- INFANTRY, long quotations restored -

Pull on the boots of an average grunt.

Chapters

• 0:07 my civilian stories
• 3:45 pull on an infantryman's boots
• 12:31 civilian war chiefs
• 14:31 Police State drones
• 15:01 casualty quotes long and pertinent
• 30:42 back to you on the battlefield
• 31:49 every survivor not a sociopath born
• 33:15 After your sacrifice
• 35:25 So tell me, dear Learner
• 36:13 Lincoln quote

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID

From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld

Learner, begin

- INFANTRY -

I have neither served as a warrior nor experienced ground combat this time around, (touch wood!). But I believe I have done so in past lives and I believe  so have you. We are all veterans and victims of combat, if only by way of subliminal recall.

If you reject my proposal because you refuse to believe in reincarnation or because you insist that civilians (or anyone who disagrees with you) should shut up about war, too bad, so sad. Read on or refuse to; figure it out or not. All I can do is propose it to you.

We must taste the blood-acid vomit of war without experiencing it first-hand, take deep breaths of its stench and soak our face in its gore. We must re-acquaint ourselves with those horrors that have been spared us by rare good fortune and wisdom this time around. 

Let’s evoke combat from the stories of those who have experienced it for us, as well as from past experience dimly recalled or wiped from our memory. That way, we can stop re-enacting it today and in days to come — much less often than we’ve had to in past reincarnations. 

I can only repeat the story my grandfather told me. He said the sweetest fruit he ever ate – and we lived in French Provence where  the fruit is good and plenty – were raw onions dug up from a desolate garden plot. Those onions were clotted with soil, and “We ate them like apples.” The memory made him smile.

That when your squad gets caught in an artillery firestorm too far away from shelter, it is best to crawl flat on your belly until your head works under the crotch of the next man in line, then cover his ass with your helmet. 

How funny they found it when one guy crapped his pants (as happens to one in four combatants or more under fire) this time over the head of the man underneath. They lived through that barrage, scary enough to crap one’s pants, and got to cackle about it afterwards. 

Or my Dad’s story about catching lice with his tank destroyer recon company under a rotting pier. Or solemnly showing me a narrow, cobbled beach at the bottom of a deeply shaded gorge, too steep to climb down into blindly, though there must have been a path somewhere. He never showed it to us again and we never went back, even though our home was quite close nearby. 

His best friend, along with his scout troop spilling out of a landing craft, were massacred in a hail of German machine guns probably nested along the cliff top where we stood, a hundred or so feet above (I was young and small back then) a pebble beach along the coastal highway. Out on the far-right flank of the American landing in Provence (Southern France), beyond which the French Naval Assault Group of Corsica got massacred. My dad was a lucky guy.

Another good friend of his died after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. He commanded the tank platoon sent to that place: ten tanks flown there in pieces, and him in the lead tank with both arms broken and set in plaster. He died during the death march out to a concentration camp, along with two thirds of the caged survivors.

Or another story my father once told me, when he was a young lieutenant commanding the point element of a horse cavalry regiment on its way home, heat-drugged after a thirteen-hundred-mile march from Fort Hood, Texas to Fort Riley, Kansas and back, the last long march like that in American history. 

The horses at the point of the advance guard got wind of the nearing post and charged over the last crest and into the valley below, drawn to their cozy stalls and out from under the blazing sun and their dozing riders. No doubt a few of those tumbled off, though he didn’t tell me and I was too dumb to ask. My father sent back word that everybody had to look sharp because the horses were going to get frisky. I’ll bet they made a fine parade entrance after a masterful march. He never said so, but I saw the pride in his eyes.

Both of them parsed their stories short and doled them out to me sparingly, even though they knew I would pay rapt attention as long as they chose to speak. Such was the pain of their recall.

Let’s pull on the muddy boots of an infantryman. On PeaceWorld, every child will have read that kind of thing as ordinary fare — but nothing about military glory. Eight-year-olds will have heard about “Infantry” in school or devoured it as a comic book. 

