Echos of War

The anniversary of D-Day brought reminds me of a story I thought lost to my wretchedness.

The story is about a father who took his family on a road trip when his boy was 10. The family drove from New York through Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Kentucky on the small highways and county roads. It was the first time the boy saw the Appalachian tarpaper shacks he had heard about. The father drove maybe 2,000 miles in ten days. The family sat in the car a lot. The father loved to drive. He was most mobile when driving, less so then when walking, since he had lost a leg on D-Day.

No book, no movie, no personal account could relate the real horrors of war. Those of us lucky to have passed our time through this life without experiencing war do not even suspect how tragic it is. To use a rumsfeldian construct, it is one of the unknown, unknowns. We civilians can only shiver in our suspicions, and sometimes that shivering is literal.

The family stopped one night in Kentucky. in a small roadside motel that sat atop a hill about 200 yards from the road. It was a hot July night and there was no air conditioning. A breeze blew through the thin white curtains that were drawn across the window; darker, heavier curtains lay unmoved at each side. Cars sounded as if they were passing far away, as far away as the graves of Arlington.

The boy and his six-year-old sister shared one double bed, the parents the other bed. Not long after the siblings fell asleep, the screams started. They were familiar shrieks. They had heard these screams before. Yet in that far away place, in that quiet and unfamiliar room, it was as if they heard them for the first time. The father’s missing leg echoed the pain from the beaches of northern France to the hillsides of rural Kentucky.

Many years later, the father told the boy about the bullets that ripped through his left leg at mid thigh. The machine gun rounds split his femur. The two severed ends of that bone painfully rubbed against each other as he was carried away from the battlefield, hours later, and brought to the field hospital. He screamed for morphine as he was unable to pass out. The medics took off his leg as the tent flapped in the wind.

His phantom limb pain recurred with frequency. The boy would lie awake in his bed at night and hear his father’s screams. His transistor radio’s earplug helped muffle the father’s cries. Late-night clear channels allowed the boy to hear broadcasts as far away as Florida and Chicago on a device not much larger than today’s portable media players. He sometimes imagined he could hear the screams of wounded men from all the battlefields of all time.

That was romantic nonsense. Hearing a father’s pain was not much more than watching a crappy war movie, or even a good war movie, if there is such a thing. You lie in your own bedroom, lie in your own bed and are trapped in your own body, within your own soul, and only imagine you know. You cannot really understand how it is to be in the line of fire or, or be the target of a bullet or a bomb, unless you are on the battlefield when the ammunition is exploding around you.

The boy was only feeling is own fears. His father was mortal, more so than most fathers, he thought. Everyone learns about the mortal weakness of parents; the boy just learned it sooner than most.

The boy of the past is gone, lost to the wretchedness of today. Today there are new battlefields constructed by men who pointedly stayed away from the fields of war when they were called to fight. They did not hesitate to send men and women to their new, useless wars. Only those who fought in wars hesitate to start wars; the ones who never fought, especially the ones who made certain they would never fight, can fearlessly put other people in the sights of guns.

Do not think I feel superior to the makers of war. These thoughts are only posted to pass the time. I am wretched and unable to feel that I can soar above anyone. It wastes time to think empires will bend to the will of their people and stop war or that empires will never begin a war because its people forbid it. The person who campaigned on the strength of his opposition to America’s War on Iraq, now that he has the authority to end it, hesitates.

From D-Day to today, we have passed the time. Its lessons are wasted.