Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori

In memory of Etch (4.00 / 4)

Alfred Starr Etcheverry, my mother's first husband, and father of my sister Michelle and brother Nick, killed in Luxembourg in WWII.

Rest in peace.

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by: Lucy Weber @ Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 14:05:41 PM CST

My Dad did 18 months in Vietnam (4.00 / 7)

He wanted to do less, he could have done less, but he was in the Navy, and he was worried that if he left after one tour they would put him somewhere it would be difficult to make a stable life with my Mom, who he was engaged to.

So he did more time in exchange for his pick of assignments when he got back, and took the world's most boring desk job when he got back.

His Vietnam assignment was not easy. A second lieutenant, he lost men under him during a surprise attack. He had been complaining to his commanding officer for months that they needed better perimeter fortification. They did. One night, the Viet Cong hit the generator, killed the lights, and ran through the hallways spraying machine gun fire into the bunks. It lasted less than a couple of minutes, but at the end of it three people were dead. He never got over that.

He died a year and a half ago, and my Mom asked me to copy some of the old reel to reel tapes he had sent her from Vietnam to MP3 format. I listened to the tape after the attack. It begins with a long long pause, and then says -- I'm sorry I haven't written for a while, but I just didn't know what to say. He says, I couldn't not talk about this, but I couldn't talk about this either. But he says, I suppose I just have to do it.

Weird, my Dad's voice on that tape, as dead as I've ever heard it. Not my Dad, but some shell of him. Behind him the sound of them finally building the border fortification he had asked for, several weeks too late.

He told me when I was in college that if the Gulf War came to a draft he would drive me to Canada himself. But outside that, he never talked about Vietnam until Iraq.

He was actually OK with Iraq at first, but the stories of how we hadn't armored the vehicles or provided adequate flack vests -- they started to get to him. He became increasingly focussed on the war. And as the rationale for the war unwound and was revealed as lies, he became furious, and then active.  He worked his ass off for Kerry in 2004 and all Dems since, and he inspired me to do the same. He's a big reason I got active in online activism, he's part of the reason Blue Hampshire exists.

I'm tempted to tie this story to some of the absurdities of this week, but I really can't. It's too big a story, too big a life and too big a sacrifice to spend on the small mindedness on display.

In fact, I have struggled to come up with a closing for this for about an hour now, and I just can't. Pretty words trivialize these things. I'll close by saying I miss him dearly, and that there's not a hard decision in my life that I face that I don't ask myself what he would do -- I don't always do it, but I always have that mental conversation.

That has nothing to do with him being a veteran, I suppose, but he never wanted to be remembered as a veteran. He always just wanted to be a great father and husband and friend.

And he was all those things in spades, despite the war, not because of it.  

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by: Mike Caulfield @ Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 15:44:44 PM CST

A good time to consider (4.00 / 5)

that it is customarily those who are not in harm's way who determine friend or foe. Wars are not of soldiers' making, that is the responsibility of those who lead.

I had a great-uncle who was killed in that "war to end all wars" almost a century ago; he died in some nameless field in France in the service of the Kaiser's army. All that remains is a name and a date carved among many others on a memorial stone in a quiet corner of the only cemetery in a tiny town in Germany.

His family missed him too.

Republicans believe government is bad - then they get into office and prove it.

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by: GreyMike @ Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 16:18:20 PM CST

Dulce Indeed (0.00 / 0)

Why did the US fight in the Great War? Because France and England were debtors and if they lost, we'd lose our loans?? I encourage everyone to read the Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. The best book on that horrible war. Recently the last British vet of that war died, and before he did he was asked if it was worth it. He said it was not worth one single life.
A foreign policy based on things like the Peace Corps achieves more security for the US than thrusting lead into others flesh.  

No'm Sayn?

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by: BurtCohen @ Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 17:26:55 PM CST

My father was in the Navy in the Pacific (4.00 / 5)

during WWII. He was the ship's doctor.  His destroyer was sunk, he was one of the last people off, he was wounded but continued to treat the injured, then spent hours in the water before he was picked up.  
He never really talked about it, and I only found out because my nephew did a lot of research and found out what a hero he was after his death in 1999.  I was born while he was serving.  When he finally came home I refused to recognize him as being the man in the picture who was my father.  
I cannot imagine what that must have been like for my mother, we moved from one relative to another as she tried to find ways to see my father when he was in the states.  I was the first child, so she had the stress of being a new mother as well as worrying about her husband.  
I wish we could find another way to live on this planet together.

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by: Lucy Edwards @ Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 17:41:04 PM CST

"The old lie." (4.00 / 1)

I am willing to forgive Owen's slander of Horace, only because Owen's poem is so good and true.

Here's the 4th strophe in question from Horace's Alcaic (a wondrous, yet unmistakably martial, rhythm), Odes, Bk.III,2:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur uirum
    nec parcit inbellis iuuentae
        poplitibus timidoue tergo.

Swift's not very literal version of it nonetheless gets the meaning across quite well, which shows the context:

How bless'd is he who for his country dies,
Since death pursues the coward as he flies;
The youth in vain would fly from fate's attack,
With trembling knees and terror at his back."

Basically: There's no use looking foolish in battle with thoughts of retreat; death will get you regardless, nobly or ignobly.

Fun fact: the novelist Pat Barker, who wrote about Owen in her Regeneration trilogy, is married to my half-uncle.  Her interest in WWI stems in part from learning about her husband's father's (my paternal grandfather) experience in WWI.

Speaking of grandfathers and wars, hat's off today to maternal grandfather Caesar Carminucci, the 101st Airborne private who in a stroke of good luck ended up in this famous photo (last body on the right):

He did not parachute down on D-Day, but was sent over in the second wave by boat; was wounded in Bastogne, almost lost some toes to gangrene in the trenches there, and marched on to see the liberation of a concentration camp.

Intensely proud of his service, he almost never spoke of it. Similar to Mike C.'s comment, as an old man he said he'd sign up again rather than have his children or grandchildren fight in a war.

birch, finch, beech

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by: Dean Barker @ Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 18:30:53 PM CST