But let’s go there anyway…

Instead of waking up in a soft bed in a warm room down the hall from loving parents, or alongside a sweet mate bent on loving, or just shiftless and on your own; you start up from rotting leaf litter at the bottom of a dank hole, roused by nonstop itching and the high-explosive roar that has stunned your senses for months, or an ominous quiet that portends nothing good. 

The horizon rumbles with the distant grumble of heavy artillery – yours, if you’re lucky; the other side’s or both, if not – surprisingly similar to an empty stomach’s growl — except it’s shaking the landscape in addition to your shriveling guts. Ravenous for another bite, it releases a trickle of sand into your hole. Beware lest it corkscrew you out of your hole and shred you for breakfast. Nothing you can do about that in any case.

You’re on your own, surrounded by steaming huddles of fellow sufferers buried out of sight. For a fortnight or more, none of you has set aside his rotting shoes or shit-colored rags, rested or bathed properly. If you slept at all, your mortal coma was bathed in sweat, teeming with nightmares and maddeningly interrupted at any moment. The haze of sleep deprivation is your daily lot, as well as that of your officers who will decide how you live or die.

This damp, dark morning is much like the others: sweat-soaked hot or shivering cold per seasonal excess. Rain and sweat soak your rotting clothing. Who would have dreamt – in the coziness of a tightly built house – that daily weather could be so savage? 

Stink fills your nostrils. It is common to every battlefield: a compound of mud or dust; foul breath, body odor and human waste; moldy clothing, food and equipment; high-explosive gas and smoke; rotting, seared lumps of flesh of every description: the burst of fresh blood, the sickly cocoa funk of its rot or the roast pork aroma when it burns. For the past hundred years, the common stink has been the inescapable one of diesel smog. Prior to that, the dung of draft and cavalry beasts and the random human kind coated every marching boot. Nothing alive stinks worse than a close column of filthy infantry, except that of overworked horses with weeping sores.

The toxic effluvia and taboo fluids you would shun in peacetime will make up your body bath during war. Its stench and racket will fester in your psyche until you die. Any hint of them in your remote civilian future will trigger fugues of post-traumatic stress.

Your body aches all over, and gut-wrenching diarrhea trots along behind you — half from dread and its immune-suppressing pall and half from the fecal breakfast you just wolfed down. Your muscles are laced with lactic acid, the milk of overwork. You cringe from a maddening skin crawl of bugs (the combatant’s faithful companions), and a sticky, stinking glaze that coats your skin. You and your buddies stink of ammonia sweat. Your hyper-abused bodies don’t carry fat any longer and burn muscle tissue instead. Nobody acknowledges your embarrassing sores and chronic complaints except with ridicule. You will have to cough, sneeze, piss or shit during moments of danger and imperil your friends in so doing. You have lost more weight than would be normal or healthy. Your exhaustion would flatten you under normal circumstances. Any doctor worth his salt would take one look at your sorry ass and prescribe a week of bed rest and rich food. Not here, not now. Front line rifle units are usually too undermanned to permit such luxuries.

You’re always hungry and thirsty. Blood warm, chlorine-stinking water nauseates you rather than quenching your thirst. Your appetite disappears the moment you open the next can of dog food combat rations. For every torment the genius of your nation’s combat logistics spares you, a dozen more plague you worse and without repair. 

Whether you suffer from clinical addiction or not, the false promise of alcohol and drugs will make you suffer like the damned. You would do almost anything for a few swigs, pills or shots of escape. Nonetheless, neither food nor drink nor drugs – those musty horrors available in your pigsty – offer you any real consolation. 

Only the fitful mails can console you now: a precious word from home. The mail clerk can just as well toss you a Dear John letter letting you know your mate went crazy from loneliness and threw herself at the next jerk ishe met; or your family and friends were massacred during a recent, martial atrocity back home and have abandoned you forever.

Instead of endless commutes to an almost bearable job, you face the snarling machinery of industrial hate that stretches out beyond the horizon: the entire genius, fortune and flower of youth of some random country whose citizens you never met and against whom you never held a quarrel — entirely devoted to, your, personal, extermination. Gulp!

