Memorial Day

"A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him." [George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant," 1950]

I still like Memorial Day on May 30. I love the last-Monday-of-May work holiday and unofficial start-of-summer cookout. But it's not Memorial Day. I prefer to keep both of them and keep them apart.

These are people to remember. They are the honorable dead of a new war. Not all of them are soldiers, but the new war sweeps up more than soldiers in its causes. And all believed in something. They believed in it enough to get up and do something about it, at peril of their lives. Whether it was themselves, their comrades, duty, their mission, their nation, the people of the world, the people of Iraq, the people of America -- or even peace. They went to the war to do something about it.

I believe none of them wanted to die. Probably until the moment the darkness whelmed them they were trying to live, to somehow make it. But all had been close enough to Fate by then to know her faceless, pitiless stare. There came a time to choose -- it came many times for some of them -- and they chose the brave thing over the easy one.



BERG, NICK
April 2, 1978–May 7, 2004

Nick Berg is the young contractor from my hometown in Pennsylvania who went to Iraq to do good and was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist terror-thugs. His sorrowing father said Bush and Rumsfeld killed his son. Yet this father, who is of the age of the '60s youth movement, taught his son to think and to make his own choices. And the son grew up to see a world that could be made better, even by Americans. Among those who sent the family condolences when Berg died were Kenyan tribesmen young Berg had helped improve their village.

He went to Iraq with the same vision: to bring democracy and a good life to people who knew little of either. He supported the war, for humanitarian reasons. In the Vietnam War, the old held that American power was a force for good and believed in the spread of freedom as a patriotic virtue. Their children spit bile at the administration. In this war, so often, the natural order was reversed.



DAILY, MARK
July 4, 1983-Jan. 15, 2007

The night before he shipped out to Iraq, Mark Daily tapped out on a laptop computer a short essay on why he had volunteered for the Army. With the touch of a button, he uploaded it to his MySpace site. Three months later, on Jan. 15, he died with three comrades when a roadside bomb demolished their vehicle near Mosul.

Volunteer armies at all times are a mix of people and motivations. But perhaps no army in modern times has had more collective ideals and ethics than the U.S. military. Daily, a cherished child from a privileged neighborhood in California, exemplified all this. He was a thoughtful, liberal (in the true, noble sense of that abused word), secular college student, a registered Democrat and a vegetarian.

Yet he grappled with his conscience and joined the U.S. Army for the sake of the humanitarian purposes it attempts to accomplish. Sept. 11 didn't change him overnight. But instead of kicking in to knee-jerk patriotism or "no blood for oil" opposition, he kept reading, and he kept thinking, and he decided ...

I joined the fight because it occurred to me that many modern day 'humanists' who claim to possess a genuine concern for human beings throughout the world are in fact quite content to allow their fellow 'global citizens' to suffer under the most hideous state apparatuses and conditions. Their excuses used to be my excuses.

... Anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the exception.

... (C)onsider what peace vigils against genocide have accomplished lately. Consider that there are 19-year-old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics.

... Don't forget that human beings have a responsibility to one another and that Americans have a responsibility to the oppressed.

And so on. Since his death, Daily's little essay has become a well of inspiration to people who never met him. His family has been flooded with letters, mailed from the White House and from mobile home parks.

John Daily, Mark's father, praised his son at the memorial service in his honor for "choosing the difficult right over the easy wrong." He also has said, as any father would, "I'd give it all back a thousandfold just to hug him one more time."

The media followed the blogs to the story. LA Times told it, though it relegated it to the local section in print and hid it behind the subscription wall online.

Ultimately, his family says, Daily came to believe that his lifelong altruistic impulses and passions for the underdog had to extend to Iraqis crushed under decades of oppression. It was time to stop simply talking about human rights and actually do something to help secure them.

And he decided that joining the Army was the best way to do that.

... Daily had read historian Stephen Ambrose's writings on World War II and the generation of soldiers who fought for freedom from the forces of fascism. If not Iraq, Daily thought, he wanted to help save those being slaughtered in Sudan.

In the fall of 2003, he entered the UCLA ROTC program. ... Lt. Col. Shawn Buck, who headed the UCLA military science department at the time, said Daily was a deep thinker and natural leader who persuaded many cadets to stick with the program. "Once he made the decision to join, he jumped in with both feet and gave it everything he had," Buck said.

In a 2005 videotape of his officers' commissioning ceremony, Daily told the crowd that the U.S. Army is one of the few militaries in the world that teach not only tactics but also ethics. "I genuinely believe the United States Army is a force of good in this world," he said.

He was not blind to military transgressions and fumed to his father that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib was a failure of leadership. But that was exactly why he needed to get over there, he said. He was going to make sure that his men upheld Army values of integrity and honor.

Christopher Hitchens attended Daily's funeral and wrote a magnificent, painful piece about it.

I thought, Well, here we are to perform the last honors for a warrior and hero, and there are no hysterical ululations, no shrieks for revenge, no insults hurled at the enemy, no firing into the air or bogus hysterics. Instead, an honest, brave, modest family is doing its private best. I hope no fanatical fool could ever mistake this for weakness. It is, instead, a very particular kind of strength. If America can spontaneously produce young men like Mark, and occasions like this one, it has a real homeland security instead of a bureaucratic one. To borrow some words of George Orwell's when he first saw revolutionary Barcelona, "I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for."

HOLLAND, FERN
died March 9, 2004, age 33

Here is the AP's story:

Lawyer Fern Holland went to Iraq to help the nation's women: She investigated human-rights violations, set up conferences and assisted in writing the women's rights section of the new constitution.

"If I die, know that I'm doing precisely what I want to be doing," Holland wrote in an e-mail to a friend on Jan. 21.

Holland was one of three civilians killed Tuesday after several gunmen posing as Iraqi police officers stopped her vehicle at a makeshift checkpoint near the town of Hillah, about 35 miles south of Baghdad. ...

