War and Propaganda

  "It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher, with a dazed white face looking out from among the blankets, and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise. One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. The P.S.U.C. militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International Brigade whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that kind of thing to the journalists in the rear. The people who wrote pamphlets against us and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe at home, or at worst in the newspaper offices of Valencia, hundreds of miles from the bullets and the mud. And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy —all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right."

"Homage to Catalonia", George Orwell

The Nature of Revolutionary Civil War

“The bloodlust in revolutionary civil wars stems from the apocalyptic nature of such contests, the attempts on each side to create a new society and cultural order, not merely a different political system, totally purged of antagonistic elements. In these conflicts the enemy is perceived not as an ordinary political rival, but as a kind of metaphysical incarnation of evil that must be eradicated before it infects, or imposes the same terror on, one’s own side. A revolutionary civil war is not an ordinary political contest, but a contest of ultimates about society, religion, and culture, perceived to demand a total and uncompromising solution.”

~ Stanley G. Payne, “The Spanish Civil War” (Cambridge University Press, 2012) pg. 103

The Next American "Civil War"?

From time to time in the universe of Internet one may come across some comment or discussion of the possibility or probability of a second American civil war. For some, such comments come from a perspective holding to a romanticized "lost cause" view of the first American Civil War of the 1860's; a view that engages in the vain yearning or perhaps more accurately the vain conceit that the "South" will somehow "rise again..."

For some time now, I have viewed such romantic conceit as totally out of touch with the reality of modern warfare and the changing face of what modern civil war has become. My classic case in point for that assertion is the Spanish Civil War of the mid-1930's. I recently started reading Stanley G. Payne's account of the Spanish Civil War published in 2012 by Cambridge as part of their Cambridge Essential Histories series. The following is an extended quote from Payne's introduction on pages 1-4 in which he deals with how the nature of civil war changed in the 20th century.

"By 1918, civil war had broken out in Finland and Russia, and it was not the traditional kind of civil war in which two contestants engage in a power struggle with equivalent goals and similar values, but a new kind of revolutionary civil war of the sort first essayed in France during the 1790's and in 1871. In the new civil wars, sharply contrasting revolutionary and counterrevolutionary programs vied for power, aiming not merely at political domination, but at imposing totally contrasting programs in society, economics, culture, and even religion--two completely antagonistic ways of life, virtually two different civilizations. These civil conflicts were fought with unprecedented bitterness and violence, extending far beyond the field of battle. Red terror and its counterrevolutionary counterpart during the Russian civil war sought not merely to conquer, but to some extent to eradicate the opposition completely, rooting out antagonists physically as well as politically, as though they represented contending religious or metaphysical principles, forces of absolute good or evil that had not merely to be conquered but completely extirpated. The result was unprecedented political violence in many different parts of the former Tsarist empire, while violent internal conflict also broke out in central and southern Europe..."

"...In this perspective, civil war in Spain was not a complete anomaly, but rather the only massive internal conflict to break out in Western Europe during the 1930's. It would reflect all the tensions, hatreds and ideologies found in these other conflicts, while adding further features of its own, characteristic of Spain and to some extent Europe as a whole during the decade before World War II."

Simply put, a modern civil war in the United States would not look much at all like the Civil War of the 1860's. Further more, we have very ample reason to believe that a modern civil war in the United States would very likely make the first Civil War look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison in terms of the level of violence and terror from both sides of the conflict. Also a modern civil war in America would very likely involve two antagonists of whom both would be repugnant and despicable, but in their extremism, there will be no allowance for any middle ground or moderation. In the Spanish Civil War there was nothing to like in either the Franco party on the one hand or the so called Republicans on the other. Both sides had repudiated the democratic process and both sides engaged in their share of violence and terror.

There may very well come a time in the future when the United States falls again into the scourge of another civil war, but if it does, it will have little or nothing to do with the "South rising again..."

