I have no idea what the provocation was, but I'll check it out.  Turns out it matters a lot in terms of lives of our troops and the hideous life altering injuries the returning suffer.  I wonder if they, like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who survived, envy the dead.  Many, those whose overcoming are put on view by the media seem to harbor a relentless drive to conquer the injury and some do, through the use of supertechnological prosthetics that are sometimes computer controlled and assisted.  Others, through sheer grit and determination make do with less sophicated tools, but are able to put on the face of a pride and satisfaction that must be admired, though some are skeptical of what support systems will be available and for how long and at whose cost.  The "some" to whom I refer are not the veterans themselves but those whose anxiety about the future for the lucky who are advertised receiving the aid, is intensified for those who somehow, randomly are not chosen.  The atrocity of underpaid fighters returning to a life of poverty and misery because of some legislative oversight or bureaucratic bungle, never get the latest available right stuff to return them to a pain-free productive life and also form a long line waiting for their stories to be told.  They at least will deserve that.  To the extent possible, this log will record what we can find.  One of the portals we can open is this log itself, and an invitation will be extended and the key to a short version of their stories will be granted at some future time when the deployments wind down and the process of withdrawal and return begins with a regularity that lends the effort efficacy and credibility.

May 23, 2011

August Wilson, interviewed by Charlie Rose, asks “Am I an Artist?”   I ask, “Why do I write?”  Do I share the obsessive-compulsive disorder that results in the narcissistic inner drive to self-expression?  Who is my audience?  Do I have purpose?  Whom and of what do I seek to persuade?  I have no talent, only modest craft, I think.  So use it wisely, sparingly; do not abuse the privilege conferred by the new internet mode.

Bemused, bewildered and bowled over by the “shock and awe” of the hubris displayed by our leaders and their cabal in the Iraq war, I stopped “steaming as before” and lay dead in the water until it was possible to recover my voice.  With so much mendacity, arrogance and misuse and abuse of power about which to complain, now where to begin?  Given to impulsive thought and action, I am not a fool.  Not wise, either, but well-intentioned, I want my words to have power, to galvanize, to provoke, to spur on those with the energy, channels and courage to change our course, take the heavy seas off the bow and head for saner, calmer waters.

Samantha Power engages genocide; Franks, the red state/red neck phenomenon in American politics; Elizabeth Warren and Barbara Ehrenreich view with alarm and sadness the relentless drive to consume and the ensuing financial crises of the middle class in America.  The third or fourth “great awakening” once again merges religion and politics and hikes up political correctness to the gagging point.  Judges are now attacked physically as well as metaphorically, and what passes for politics in the U.S. is acted out on the floors of the houses of Congress, displaying all the flaws depicted by the Greek tragedians but without their dramatic power. But these recurring themes will ripple like the tsunami, unseen until some other day when they will come ashore, wreak brief, but tragic havoc, and then recede.

“Loose Nukes,” as the idea is now popularized, I will adopt as my chief concern, because unlike the tsunami, their havocs have a devastation measured in “half-lives,” an ironic double entendre nonpareil. Former Senator Sam Nunn, Warren Buffet, and a friend who worked for the Department of Energy in the G.H.W. Bush regime, along with a host of atomic scientists since the early days of their Bulletin and its famous clock, have howled with the fury of a Greek chorus, but with less effect, that the holocaust of accidental nuclear war grows more likely as the complacency engendered by the imagined end of “cold war” continues to lull us in the face of increased danger from “rogue” states and terrorists.  Buffet, along with many others, points out that the loss of life and material destruction of 9/11 will be diminished beyond perception by the explosion of a 10 kiloton nuclear device in a compact urban setting such as New York or Washington.  Between 11 and 17 Kilotons was the estimated “yield” of the Hiroshima bomb, exploded at about 1500 feet above ground. !40,000 died as a result of the blast and burns.  An equal number died within the next four months from radiation sickness. Countless others have died of radiation induced disease, and genetic defects presumed to have resulted from radiation exposure.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), organized by Nunn, and substantially funded by Buffet, is a leading private agency dedicated to educating the public and influencing policy to step up efforts to account for and control the nuclear material and weapons now possessed by many states and non-states.  It has produced a short film called “Last Best Chance” which is distribute free and should be played in classrooms at all levels everywhere, not to say in homes as well, repetitively, if necessary, which seems obvious.  There are other dramatizations, such as “Dirty War”, a Frontline production, and “The Day After” a 1983 cold war stunner, starring Jason Robards.  For dramatic written descriptions, few can surpass those of “The Third World War” and “Arc Light” both works of fiction by writers knowledgeable about the precise way in which nuclear weapons work their evil.  There are, doubtless, many others, if we need reminding of the effects of even low level nuclear devices, the most profound of which is the psychological state in which “the survivors envy the dead.”