Holland's family believes she was targeted by assassins because of her work, which included opening women's centers around Iraq.

"She believed in freedom. She believed that every man and woman born should enjoy the right of freedom," her sister Vi Holland said. ...

Holland, a 1996 graduate of the University of Tulsa College of Law, worked at two law firms in Tulsa before joining the Peace Corps and traveling to Namibia.

She returned to the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but did not stay long.

Tulsa attorney Stephen Rodolf, who kept in touch with Holland through e-mail, said she seemed to be aware of growing threats to her safety.

"We stand out, and those who dislike us know precisely when we come to town," she wrote to him.

Her job required her to travel almost every day on highways where snipers and roadside bombs lurked. And yet, she asked to travel with an unarmed escort because she felt the high security around her was a barrier to her work, he said.

"She was an extraordinary person who honestly wanted to help people," Rodolf said. "Anybody who knew her would tell you that."

That's the best of this country. No conflict whatsoever between serving in the Peace Corps and helping to rebuild Iraq. People on both sides of the U.S. political equation should wake up to that one. It's the same good work.

According to some reports, she was the first U.S. civilian working for the U.S. occupation authority to be killed in Iraq.



MONSOOR, MICHAEL A.
April 5, 1981–Sept. 29, 2006

Monsoor was born to a Christian Arab/American former Marine father and an American mother. The Wikipedia entry on him paints a picture of a typical active American boy:

Afflicted with asthma as a child, Monsoor strengthened his lungs by racing his siblings in the family's swimming pool. Monsoor attended Garden Grove High School in Garden Grove, California. He played tight-end on the school's football team and graduated in 1999. His hobbies included snowboarding, body-boarding, spearfishing, motorcycle riding, and driving his Chevrolet Corvette.

He joined the Navy and made it to be a SEAL. His platoon was sent to Ramadi in 2006 and assigned to train and mentor Iraqi troops.

As a communicator and machine-gunner on patrols, Monsoor carried 100 pounds of gear in temperatures often exceeding 100 degrees. He took a lead position to protect the platoon from frontal assault. The team was involved in frequent engagements with insurgent fighters. Over the first five months of the deployment, the team reportedly killed 84 insurgents.

During an engagement on May 9, 2006, Monsoor ran into a street while under continuous insurgent gunfire to rescue an injured comrade. Monsoor was awarded the Silver Star for this action. He was also awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Iraq.

The Medal of Honor citation tells the story of his death:

In the early morning, insurgents prepared to execute a coordinated attack by reconnoitering the area around the element’s position. Element snipers thwarted the enemy’s initial attempt by eliminating two insurgents. The enemy continued to assault the element, engaging them with a rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire. As enemy activity increased, Petty Officer Monsoor took position with his machine gun between two teammates on an outcropping of the roof. While the SEALs vigilantly watched for enemy activity, an insurgent threw a hand grenade from an unseen location, which bounced off Petty Officer Monsoor’s chest and landed in front of him. Although only he could have escaped the blast, Petty Officer Monsoor chose instead to protect his teammates. Instantly and without regard for his own safety, he threw himself onto the grenade to absorb the force of the explosion with his body, saving the lives of his two teammates. By his undaunted courage, fighting spirit, and unwavering devotion to duty in the face of certain death, Petty Officer Monsoor gallantly gave his life for his country, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and upholding the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

PERALTA, RAFAEL
April 7, 1979–Nov. 15, 2004

KIA in the second Battle of Fallujah. Bing West tells his story in "No True Glory," his masterful account of that fight.

"He saved half my fire team," said Cpl. Brannon Dyer, 27, of Blairsville, Ga.

"It's stuff you hear about in boot camp, about World War II and Tarawa Marines who won the Medal of Honor," said Lance Cpl. Rob Rogers, 22, of Tallahassee, Fla.

Here's a newspaper account:

Peralta, 25, as platoon scout, wasn't even assigned to the assault team that entered the insurgent safe house in northern Fallujah, Marines said. Despite an assignment that would have allowed him to avoid such dangerous duty, he regularly asked squad leaders if he could join their assault teams, they said.

One of the first Marines to enter the house, Peralta was wounded in the face by rifle fire from a room near the entry door, said Lance Cpl. Adam Morrison, 20, of Tacoma, who was in the house when Peralta was first wounded.

Moments later, an insurgent rolled a fragmentation grenade into the area where a wounded Peralta and the other Marines were seeking cover.

As Morrison and another Marine scrambled to escape the blast, pounding against a locked door, Peralta grabbed the grenade and cradled it into his body, Morrison said. While one Marine was badly wounded by shrapnel from the blast, the Marines said they believe more lives would have been lost if not for Peralta's selfless act.

... Rogers and others remembered Peralta as a squared-away Marine, so meticulous about uniform standards that he sent his camouflage uniform to be pressed while training in Kuwait before entering Iraq.

But mostly they remembered acts of selflessness: offering career advice, giving a buddy a ride home from the bar, teaching salsa dance steps in the barracks.

Peralta, a native of Mexico, joined the Marine Corps the day after he got his green card. He took the oath of citizenship in his Marine Corps fatigues. On the wall of his room in his parents' house were three documents: the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and his boot camp diploma.

Before he left for Fallujah, he wrote his 14-year-old brother, “Be proud of me bro ... and be proud of being an American.”



RUZICKA, MARLA
Dec. 31, 1976–April 16, 2005

A California hippiechick anti-war activist and human-rights crusader, she died in an insurgent attack in Iraq in 2005 while working on her campaign to help innocent victims of the war. Ruzicka had invested her adult life into coaxing people to see through the term "collateral damage." To her, it didn't so much matter who started the fight, it didn't so much matter how the hurt happened: she saw people, real people, with names and faces and families. And they've been wounded through no fault of their own, and we should help them.

Her young life took some time to reach that level of practical idealism. But that she reached it by 28 -- when many so-called progressives in their 70s still don't get it -- was a testimony to the woman and her virtues.