A Union Soldier's Year End Reflections

"Another year has rolled past and joined the many gone before in the vistas of the past. Its glorious deeds of valor and achievements, its scenes of anguish and bloodshed, of wrong and oppression, are subjects for the future historian. Its ever varying scenes and emotions are indelibly impressed upon my mind, which death alone can efface. The snow has clothed the earth in a lovely mantle of white as though to hide the sad past, and offer a clear page for me in the coming year. Let me then look forward with hope and determination to keep in the path of virtue and right, striving to improve the blessings and privileges offered me, so that when 1865 closes I need not look back with regret at the year spent."

~ Jenkin Lloyd Jones, 6th Battery, Wisconsin Artillery, December 31, 1864, writing from Nashville, TN.

(Copied from DOTCW.)

Images of War

"—I see all the little signs, getting ready in the hospitals &c.—it is dreadful, when one thinks about it—I sometimes think over the sights I have myself seen, the arrival of the wounded after a battle, & the scenes on the field too, & I can hardly believe my own recollection—what an awful thing war is—Mother, it seems not men but a lot of devils & butchers butchering each other—"

Walt Whitman in a letter to his mother dated March 22, 1864

With God on Our Side

"Sir, my greater concern is not whether God is on my side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."

~ Abraham Lincoln

Thoughts Upon Seeing "Red Dawn

This movie is "believable". By that I mean it comes across as something that could really happen.

What I was sensitive to was how the kids involved came face to face with and had to deal with the realities of war. Comrades get killed. There are the retaliatory executions of civilians by the enemy occupiers. There is betrayal by one of their own, and the resulting justice on the betrayer. And there was the issue of how the violence of war tended at points to make the kids the same as the enemy in terms of the ruthlessness with which war is waged.

When I was in school, our education was not suddenly interrupted in a way that thrust us as 15 or 16 year old kids into fighting enemy troops. We got to go to our Sr. Prom, and walk across the stage and get our diploma and for the most part, go on with the rest of our lives. The kids in "Red Dawn" didn't get to do that. War stole it from them... They had to grow up before their time.

It was the loss of innocence and childhood that was the saddest thing about "Red Dawn".

Images of War: Passchendaele

"Listen to me. Forests burn 'cos they have to. And oceans, they go up and down 'cos they have to. I don't think we're that different. If you want to get through this you have to start seeing it for what it is. It's something we do all the time because we're good at it. And we're good at it because we're used to it. And we're used to it because we do it all the time."

~ Michael Dunne, in the movie "Passchendaele"

Images of War: The Fall of Troy

We rush to no uncertain death, and hold
Our way into the city's midst. Black night
Hovers around us with her hollow shade.
Who can describe the carnage of that night?
Down falls the ancient city, having ruled
So many years: and everywhere struck down
Lay many an unresisting corpse along
The streets and through the houses, and beside
The sacred thresholds of the deities.
Not only do the Trojans suffer death.
Courage returns even to our vanquished hearts,
And in their turn the conquering Greeks are slain.
And everywhere are the sounds of bitter grief,
And terror everywhere, and shapes of death.

~ The Aeneid, Book 2, Virgil

A Stranger to His Own Child

A STRANGER TO HIS OWN CHILD

There never was a war so prolific of personal incident in every shade of experience possible to human life. The devastated provinces of France offer perhaps more of these happenings than any other part of the steel-swept, shell- wrecked fronts of all Europe. An Associated Press correspondent tells one that is especially touching.

He was motoring toward Denaen, one of the cities the Germans had occupied through four hard years, when a French officer going in the same direction asked him for a lift, explaining that he had lived there but had neither seen nor heard from his wife during all that time.

Entering the city and turning into his street the officer saw the first house was in ruins. He gave a nervous start. A few doors farther on was his home. The officer climbed out with an effort, his eyes fixed on the place.

There was no sign of life. The windows were shuttered and on the door was a sign showing German officers had been living there. The officer pulled the bell with shaking hand. No one answered. He backed away like a man in a trance and leaned against the car, trembling.

Suddenly the door opened and an aged servant appeared, leading a beautiful baby girl with a wealth of golden curls. The officer took one step toward the child and halted. He was a stranger to his own flesh and blood. The child hid behind the nurse, peering out in fright.

The half blind eyes of the old nurse had recognized her master and she held out her hands, repeating, "Monsieur! Monsieur!" in ecstasy. He crossed the road and grasped her hands, but the baby drew back.

