Thanks for your astute observations. My dad was one of those German WW I soldiers. I can tell you that he didn’t talk about his Heldentum. On the contrary, he returned after serving to years in France and two years in Russia with a hatred of the military and was a pacifist all of his life. He heroically stood against the Nazis before they were handed power by the German elite and refused to submit afterward. It is a disgrace that young men and women are not introduced to the great anti-war literature that came out of WW I. Who knows of Wilfred Owen’s poem DULCE ET DECORUM EST … or Robert Graves’s GOOD BYE TO ALL THAT and Remarques Nichts Neues im Westen (ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, etc. The military appropriation of heroism is a fraud to perpetuate military “solutions”instead of political or diplomatic action.
Remarque followed with "The Way Back." I have a nephew who is now a highly-trained killing machine in US Army special forces. Before he went in I tried talking with him about Philip J. Caputo's "A Rumor of War" but he dismissed the very idea as "bullsh*t," and that Caputo was obviously a coward. Whereas he - my nephew - wanted to kill people who hate America. Apparently, a far more noble pursuit.
Your nephew is a victim of the pathological propaganda/indoctrination of American exceptionalism that starts in elementary school. Let's hope he will recover from this delusion before he becomes a victim of this delusion.
When I consider the word "Hero" I think of Firefighters, Cops, & Military etc. who made the supreme, ultimate sacrifice of being either killed or wounded, or severely maimed in battle, or in their public service to protect & serve "fight" as a Servant of the people-- they took a sacred Vow to protect and be a Guardian. Any thing else is non-negotiable imho! Most ordinary people can't do these things... So a true, blue Hero is rare indeed. That's good enough for me.
The last people I called heroes were the six women who put their bodies between the killer and the 20 children at Sandy Hook and paid with their lives. I know there have been many others who risked (and sometimes lost) their lives working to save someone else.
I grow angry every time I hear the word hero appended to the word sports.
Absolutely TomR the most laudable for sure self sacrifice... The most laughable on the other side of the Coin I heard a Sportscaster calling a Golf Shot by a Player "What a courageous shot" gmafb!!!
Here's how all those "Heroes" have what they need ~ and get paid ~ for what they do... :
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget presents an overview, analysis, and critique of Vice President Kamala Harris’s AGENDA TO LOWER COSTS FOR AMERICAN FAMILIES, released yesterday, which that outlines a number of proposals she would aim to enact if elected President at https://www.crfb.org/blogs/kamala-harris-agenda-lower-costs-american-families .
The AGENDA includes promises to “cut taxes for the middle class, reduce grocery costs, take on price gouging, lower the costs of owning and renting a home, continue to bring down the costs of prescription drugs, and relieve medical debt for millions of Americans.”
This would be paid for by Vice President Harris and Governor Tim Walz fulfilling “their commitment to fiscal responsibility, including by asking the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.”
The first question that arose in my mind was: How far will that AGENDA go if the Democrats do not also seize control of the House and Senate in November? Particularly when it comes to getting that all paid for via increased taxes on corporations and high income earners?
Permit me to share the Eulogy i delivered at a military funeral in Van Nuys, California on January 3, 1970 in honor of a young assault helicopter pilot named Larry, with whom i was privileged to serve as a door gunner down in the Mekong Delta back in 1967-68. Larry left behind his Widow Bride, and two elderly Parents who had adopted him as a Child and were paralyzed with Grief.
EULOGY
It is difficult, my friends. Very difficult.
I know none of you, yet I call you my friends. Thank you for being here, for sharing this, for enabling me to bear it.
After two years of this War, I have finally lost someone I love. Buddies? There's been plenty. Never, until now, someone I love.
It is said that tragedy is the fire that tempers the soul. I can only hope that my soul, and my heart, and my mind, and my life is tempered and forged from this nightmare into a design of dedication NOT to the forces and elements that killed him: rage, hate, lust for violent revenge, a mindless, headlong flight into, through, and finally submerged by insanity.
