Archive for the 'Tragedy' Category

Letter from an Infantryman

armydad

I found this among my father’s papers. He wrote it as a 20-year old infantryman who had been in combat for about six months.

I am struck by the eloquence, and doubly struck that he managed to be eloquent in the medium of pen-and-ink, with no copy/paste/delete and not even any crossouts:

Monday, Jan. 8 (1945)

Dear Mother and Dad:

Well, the new year has arrived and with it, sadly enough, have come no great changes. The war is still being fought, I and millions of other boys are still several thousands of miles away from home and our loved ones, and it almost seems as if there will never be an end to this useless, heart-breaking, killing war.

Whether a man is German, American, or French, he looks just the same when he is wounded, dying or dead. The battlefield bullet is a great leveler; it can make the biggest man very small or the weakest man a hero, but in this war most of the heroes are dead.

We who are actively engaged in defeating the enemy would not hesitate to lay down our arms and surrender if we thought that the people who make the peace will fail to make it permanent. The mere thought that our comrades may have died for nothing, that we may have a brief pause from this war so that we can raise sons to fight another war would cause us many sleepless nights. The last thing one dying soldier said to me was that he was dying on the battlefield so that his son would not.

I may sound very bitter and full of resentment and frankly I am. This war should have been averted in 1918 and the ensuing years, but instead of preventing war, the American people actually encouraged it by ignoring everything that was going on around them. For the sake of all the men who have gone through this hell, we must not let this happen again. We must not have allowed so many of our boys to have died in vain.

I can’t possibly express the resentment these boys feel when they hear about these “Victory in Europe Celebrations”, and when they hear about the lotteries that are held to determine the date of the European victory. Here their own sons are being killed, maimed and crippled for life, and they trouble themselves with such trivial tripe. What is the matter with the American public? Is it entirely aloof to this war?

Perhaps I don’t sound like a twenty-year-old kid anymore, but I’ve seen things that I shall never forget, ghastly things that I shudder to think about. I think that a just punishment for any of these “Victory in Europe Celebration” planners would be to pick up a soldier’s boot on a battlefield and find the foot still in it, or sweat out just one artillery barrage. If they could just realize what is going on they would spend all their spare time praying for the safety of their boys and thanking God that America has been spared everything but an army.

Aside from being a little angry, I’m feeling fine. I’ve received several of your packages and everything is swell. I know that God has been answering your prayers, and he will continue to watch over me.

Love, Norman

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Late Night Thoughts

Hey, stay calm. Germany elected Hitler, and they survived okay.

Less flippantly, there are some silver linings in this very dark cloud:

  • Lots of good people re-elected to the Senate: Portman, Toomey — still waiting to hear on Ayotte. This means there will be at least some smart and forceful advocates for what we used to call Republicanism.
  • ObamaCare will probably be repealed and might be replaced by something better. (Or not.) It even stands a chance of being replaced by something much better, along these lines.
  • Dodd-Frank is probably about to go away. Again, that stands a chance of being excellent news, depending on what it’s replaced with.
  • The estate tax is likely to be finally dead and buried. Beyond that, there is at least some hope for broader tax reform (closing loopholes, lowering rates, fewer incentives to overconsume, etc). I’m not aware that Trump has ever shown much enthusiasm for this, but if Congress takes the initiative there’s a least a chance of avoiding the veto that would have been certain under Clinton.
  • Donald Trump will name the successor to Antonin Scalia, along with, probably another one or two or three Supreme Court justices. I am hopeful that he’s sufficiently uninterested in constitutional law that he’ll hand over the choosing to someone like Mike Pence. Compared to what we’d have gotten from Hillary Clinton, this would be a majorly good thing. Of course it’s equally likely he’ll nominate, oh, John Gotti, Jr. or someone. But we have reason for hope.
  • More generally, we can at least hope that Trump is sufficiently uninterested in governing that he’ll hand over everything to someone like Mike Pence.

None of this remotely compensates for the prospect of living in an America where Trumpian stormtroppers go door to door ferretting out people to deport. None of it compensates for the Trump Depression that we’re in for if he’s serious about his trade policies. But it’s something.

Continue reading ‘Late Night Thoughts’

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It’s Official

     

The enemy — he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury it secretly in some flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.

— Whittaker Chambers
Letter to W.F. Buckley, August 5, 1954

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