If you will lend me your eyes for a few moments, I will try to give you a nickel’s worth about aphasia and several dollars’ worth about the realities of being a soldier. My thoughts about the realities of being a soldier have been rolling around in my mind and have been keeping me awake at night. So something has to be done and that accounts primarily for this essay.
Let us turn to the aphasia part of this equation. Aphasia is a stroke-induced ailment that causes one to forget nouns. For example, in preparing to write this essay, I somehow lost the word aphasia even though it is one of the subjects of this essay. On other occasions, I frequently forget the name of glaucoma, the ailment which blinded my father, my brother, and now myself. It is a matter of calling the names to mind. For example, I can tell you that Tom Brokaw, who called my generation the greatest generation, worked for NBC and appeared on the 6:30 PM national telecast. While I can tell you all about what Tom Brokaw did, I often cannot call his name to mind. This ailment tends to become dangerous when I fail to call the name of a prescription drug to mind. I might say that it is in the tall green bottle or the tall white bottle, but that is not much use to the pharmacist who dispenses it. I am simply unable to speak the name.
In my own case, aphasia was the result of a stroke that I had in 1997. A stroke affects the brain. It is not necessarily a heart-related matter at all. In my case, I was spared the loss of movement in my limbs, but the net result was aphasia. The surgeon who had planned an aortic valve replacement, said that we had dodged a bullet by having control remain in my limbs. Nevertheless, he is not the guy who suffers from being unable to call nouns to mind as a result of aphasia.
To correct the effects of aphasia, I had treatment for three months at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation under the care of Shirley Morgenstein. As the work with rehabilitation proceeded, Shirley suggested that I should write essays as a means of rehabilitating my brain. Now some 200 essays later I am still at it.
There is one rule that I have always tried to observe. In all of the essay writing that I have done, I have never commented on the deprivations of the great American Depression, which affected so many of us. I have never commented on the divorce which took place 23 years ago. And I have only written an essay on one occasion having to do with the brutalities associated with combat warfare. In that case, I wrote an essay called “They Never Betrayed Me.” It had to do with my experience of December 8, 1943, after being shot down in northern Italy, being a POW, and being rescued by the Italian Partisans. It was the Italian people who never betrayed me in the escape from the German prison. I wrote that essay some 60 years after the event as a means of telling my daughters and their husbands and their children about what had happened so long ago. It was also a piece intended to keep my five grandsons from being seduced by the lure of military life.
Now, I am about to transgress that rule once again by writing about the realities and the brutishness of warfare. Violating a rule twice in 65 years would seem to me to be acceptable behavior.
What set me off were the six or seven generals who demanded the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. All of these generals were retired, of course. While they were active, if they had ever asked for Rumsfeld’s resignation, they would have been cashiered immediately. They knew that, and so they kept their remarks to themselves until they retired. The burden of what the generals had to say about Rumsfeld had to do with the whole Bush administration which started the war in Iraq. It was the view of these generals that the war was ordered by people who had never served in the military forces, including Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, Rice, Wolfowitz, and all the rest of the neocons. It is easy for those sitting in Washington to send an army to invade Iraq because it is not their lives that they are putting on the line.
The quote that is the title for this essay comes from what they have had to say. The retired generals have said that the Bush administration sent people to war to get killed but they had never been sobered by the requirement to “bury the dead”. They never experienced war and the attendant duty to take care of its obvious aftermath. I am here to tell you about the realities having to do with the death of soldiers. And I am here to tell you about burying the dead.
From this point on, this essay will probably be a grim one for many readers. It is my intention to talk about the death of soldiers and it will not be a pretty scene. It is unreal to assume that, in every case, soldiers die from a dime shaped bullet hole to the heart and that they fall to the ground in a position where the Army Graves Registration Unit can pick them up and put them in coffins. The fact of the matter is that soldiers are killed in the most grisly of circumstances. Today in Iraq we see the effects of roadside bombings that separate men from their senses. They lose their eyesight and their ability to reason. So far we have lost 2,450 men in Iraq being killed with more than 18,000 being injured. The casualties have suffered gruesome injuries.
Kindly remember please that the statistics published by the American military are subject to great doubt. It is not in the interest of the American military to tell you how many people have been killed and how many have been injured in a sad fashion. It is in the interest of the American military to minimize the deaths and the injuries. Simply put, don’t trust the military when it comes to publishing details about deaths and injuries.
I was never in the infantry where the bulk of deaths and injuries occur. My service was in the Air Force and I will use that as a means of describing the deaths of airmen. When a mission is mounted against the perceived enemy, only a small minority of the wounded ever return to base. As a general rule, those on the mission suffer their injuries over enemy territory and do not return to their bases. Their deaths may occur by anti-aircraft fire or by fire from opposing fighter pilots. They may be captured and lose their lives in prison camps. All that we have to go on here is that those who are missing will be an empty cot in the tent or in the barracks. When a man has been missing for a short time, you know that he is not returning when people from the headquarters come to collect his personal effects from his footlocker, if he has a footlocker.