 Your side’s firepower is just as menacing as that of the enemy. Front-line troops can be massacred by either side. Mechanized forces are hotbeds of disaster. Both sides’ artillery, tanks and aircraft are perfectly designed to shred your delicate transparency. Disease and accidents will kill you just as dead as combat, often sooner. Death is not picky on the battlefield. 

Danger lurks everywhere, as well as quiet execution by firing squad or a squad leader’s pistol if you tarry too long in a place of safety. No relief or security awaits you except in the tidy rows of a military cemetery or a convalescent ward. Otherwise, in a common grave carved out by bulldozer, or some dank, scream-filled and stinking aid station grotto — from first aid to the three volleys of a funeral salute, by the book with military precision.

Instead of schmoozing with familiar and reasonable people under the constraints of law and civility, you confront lost souls as filthy and miserable as your own. Instead of a coterie of friends and acquaintances nourished by mutual kindness, they are a bunch of smelly, brutish and crude compulsive-neurotics with whom you share nothing but common misery motivated by petty spite and perfectly reasonable terror. 

If you’re lucky enough and possessed with the dignity of courage, they will treat you like a noble brother during a crisis, share their last crust of bread and sip of water with you, risk their life to save yours — and treat you like dirt at other times. Your tender feelings and aching bodies are at each other’s mercy. No choice in the matter.

This black morning promises calamity for you and your guys. You have become sly creatures by now, as superstitious as cannibals and feral-wary of everyone else. 

If you find yourself in a pocket of relative security, combat may seem to be a lesser worry. You will be bullied by rear area lifers handpicked for cruelty and determined to keep you cowed. Perfect brutes you would neither party with behind the lines nor trust in combat — for endless rounds of meaningless, filthy and exhausting chores. Their only response to your demand for dignity: reflexive insult, brutality and another perilous assignment. Their relative safety dictates your peril; their meager comfort, your misery. Imps lining the entranceway to Hell, goading the damned to their doom — their primary goal is to drive you back into the fight. Like other repressive institutions in peacetime, like the cilia lining peristaltic intestines, they flutter chow along their way while wringing the last scrap of vitality from them.

Your commanders will be more intent on the enemy’s destruction than on your wellbeing. If they are good, they will work themselves ragged to see that you are fed and housed to minimum standards. They may briefly regret your bug-like distress and extinction, then carry on with their plans. Otherwise, they won’t give a damn. Indeed, they’ll seek their promotion by promoting your distress without sharing it with you.

 A good officer will lead you into hell and bring back as many of you intact as possible, by his coolness under fire, his compassion and know-how (especially miraculous good luck!); a bad one, on the contrary, will get you killed by his stupidity, snobbery and cowardice. There are no bad troops, only bad officers. The good ones form elite troops before sacrificing themselves; the bad ones survive their lethal ineptitude too often.

That is what makes a general’s career and earns him his stars. His honorable record generations ago as a small unit combat leader, and his political cunning since, have brought him promotion. Like good wine soured into vinegar, his noble calling has devolved into rote mechanics: oppress or replace subordinate commanders when their war-torn compassion paralyzes them. Needless to say, barring catastrophe, he’s headed nowhere near peril, he and his drafted three-star chef. His primary task is to dig you and your friends into some untenable spot, then send you on endless marches into greater peril until you become casualties: so much lost baggage. There will always be a stream of anonymous new replacements to fill in the holes and get used up in turn. General George Patton wasn’t happy unless a few of his many lieutenants got shot recently. That is a general’s duty, glory and reward.

As for civilian masters of war, things are even less decent. As frontline infantry, the less you know about the political stuff, the better.

Did you know that the last four successful Republican Presidential candidates negotiated with the enemy behind the back of a Democratic Incumbent President?  Look it up for yourself in the public record: Johnson v. Nixon with the North Vietnamese, Carter v. Reagan with the Iranians, Clinton v. Bush the Lesser with the Taliban, and Obama v. Trump with the Russians. Treason, high crimes and misdemeanors: the only way Republicans can win a straight-up contest – at least until the reactionary Supreme Court puts its thumb on the voting scale. The “neutral” media would crucify any Democratic candidate who dared do such a thing. Just like President Obama could never get away with one-one hundredth of the crap Trump gets away with routinely. If I applied for a security clearance with one-tenth of Trump’s moral baggage, they’d laugh me out of the office. Who gave that jerk a security clearance, anyway, long before he was subject to “executive privilege?” Apparently, you don’t need a security clearance investigation if you’re a Presidential candidate, even less so if elected.

