing Down; From Warrior to Civilian, published by the Great Books Foundation in 2013.
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