A door opened and a comely young matron came to see what was going on. She caught sight of her husband, then stopped. Her hands flew to her breast. She swayed for a second. "With a sob of joy she hurled herself into his arms.

The correspondent moved away. And thus they were left, the nurse beaming on the happy couple and the curly headed youngster looking with troubled eyes at this strong man who had appropriated her mother so completely without a word.

Taken from "The Great War", published by The Christian Herald, (1919).

August 1914 Aftermath

"When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominiant one transcending all others: disillusion. "All the great words were cancelled out for that generation." wrote D. H. Lawrence in simple summary for his contemporaries. If any of them remembered, with a twinge of pain, like Emile Verhaeren, "the man I use to be," it was because he knew the great words and beliefs of the time before 1914 could never be restored.

After the Marne the war grew and spread until it drew in the nations of both hemispheres and entangled them in a pattern of conflict no peace treaty couold dissolve. The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimatly lose or the Allies ultimatly win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffe told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been no exit."

(The Guns of August; Barbara W. Tuchman; (1962, Bantam Books edition, 1976); (Page 489)

What They Want...

Trautman: John where are you going?

Rambo: I don't know.

Trautman: You get a second medal of honor for this.

[Rambo looks over at the rescued POWs]

Rambo: You should give it to them. They deserve it more.

Trautman: You don't belong here why don't you come back with me?

Rambo: Back to what? My friends died here, let me die here.

Trautman: The war, the whole conflict may have been wrong but damn it don't hate your country for it.

Rambo: Hate? I'd die for it.

Trautman: Then what is it you want?

Rambo: I want, what they want, and every other guy who came over here and spilled his guts and gave everything he had, wants! For our country to love us as much as we love it! That's what I want!

(First Blood: Part II (1985))

Requiem for Ronnie

[I thought I had already published this on The Billy Goat Blog in the past, but realize I haven't. So here it is...]

They lived down the road from us. Ron, his two brothers and three sisters and I with my brother and two sisters would get together and play; play in the woods by their house; play back by the river that was on our farm. There were the times of hanging May Baskets on one another’s door in celebration of the coming of that month when winter’s blast was finally a memory.There were the games played and little plays acted out. There was the time one of Ron’s sisters had a serious illness, I believe it was Rheumatic Fever, and she had to stay in bed along time, and we were finally able to briefly visit her and give her a little get well gift. There were the “Daniel Boone” and “Lewis and Clark” expeditions back along the river and in the woods. Yes, the romps and play of childhood, a happy and an innocent time of life in that decade of the 1950’s.

On Sunday, our church had an early service. Their church’s service was a later service. Often as we came home from our church service, we would pass Ron and his family as they were going to their church’s service. That passing of one another became a rite in itself: a familiar cycle and pattern of our lives from week to week giving a sense of comfort and stability.

For a few years Ron's father worked the farm right across the road from ours. When they were working there, my brother and I would sometimes go over to visit and lend a hand if needed. Sometimes my dad would do custom farm work for his dad; opening a field of corn, combining a field of barley. So it was we grew up together, and in that small rural community, being neighbors meant you were friends.

Eventually Ron's father got out of farming, and they moved to town. A number of neighbors came together to help with the move. When they moved out of the immediate neighborhood, contact with the family was diminished.

In our small rural school you pretty well knew who everybody was. So what words do you use to describe the relationships you have with people in a place like that? In high school I got to know Marilyn. She was older, and in my brother’s class. We worked on the high school newspaper, we were casual friends, and her younger sister was the first of several girls that would break my heart. She was intelligent, capable of seeing through my naïve intellectual presumptions, and at times telling me so. Marilyn had a reddish tint to her hair and a hint of freckles that gave her a more subtle kind of attractiveness. Those features apparently were inherited from her Irish mother. While in high school, Marilyn’s mother died from cancer. She shouldered responsibility for her father and two younger sisters.

A few times at the high school dances, she would ask me to ask her to dance. I can still see in my mind’s picture, the look in her eyes, the turmoil of fear, pain, and frustration; the fear of being “left out”; or of being left behind in life. Most of the guys were probably intimidated by her intelligence. Only a few would ever dance with her. It did not bother me to oblige her request at those times. I struggled with my own feelings of not quite “fitting in”. It was as if in those times together on the dance floor, for a few brief moments we affirmed one another’s existence and worth.