Your best buddy will die before your eyes or lie horribly mangled in your arms, and their replacement and their replacements afterwards, and likely yourself in the long run. After witnessing their agony and washing your hands in their blood, you will bury them in a common grave (one of hundreds you had to dig) that took hours of grueling work to scrape away the clay, the rocks and stubborn roots at your feet. Digging a friend's grave, a latrine, a trench or a decent dugout by hand takes a staggering amount of work.

Lemon-sized sub-munitions bounce into the bottom of fortifications, down dugout steps and around sandbag walls before they go off in a blizzard of mini detonations, shredding those cowering in terror underneath and inside. Kamikazes flying overhead, or technicians based on the other side of the planet, can pilot vehicular and drone-borne explosives, and soon ruled by artificial intelligence, without any likelihood of escape.

Beware, once the police adopt these drones, they will hunt down "terrorists" (those who challenge the routine monopoly of corruption by the leadership, whatever its political orientation). These victims will be shot down in the street, anonymously, day and night, and left to rot as an example for the others, their relatives risking the same fate if they touch them. So too, allies of the leadership and those neutral, at the hands of both sides. Man, woman and child: everyone on Earth is on the front line of combat.

Now for some quotes from people much more qualified to comment than I: 

“The ‘million dollar’ wound (as suffered by Hollywood heroes) is caused by a high velocity military bullet, undistorted and still encased in its metal skin, which passes straight through relatively elastic muscle tissue and out the other side, making a pencil-thin tunnel and leaving a star-shaped exit wound only about three-quarters of an inch across.  However, the size of the tunnel caused by the bullet’s passage varies due to yawing.  For roughly the first 6 inches of its journey, the fully jacketed bullet continues point first, and this may well be enough to take it out the far side; but because the heavier base of the bullet still wants to be at the front, after that distance it begins to turn around or cartwheel.  When this tumbling reaches 90° the bullet is traveling sideways, thus enlarging the tunnel to more than an inch across.  By the time it has traveled through tissue for about 15 inches, it is moving base first, and the tunnel resumes its original width.  Irrespective of the distance traveled inside the body, however, a bullet which hits major bones may break up; the metal jacket and soft lead core may separate into irregular pieces, each of which travels in unpredictable directions — as do the pieces of broken bone.  In such cases, the exit wound may be up to 5 inches across.  Limb wounds which shatter the long bones can cause massive damage; particularly to the legs, where splintered bones threaten major blood vessels.  Even a ‘clean’ penetration of the heart, liver or major blood vessels is usually fatal, and brain damage normally has devastating results even when the victim survives: …

[Author’s note: bullet-proof armor and modern surgical techniques permit the survival of more and more wounded soldiers who used to die quickly: those struck at exposed portions of the face and neck leading to their brain and cervical vertebra.  Thus more and more wounded veterans live out the rest of their lives more or less vegetative or paralyzed.  Another bunch of high-tech survivors lose unarmored appendages: arms and legs, hands and feet].

“… apart from yawing and bone strikes; the amount of damage a bullet causes depends upon another effect known as cavitation.

“Imagine a tennis ball, drilled through the center and sliding freely long a pencil-thin rod.  The rod is the tunnel made by the bullet – the ‘permanent cavity’; the ball is the ‘temporary cavity’ caused all around that path by a brief but powerful shock wave following immediately behind the bullet, cavity up to 7 inches across, which then collapses inwards again (the vacuum effect may also suck dirt through the entry wound into the bullet track).  Some organs, such as the liver, can rarely survive this process; others, such as the lung, are less affected

“The crushed muscle tissue of the permanent cavity and the stretched tissue of the temporary cavity are both, in effect, pulped, with their blood supply through minor vessels disrupted; if left untreated the flesh will rot (necrotize), producing an ideal breeding ground for bacteria.  The surgical treatment therefore involves debridement – the cutting away of the dead tissue and of a margin of healthy tissue around it; this is more or less radical depending upon individual circumstances, and the correct timing and degree of debridement are matters of professional discussion among trauma surgeons.  In the best case, new healthy tissue will grow inwards all around the debrided wound.  In the worst case, sepsis will occur – gangrene – and the patient’s prospects become seriously worrying.” 

Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam, Da Capo Press, Perseus Books Group, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004.   Originally published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, England, 2004, pp. 533-534. (See also, below the next paragraph).

“No weapon frightens me as much as the shell.  Bullets have a certain logic.  Put a sizeable enough piece of concrete between yourself and the firer, and you will be untouched [pending AI directed bullets].  Run between cover, for it is difficult even for an experienced shot to hit a man who sprints fast.  Even when people around you are hit, the wounds seldom seem so bad, unless the bullet has tumbled in flight or hit them in the head.  But shells?  They can do things to the human body you never believed possible; turn it inside out like a steaming rose; bend it backwards and through itself; chop it up; shred it; pulp it: mutilations so base and vile they never stopped revolting me.  And there is no real cover from shellfire.  Shells can drop out of the sky to your feet, or smash their way through any piece of architecture to find you.  Some of the ordnance the Russians were using was slicing through ten-storey buildings before exploding in the basement.  Shells could arrive silently and unannounced, or whistle and howl their way in, a sound that somehow seems to tear at your nerves more than warn you of anything.  It’s only the detonation which always seems the same – a feeling as much as a sound, a hideous suck-roar-thump that in itself, should you be close enough, can collapse your palate and liquefy your brain.”  

Anthony Boyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, Penguin Group, New York, London, 2001, first published by DoubleDay, New York, 1999, p. 244.

“The most clichéd but accurate metaphor for the sound of incoming shells in flight is that of an old-fashioned steam express train rushing past a few feet away.  Depending on their distance, speed and angle [and caliber], shells tunneling through the air make slightly different noises; so a heavy barrage weaves itself into a bewildering cacophony of sounds; but the rushing always ends the same way, with a thunderclap detonation – sschhiiii… boom!  Hollywood’s microphones fail to convey either the sharpness or the loudness of battlefield explosions; and the visual effects normally used to simulate shellfire – with plastic bags of petrol and aluminum silicate – are equally misleading.  In reality the eye usually registers a shellburst as an instantaneous orange-yellow flash inside a dark, leaping fountain of mixed smoke and pulverized earth, sometimes studded and fringed with large pieces of slower-moving debris.  The bigger, heavier chunks of earth and stones thrown up by the explosion fall nearby first; the smaller debris, blown much higher, comes pattering and clinking down for a considerable time afterwards and over a wider area.

“The instantaneous pressure wave from the explosion moves outwards at supersonic speed – this is the expanding ring effect seen fleetingly in, for example, aerial footage showing the explosions of ‘sticks’ of bombs.  It is followed after a slight but appreciable interval by a blast wind – the bulk flow of hot gases, fragments and ground debris away from the explosion.  People in the target area experience the pressure wave as a sharp squeezing sensation in the chest, and its shock is also felt through the ground underfoot; this shuddering of the earth is powerful enough to make those sheltering in trenches fear (justifiably) that they are about to be buried alive, and those who are lying flat feel themselves being shrugged violently into the air.  These sensations are accompanied by stupefying noise, and under heavy and persistent fire all the physical senses are overwhelmed.  Completely impotent to affect their chances of survival, soldiers find sustained shelling and mortaring the worst ordeal of battle; those experiencing it often become temporarily unhinged, losing all muscular control (including of the bladder and sphincter) and the capacity of any rational thought beyond ‘Oh please God no…’  These effects are particularly marked among men exposed to shellfire for the first time — as were the great majority at Dien Bien Phu.  Although these physical and mental reactions are quite involuntary, the fear is rational: in modern warfare it is shell and mortar bombs that cause the great majority of casualties.