She was well down the Rachel Corrie path. Then, gradually, something happened. She realized she really wanted to help people. And she realized what mattered was connecting people who needed help with those who had the ability to give it. Ruzicka changed her tactics. Instead of bellyaching about the corporate media, she went to Afghanistan and befriended journalists in the foreign correspondent pool and lobbied them with a mix of charm and persistence to tell the stories of the civilians she was meeting. More importantly, she began connecting the civilian casualty survivors with U.S. military and government officials who had the cash in-country that could help.

"She had the ability to connect with the victims and to talk with the U.S. military and be acceptable and authentic to both," a co-worker said. "I think that was because she was concerned with the victims. It wasn't about the morality of the war, or the politics."

Here's how "Rolling Stone" described her awakening:

Through her experiences in Afghanistan, Ruzicka's politics, and views toward the war, had changed. Once a dedicated peace activist, she'd decided that war was terrible but in some cases inevitable, even justified. It was a conscious split between her and her mentors at Global Exchange, and her embrace of the people Medea Benjamin calls "the realists" signified a major shift not just in Ruzicka's political philosophy but in her life as well. For about the past ten years, Benjamin had been both a mentor and a mother to Ruzicka. But now, the two clashed on their views regarding the upcoming war with Iraq, something that became more apparent when Ruzicka joined Benjamin on a fact-finding tour in Baghdad just prior to the war. "She was working with people in D.C. who were saying the war is going to happen, let's help the people who will be hurt," says Benjamin. "I thought it was a mistake to think like that before civilians were even killed." Medea urged Ruzicka to return to the activist fold and come back to San Francisco to "join us with all her energy and all her incredible enthusiasm to do whatever we could to stop the war."

She had the chance to be strident. Instead, she chose to invest herself in actually helping. Her father, Clifford, a civil engineer, put it like this:

"She had some rebel in her. She didn't like the status quo and wanted to change injustices where she found them. But she learned that she could be more effective by working with the U.S. She wowed the people in Washington and spurred them to do more."

"She brought a spot of light to a very dim setting," said one friend. "She had this frenetic, youthful energy that made her just unstoppable." She came across as an innocent in some of the darkest, dirtiest places on earth.

But she strode in there deliberately, with her blonde, simple American demeanor, assured that there was no place else on earth she could do so much good and be true to herself.

'Tis the gift to be simple,
'Tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be

"The Nation's" eulogy noted the words of one of Ruzicka's myriad friends, author Peter Bergen:

"One really interesting thing is that Marla was very opposed to the Iraq war before it began, but once the war started I never heard her express any opinion about the war itself. Once the war started she just wanted to help people who were hurt, not engage in a debate about the merits of the war. Beneath her Californian happy-go-luck demeanor Marla was a very hardheaded realist about what needed to be done. The war happened. People were hurt. She wanted to help them. And an example of her realistic approach is how she worked in Afghanistan and Iraq compensating the families who died. Marla had no patience for people who demonstrated against the war, and did nothing else."

SMITH, PAUL R.
Sept. 24, 1969–April 4, 2003

U.S. Army Sgt. First Class, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

A few days after he died, I did a wire service search for every variation of the name "Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith." The search would cover everything published in the last three or four days by most of the big media services. I got only one hit. It's an incidental mention in a column of short takes that also includes news about pandas at the National Zoo. [I did get a hit on another Sgt. Smith, but it wasn't the same one. This one was a gay Marine, prominently featured in a big story about how the military is hungry for recruits but turning away homosexuals.]

Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith was invisible in the gatekeeper media. Fortunately, the alternate media remembered him.

Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action with an armed enemy near Baghdad International Airport, Baghdad, Iraq on 4 April 2003. On that day, Sergeant First Class Smith was engaged in the construction of a prisoner of war holding area when his Task Force was violently attacked by a company-sized enemy force. Realizing the vulnerability of over 100 fellow soldiers, Sergeant First Class Smith quickly organized a hasty defense consisting of two platoons of soldiers, one Bradley Fighting Vehicle and three armored personnel carriers.

As the fight developed, Sergeant First Class Smith braved hostile enemy fire to personally engage the enemy with hand grenades and anti-tank weapons, and organized the evacuation of three wounded soldiers from an armored personnel carrier struck by a rocket propelled grenade and a 60mm mortar round. Fearing the enemy would overrun their defenses, Sergeant First Class Smith moved under withering enemy fire to man a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a damaged armored personnel carrier. In total disregard for his own life, he maintained his exposed position in order to engage the attacking enemy force. During this action, he was mortally wounded.

His courageous actions helped defeat the enemy attack, and resulted in as many as 50 enemy soldiers killed, while allowing the safe withdrawal of numerous wounded soldiers. Sergeant First Class Smith’s extraordinary heroism and uncommon valor are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, the Third Infantry Division “Rock of the Marne,” and the United States Army.

At some point before the battle, Smith had written, but not sent, an email to his parents. In it, he wrote, "there are two ways to come home, stepping off the plane and being carried off the plane... it doesn't matter how I come home, because I am prepared to give all that I am to ensure that all my boys make it home."



VINCENT, STEPHEN
Dec. 31, 1955–Aug. 2, 2005

Killed in Iraq for telling the truth.

He was one of the people who on Sept. 11 decided to change a world where that could happen into a world were it couldn't.

His Reuters obituary describes him as "an art critic inspired to write about war after watching from the roof of his New York apartment as the World Trade Center towers fell."

He did it his way. He took his skills to Iraq, and he set up base in Basra. He wrote online, at his excellent blog, In the Red Zone, he wrote a much-praised book by that name, and he freelanced his prose for big media.

It was the last that got him killed.

His death came four days after publication in the New York Times of an opinion piece he wrote critical of the rise of Shi'ite Islamist fundamentalism in the southern city of Basra, Iraq's second city and the subject of his next book.