Ron and Marilyn were in my older brother's class. Ron was not an outstanding academic student, though he was intelligent enough, and did graduate from high school. On the other hand, Marilyn was the class' s valedictorian. Somewhere along the line they began to date. At first glance, it was kind of an odd match. Ron came across as a simple kind of guy, but Marilyn saw some of those good things under that quiet exterior that others might tend to overlook. I don’t know that Ron ever dated any other girl before he dated Marilyn, or that she ever dated any other guy before Ron. In either case they had each other and were no longer “alone”.


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The war. It was increasingly in the news. It increasingly became a part of our conversation. More and more it came to loom in the back of our minds; a dark cloud off on the horizon that keep drawing nearer and dominating the horizon of our thoughts; that war going on in a small Southeast Asian nation called Vietnam. We didn't understand it. Why didn't we just go in and clean up on those guys and get it over with? We thought of it in terms of the conventional kind of war fought by our fathers’ generation only a very short time before. We thought we were right being there, but people were getting killed over there, and there were anti war protests. How could this be? It was very bewildering.

There was in the school an older teacher whose son was in college. His son visited the school one day. He wore insignia clearly indicating he was against the war. There was some uproar by some of the students against his wearing that insignia in the school. Some of us found ourselves torn between our patriotism and our firm commitment to free speech issues. The stable, comforting world we had known was starting to un-ravel.

The first local Vietnam fatality occurred; a guy recently graduated from the high school and married to a girl in my class who was still in school. Our whole class went to the funeral, and afterwards to the cemetery for the burial. It was a clear cool day; the sun shining, the sky blue with a few white clouds here and there, the young widow weeping.

Guys were continuing to be drafted right and left. If you didn't get a college deferment or some other deferment, you were in. A lot of guys ended up going in. I had a deferment for college. There I would sign up for the required ROTC classes.

Ron was drafted into the Marine Corps. I think it was after boot camp he and Marilyn were married. One night, shortly after they were married, a few of the family and friends got together and we shivareed them. Ron had to haul Marilyn in a wheelbarrow the short distance down to the main four corners of town. Marilyn had to haul him back in the same. The rest of us accompanied them, beating on pots, pans, old farm tools, and whatever, making all sorts of noise and racket.

That fall I left for college. Back home I had been a relatively larger fish in a very small pond. In going to a major state university campus, I barely registered at the plankton level. It was a strange new world to me. The culture shock was at times almost overwhelming. It is only in looking back that I see how provincial my view of the world had been up to that point. Eventually I settled in best I could, and managed to get passing grades in my courses.

I didn't hear much news from back home. I knew Ron was in 'Nam. Then in May 1968, the news came. Ron had been killed: a casualty of "hostile small arms fire". Being away at college, I wasn't there for the funeral. It seemed un-real to me. It didn't sink in as to what it really meant. I was becoming caught up in my own bewildering emotional turmoil of what it meant to grow up and become an adult. With all that focus in my mind, what happened to Ron seemed as far away as Vietnam or the moon.

In my sophomore year of school, I was finally able to come to grips with much of the emotional turmoil of the year before. The summer between my sophomore and junior years, I was back home, working at the local factory. It was then that Marilyn came back into my life.

Why did she come to see me? To this day I’m not entirely sure. Marilyn came by the shop when I had my lunch breaks. She looked terrible, real thin, having lost weight, grief and pain written all over her face. She wanted to talk. I was very new in my faith. I tried to help best I could, but felt totally inadequate. I didn't know really how to help her, but in looking back, I wonder if she was really just looking for someone to listen. Could it be that in the pain of her face and words, there was once again that fear of being alone?

She told about going to church, and praying Ron would safely return. But then he was dead. Her unspoken question being, “Where was God in all of that?” Even now, so many years latter, I am not entirely sure how I would answer such a question. In the space of a few years she had lost two very close people in her life, her mother and her husband. I could only in a very inept way tell her what God had done for me. From her verbal and facial response, I realized I was far from making any apparent connection to where she was in her grief and pain.