“In that minority of cases when men suffer a virtually direct hit from artillery the result is complete destruction of the body: “The shell hit him, I’m telling you, it blew him into tiny little bits… a booted foot, a section of human cranium, a bunch of fingers, a bit of clothing.  It was simply a matter of little, tiny bits.’  To be a witness to this utter physical annihilation – perhaps of a friend – is particularly shocking; it abruptly tears away a number of necessary self-protective illusions all at once.  When a body has been blown up, the spinal column – surprisingly resilient – often survives after a shell has fallen among a group of men; counting the remaining spines is sometimes the simplest way to determine the number of dead.

“Most injuries, however, occur further out from the site of the explosion.  Blast injuries to the human body are categorized as primary, secondary and tertiary.  The first is the direct effect of the pressure wave; the second, the effect of projectiles and debris carried by the blast wind; the third, the result of the body being thrown through the air and smashing into the ground or other obstacles.

“The most obvious sign of primary injury is rupture of the eardrums, which may occur when air pressure rises to anything between 5 and 15 pounds per square inch [additional? 14.7 psi is normal]; war memoirs offer many instances of men killed by blast who appear peacefully asleep apart from tell-tale bleeding from the ears.  The lethal internal damage caused by pressures of 50 psi and upwards won't present dramatic outward signs (though shellfire casualties typically suffer multiple injuries).  It is the gas-containing organs which sustain immediate and often fatal damage from the pressure wave: the lungs and occasionally the colon suffer catastrophic injury from the instantaneous compression effect of the blast.  Large blood-filled cavities are formed in the spongy alveoli of the lung, and fatal air embolisms are released into the arterial system; less often, the bowels may rupture, as – in a few cases – may the spleen and liver.

“Secondary injuries will be more obviously dramatic.  When a shell bursts the steel case breaks up into fragments of all shapes and sizes, from tiny beads to twisted chunks weighing several pounds.  These – together with stones, pieces of weapons and equipment, and even large bone fragments from casualties nearer the blast – whirl outwards from the center at different speeds.  The effects of being struck by shell fragments (usually, though incorrectly called ‘shrapnel’) vary as widely as the size and speed of the metal shards.  Sometimes a man is unaware that he has been pierced by a small splinter until somebody else points out the bloodstained hole in his clothing.  Larger fragments, cartwheeling unevenly through the air, edged with jagged blades and hooks, can dismember and disembowel.

“In many cases the evidence confronting an eyewitness is all too vivid.  In others the immediate reaction is one of simple puzzlement: blast and steel can play such extreme games with the human form that the observer does not understand what he is looking at.  When some random physical reference point suddenly jerks the whole image into a comprehensible pattern, the shock of recognition may be appalling.  The results of massive destruction – the ruined hulk of a torso, the crimson rack of ribs, the glistening entrails, limbs ripped away and scattered, a severed head – have a charnelhouse squalor that denies all human dignity.  On chilly evenings at Dien Bien Phu, the warm, gaping body cavities steamed visibly, and the opened-up bowels gave off a stink of faeces.”  

Martin Windrow, The Last Valley, op. cit., pp. 371-374.

Or check out Southern Lebanon, or Yemen, or Syria, or Palestine, or Soudan, or... within the last few years.  Am I really in the Twenty-First Century of the Christian Era on Earth?!?

“It comes down to physics.  What movies cannot render is that, often, the most lethal aspect of an explosion is not the scattering of projectiles in its blast, but the tremendous shock wave that blast releases.  And whereas this shock wave rapidly weakens over the open ground of a traditional battlefield, the canyonlike structure of a city provides both channels for it to travel and an amplifying effect as it caroms off surrounding walls and buildings.  This wave, too, will gradually weaken as it moves away from the source, but it’s exponentially more concentrated force will inflict far greater damage.  It is also likely to leave behind clearly delineated, concentric circles of destruction.  Much like reading the growth rings of a tree, a seasoned observer examining these circles can quite easily determine the explosion’s precise epicenter, even if no obvious physical evidence – a crater, for example – is left behind.