For those who return wounded from a mission, there are grim realities. These are the realities that the generals did not mention in their effort to unseat Donald Rumsfeld. Nonetheless I am sure that they are cognizant of these injuries. I am going to be talking here about airmen who participate in raids over enemy territory. Before leaving on any mission, every airman must don a parachute harness. The parachute harness is like a pair of overalls in one respect in that it is stepped into with the harness being anchored at the crotch level and then thrown over each shoulder. There are devices, latches if you will, to hold the harness together. Many airmen, particularly pilots, prefer to use a seat parachute pack attached to the harness. The seat harness covers the buttocks and indeed, it is sat on. Many of us, me in particular, used a chest pack parachute that must be attached to two receptacles near the top of the harness. The main thing about the chest pack is that it must be attached properly or the parachute will open downward rather than upward. Furthermore, the chest pack must be remembered before jumping out of the airplane whereas those with the seat parachutes do not have such a concern.
When enemy fighters try to disable one of our aircraft, they usually go after the tail gunner and then the side gunners. Once they are put out of commission, the plane is largely defenseless to attacks from the rear and from underneath. Injuries from 30 caliber or 50 caliber bullets to the aerial gunners are hideously gruesome. Either the 30 caliber or the 50 caliber can make a hole in a man’s midsection much bigger than the size of a fist. When a plane arrives back at the base from which the mission started and there is an injured airman or airmen aboard, there is the problem of removing the injured man. In most cases, however, if an airman takes 30 or 50 caliber bullets in his chest or stomach area, he will probably be cut in half. As I said, 30 caliber and 50 caliber bullets just tear holes all the way through a man’s midsection or through his chest area.
Now I return to the theme of this essay, which is “they did not have to bury the dead.” Removing the remains of an airman who has been hit by anti-aircraft or fire from an airborne machine gun is a delicate operation because the lower part of the body is still attached to the upper part through the parachute harness. It is not uncommon to see a man’s lower parts dangling, being held on only by the parachute harness which passes through his crotch area. I know these are grim and gory details, but the neocons who ordered this invasion of Iraq, Bush, Cheney, et al., should think about things such as this. Removing a man who has been killed by machine gun fire from the rear cockpit of an airplane, for example, is a gory and messy piece of work. It is not a case of a single small bullet hole through the heart at all. It is simply a man being cut in half with all of the attendant details.
I regret to tell you these details, but these are the actual facts of war. There is no gainsaying that the war is making, as Bush says, “great progress.” The fact of the matter is that George Bush has never seen what war has done to his troops. Neither has Cheney, neither has Rumsfeld, neither has Gonzalez, and neither has Madame Rice or anybody else among the neocons. It is my recommendation that people of this sort who directed this war against Iraq be required to bury some of the casualties that have occurred. It is my estimate that once the people who ordered this war in Iraq get their hands bloody from a dead soldier, they might have more reluctance in the future to order any invasion. It is one thing to sit in Washington and send airmen to bomb Iran or Iraq. It is quite another thing to lift an airman out of the rear cockpit of the airplane with his two halves coming out being held together largely by a parachute harness.
Well, you see, the retired generals have obliged me to break my promise of never discussing the combat phases of my war experience. It is only the second time. If my recollections, which are grim, were to become known in the upper reaches of this administration, it would be welcomed by me. In the instant case, Bush now contends that the war will go on at least through the rest of his term, which takes us to somewhere into 2009. By that time, there may be another 2,500 dead and another 15,000 wounded. May I ask, is this in the interests of the United States? Of course it is not! Do you feel one bit safer because of these casualties?
As you can see, the generals set off an angry response that I have been harboring for years, since the Iraqi war started. I grieve for every American and Iraqi death. I grieve for the deaths of our allies in this misadventure. While I grieve at the deaths and the injuries, Bush rides his miserable bicycle and worries not at all. Well, I shouldn’t say “worries not at all;” he dreams up ventures such as wiretapping and collecting data on telephone calls made by American citizens, and threatening to bomb Iran.
This essay started out with my recollections of aphasia and it ended up exactly where I knew it was going, which is a grim recital of deaths that occur to soldiers. As such it is merely an exercise in the realities of warfare. If you are upset by this recitation of the realities of warfare, please don’t harbor resentment toward me but rather toward the people in Washington who ordered the misadventure into Iraq. For the deaths and the gruesome injuries to American soldiers, this administration must be held accountable and the fact that it is going to go on for years to come is a travesty of the first order. If you are aroused and angered, as I am, please tell your representatives or your senators about your anger and let them know that killing and torture by Americans is not in our best interests. Absolutely not at all.
E. E. CARR
May 17, 2006
Essay 190
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For new readers, it’s probably worth mentioning that this particular type of essay is atypical. Pop generally enjoyed writing about language, culture, and current events. This incident must have royally pissed him off, since nothing short of that would cause him to revisit war memories.
Now that we’re once again in the election season, this essay makes me think back to John McCain, who is still in the senate trying to (among other things) protect American soldiers from torture. He’s of course far more familiar with the realities of war than most of his colleagues; he’s buried the dead. I only hope that however this next election turns out, we’re not left with another commander in chief who deploys troops first and asks questions later.