After a few of those lunch time visits, she stopped coming. I never saw her again. I heard a few years latter she had re-married and had several children. Apparently, somehow, she had been able to go on with life. Later, her father passed away. One time, when visiting, I saw her youngest sister singing in the choir at a local church. I didn’t have a chance to talk to her. She had been youngest of the three sisters, and I’d never really got to know her. That was the last time I saw any one from Marilyn’s family. From time to time through the years, I wondered how Marilyn was doing: if she had come to knew some measure of happiness and joy in life.

Early my junior year the draft was being changed to a lottery system. If your birthday was drawn with the short number you could kiss your college days goodbye, and plan on forwarding your mail to Vietnam. On our dorm floor we all put a bit of money in the kitty. The guy ending up with the lowest number would take it all.

I don’t remember his name. He was one of the boys from Flint. A group of those Flint boys had kind of ended up living in the same dorm floor. This guy had just gone through a hassle with his local draft board regarding his student deferment. He had just had that deferment restored. We gathered together to watch the drawing as it was broadcast on TV. When that first lottery drawing was over, he had the lowest number of any of us. He got the kitty. I can still picture his dropping shoulders, the dejected look of dismay on his face. My own number was one of the highest of those on the floor. He’d be going. I’d be staying. What could I say to him?

In the spring of my junior year at college, the Kent State shootings happened. Since I was attending a major state university, it was no surprise when the campus erupted with anti-war demonstrations. When passing by one rally, I saw the demonstrators handing out posters with the names of the men from Michigan killed in Vietnam. I looked for Ronnie's name. I had the idea in my head that if l saw anyone with it, I was going to take it away from them even if it met a fight. After all, I was the one who had known Ronnie, and in my mind there was something profane and obscene about his name being used in such a manner by a total stranger. I never did see the placard with his name.

I sat with one of my friends on a low hill along the main street running along side of the campus. The marchers went by, led by the acting University President who has just gave a speech declaring his opposition to the War. They marched by carrying their banners and signs. How many of them I know not, but clearly a number in the thousands. It was the high point of the protest movement, the apex of the radicalism of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the “Age of Aquarius” with its false hopes and empty dreams.


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I graduated from college, and the years began to roll by. When down home, from time to time I'd visit the local cemetery. There were the gravestones standing silently in rows arranged amidst the neatly cut grass; monuments to the remnants of the memory of lives lived; people who had lived and breathed, worked, loved, and at the end of their days, had been laid beneath the sod to await the Great Day of all days. People I use to know were there, older people including my grandma, people who had been alive and I had known when growing up as a child. And back in the center of the new section was Ron's grave, marked by the bronze plaque.

One time I was there for a Memorial Day ceremony. There were the usual appropriate comments and rituals; the sober faces of those there to remember fallen loved ones. There was the familiar sound of the bugle playing the familiar notes making up the Taps. Ron’s sister was there... I think she was crying, but couldn't tell for sure... If she was not crying, she sure looked like she wanted to. It was in those years I started to hate that war, that miserable war. Nixon had resigned... Saigon fell...What was it all for?

I have visited the Gettysburg Battlefield, and stood at the place of Picket's Charge. I have stood on the battlefield at Antietam where blood had flowed like a river. I have visited the Wilderness Battlefield in Virginia, and could only begin to imagine the horror that had raged among that now quiet and peaceful wooded land. Whatever else war is or is not, it is indeed "hell".

The years continued to roll on. In the last part of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. It was said that Hussein had gas and a whole bunch of nasty things. As the year turned to 1991, it became clear there was probably going to be some kind of military action. As civilians, we had no idea what lay ahead. I had visions of body bags all over the place, and I very much feared it would be another Vietnam all over again...

Wednesday, January 16, 1991, the Gulf War started. For some reason I started to think about Ronnie... The memory pictures of those long ago years played across the screen of my mind. I found myself weeping, weeping for Ronnie and all the guys who died and were going to die. ...I hated war... There have been and will be wars that need to be fought, but nevertheless, to this day I hate war.