Writing or emailing your Congress people is a start, of course, but what is needed is the use of large scale peaceable assemblies, on the order of, but much larger than, say, the “million man march” of the civil rights era.  What is at stake is the most fundamental civil right – that to life, leaving aside the familiar accoutrements of liberty and pursuit of happiness.  If the energies of those who oppose abortion could be channeled into securing “Loose Nukes” a major step would be underway to protect what they claim is their most precious goal: life at any cost, which may include violent death.

A former student and friend, now pursuing graduate studies, served in the accursed Somalia, and experiences the haunting of war:  He  permits me to share with you his most recent account of his sleep deprivation:

The war for me is over, but, every now and then, it
starts up again. You can never get away from it. You
wanted war and finally got it and now you have to live
with it whether you like it or not, you poor
motherfucker. You asked for it and now you have to
live with it. War is your child. War is dangling from
your shoulders, pulling you down and bringing the
sharp pains in weak places…pain in places you won’t
admit exist but are there, just the same. Sometimes
you dream about it but it makes less sense there than
it does on the outside….

You are lying in a bright room surrounded by warriors
you did not fight with…but you know them…knew them
after their war ended….knew them when they let it all
go and ran away….ran home to forget about it all….you
and that guy, and another guy…you’re all the same but
you know you’re different….but it doesn’t really
matter…

…you’re lying in the room, relaxing…and you are back
in the Marines…it is time to get up and put on a dress
shirt and slacks…to walk proudly and admire the wars
on each other’s chests. The Marine you’re looking at
has a khaki shirt…piled high on his chest, in the
place above the pocket where the fighting is stacked
neatly…is instead a stack of hardback book…these hardbacks
are from your youth…the books that you had as a kid…you
stacked them on your dresser and sometimes flipped through
them….sometimes you colored in them or found where someone
else had already colored in them for you…red and blue…
streaks violating the seriousness of your precious books…
your books sitting stacked on the shelf and piled more
for show than to teach you anything…….the books are piled
on his chest, where the war is supposed to go…

…you are confused by this, but this is a dream and
your life is confusing, anyway, and for these reasons
it all makes sense and seems normal…you tell yourself
as you narrate your own fantasy….

The Marines walk outside….some of your loved ones are
walking behind you…a woman…you have a daughter…there
is a warm feeling from this but you know it is only a
dream, that you have no daughter…but the daughter
walks behind you and you feel like a man…more than the
war or the books or the Marines built you in to…

You are walking across a street and just like that the
bright day is gone and now it is African dark….you are
wearing the gear of a man again…you are walking and
your hands are filled with anxiety and a loaded
rifle…you are lost and you cannot see and now you are
in charge again of a lost patrol and are coming up
quickly on a house….you are following the sidewalk and
there is a house with the porch light lit and now you
are closer and you can see students….you know they are
students because they covet books on their laps and
learn but do not share knowledge….like students do…and
now you realize that you are separated from the
Marines you are responsible for and that they are
missing in the dark…the students are looking at you as
you walk past in your war gear and you look and see
the skyline of your hometown….and now you
realize..through the dark of the place and the dream
and your broken soul that you are in your hometown and
you are still very much in Somalia.