Not to that, but to the ideals and principles that should have been the forces and elements at work that could have kept him, you, me, us all nowhere near Vietnam, or Biafra, or Suez, or Korea, or Normandy, or Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, and on and on back thru the ages and the battlefields, back to the beginnings of time, the beginnings of man, the beginnings of War.
The ideals, principles, forces, and elements of understanding, concern, love, peace, and the knowledge of our status as but "the family of Man, fellow-passengers on the Spaceship Earth… ."
And how meaningless, empty, and vapid these words sound and are tonite. But, a man's words are really nothing more than indicators, the elements of the metaphor that his living is, as it seeks to explain to him, and to us, his life.
Perhaps these moments of futility, emptiness, and tragedy are the price we must pay for having had the privilege of his company, the strength of his presence, the happiness of his warmth and joy, the security of his being.
We have all lost something. A friend, a husband, a son. But there is a greater loser, a more tragic victim from all this than we, his wife, his parents, his family, and his friends. And that victim, my friends, is the world.
It is this world ~ this world that murdered him ~ that is the big loser.
The terms I think it might understand are that he is no longer at its disposal; that he is free and no longer subject to the prices that the world and mankind demand from its children as they attempt to struggle as individual human beings, with individual lives and loves, and concerns and cares, and projects, plans, and goals, and wins, losses, and rainouts.
The world requires that You be more than a man or a woman, which, until death, is impossible.
It requires that citizens of nations become us all. Citizens of nations, and pawns to realities revolving around such grandiose, eloquent, pompous terms, tenets, and ideas as ideology and geopolitics, alliances and balances of power, negotiations, diplomacy, and treaties, and on and on ad nauseam: the vocabulary of Government.
And much more real, final, and meaningless terms as enemy and body-counts, and hot LZ's and .5O-caliber machine gun positions, and frozen rotor blades at 300 feet, and notification of next-of-kin: the vocabulary of the logical conclusion of the rhetoric of Government: the vocabulary of War.
The world required this of him, and he agreed to pay his portion of the price. Tonite, however, the world's account is overdrawn. Tonite, there is the matter of revenge. No. No, not revenge. Avenge. Avengeance. aVengeance: Revenge without Vengeance; Revenge without Violence.
Is it to be directed against those people and places and principles that killed him? Against other young ~ and old ~ women and men from other nations who, too, are but playing their part and paying their price as their world ~ this world, our world ~ demands? They are but pawns as we. And as long as we pawns keep fighting ~ and paying for ~ all these Wars, there will be War.
What, then of the kings and queens and bishops and rooks and generals and knights and such? They, too, are but pawns. Their bloodshed is not their own; rather, it is of those that they like to call "their Peoples'." These, too, however, are paying a price: the price of being those most directly associated with the true killers ~ the ideas, and terms, and tenets, and vocabularies. And, having to live with them, of, by, and for them, they thus become the emptiness, the insanity, the impotence, the wretchedness that these words are.
No. It is neither the pawns nor the princes ~ the presidents, premiers, and propagandists ~ that are to be sought out and made to give retribution for Larry. It's not the people who are directly, and thus apparently responsible for his having been there, and thus being no more.
Rather, it is those who are truly, though indirectly responsible. It is those that could have stopped it, could have prevented this specter from becoming the spectacle that it is.
It is, indeed, those who permit the world to make them pawns and slaves, and legions to, of, by, and for these ideas and words. Those who permit themselves to go and become but the bit-players in this passion play, the finale of which is the death of their brothers and their sisters, their sons and daughters, their fathers and their mothers, their selves.
A death as meaningless, as senseless, and as empty as their lives. Lives spent under the tyranny of ideas, killing and thus dying under their effect. Lives lived under the anarchy of this self-imposed despotism, rather than in and through the fulfillment that is to be found in the truth, the beauty, the reality of the mind's products ~ Ideas~ as they are used instead to eliminate the trials, tragedies, and traumas of man. Rather than, as today, propagating, perpetrating, and perpetuating them.
HUMANITY is the object. HUMANITY and LIFE. All of LIFE. Ideas are but vehicles. The price for avenging Larry shall have been extracted when that simple statement becomes a world-truth.