Those closer to the story than Reuters make the connection more explicit. The Times of London tells it like this:

There is speculation that Mr Vincent, who received death threats, was murdered in an attempt to silence him. Four days before his death he had written an opinion piece in The New York Times in which he said that the police force in the British-controlled city had been infiltrated by Shia Muslim extremist militias, who were responsible for carrying out hundreds of murders of prominent Sunni Muslims.

He criticised the British, whose 8,000 troops in the area are responsible for security in Basra, for turning a blind eye to abuses of power by Shia extremists. The whole city was "increasingly coming under the control of Shia religious groups, from the relatively mainstream ... to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr".

In his final blog, he wrote: "The British stand above the growing turmoil, refusing to challenge the Islamists’ claim on the hearts and minds of police officers."

How cruel, then, that, as the Times reports, Vincent "and his female translator were kidnapped as they left a currency exchange shop, within sight of a British military checkpoint." The translator, Nour Al Khal, was shot four times but survived.

In light of what has been happenning in Basra this spring, Vincent's last full post, dated July 26, 2005, on his blog, is prophecy.

Reader_iam, while writing here, called attention to a Nick Gillespie piece in "Reason" just after Vincent's murder.

Journalism is a profession covered in self-congratulatory myths the way a barnyard is covered in stinking horseshit. It's easy to slip into routinized obituaries, especially about good people who die—are murdered—in the ugliest of circumstances by the ugliest of people. The impulse is to acknowledge the victims' sacrifices and their talents, invoke the righteousness of their lives and your anger, bow your head, wipe away the tear forming in your eye, and then get on with your day. That's a noble gesture—and a necessary one. It allows us to process grief, and if we didn't do that, we'd all be puddles of tears all the time.

But when I think about the murder of Steven Vincent—when I think about those last grim hours he spent in captivity, waiting for the inevitable bullet to his body or the blade to his throat—it's hard to wipe away the tear. His death gives us reason to linger at the gravesite and puzzle over many things. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to know Steven, however briefly and however barely—and, more important, to have published some of his material. He was that rarest of a breed in a profession that supposedly reveres shoe-leather reporting and a dogged pursuit of the truth, no matter where it leads. Unlike most of us, he used reporting to challenge his own beliefs rather than set them in concrete.

[emphasis added by R_ia]

It is worth noting that Vincent's wounded translator and companion had been trying to get to America. I'm pleased to be able to say, she made it.

Newsroom Chit-Chat

Editor asked to write editorial for Memorial Day edition complains how hard it is to do and says he wishes he could be writing instead on "something I feel less ambivalent about."

Memorial Day

[posted by Callimachus]

Memorial Day should have remained May 30, without reference to day of the week. I like the national end-of-May holiday weekend; I celebrate it like everyone else. But it's not Memorial Day.

If you want an example of how the holiday has gone fuzzy, read one of the many blog posts and even media columns on this Memorial Day devoted to honoring veterans and living servicemen. That's a proper thing to do, of course, and there is Veterans' Day, if you want only one day to do it. But that day is not Memorial Day.

Memorial Day should remain as it was in the beginning, at least in the places where I've studied it. The encyclopedia stories focus on the first civic celebrations, which paints a wrong picture. The old Decoration Day was a time for soldiers to gather in town and walk out to the gravesites of fallen comrades and remember them as they saw fit, and say fitting words among themselves, then come home again.

Once the civilians got involved, it became something else. We still lack the thing it once was. Few words are sure to fall more flat or miss the mark more widely than the florid oratory of a local politician at a Memorial Day event. After the 272-word Gettysburg Address, what more is left for a civilian to say?

Families of the fallen need no day set aside for remembrance. They have the birthday, the wedding day, the day the troop train left the station, the day the telegram from the War Department came -- they have every day they draw breath.

The rest of us should just stand back today and say little and try in some impossible way to understand what it was to be him, or her. And what it means to be those who shared the experience but lived.



This was a little heartwarmer for me today. A professional historian pays proper tribute to the amateur:

I don't think there's a good word for what Mr. Hall did: "researcher" is too dry, "historical investigator" carries hints of melodrama, and "archivist" suggests a dutiful drudge, which Mr. Hall was not. "Amateur historian" probably fits best, though it sounds vaguely derivative and second-tier. Following a career with the Labor Department--he retired in the early 1970s--Mr. Hall turned himself into the world's foremost authority on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Historians, pros and amateurs alike, sought him out for his knowledge and access to his exhaustive files. As one of them put it, James O. Hall knew more about Lincoln's murder than anyone who ever lived, including John Wilkes Booth.

I probably have too much education to be considered an "amateur," but certainly not enough to claim to be a "professional." What I do mostly is history with a little "h." It's not my primary source of income. Big "H" historians write biographies of generals. Little "h" historians publish correspondences of corporals.

Big "H" historians write about "why did the French Revolution happen" and try to come up with a different answer than the previous generation believed. Little "h" historians become experts in the eccentric script and shorthand of 18th century French parish clerks. The French Revolution will have a different cause 20 years from now, when the next generation of graduate students gets its grants lined up and its word processors plugged in. But those parish records will be there forever, and either you can read them properly or you can't. Those big names who tackle the French Revolution know well their debt to the man who can guide them through the archives, or can spot an obvious error in your thesis based on a minor but telling detail.

I know my debt to them; I acknowledge it in every book preface I write. But, like I said, I'm as often in the little "h" camp. You pick your specialties carefully, if you're a little "h" historian. You wouldn't bother staking out a turf that's already been claimed. I've got nothing so dramatic as the Lincoln assassination to my credit, but it's been worth the trouble of a BBC crew to cross the Atlantic to walk around the countryside with me and interview me on the topic of Welsh settlement in America in the 1600s, and I've discovered or proved some hitherto-unnoticed details about the role of the Know-Nothing Party in the rise of the Republicans in the 1850s.

It's small beer. Like growing the biggest pumpkins in your hometown or winning a blue ribbon in a goat-milking contest (like my prima donna princess-y Italian ex-girlfriend did once, to everyone's amazement). It won't get you into any clubs. But there are moments when you wouldn't trade it for anything.