The Marines are missing and you call for them on the
radio and they tell you they are under fire and you
tell them to hang on, you are coming…and you hear the
fighting over the radio but you cannot hear it with
your own ears and you know they are far away from
you..and suddenly you realize that you have just
walked to the edge of the long sidewalk.

You look to the left and you see three armed Somalis.
They are firing their rifles at you. This is all very
real and you look to your front and one of your
Marines is hiding behind a clump of bushes in the
front yard of one of the houses in your hometown…you
can remember crashing your bicycle into that same
bush….on purpose for laughs…before the gear of man and
rifles and war…that obsession still young and
unfocused…waiting for you to find your nerve and wit.

You are pinned down between the end of the row of
houses in your hometown and the clump of bushes where
your Marines are firing fiercely into the Somalis…the
fighting goes on for a minute and you are firing into
it again.

You are firing into it but this time you can see their
eyes and very much want to greet them, to ask them if
they remember you and can validate it all but you also
very much want them to see your bullets striking them
in their chests and killing them…

The fighting rages and the lost patrol is winning,
too…everyone is winning but it never really ends…and
you think to yourself as you fire into the war again
how strange it is for someone to have books from your
childhood pilled high on their dress uniform in the
place where their war is supposed to go…

The little girl is gone and the woman you love and
even the Marines but the war is still there… and you
wake up and start all over again.

Cole’s work in progress, as yet untitled, will be published in the near future.

As the would be peacekeepers in Iraq are picked off slowly, perhaps a pair at a time, one muses about the mental instability of those who will return someday, perhaps to a society unable to sustain interest in saturation TV of real time coverage of the daily carnage, much as the Israeli/Palestinian seesaw of violence takes its daily place in the Living Room Wars.

IN MEMORIAM THE DEAD AND WOUNDED – “WE HERE HIGHLY RESOLVE, NEVER AGAIN” (PACE LINCOLN)

I suppose a word of introduction is in order.  It took a while, but I eventually caught on to the idea of a weblog.  It is an appealing exercise in willful narcissism, but I found “blog” offputting for reasons I could not explain to myself for a while.  I came to see that the problem was the “b”…

If one is going to engage in this practice, why start with a “b?”  I managed to manipulate my way through graduate school in the humanities without missing an “a”, so I see no reason not to call this an A Plus Log, or APLOG for short, as it were.

Former Naval Persons (as Sir Winston Churchill liked to refer to himself) will recognize “Steaming as before” as the standard beginning to the deck log kept by Officers of the Deck relieving from another officer for a standard watch period and having nothing of substance changed from the prior watch, at least at first.  Thus, some prior OD would have recorded the course, speed, ships in company, boilers on the line, any unusual sea conditions or weather problems, major equipment outages, upcoming exercises or major events to be expected, and the like.

A couple of years ago, I retrieved copies of the logs from U.S.S. Basilone, DDE 824, the experimental ASW destroyer I served aboard for several years in the mid-fifties, for the month of January 1956. I will describe the catastrophic events of the first week of that month later, but for now simply want to record my shock at seeing the “anchored as before” legend continue to appear from watch to watch, with very little mention of the extraordinary trauma unfolding for ship and crew during one of the most treacherous gales, a northeaster, recorded in Norfolk, Virginia weather archives.  It was indeed a “perfect storm” as the eponymous Sebastian Junger book title has it, and the grounding of Basilone during it, the lives lost, equipment destroyed and command structure assembled to salvage the foundering ship, are glossed as if nothing more routine that a man overboard drill had been conducted.

Perhaps the records have been scrubbed, but I don’t think so, especially since my own logs appear recognizably in this chain of banality, and they speak in the same subdued tone.  Thus, the title of my electronic log is intended to convey the idea that as we steam right along through the sometimes heavy weather of life, there may be more to be found than meets the eye, belying the apparent quotidian calm.

Come along with me as you choose.  You can always tell me to keep my peace, or say your piece at stil9285@charter.net.