The images of those we use to know in our younger years are frozen in time. The picture of Marilyn and Ron carried in my mind is the young Marilyn and Ron I knew back in high school. If I passed Marilyn on the street, I probably would not recognize her, or she me. Time takes it’s toll on all of us. Also, a lifetime separates those who once knew one another. How does she remember those days so long ago in light of all she has experienced since? How were the passing years molded in light of the fire she went through back then? That is another story not given to me to write. It may be a story never told. My hope and prayer is that the final chapter of that un-known story will somehow read, “She lived happily ever after…”

I worked on family genealogy for some years. I knew one of our distant cousins had married Ron’s youngest brother. The day came when I received the information on that family. There in the list of the family’s children was the name “Ronald” with the notation he had been named after his Uncle who had been killed in Vietnam. Ron was not forgotten.

Cruising the Internet, I came across the “Virtual Vietnam Memorial”. I did a search and found Ron’s listing. There was a place where those who had known him could leave a note. A Marine comrade had left one note, Dan had left another note: Dan, another neighbor kid who had lived around the corner from Ron and his family and remembered. I added my own note. Ron was not forgotten.

Recently when down home, I visited the local library. A lady with a teenage boy came in. They wanted to use the scanner, and my sister, who is the librarian, asked me to show them how to use it. As we talked, I thought this woman looked vaguely familiar. I asked and she told me her name. She was Ron’s youngest sister, and the young man was the younger of her two sons. I had not known her very well. She had been so much younger then the rest of us. She was scanning pictures of the family to use in making a calendar. I looked at the familiar faces. I thought of this story sitting in my notebook back home. I didn’t say anything to her about it. It just wasn’t the place or time to… the place or time to let her know… to let her know Ron was not forgotten.

Someday I'll go to the Washington, DC and visit "the wall"... I'll look up his name and see it engraved there along with so many others, others I never knew... But I did know Ronnie... I know when I see it; I'll probably cry my fool head off...

RIP

(Postscript to a Requiem)

(If I Could Dance With You Once Again)

(Written by J. William Newcomer, Copyright March 2001, J. William Newcomer, all rights reserved. )

Yes Virginia, there really was a holocaust.

I have been watching Band of Brothers. Tonight I watched the segment titled "Why We Fight". This is the episode where Easy Company comes across a concentration camp near a town in Germany. The scenes are pretty graphic, tragic, and heart wrenching. It was right that the German civilians from the town were made to clean up the camp; lifting the dead bodies, facing and dealing with the reality of what their Nazi leaders had done. The occupants intered in that concentration camp had been put there not because they were criminals, but because they were Jews. That one fact alone was the sole reason for the Nazi's subjecting them to the atrocities they had endured and under which so many of them had been killed or died.

I remember as a young lad in elementary school in the late 1950's, seeing some of the grainy pictures of the concentration camps on our black and white TV set. Back then there was no question that the holocaust had happened. The evidence, hardly 10 to 15 years after the end of the war, was over whelming. And there was also the continuing hunt for the war criminals that had perpetuated those atrocities.

An example of the information that was and is available is Alfred Hitchcock's Documentary on the Holocaust. Movies such as Schindler's List and The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler as well as others are based on historical documented events.

To deny the holocaust is to deny historical truth; it is to bear false witness regarding the nature and criminal activities of the 3rd Reich. We must never forget. Yes, there were other holocausts in the 20th Century. They should not be forgotten either. But if we forget this holocaust, I believe those others probably will very quickly be forgotten too.

~ The Billy Goat ~

Alfred Hitchcock documentary on the Holocaust
(Graphic content)



It was real. It really happened. We must not forget....

The Human Side of a "Forgotten" Battle in an "Ignored" War:
A Billy Goat Review of:

Gallipoli, directed by Peter Weir. Starring Mel Gibson and Mark Lee. Paramount Pictures (1981)

Robert E. Lee is reported to have said, “It is a good thing war is so terrible lest we become overly fond of it.” If the American Civil War was terrible, and it was, the “forgotten” or “ignored” war we call World War I was even more so. And as much as any battle in that “forgotten” and “ignored” war; Gallipoli is probably one of the most ignored and forgotten except in Australia, where this film was made, and New Zealand.