For me, it comes when I manage to boost someone from my little "h" into big "H." After my young teen-age Bruce Catton enthusiasm, I never was much of a Civil War buff. I studied medieval and European history in college. But afterward, the blue and gray kept coming back to me. Partly because the place I settled and worked sat atop a trove of archival material that never had been published. So I started to dig, and when I had mastered it, I began to write it. I distilled that meticulous county-level record-keeping, and those packets of crumbling letters and diaries from the astoundingly literate Quaker lieutenants (and the semi-literate, but gloriously expressive, farm hand privates) into a book that told the war through their eyes, their stories.

My own books have never been on anyone's best-seller lists, and probably no more than a few thousand ever have read that one. But the book is in the libraries of research universities and on the shelves of professional historians whose names you know. I know that because they sometimes write to me, and I occasionally find myself footnoted in their big-selling tomes.

And when I track the footnotes back to the page references, there I find -- not me, but the boys born 120 years before me who never made it to 25, who rotted in the Virginia sun, whom I came to know while they lived, in the magical suspended time in a sterile county archive basement. Their names, their words, their stories. In the 200-somethingth retelling of the Battle of Fredericksburg, by one of the most famous living historians, their lives now take their place with the others that have been told in print. The camera pauses on their faces among the dense ranks. They are, somehow, less dead than they were yesterday. If that's all that comes of my research, that's enough.

Under the Grass

Memorial Day began not in one place but in many. Hilltop cemeteries across the North, behind old stone churches and meetings, with long views across the farms. On the grass where fathers and mothers -- the ones who could find the corpse among the slain -- laid their boys.

After the war, everyone wanted to forget. Was there ever a war everyone didn't want to forget after it ended? But in the springtime the veterans, still boys themselves in '66 or '67, walked up the hill to the graves of their buddies and remembered. As a later generation of veterans walked to a long black wall in a gash in the earth in Washington, D.C., and remembered.

My first book was a Civil War book, and I went to the cemeteries to finish building a statistical picture of the community I was studying. I had built a skeleton from census records, fleshed it with draft enrollment books and regimental files in the National Archives. The last stop was the cold grass on the windy hills, with cicadas singing down in the creekbeds and no other sound. There where all stories end, on marble tombs, spalling from decades of acid rain and barely legible (I learned to go in the evening when the slanting sunlight revealed the eroded letters).

Under them lay boys full of honest virtues and dreams of glory, and criminals with nothing better to do but go get shot at. Every volunteer army is the same; the best of a generation, and some of the worst, and most somewhere between.

The granite shaft in the small city where I live now honors those who fell "in defense of the union in the War of the Rebellion." As palpable a lie as ever lured men to war; like killing your estranged wife and saying you did it in defense of marriage. All that political hot air, and they bought it.

Did they die for nothing, then? Of course not! Look around you. Look at the faces of people at work or play. They never knew it, those soldiers, but they allowed all this to happen. What they did re-set this nation on its foundation and set men, women, and children free.

And there I'd better stop, lest I break one of my own rules. This time last year I wrote about two of my ancestral relations who died in that war. That's one of them on the tombstone at the top of the post.

When that post reached the point where a blogger typically ties the past to the present and attempts to turn the reality of that generation into a moral lesson to this one, I stopped. And I'll stop here now, saying what I said then:

What can you say about that? You could remind your anti-war friends That he was a not entirely willing participant in a not entirely legal war, in which a lot of basic American rights were overturned by a president elected by a minority of the voters. No, that's wrong. That's turning a dead man into a rhetorical trope. It takes him out of his context and his time, uses him to advance a present-day argument that has nothing to do with him. That's not what Memorial Day means. That's not what honor looks like.

This holiday began as a private affair, among the veterans themselves. In my part of the world, at first, they marched out to the cemeteries together, black and white, a truly remarkable thing in the old segregated North. Then the civilians and the politicians got hold of it and it became about speeches and contemporary matters and the blacks and whites stopped mingling.

Every attempt to use Memorial Day for any purpose but honoring the dead is unseemly. The day belongs to the individual man or boy who went to do a duty, with whatever mix of willingness and fear, and died doing it, as he knew he might. Any thought that goes much beyond that risks desecration.

Memorial Day

It's been 20 years since I did the research that turned into my first book, a Civil War history of one county in southeastern Pennsylvania. The book was distilled from hundreds of letters and diaries, enlistment records, muster rolls, doctor's reports and box after box of official government documents.

Always as this time of year rolls around, I remember them; the ones who left the paper trail I followed between the present and the past. These people were real to me; I would recognize their handwriting at once. Their quirks of spelling, the references to the novels they had read.

With time, their experiences have melded in my head into one big thing called "the war." But there are lines from them that still spike out, and I seem to carry them mentally not as old brown ink on thin blue paper, but as spoken voices of young men who died at war.

In other cases, it is the officialese of the government paperwork that stays with me. The departmental language of death. In still others it is the delicate words of parents or wives, agreeing with their menfolk's desire to attain glory, but at the same time urging them to be brave -- but not too brave.

The more the time passes, the more the words, the spoken words, shape themselves into poetic cantos.

1861

Hi is still whearing the old boots he took with him from home. They can not get a pair large enough for him.

I was over there this forenoon to see Phares Brown. He says he likes it first rate and he may as well like it as not like it for they don't ask a fellow down here whether they like it or not.

The boys will march all day and play foot ball at dark

It was a point of argument at one time which would be the most likely to seize the baggage, the mosquitos or the secessionists ...

It wod do you good to see the boys hear. Some is a-plan cards, and some a-swaren, and some a-tuslen, and some a-riteing to thear gals.

Thee must not worry about us for we are doeing finely, also there is no danger of us getting in an engagement this winter and the war will all be over before spring.

I did not mind cooking out of doors untill yesterday morning when I found every thing snowed up which I did not expect to see down here. ... I don't see much advantage in being south, for we could not have any more ... freasing whether in Penna.