We live now in the insanity of Human Beings being the vehicle, and terms, tenets, vocabularies, ideologies, and ideas being the object. The object that Humans have permitted to become, at not only Its expense and thus Life's, but at the World's, as well.
The guilty, my friends, is You and me and him and her and everyone. Each and every one of us all. Including Larry. And we begin, now, to pay the price for this. We have lost someone for whom Humanity and Life was the object.
Larry, as the rest of us, the Young, was at but the beginning of this realization, at the beginning of this work. Because those of us that could have helped, long ago, to prevent what has happened did not, we are now paying the price.
Again: HUMANITY is the object. HUMANITY and LIFE. Ideas are but vehicles. The price for avenging Larry shall have been extracted when that simple statement becomes a world-truth.
The question, again, is "How?"
aVengeance will be mine. I pray, my friends. And Yours as well. The question, at last, is HOW?
Earlier, the question was raised: “Do Ukrainians, Russians, Israelis, and Palestinians call their Soldiers ‘heroes’?"
To which wdt parker responded: “Only when they're dead, jg, whereas we consecrate ours in advance.”
Which leads me to ask: “Do the Peoples of Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and Palestine think that Their Soldiers who are defending Their respective Homelands are not ‘Heroes’? Even before they are killed or maimed physically and/or mentally?
The problem with calling the American military “Heroes” is that they have not been engaged in the Defense of The American Homeland for a long, Long time. Rather, their Mission has been to first expand and then defend The American Empire, as directed and controlled by the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, and the Security Secrecy Surveillance Censorship Propaganda proto-Police State Panopticon that runs America.
To update Smedley Butler's timeless observation of his career: "They were and are Gangsters for Corporatism and its Deep State."
Thanks for your astute observations. My dad was one of those German WW I soldiers. I can tell you that he didn’t talk about his Heldentum. On the contrary, he returned after serving to years in France and two years in Russia with a hatred of the military and was a pacifist all of his life. He heroically stood against the Nazis before they were handed power by the German elite and refused to submit afterward. It is a disgrace that young men and women are not introduced to the great anti-war literature that came out of WW I. Who knows of Wilfred Owen’s poem DULCE ET DECORUM EST … or Robert Graves’s GOOD BYE TO ALL THAT and Remarques Nichts Neues im Westen (ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, etc. The military appropriation of heroism is a fraud to perpetuate military “solutions”instead of political or diplomatic action.
Remarque followed with "The Way Back." I have a nephew who is now a highly-trained killing machine in US Army special forces. Before he went in I tried talking with him about Philip J. Caputo's "A Rumor of War" but he dismissed the very idea as "bullsh*t," and that Caputo was obviously a coward. Whereas he - my nephew - wanted to kill people who hate America. Apparently, a far more noble pursuit.
Your nephew is a victim of the pathological propaganda/indoctrination of American exceptionalism that starts in elementary school. Let's hope he will recover from this delusion before he becomes a victim of this delusion.
I'm sorry to hear about your nephew, wdt. Your comment is tinged with loss. I hope that, eventually, he finds his way back.
Thank You for sharing this, Bill; it is a very powerfully profound thought-provoker.
And Thank You, particularly, for including Mr Rooney's call for what a Real Memorial Day would be.
It would be interesting to find out if Ukrainians, Russians, Israelis, and Palestinians call their Soldiers "heroes."
Only when they're dead, jg, whereas we consecrate ours in advance.
When I consider the word "Hero" I think of Firefighters, Cops, & Military etc. who made the supreme, ultimate sacrifice of being either killed or wounded, or severely maimed in battle, or in their public service to protect & serve "fight" as a Servant of the people-- they took a sacred Vow to protect and be a Guardian. Any thing else is non-negotiable imho! Most ordinary people can't do these things... So a true, blue Hero is rare indeed. That's good enough for me.
The last people I called heroes were the six women who put their bodies between the killer and the 20 children at Sandy Hook and paid with their lives. I know there have been many others who risked (and sometimes lost) their lives working to save someone else.