I have read several accounts of Gallipoli including Winston Churchill’s. (He lost his Admiralty job as a result of the Gallipoli debacle.) I did not see Gallipoli when the movie first came out in 1981, but recently bought the DVD out of historical interest and a curiosity regarding the acting skills of a much younger Mel Gibson. Gallipoli is not a “kids” movie, and though rated PG, (rough language & minimal posterior nudity), there is an intense emotional level to the last part of the film that parents should also be aware of.

This movie does an excellent job of showing the human side of war. That human side takes up a good part of the 111 minutes on the DVD version, and at times the pace of the story gets a little slow. You see the Australian “home front”, far from the trenches of Europe. The newspaper gives accounts of the latest news of the ANZAC movements and battles. Two young men, (Mel Gibson and Mark Lee), met and become friends. They try to enlist together but end up in separate units. Other comrades enlist also. Both units end up in Egypt and in the course of training the two friends become reunited. Eventually one is able to transfer to the other’s unit.

The actual battle scenes come into the movie rather abruptly. One moment you’re at a ballroom scene in Egypt, and the next you’re in a boat heading to the shores at Gallipoli. The encampment on the shore is lit up with strings of light bulbs, reminiscent of a crowded carnival midway. Grim “carnival” indeed as occasional enemy shells come screeching into the encampment area, and you see the wounded on litters or shuffling around with their assorted array of bandages. You don’t see the dead, though in one trench scene a soldier shakes the protruding hand of a dead man and says, “Glad to met you.”

I am not so sure that the British and ANZAC troops lost at Gallipoli due to superior Turkish arms and troops. The Turks did have the advantage of the high ground, but Allied failure was due as much to an inept higher command as anything else. The most glaring omission of command illustrated in the movie was the failure to synchronize the watches of the commanding officers responsible for an attack against a fortified Turkish position. The plan, as conceived would have worked, but a several minute discrepancy between the watches of the two officers becomes deadly. There was also the failure of the immediate superior officer to recognize the quickly changing face of the situation and his over riding the inferior officer actually on the scene.

As the decimated troops prepare for one last charge, they know it is to their death. The camera flashes from one man to another as they quickly scrawl that last note home to loved ones, strip off valued personal possessions to leave in the trench with those notes; and we see on their faces the resignation and foreboding realization that this was it. They would go over the top and not return. They were to be fed as cannon fodder to the scourge of war. The commanding officer on the scene swears he will not ask his men to do something he himself would not do, and he makes his preparations to go with them.

I will not tell you the ending. You will have to see it for yourself. It was one of the most abrupt and saddest endings I have ever seen in a lifetime of movies. The emotional shock packed into the way this movie ends brought me to tears.

General William T Sherman, USA, said, “War is hell.”(#) That is a true objective statement that has nothing to do with being “pro” or “anti” war. The truth of Sherman’s observation was glaringly and vividly portrayed in the trenches of WWI, and Gallipoli was a prime example. Peter Weir did an effective job in bringing that to the screen, and a young Mel Gibson turned in one of his best performances ever.

PS: Duh... Where's Gallipoli? For the geographically challenged, look up Gallipoli's location in your atlas. You don't have an atlas? That's your problem, not mine.

(#) In Biblical Theology, war, just and unjust, is in this life the most stark refection of the reality of what Hell will be like. As a reflection it falls far short of Hell's actual reality, but is nonetheless a reflection of the horror of that reality. It is in that sense I am affirming the truth of Sherman's comment on war's nature. ~ The Billy Goat ~

Shake Off The Dust From Your Feet

"They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. They passed the last child into the ship.

The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizons became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away from the flashes. When the flashes were gone, they looked back.

The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth.

Someone barked an order. The monks began climbing again. Soon they were all inside the ship.

The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. "Sic transit mundus," he murmured, looking back at the glow. He slapped the soles of his sandals together, beating the dirt out of them. The glow was engulfing a third of the heavens. He scratched his beard, took one last look at the ocean, then stepped back and closed the hatch.

