Posted on 03/31/2003 6:15:09 AM PST by RonF
I take, I have to take, a nap in the late afternoon in order to be alive and agreeable in the evening. For the past week or longer I've not napped, I've lain there - it's called resting I believe, but my mind turning over many things. "fretting" I think is the right word.
"It's the war," said my helpmeet with the wagging finger.
She was right. It was time to do something about it.
I let myself think the unthinkable and realised that my trouble was anxiety and you don't need a Freudian analyst to tell you that anxiety is bred by repressed fears, not suppressed, the fears you don't know you have or you don't want to recognise. Well I've done a little digging and I find one fear at the back of my mind for months and it's time to haul it up front. Instead of throwing down at you an abstract noun and I'm saying I'm talking about casualties, I believe I can make things plainer by telling a story which goes to the root of the fear.
You must bear with me if I take you back in imagination 87 years - 1916, the summer. In France, a summer of heat and much rain. In any street in Lancashire, women and children mostly, going about their daily chores. I was eight years old, an inquisitive age, well aware of what's going on. What I recall going on was my mother indicated, the awful monotony of the newspapers - everything the war, the war, every day, heavy casualties. Especially now - the battle for a river, the Battle of the Somme.
I'll make this revelation as brief as possible. The battle began along a 20-mile front, just north of the River Somme. It began on 1 July and on that day alone we, the British, lost 20,000 men. The battle lasted four and a half months and at the end of it the Germans, for the time being, had been pushed back about 10 miles by the two allies - the British and the French. At the end of it the total French dead were 200,000, the British 400,000.
It ended the day before my birthday. And next morning, when the papers were printing headlines about our glorious victory, I remember I had a candle stuck in a plain cake - we had no sugar, I'd never seen icing. In the following weeks I noticed that more young women than usual in my street and the next one were dressed in black and old men and young boys having black armbands. Otherwise we went uncomplaining about our daily chores. To an eight year old whatever happened - the flu, a thunderstorm, a war - was life. I went fishing with my great uncle.
Why? Almost half a million men gone. Why?
We didn't know then or ever guessed at numbers. All we knew was "heavy casualties". But the main thing was there was no television, there was no radio. Now this war, the invasion of Iraq, had been on for only a few days and there were - the words sprung to many lips - casualties - eight Britons, five Americans, some prisoners of war - one a woman. More protests, more vocal protests. The president talked of going off to visit bereaved families.
The bad news came in: stiff resistance. And then the possibility that hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, in Basra might starve from lack of food and water, children die from dysentery. The popular support for the war wobbled and dropped a little. Television interviews with scandalised housewives and young people. And in this war, as never before, the reporters are way up front there in the blood and sand.
Here's a young housewife in Ohio: "It's making me crazy to see what people are going through. I thought we'd get in there boom, boom, boom, and get out." So I'm afraid did many millions. This bared my long held fear that a country, a people, that has not known war in its own land for 138 years, a generation that never saw filmed coverage of a war - an actual war, not in the movies - would they, will they, have the stamina to stay with their belief that it is a necessary war if the casualties go beyond the hundreds into the thousands?
Over 30 years ago I said here these words for an audience that was seeing war for the first time from the correspondents in the field.
Quote: In the First World War the statesmen and generals and correspondents waited many years before they told us of the horrors and the scope of the casualties. Here now in Vietnam young correspondents in sweaty shirts poke microphones into a soldier's face and hear him say he doesn't know what he's there for. There is now no gap between the battlefield and the memoirs. I don't think it's possible to exaggerate the shattering capacity of television to tell it now and what is shattered, I suspect, is morale - both at the front and at home.
It puts a crippling burden on the statesmen and the generals, most of all on the field commanders, who in a democracy are trying to conduct any war. It raises the profound question whether any nation not under a dictatorship can ever again fight a war with a steady spirit. And this I believe is something new under the sun.
Unquote.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
No evidence of that in Cooke's address; no quotes from Iraqis, etc.
The main substance is a quote from a housewife in Ohio and an extended quote written during the Vietnam war, a war that dragged on for years, and opposition to which didn't solidify until we were mired in it for five or six years. The terrain is different, the weapons are different, and the extent of the coverage is different. Instead of relying on reports filtered through the prejudices of reporters and edited for maximum loathing, after a lapse of hours and days, we are seeing small swatches of battlefield reality, in real time, from reporters who are travelling along with, not trailing after, our troops.
The quote from the housewife isn't even worth commenting on, unless you believe she is unversally representative of Americans, which even the liberal media can't assert, given recent polls.
He makes no comparison to the views projected by state-run communications systems, but rather gives an historical perspective of the vast difference and immediacy of war coverage in the modern world as opposed to the world of his childhood.
The general effect is anti-war, I might add, since he is ignoring the difference in coverage between this war and Vietnam (not least of which is the internet), as well as the obvious differences in the war itself: terrain, objectives, volunteer army vs. conscripts, advanced weaponry, and, most importantly, what led us to this point: 9/11, WMD's and terrorism. It was difficult for Americans to relate to fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, but it's hard to ignore the relevance of 9/11, WMD's and terrorism, experienced up close and personal on our soil, to the war in Iraq, although many try.
No thanks.
The fear and dread and foreboding ... that we are daily given by the media to understand, according to the media, that we should not take another step? It is indeed, brought into our homes; thanks to the media, but also from personal reports from the theatre of operations, as well as previous experience and military history.
Yet it is no more than our troops have felt throughout the history of the United States.
This did not stop them.
They pressed on.
Through the hail of bullets and such.
What we fear, is what they fear.
It is the fear of battle, that people feel more at home; not the fear of failure of our cause.
The fear of warfare is what has been brought home; and it is fearsome; and it is the price of liberty.
Welcome home, the responsibility.
Now you know what it's like to realize that the lightpole "behind" which you stand, is both thinner in diameter than you'd prefer, in addition to the little matter of trying to figure out exactly where is the best "behind."
I've had some shaking spells. I know what it's like to be shot at. I know the sound of battle, the incredible racket. It has all been brought home, now, thanks to the availability of information.
You can dwell on your fate and fear, fear itself, or you can apply yourself to what is worthy and smartly charge ahead.
Your end is going to come; you may as well make it worthwhile. This fact of life, is with us everyday; war or no war.
Get yourself the nutrition and rest you need, the clothing and shelter you need, and then carry on trying to do the right thing.
A good day's rest, like freedom, is something you must earn.
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