The Ming Report

WE DON’T KNOW

August 7, 2004 - “He wasn’t twenty years old. He hadn’t begun to live. He gave up his life on a stretcher. Back in America the standard of living continued to rise. Back in America the racetracks were booming, the night clubs were making their greatest profits in history. Miami Beach was so crowded you couldn’t get a room anywhere. Few people seemed to care. Hell, this was a boom; this was prosperity; this was the way to fight a war. We read of black market restaurants; of a manufacturer’s plea for gradual reconversion to peacetime goods, beginning immediately, and we wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win this war.”

That was how Private David Webster of Easy Company described the death of one of the Screaming Eagles in his unpublished manuscript quoted extensively in Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. Private Webster wrote of a boy’s death in January 1945 but when I read those words this morning they grabbed me, reminding me that he was writing of things that I will never know; reminding me that war is timeless, unchanging and unclean and now.

I will never know the terror, the bloodshed, the hideous agonizing war of combat. My military experience is limited to twice weekly drills and classes in Basic ROTC at the University of Illinois in 1957 and 1958. My uncles know. Wayne was there when the Screaming Eagles were surrounded in Bastogne. Francis was in New Guinea. My Brother knows. He was on the trucks rolling into Cambodia. He crawled the tunnels in Vietnam. They know what I will never know.

George H. W. Bush knows. John Kerry knows what John Edwards can never know. George W. Bush can’t know. Neither can Richard Cheney, or John Ashcroft, or Paul Wolfowitz, or for that matter, Donald Rumsfeld. Wesley Clark knows, Colin Powell knows albeit from a distance. Back home in America big oil is making their greatest profits in history. You can’t find a room on Sanibel Island and the family compound at Kennebunkport is celebrating its family values at a wedding and three marines bled out their lives in Najaf. They knew and their knowledge died with them.

Private Webster’s question is eternal and so is the answer. You and I can never know unless we were there, unless we felt the terror, unless we shed the blood and watched our brothers and their hideous, agonizing deaths. It is easy for those of us who do not know, who have not experienced the eternal horror of war, to waive the flags and posture with patriotic fever. It is easy for those of us who do not know to send our sons and daughters to learn the lessons of war yet another time.

The fact is that we don’t want to know. We don’t want to be reminded of that eternal truth of war. We want to pretend that it is a clean and sanitary business conducted with computers and symbols on maps. We want to believe that it is a righteous undertaking full of pageant and glory. That is why we forget the debt that we owe to those who do know. That is why we stint on caring for those who come home. We want to forget and bury that knowledge of terror, of bloodshed, of hideous, agonizing death.