... more bugles than men with ability to blow them. The result was far from pleasing ...

[A woman's voice]: As memory dwells upon the scene I wonder that we realized so little of what war meant.

1862

An involuntary sentence burst from my heart, and all I could say was, "My God, this is awful."

[Shells] make an awful noise flying through the air. You can plainly see them. ... They all seem to be coming right at you.

A person in battle has no feeling at all. He does not think of danger nor fear death. When you are just marching in is the worst. It loocks hard, though, to see them carrying the men off wounded on streachers.

The bank was thickly strewn with dead and wounded. These latter were begging some for water, some for a doctor, and some holding up their hands and begging for God's sake that we should not kill them.

A dying cavalryman (one of ours) lay where he had been blown some distance from his horse which was dead, both having apparently been killed by the same shell. He asked me something in an unintelligable tone I could not understand.

We had to lay on the ground without eny blankets or tents. For my par[t] I got to rails and laid on them but my close was dripen wet. I did sleep a little but not much.

I should have passed him as a stranger, he's changed so much. Looking up, he did not know me till I spoke.

... a mean hole for a Maryland town ...

"Bucktails to the front"

I soon concluded to retire to a woodpile, which I did under a heavy fire & on reaching it tumbled over a dead man, but deeming it too dangerous an experiment to move again, I laid down, resolved to await daylight.

Broken guns, scattered clothing & accoutrements, trampled corn & grass, the marks of shot, dead horses, half-buried men .... The smell was truly awful.

... we would have to fight if we got into it, as we were too tired to run away.

The most affecting case was that of a New York soldier, who had his name and regiment pinned to his vest. Falling from his pocket was an ambrotype case which, on opening, disclosed the features of a woman and child, the latter not more than six or eight months old.

... very glad that Morgan Davis succeeded in getting the body of John home.

1863

... much of the business part of [Vicksburg] had been burned, and the rest went the same road before we left ...

If there ever was a city sufferd from the effects of war, Nashville has had a goodly portion. Please me to see it in ashes, for it is a real rebbel hole, nothing but traitors and spys in it. Yes, and street women, any ammount of them.

Our regt. is not in as good sanitary condition as I've known it to be, ther being some over ninty (90) odd cases of Clapp at present and we only number 188 men all told.

... mere masses of blood and rags ...

If I should fall it could not be in a better cause, and this reflection would do much toward calming the feelings in such a trial. I hope thee will look upon it so.

As the Johnnies got too thick for us we busted for the rear ...

It was nothing more than a perfect slaughter but I think the Rebs lost as many as we did.

I reckon you have bully times at home now. I would not mind being with you for a while running about at nights instead of standing still along the Rappahannock River, watching the movement of the Rebs.

I thought the war was going on at home and that the rebels were throwing shell at us and a piece of shell struck Laura on the head. Oh I was in an awfull way when I awoke. I was all in a perspiration.

They detailed squads of us to go load wood fore the new troops that lazed around there, the 9-month bounty men, poor helpless souls.

Thee has wrote a good letter for one so young and it was dated at chool, which I was glad to see. Thee has improved so much in thy writing that I hardly new it, and on looking over it I did not see a misspelled word, for which I give thee credit. Only continue to improve and thee will make a good schollar.

... much need exhists among the families of volunteers, owing to the irregularity of payments in the army.

1 pocket book
1 Five (5) dollar current bill
1 package of note paper
1 do. envelopes
1 likeness of a lady
Sent by express to his mother, Mrs. Eliza Henderson of Coatesville, Chester County, Penna., together with clothing ... with the exception of clothing buried in.

The death of that number of such Irish savages as made up the bulk of that mob would have been small loss to the world, anyhow; and the lesson would have had a salutory effect, not only on this generation, but one or two succeeding ones. I think most of our soldier boys here feel the same way.

I anticipated the news. I awoke on the morning of the 4th with a terrible weight in my heart -- a weight which I carried with me and could not shake off. When I saw the outside of the letter yesterday, I knew what it contained.

... one leg and one forearm had been amputated before admission, and one leg was amputated in the ward.

What do you think of the war now?

1864

I would liked to of got home once more to of seen you and the folks, but they would not allow me. Take good cair of yourself.

It was a hard struggle, for a number of us were out of ammunition by the time we got into the forts; and we had to fight with the bayonets and the butts of our guns, and we fought in this way about twenty minutes until the Second Brigade came up .... All the boys from around home are safe.

We prepared to skedaddle. A captain shouted "Who has a rat-tail file or nail to spike these pieces?" One of the boys grumbled, "This is a hell of a place to ask for a file." I had hold of one of the wheels, and, although scared like thunder, ... looked up into the captain's face and laughed.

Where we once counted thousands we can now count but hundreds and another ten days will finish us up all together. ... The seven days before Richmond are nothing to this. Gettysburg was as severe, but did not last so long.

... I almost doubt that I am alive myself.

"Petersburg Express" firing at intervals of 15 minutes all night. Sharp shooters very busy. ... The regiment still in the front pits. Some 8 or 10 killed and wounded.

I wish I was some rich man's dog laying beside his stove.

I almost forgot to tell you that I have lost a nother brother in this cruel war. He was wounded at Cold Harbor twice on the 2nd of June last and died from the affects on the 2nd of July at Georgetown Hospital. You have heard me speak of him, his name was Daniel.

Amputated leg looks as though some dog had chewed it off.

Rock & McCarter stood by me well. They carried me off amid a perfect hail of Rebel bulets. I can never forget them.

Although I feel very sorry you have moved, still I can't help but admire your spunk. But my advice to you my dear son is not to rush into any unnecessary danger. A soldier can be brave, but likewise it is well enough for him to be prudent. May God in his infinite mercy protect you from all danger both seen and unseen, which shall be my daily prayer. ... I am working on the government shoes. I can make 9 or ten pair a week and think after a while I can make more as I get used to the work.