I grow angry every time I hear the word hero appended to the word sports.
Absolutely TomR the most laudable for sure self sacrifice... The most laughable on the other side of the Coin I heard a Sportscaster calling a Golf Shot by a Player "What a courageous shot" gmafb!!!
Here's how all those "Heroes" have what they need ~ and get paid ~ for what they do... :
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget presents an overview, analysis, and critique of Vice President Kamala Harris’s AGENDA TO LOWER COSTS FOR AMERICAN FAMILIES, released yesterday, which that outlines a number of proposals she would aim to enact if elected President at https://www.crfb.org/blogs/kamala-harris-agenda-lower-costs-american-families .
The AGENDA includes promises to “cut taxes for the middle class, reduce grocery costs, take on price gouging, lower the costs of owning and renting a home, continue to bring down the costs of prescription drugs, and relieve medical debt for millions of Americans.”
This would be paid for by Vice President Harris and Governor Tim Walz fulfilling “their commitment to fiscal responsibility, including by asking the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.”
The first question that arose in my mind was: How far will that AGENDA go if the Democrats do not also seize control of the House and Senate in November? Particularly when it comes to getting that all paid for via increased taxes on corporations and high income earners?
Permit me to share the Eulogy i delivered at a military funeral in Van Nuys, California on January 3, 1970 in honor of a young assault helicopter pilot named Larry, with whom i was privileged to serve as a door gunner down in the Mekong Delta back in 1967-68. Larry left behind his Widow Bride, and two elderly Parents who had adopted him as a Child and were paralyzed with Grief.
EULOGY
It is difficult, my friends. Very difficult.
I know none of you, yet I call you my friends. Thank you for being here, for sharing this, for enabling me to bear it.
After two years of this War, I have finally lost someone I love. Buddies? There's been plenty. Never, until now, someone I love.
It is said that tragedy is the fire that tempers the soul. I can only hope that my soul, and my heart, and my mind, and my life is tempered and forged from this nightmare into a design of dedication NOT to the forces and elements that killed him: rage, hate, lust for violent revenge, a mindless, headlong flight into, through, and finally submerged by insanity.
Not to that, but to the ideals and principles that should have been the forces and elements at work that could have kept him, you, me, us all nowhere near Vietnam, or Biafra, or Suez, or Korea, or Normandy, or Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, and on and on back thru the ages and the battlefields, back to the beginnings of time, the beginnings of man, the beginnings of War.
The ideals, principles, forces, and elements of understanding, concern, love, peace, and the knowledge of our status as but "the family of Man, fellow-passengers on the Spaceship Earth… ."
And how meaningless, empty, and vapid these words sound and are tonite. But, a man's words are really nothing more than indicators, the elements of the metaphor that his living is, as it seeks to explain to him, and to us, his life.
Perhaps these moments of futility, emptiness, and tragedy are the price we must pay for having had the privilege of his company, the strength of his presence, the happiness of his warmth and joy, the security of his being.
We have all lost something. A friend, a husband, a son. But there is a greater loser, a more tragic victim from all this than we, his wife, his parents, his family, and his friends. And that victim, my friends, is the world.
It is this world ~ this world that murdered him ~ that is the big loser.
The terms I think it might understand are that he is no longer at its disposal; that he is free and no longer subject to the prices that the world and mankind demand from its children as they attempt to struggle as individual human beings, with individual lives and loves, and concerns and cares, and projects, plans, and goals, and wins, losses, and rainouts.
The world requires that You be more than a man or a woman, which, until death, is impossible.
It requires that citizens of nations become us all. Citizens of nations, and pawns to realities revolving around such grandiose, eloquent, pompous terms, tenets, and ideas as ideology and geopolitics, alliances and balances of power, negotiations, diplomacy, and treaties, and on and on ad nauseam: the vocabulary of Government.
And much more real, final, and meaningless terms as enemy and body-counts, and hot LZ's and .5O-caliber machine gun positions, and frozen rotor blades at 300 feet, and notification of next-of-kin: the vocabulary of the logical conclusion of the rhetoric of Government: the vocabulary of War.
