Veteran's Day remebered

Here's one toy soldier you don't get to see often enough, though isn't this one of the logical conclusions of war?

This Sunday is Veteran's Day, in the beginning it was originally Armistice Day to commemorate the end of World War . Back then it wasn't World War 1 but instead it was the Great War, the war to end all wars. It was really the first war of mass industrial slaughter that lead to an even more terrible conflict less than a generation later. It was only then historians and politicians had the concept of "world war" volumes one and two. 

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 there was a ceasefire on the Western Front, for all practical purposes the war was over even though hostilities continued in the east and around the Ottoman Empire with the very last casualties on June 21st 1919. For a moment the world was ready to swear off armed conflict as a way to settle disputes, it was a short lived moment as nations resumed the race to find better ways of killing each other and refining the political manifestos to justify it.

Wilfred Owen may have been the best poet of World War 1. Few people have heard of him because he did not spare the reader about horror of war. Like Homer, he was willing to describe the detailed truth of what truly happened. Owen was no Lord Tennyson. Ironically Wilfred Owen was killed on the Western Front November 4th, 1918 and the news of his death didn't reach his parents until the the 11th, the day the Armistice was declared.

 In the face of hyper-nationalism it is a rare voice that questions authority and tries to be rational in the face of fear. Wilfred Owen's poem takes an opening line from Horace's ode "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" -it is good and right to die for one's country, and examines what that means.

I was introduced to this poem in a college cafeteria and while sitting in with a group of Vietnam veterans. Over the years I have heard this poem recited in shrill dramatic indignation but the first time was different. Read aloud by somebody that knew what combat was. Him and I shared a couple of classes and eventually he told me about his time in a behind the lines unit. The experience was so traumatic that he felt he could not return home and live among normal people -so he volunteered for a second tour of duty.

Wounded near the Cambodia boarder he was sent home or as he would have said "forced home". He got into college on the GI bill and loved it. Loved it so much, I had to ask why? He looked at me as though I asked silliest question and answered "the girls are pretty and I'm not required to kill anybody".

I can still hear him reciting this poem from 35 years ago. In that cold somber voice of experience.

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I guess every war is fought with the illusion of victory. One of the best books to scrutinize that illusion and see how it breaks down is the Guns Of August by Barbra Tuchman. As she tells the history of the first month of World War 1 you see how all the parties run blindly into an epic tragedy and can not get out once trapped in it.

Another book worth reading this weekend is Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Without giving away any of the plot, two quotes come to mind.

"The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought"

The second quote comes from Mary O'Hare, a character in the story who is upset with Kurt Vonnegut when  she fines out he's going to write a book about his experience in World War 2.  She has just put her children to bed. "You were only babies in the war- like the ones upstairs. But you're not going to write that, are you...
You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." 

Compared to the wide scope of human history, the world is relatively peaceful. Maybe as more people achieve a certain level of bourgeois prosperity there seems so to be so much less to fight about. One of the biggest challenges for the future is to make sure there's enough to go around.

If it was up to General Patton, World War 3 would have started the day after Hitler's death. Patton was ardent anti-communist and felt it was a good time to strike the Soviet Union when they were weak. There was one essay titled Thank God For The Bomb that estimated the carnage of a World War 3 using strictly conventional weapons . If World War 1 exterminated 20 million people and World War 2 meant the end of 80 million -an all out World War 3 could have brought the collapse of civilization and the deaths of half a billion.

The atomic bomb just proved to be too big and terrible to use for wars between nations. Now all we have to see if we can survive the wars of extreme ideas.

To all Veterans -thank you and welcome home. The best way to honor your sacrifice is to learn how to live in peace.

                                       In the Mailbox

The blog is still growing. I'd like to say hello to Hong Kong, Latvia and Croatia. My two sons are proud of me because people are reading this blog and I haven't resorted to the two most popular things on the internet  -which are porn and cats. (Okay I like cats so I have thrown in a picture or two)

One email reminded me of Fotomat. In my posting Polaroid Memories I mentioned how commercial film developers would pick out and destroy any negatives that were lewd or immoral -which meant there was nudity involved. The Polaroid camera, with its self developing pictures, was one way around that. Another way around that was Fotomat. They were convenient, inexpensive and had a quiet policy of developing everything without any self-righteous judgement.

The last time I saw a Fotomat was maybe 20 years ago, just as digital cameras started to become popular. If you know of any still in business, please email me.




I had several ask me about other female science fiction writers. I might do another posting on that later on. I wanted to stick with only those writers I actually read. If you want to recommend other female writers please feel free contact me.