I cannot tell you any thing about how our army is making out, for we know nothing about it.

Head Quarters, Pennsylvania State Agency, Washington, D.C., July 24, 1864

Dear Sir: Your letter of the 25th inst. making inquiries about the remains of your two sons is duly received. In reply I have to say it is almost impossible at this time to recover from the front those who have been killed in the recent battles. ...

Fr. Jordan, col. and Military Agent of Penn.

P.S. The foregoing circular letter answers most of your questions. You can not therefore disinter before fall. Untill lately the government did not charge anything for going down to the army, but now they charge $7.00 for each person from here to City Point, & as much to return, by water.

1865

The only thing to do, is to kill every son of a bitch.

[An army nurse's voice]: I've talked with very many [soldiers] since I'm here & never have I heard one say they would enlist again, did they know what they do now. I do not blame them either. It's all very well to talk & be patriotic. I've done it myself, but I tell you such a place as this is where the beauty is taken off -- you can see the dread reality of the case.

... crowded into a few years the emotions of a lifetime.

Lost Dignity

Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote an odd, ranting Memorial Day column; or rather, an odd rant disguised as a Memorial Day column but in fact having nothing to do with Memorial Day after the first sentence: "This Memorial Day is not a good one for the country that was once the world's most brilliant beacon of freedom and justice."

State Department officials know better than anyone that the image of the United States has deteriorated around the world. The United States is now widely viewed as a brutal, bullying nation that countenances torture and ...

and so on, through all the grand catalogue of mishandled holy books and wounded enemies finished off before they got up and shot back, and treating foreign irregular POWs the way foreign irregular POWs are allowed to be treated by Geneva, and the fact that Amnesty International has a bee in its bonnet about us. This seems to be the point of the column; some writers will expound America's crimes at the drop of a hat, even if it's a VFW cap on Memorial Day.

He writes that the "Bush crowd" (It's not an "administration" any more on the NYT editorial pages) is attempting to solve the problem of "America's image."

This is much more than an image problem. The very idea of what it means to be American is at stake.

What's odd is that this whole column is based on the premise that America enjoyed a lost golden age of purity at home and respect and adoration in the world community, until the "Bush crowd" seized power in 2001. If the U.S. does what Herbert demands, "The U.S. would regain some of its own lost dignity." He mentions the outpouring of sympathy after 9/11 as though this was the typical situation from, say 1776 to Sept. 12, 2001.

In much of the world, the image of the U.S. under Bush has morphed from an idealized champion of liberty to a heavily armed thug in camouflage fatigues. America is increasingly being seen as a dangerously arrogant military power that is due for a comeuppance.

Odd, because Herbet himself is right at the center of one of the two institutions -- the New York Times, lynchpin of the big media -- that has been relentlessly reminding us since about 1965 or so that America is a terrible, corrupt place, founded on genocide and racism and a nation that long ago sold its soul to religious stupidity and militarism. [The other institution is the academic world.]

"World opinion" about the United States has been in the toilet since Vietnam; it was even worse in the 1970s than in the 1960s in most places. America managed to get blamed -- and to blame itself, in many cases -- for everything from the failed economic polices of the so-called "Third World" to the greed of Arab oil sheiks.

And why shouldn't the rest of the world feel affirmed in this contempt, when it appears daily in the domestic press? It's been a long and complicated evolution for American media, but after the Tonkin incident, they turned sharply against the Johnson administration and essentially broke it. That power seems to have got into the blood of the press, so that every administration since 1968 has had to deal with an actively hostile media doing its best to break the president, as though that were its job. A weak pre-1968 administration like Jack Kennedy's survived and is lionized, while a much stronger one, like Clinton's, barely got out in one piece.

So let's see what Bob Herbert had to say about this once-brilliant "beacon of freedom and justice." Let's see what he did to project that essential "image" into the world, the loss of which he so loudly now laments.

Here's a "New York Times" abstract of some of his columns from early 2000 and late 1999 -- before the evil "Bush crowd" rose to power and sullied our beacon. It's a typical sampling; to give the whole list from any given month would be repetitive, because he comes back to these same topics over and over:

• Bob Herbert Op-Ed column criticizes National Rifle Association for opposing gun control; assails NRA exec vice pres Wayne LaPierre for asserting that Pres Clinton is willing to accept certain amount of violence and killing to further interests of gun control
  
  
• Bob Herbert Op-Ed column on problems with criminal justice system nationwide; says 'gruesome' problems that have been overlooked for many years are starting to burst into public view, and system is beginning to break down in some parts of country
  
  
• Bob Herbert Op-Ed column examines'ancient attitudes' that govern why Americans are so unwilling to elect women to high public office
  
  
• Bob Herbert Op-Ed column scores Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for inflicting 'further torment' on city's homeless by ordering police raids on New York City's homeless shelters during recent cold wave to arrest those with outstanding warrants
  
  
• Bob Herbert column on Southern Poverity Law Center report on inroads hate groups are making among white youths whose families have missed out on nation's economic boom
  
  
• Op-ed column by Bob Herbert on Legal Aid Society's class action suit against New York State's mental health system, charging that children known to be severely mentally ill are being denied treatment because state refuses to provide mental health facilities they require, leaving many of them to languish in hospitals, foster care or jail; describes plight of several such tormented children; notes that suit asks court to compel state to place children in residential treatment facilities within 30 days of determination that they are eligible for such services
  
  
• Bob Herbert Op-Ed column on poll for Council for Excellence in Government that found large majority of Americans feel disconnected from government; expresses concern at finding that gulf between citizens and government grows larger with each successive generation
  
  
• Bob Herbert Op-Ed column describes visit with Andrew Cuomo, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, to poverty-racked town of Guadalupe, Ariz, where people live in rickety shacks, plumbing is outdoors, and residents, mostly Yaqui Indians and Mexican-Americans, go to bed hungry; says there are many such pockets of extreme poverty across country, even as Dow reaches 10,000 and millionaires are being created every day; says Cuomo is trying to spread word that country as whole has obligation to do what it can to assist those in danger of being left behind economically
  

Ah, what a wonderful world it used to be, eh, Bob Herbert?