The world required this of him, and he agreed to pay his portion of the price. Tonite, however, the world's account is overdrawn. Tonite, there is the matter of revenge. No. No, not revenge. Avenge. Avengeance. aVengeance: Revenge without Vengeance; Revenge without Violence.
But against Whom does one direct it? And How?
Is it to be directed against those people and places and principles that killed him? Against other young ~ and old ~ women and men from other nations who, too, are but playing their part and paying their price as their world ~ this world, our world ~ demands? They are but pawns as we. And as long as we pawns keep fighting ~ and paying for ~ all these Wars, there will be War.
What, then of the kings and queens and bishops and rooks and generals and knights and such? They, too, are but pawns. Their bloodshed is not their own; rather, it is of those that they like to call "their Peoples'." These, too, however, are paying a price: the price of being those most directly associated with the true killers ~ the ideas, and terms, and tenets, and vocabularies. And, having to live with them, of, by, and for them, they thus become the emptiness, the insanity, the impotence, the wretchedness that these words are.
No. It is neither the pawns nor the princes ~ the presidents, premiers, and propagandists ~ that are to be sought out and made to give retribution for Larry. It's not the people who are directly, and thus apparently responsible for his having been there, and thus being no more.
Rather, it is those who are truly, though indirectly responsible. It is those that could have stopped it, could have prevented this specter from becoming the spectacle that it is.
It is, indeed, those who permit the world to make them pawns and slaves, and legions to, of, by, and for these ideas and words. Those who permit themselves to go and become but the bit-players in this passion play, the finale of which is the death of their brothers and their sisters, their sons and daughters, their fathers and their mothers, their selves.
A death as meaningless, as senseless, and as empty as their lives. Lives spent under the tyranny of ideas, killing and thus dying under their effect. Lives lived under the anarchy of this self-imposed despotism, rather than in and through the fulfillment that is to be found in the truth, the beauty, the reality of the mind's products ~ Ideas~ as they are used instead to eliminate the trials, tragedies, and traumas of man. Rather than, as today, propagating, perpetrating, and perpetuating them.
HUMANITY is the object. HUMANITY and LIFE. All of LIFE. Ideas are but vehicles. The price for avenging Larry shall have been extracted when that simple statement becomes a world-truth.
We live now in the insanity of Human Beings being the vehicle, and terms, tenets, vocabularies, ideologies, and ideas being the object. The object that Humans have permitted to become, at not only Its expense and thus Life's, but at the World's, as well.
The guilty, my friends, is You and me and him and her and everyone. Each and every one of us all. Including Larry. And we begin, now, to pay the price for this. We have lost someone for whom Humanity and Life was the object.
Larry, as the rest of us, the Young, was at but the beginning of this realization, at the beginning of this work. Because those of us that could have helped, long ago, to prevent what has happened did not, we are now paying the price.
Again: HUMANITY is the object. HUMANITY and LIFE. Ideas are but vehicles. The price for avenging Larry shall have been extracted when that simple statement becomes a world-truth.
The question, again, is "How?"
aVengeance will be mine. I pray, my friends. And Yours as well. The question, at last, is HOW?
This we will learn. With help..... .
Earlier, the question was raised: “Do Ukrainians, Russians, Israelis, and Palestinians call their Soldiers ‘heroes’?"
To which wdt parker responded: “Only when they're dead, jg, whereas we consecrate ours in advance.”
Which leads me to ask: “Do the Peoples of Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and Palestine think that Their Soldiers who are defending Their respective Homelands are not ‘Heroes’? Even before they are killed or maimed physically and/or mentally?
The problem with calling the American military “Heroes” is that they have not been engaged in the Defense of The American Homeland for a long, Long time. Rather, their Mission has been to first expand and then defend The American Empire, as directed and controlled by the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, and the Security Secrecy Surveillance Censorship Propaganda proto-Police State Panopticon that runs America.
To update Smedley Butler's timeless observation of his career: "They were and are Gangsters for Corporatism and its Deep State."