“In the immediate blast area, the ground will be swept perfectly clean.  Naturally the size of this epicenter will depend on the explosion’s magnitude – given the range of ordnance most commonly used by modern armies, it might extend anywhere from fifteen to eighty feet – but within this area, there will not be a scrap of paper or a nugget of loose asphalt, and anyone unlucky enough to have been standing there was not flung or somersaulted to their death, but vaporized: not a tooth, not a patch of clothing or a shoelace, they have simply turned to mist.

“Moving past the epicenter, one will begin to come across small bits of debris, including scraps of flesh, but initially these will be so minute and degraded as to be unrecognizable.  A little farther out and these scraps will become larger, but distinguishing them from mere detritus will still be difficult because human bodies break apart in unpredictable ways, and the parts here will be blackened with scorch marks, encrusted with dirt and gravel, so as to be easy to mistake for clumps of singed fabric or even twisted fragments of metal.

“Beyond this ring, the human remains will start to take on recognizable forms.  At first, these are likely to be mostly detached limbs and torsos, some still clothed, but most naked or bare to their underwear, their outer garments having been shredded or burned away in the initial blast.  In this area, there may also be a number of bodies without heads.  This is because the head is the heaviest part of the human body, as well as its most delicately attached, and in the tremendous concussion of an artillery blast, it often severs at the top vertebrae of the spinal column.  It is not at all uncommon in such situation to come across three or four heads lined up against a street curb or the side of a building some distance away from the explosion, the heads having rolled until coming to an obstacle to halt their momentum.  In this section, one will also begin to come across the first of the survivors, most grievously wounded, and since many of them will still be conscious and pleading for help that is beyond the ability of anyone to give them, it is usually this area that is the most upsetting to the eye witness.

“At a certain point away from the epicenter – anywhere from sixty to three hundred feet, again depending on the explosion’s magnitude – it will appear one has reached the outer edge of destruction, but this will probably not be true.  Depending on the trajectory of the shell and the architectural peculiarities of the city, shock waves are likely to have traveled through the surrounding building and alleyways, and there one is liable to find a number more of dead with no visible wounds upon them.  These will be people who have essentially been crushed, this internal organs bursting from the tremendous split-second force to which they were exposed, and it is not at all abnormal to find these victims still sitting upright in chairs, as if they are merely napping or gazing meditatively into space.

“But as ghastly as all this is, those who fall direct victim to an artillery shell’s blast and shock wave normally represent only a portion of those killed when a city is bombarded.  Many more are felled by glass shards from blown-out windows; these are like thousands of jagged daggers streaking out in all directions, sometimes with enough velocity to pierce metal or concrete or pass clean through a human chest.  Others die from having buildings topple on them.  And then there are the fires which so often accompany bombardments.  While more advanced armies have developed firebombs that literally suck the oxygen out of a targeted area, [and more recent "Dragon" drones that vomit long streams of white-hot liquid thermite], quickly exterminating all within, the more common form of death in such circumstances is the protracted ordeal of carbon-monoxide poisoning as the building around the victim slowly turns.  And, of course, there are those who linger for a time, who don’t succumb to their wounds until the next day or the one after that…”  

Scott Anderson, Moonlight Hotel, Doubleday, Random House, 2006, pp. 168-170.

Otherwise, you will have to lug their broken, lead-heavy body to an uncertain fate in the rear, half-willing that they croak and relieve you of the struggle to save them. The loss of precious friends will twist like a dagger in your heart. Later on, you will shun such painful friendships.

The buddy you save is a ‘lucky’ one. More likely, your friends will move out, under orders to ignore the wounded. The next volleys of enemy fire will mow down your heroic medics.  Your wounds will pin you to the ground until some wandering enemy ends your misery with sadistic enthusiasm or queasy hesitancy and strips your body before he moves on. In your own good time, you may die screaming in agony or quietly bleed to death all alone.

Why bother with anyone outside your vermin-infested tribe? Anyone beyond your narrow squad – friend or foe, combatant or non-combatant – will assume the phantom profile of inhuman wraiths whose suffering and extermination are matters of relief, indifference or derisive sport. Most of all, you will despise those pasty civilians you were sent here to defend. Wishing them a fate worse than your own, the black magic of your envy may worsen theirs. 