The belief in the media, which I can testify to first-hand, that the sole purpose of a printing press or a television camera is to shine a light on every fault and failure of American authority, has its uses. It may at times be what saves democracy. But too steady application of it can be a water torture that can drive a nation to suicidal madness.

And many Americans feel, with Rabindranath Tagore, that "He alone may chastise who loves."

And Bob Herbert fails that test.

Two Sergeants

My family's history is not where I now live. The family has deep roots in Chester County, Pennsylvania, which used to be a beautiful country place; its dales and hollows grew foxes, then sheep, then milk cows, then, finally, housing developments.

When Memorial Day arrives, my natural place to commemorate it would be the grave of "Cousin" Joe Acker -- he would have been my great-great-grandmother's cousin, but that family seemed to collapse time to an eternal present tense. Joe was a sergeant in the 97th Pennsylvania, which enlisted in the summer of 1861.

One May day in 1864 the 97th was trying to hold the Bermuda Hundred line together in the face of strong probing attacks from Pickett's rebels. A staff officer -- that detested species -- wandered up to the front, and, looking to prove himself worthy of his stripes, told Acker to take a detachment out and see whether there were any rebels in that woods out in front of them.

"I can tell you from here," Cousin Joe said. "It's full of them."

But the staff officer, now having got his authority and ego tangled up in the case, insisted. And with no higher officer in sight to appeal to, Acker took a platoon out and crept toward the woods. When they got to the edge of it, the Confederates shot him dead.

His men dragged the body back, cursing and looking for that staff officer, who had quickly vanished. They never got his name.

That story is known in some detail because the regimental history of the 97th was written by the man who had recruited Acker and a handful of other farm boys from up in the Great Valley near Paoli.

I live now in Lancaster County, only one municipal unit removed from Chester County, but a different world altogether, historically. Chester is Quaker, Lancaster is German; Federalist vs. Democratic; spiritual and otherworldly vs. grubbily commercial. I still tend to see these places in their 19th century garb. That's the effect of doing too much research.

Joe Acker's grave is back in Great Valley Presbyterian cemetery, an hour's drive from here. But some stray branches of the family tree crossed into Lancaster County before me. One is the Passmores. Unlike the Ackers, the Passmores were no sort of gentry, even on the local level. One was a tavern-keeper along the road where the lime wagons dragged their loads to the kilns and the Lancaster farmers took their wheat to Wilmington. His sons sought livings on the Lancaster side of the line in the 1850s, working in stone quarries one year, teaching school the next. A public school teacher could have workman's knuckles back then.

The younger son was Josiah. He was older than the average soldier when the Civil War began, a family man, and he did not go in with the first wave of Northern enlistments. But he seems to have been one of the many men the threat of a draft shook out in 1862. He joined a 9-months regiment from Lancaster County that fought at Antietam and Chancellorsville. When he came home, he enlisted again. He joined the 2nd Pa. Heavy Artillery, which was a cushy "safe" regiment at the time, full of married men with children. Its duty was guarding Fortress Monroe down on the Virginia coast, a place almost immune to rebel attacks.

But when Grant took over the army in the East, he called in all the available manpower, including the "Heavies." Their days of safe duty ended, and they got thrown into the meat grinder of the Petersburg trenches. I have one of his letters home, to his little sister, my great-great-grandmother. He fretted a good deal about how his wife was getting by. Josiah died in the Battle of the Crater, the hideous debacle that was re-enacted at the beginning of the movie "Cold Mountain."

They brought his body back to Lancaster County, and buried it in a hilltop German churchyard outside the little village of New Providence. When I moved out here in 1990, I found the spot. Every year now, we visit his grave on Memorial Day. Sometimes the Boy Scouts have got the flag on it, sometimes they miss it. This year they found it alright. We brought a blossom from our garden.

---

What can you say about that? You could remind your anti-war friends That he was a not entirely willing participant in a not entirely legal war, in which a lot of basic American rights were overturned by a president elected by a minority of the voters. No, that's wrong. That's turning a dead man into a rhetorical trope. It takes him out of his context and his time, uses him to advance a present-day argument that has nothing to do with him. That's not what Memorial Day means. That's not what honor looks like.

This holiday began as a private affair, among the veterans themselves. In my part of the world, at first, they marched out to the cemeteries together, black and white, a truly remarkable thing in the old segregated North. Then the civilians and the politicians got hold of it and it became about speeches and contemporary matters and the blacks and whites stopped mingling.

Every attempt to use Memorial Day for any purpose but honoring the dead is unseemly. The day belongs to the individual man or boy who went to do a duty, with whatever mix of willingness and fear, and died doing it, as he knew he might. Any thought that goes much beyond that risks desecration.

Memorial Day

I will be updating this, after we perform our little family ritual. Meanwhile, if you're feeling the stirring of the spirit and want to do something about it, Winds of Change has an excellent and well-researched standing post of ways to help the current troops, including those of our allies (and yes, though you might not realize it to see the news broadcasts, we do have allies).

And this:

But news of a baby girl with a circulatory condition who needed hand surgery getting medical help from U.S. soldiers and a concerned nurse did not become a SIGACT, nor will it be included in a media release. So, unless a reporter was embedded with that unit at that time--and decides to tell the story--no one will ever know this one small, but powerfully important detail. There are a thousand such details falling like trees in a forest, but no one is listening for those kinds of sounds.

I write about them when I can, but there's an irony to all of this that is hard to escape. Most of the acts of kindness I witness are done from an instinctive altruism that almost always seeks anonymity. And there is that other problem with catching people doing good--the cynical media is quick to ascribe cheap motivations to soldiers who reveal their humanity through their decency. And does anyone really care about the soldiers who, after having arrested a suspected insurgent, then spent the next twenty minutes trying to find a home for the two little puppies he was keeping?