Kinda sick, but it makes a few points

[Tiassa]

http://www.thestranger.com/current/feature.html

I shall endeavor to keep this link updated. In the meantime, The Stranger is an alternative newspaper in this town, largely reviled for its policy of selling ad-space to small businesses instead of large companies. Well, it's also reviled for being a left-wing rag, but it's also held up as the only real newspaper left around here; the Times and the Post-Intelligencer are so intertwined that they release a common Sunday edition, and the only difference between them is whether they like Nordstrom's.

But it's just a strange commentary on the present conflict, and it reflects in its biting essence the sort of mentality I pick up among my neighbors and co-workers, though strangely not as much among posters here, though such sentiment and method are present at Sciforums. Anyway ...

thanx,
Tiassa

 

[Oxygen]

Best War Book

Why is this subject so sick? It's just literature we're talking about. (People get so jumpy around the word "war". Warwarwarwarwarwarwarwarwarwar. There. That's out of my system. Now, back to the board...)

My favorite war book is "They Were Expendable". It was originally released in 1944, I believe, and it was intended as a propaganda piece showing what rough and rugged men we had sent overseas. Well, it did its job. It wouldn't have done for the war effort if we had known our brothers and sons were shivering, cold, hungry, wet and wounded, lying in a trench somewhere deep inside of hostile territory. It was, however, a realistic account of men in combat.

The agonizing of one sergeant to leave one of his men behind to man a machine gun so the unit could have its backside covered emphasized the human side of what Hollywood turned into a "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" macho he-man John Wayne image. The sergeant was faced with the fact that he had to take one of these boys and leave him with a machine gun, where he would most likely die eventually. He had to expend one man to save the others. (With the German army approaching and heavily equipped, the unit was "advancing to the rear", as they say.) The soldier was expended, and he obeyed without question. He was under orders, and all the sergeant could say was for him to man that gun. The soldier asked for how long and was told just to man the machine gun. At that point, even the soldier knew he had just been expended. With a heavy silence, he manned the machine gun and the unit marched away without him.

The author never goes back to the machine gunner. His fate is as unknown to us as it was to his unit and his sergeant. Most likely he was taken down by a German sniper. We'll never know.

The book covers other incidents, such as the intense situation of the crew of a PT boat throwing themselves in front of an inbound torpedo that was en route to sink a destroyer. The book is laden with tales of uncommon valor, and in the day that the book was published, it's easy to imagine a reader thinking "What courage! What bravery! That's what our boys are made of!" I read the book in a time of peace and thought "Wars are nasty, ugly things, and that's why we try to avoid them."

I was able to research some of the incidents relayed in the book, and found that the author remained pretty true in his narrative. No Rah-Rah Go Get 'Em, no flag waving, no brass bands playing, just war.

 

[machaon]

War books

To be fair, I have not read THE THINGS THEY CARRIED or ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. My personal favorite is Dalton Trumbo's JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN.

 

[Tiassa]

Briefly ...

O2 ... I was, uh ... being assumptive.

Let me clear my throat and crawl in the hole ... the bit about whether or not you have any f-cking arms left to eat the food cracked me up, but precisely because of its perversity. It's an unusual perspective, and seems to be a number of rhetorical stereotypes flung into an extreme and then dressed up according to the vulgar American selfishness ...

Don't get me wrong, the whole thing cracked me up. But please understand ... The Stranger is the only viable print news source in town, and its very nearly a leftist rag. Our TV stations, even, follow its lead from time to time. And yes, I feel slightly sick for laughing so hard at the thought of a befuddled Afghani child staring at a can of food wondering how the hell he's supposed to pull the damn tab without any arms.

machaon ... the really sad thing is that I wrote the topic post on a break at work, and was rushing. Two of us put our heads together and couldn't think of the actual title of Johnny, so I went with Red Badge of Courage.

I read The Things They Carried before I saw any of the Vietnam War movies that are considered classic. I think it's the reason they don't impress me the way people seem to be impressed by these films; Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now ... okay, only a few of them were good, but you get the point. It's a bunch of stories that nearly make a complete novel, and I highly recommend it.

thanx,
Tiassa

(P.S.--O2 ... sorry, I couldn't think of a thing to say about the novel; I didn't feel right continuing the message after the Afghani joke, and needed the break in address before changing subject. Rest assured I shall turn my eye to that gem if I find it around town.)

 

[Oxygen]

Tiassa- Good luck finding the book. I think it may be out of print. BTW: What was that about food and arms? If it was something I had mentioned, I seem to have gone amnesiac.

 

[Tiassa]

Oxygen ...,

What was that about food and arms? If it was something I had mentioned, I seem to have gone amnesiac.

It's the fourth cartoon on the linked page, when the guy says:

Well, it turns the relief effort into a fun game for the Afghan people--a game called "See if you have any f--king arms left to eat the food we dropped after you step on a landmine to retrieve it!"

I laughed for several minutes about that, and then had occasion to wonder what was so damn funny about it. Something about the way the cartoons assail the American casualness toward war. Sure, these characters are hung up and almost neurotic about the war, but they represent certain extremes of the American attitude compiled in a fairly unique manner. They're fair characterizations, if comedically melodramatic. But I know people who are this selfish, whose only response is to become embittered and selfish, and I think such attitudes ... ah, I could moralize it all afternoon. But when I'm laughing at the food package that "flies into your f--king decapitated head as it sails through the air," in the middle of a wartime action, the notion strikes me as somewhat perverse.

But, to tie this in somehow, it's sick both in a few senses: A) that someone said it; B) that conditions are such right now that someone felt the need to say it; and C) yes, that I, personally find it so damn funny.

I think the key is in how we react to the cartoons; I'd like to think I see a certain irony in them worth appreciating, but still I'm merely projecting my own standards over the society whose representation I attribute to the cartoons. Moreover, I did hear a few reactions to the cartoon that scare me: that it didn't matter if we dropped food in the minefields and thus blew up desperate Afghani children, for, as is obvious, they are Afghani, Muslim, and therefore among "them". And other such things. But it's Saturday afternoon and I'm just getting myself into the day, so I may well be making more of this than I need to.

At the time I posted it? Hell, it was just that funny. One of those odd, Edwardian justifications of mine, eh?

thanx,
Tiassa

 

[shaman1301]

Best War Book!

"Johnny Got His Gun"

 

[Oxygen]

Tiassa-
Okay, I finally turned the other half of my brain on and clicked on the link. Bitter sarcasm, and a bit over exaggerated to be depicting real life, but they do drive the point home. Looks like they used a bunch of public-domain clip art. I loved the last one, though, about how religion brings out the best in the human race, and how we only get rewarded in the afterlife. That one left me smirking and shaking my head.