There came a blur, a glare of light, a high thin whining sound, and the starship thrust itself heavenward." (Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle For Leibowitz, Fiat Voluntas Tua, 1959)

We grew up in the shadow of the very real possibility of nuclear warfare. As children we lived with the Red specter of the East haunting the outskirts of our otherwise safe and peaceful childhood. Our parents had just fought a long bloody war against a Nazi Germany and an Imperialistic Japan. We saw the black and white images of that war played across the grainy screens of our new TV's. But the Red menace of atomic warfare had no face we could see and focus on. Perhaps the sight of a silly old man at the UN pounding on the desk with his shoe was the closest personification we had of that threat. So we went through the 1950's and early 1960's. It would be another 30 some years before that Red specter collapsed under the weight of its own inconsistencies.

Of all the nuclear apocalyptic literature of that era, A Canticle for Leibowitz is in my mind the most profound and classic. It was one of the few Sci-Fi books I choose to keep in my library. After thirty some years, I recently read it again. I found it even more profound the second time around, and as an Evangelical Christian, I highly recommend it. Yes, Miller wrote with a Roman Catholic perspective, but the issues and questions he wrestles with in the Canticle are fundamental to all of Christian faith, and mankind as a whole.

In the above quote from the end of the Canticle, there is the allusion to the words of Christ in Matthew 10:14-15. To understand that allusion, you will need to know that the quotation above takes place around the year 3781 A.D., about 1800 years after the world had blown itself up in nuclear warfare, and in that carnage had relapsed back into another long dark age in which knowledge had been keep preserved in the monastery. Out of the ancient ashes of the 20th century, civilization has finally risen again only to once again self-destruct.

Come quickly Lord Jesus,

~ The Billy Goat ~

Is the Vietnam War Finally "Over"?

05 November 2004, Federalist Patriot No. 04-44/45, Friday Digest

"The Vietnam War is finally over ... and we finally won. The Patriot is convinced that the one demographic completely overlooked in this election was the Vietnam-Era veterans.

Those millions of unsung heroes and faithful servants finally had their say last night. We finally put a stake through the heart of the cowards, the liberals, the leftists, and the Hollywood and major media co-conspirators who sold this nation a sack of lies about the Vietnam War and its veterans. So emboldened were the Democrats that they had the audacity to put a willing enemy collaborator on the ticket to oppose President Bush. Well, they had their chance, and the American people sent them a loud and clear message on 2 November 2004, a day we now propose as Vietnam War Victory Day! (How 'bout a Bury the '60's Day, too?)

Their lies about unparalleled U.S. atrocities, war crimes, and defeat on the battle field were finally put to the electorate last night. Just as in their war, our Vietnam Era veterans once again put nearly everything on the line to save our country and to keep the light of truth alive. The Swiftees, the SOG vets, and the producers and authors of books like Stolen Valor and Stolen Honor -- none of them would be silenced. We don't know of any exit polls that can validate this belief, but we know that those untold millions of veterans overwhelmingly sent a message to Lt. Kerry and company. No more lies, no more phony apologies, no more pandering to the UN and the world's socialist elite. We wouldn't let you steal the only thing that many of us have left, our honor and the truth.

The Patriot salutes all those veterans and thanks them for securing yet another victory for America."

There is a lot in the above I agree and sympathise with. And it may indeed be true that the Vietnam War will no longer factor into a Presidential election like it did in 2004. But is it really over? I'm not so sure. I did not serve in the military and am not a veteran. But I suspect the Vietnam War will never "really" be over until the last surviving Vietnam veteran lays down his or her head in the Bivouac of the Dead... Rest in peace Ronnie...

~ The Billy Goat ~

Memorial Day, May 31, AD 2004

George H. BRITTON

December 11, 1890 - October 21, AD 1918

My Great Uncle, George H. Britton was killed in France, Argonne Forest during WWI. He was buried in France, and a memorial marker was erected in the Leonardson Cemetery, Jefferson Twp., Hillsdale Co., Michigan at the family plot. George was killed exactly three weeks before the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918 brought the war to an end.

RIP...

---

LCPL. Ronald Joe Markel, USMC

Born on May 14, 1947
From WALDRON, MICHIGAN
Casualty was on May 9, 1968
in THUA THIEN, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
GUN, SMALL ARMS FIRE
Operation HOUSTON II
RIP...
Requiem for Ronnie