Sooner or later, you and every survivor not a sociopath-born will become post-traumatized zombies — at which point, nothing much will matter until you’ve received months of professional help and perhaps never again. You will never recover fully.

Your only real assignment is to kill and, if possible, not be killed. You will be invited to commit every crime you despise. Nothing less than your complete acceptance of this criminal degradation will let you escape this hell with perhaps your body intact but your soul in tatters. Your hatred will blind you. The screams of agony of the enemy will become music to your ears, along perhaps with the wail of wretched women and children caught in the crossfire. Plunder will become an indoor sport, a pastime from the interminable boredom of military life, the endless boredom of military life, the unending boredom of military life: repeat ten thousand times a day. Any decency you once prized will be ripped from you, and every perversion of justice and compassion will become routine.

Not until then will you fully grasp the monstrosity of war. Unfortunately, too late to do anything about it except compound its misery. Your options will narrow to mere survival and perhaps not even that. Everything else will become empty words and meaningless sensations, compared to the combined rush of combat survival, fraternal loyalty and the random verdict of life or death. 

Stripped of the pastels  and smiling rainbows of civilian life, you may become addicted to your black and white dilemma and unfit to resume the trappings of peace. In that case, your beloved society, ancient practitioner of social triage, will quietly snuff you out once you resume its embrace — without pause, mercy, dignity or regret. Your disappearance will not even be counted among the casualties of war, much less honored. More veterans die that way than in combat, dying alone and forsaken by everyone at home. From 22 to 28 veteran suicides per day in 2019 USA.

These days, more children die from war than soldiers. It has probably always been so, but never reported without censorship to the civilian world. Psychopaths would rather harm the innocent wholesale with the consent of an ignorant public.

Tomorrow’s wake-up will seem much like today’s and yesterday’s and the one the day before, unless some new disaster probes your courage, sanity and endurance, and likely leads you to collapse, convulse and perish.  Instead of operatic appeals to God, to duty, honor and country that you’d imagine you’d utter heroically; your last gasps are likely to be the whimpers of a toddler in pain: ma, mommy, mama – begging for a miraculous reprise of her loving embrace, to please, please come soothe your agony with her recalled love – your last plea for the comforts of the breast and the womb. It hurts so bad! Your precious adult vitality will pour out of you with your blood. 

Nobody will pay much attention to you for very long. The Army is set up to dispose of your corpse with the least fuss.  If you are a parent, your death will worsen the misery of your children and spouse and the agony of your parents. Those who grieve you will shut down sooner or later, whether they survive into victory or in defeat. Then they will pass on, and your life, cast into oblivion, will be forgotten. 

Your misery will become an abstraction, less significant than a footnote in history books that have buried so many throwaway lives in military jargon, fantasy heroics and socio-geo-religio-political nonsense. Less meaningful than a crushed ant or a moth in the flame. Your passionate, pristine existence – born in pain and hope and tenderly nourished by parents and guardians – will be shoveled into the WeaponWorld Jive Drive. Endless yous, reincarnated in the children to come, will have to retrace your absurd path into oblivion.

Every military calling is a long suicide mission for those who die.

So tell me, dear Learner, how can the reassuring routines of peace and progress prepare us for this long, serial agony — compared to which Christ’s afternoon Crucifixion might have made up for its Agony by its brevity? Only gradual and hypnotic conditioning from birth – backed by thousands of years of obsessive regimentation, courtesy of weapon civilization – prevent us from abandoning this charnel house bedlam screaming our lungs out and defying the psychopaths who lust to poke our tender extremities into their patriotic blaze, like weenies crackling in the campfire.

It would be better if there were no more war, only peace. Not no combat at all on this planet, at least for a while longer — but less now and a lot less in the future. Please God.

- LEARNER PEACEWORLD -

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

 Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

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We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

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, November 19, 1863

https://www.owleyes.org/text/gettysburg-address/read/text-of-lincolns-speech#root-8

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