Wild About Writing

It’s November 11th, 2008, and as I write this the 11th hour of the 11th month is only moments away. I’ve been watching CBC-TV’s early coverage of the many Canadian-related commemorations taking place on this 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War. On CNN, they’re showing greetings from troops serving in Iraq and discussing a film about women soldiers in support roles there.

My friend Michael Callaghan has sent me this about an item in today’s New York Times:

“To save Loe Sam, the army has destroyed it.The shops and homes of the 7,000 people who lived here are a heap of gray rubble, blown to bits by the army. Scraps of bedding and broken electric fans lie strewn in the dirt.” These words, written without any irony, open Jane Perlez’ front-page New York Times account today (Remembrance Day) of a battle in North Pakistan. Haunting words, they mirror exactly the language used during the Vitenam war to describe South Vietnamese villages that had
been relocated to “strategic hamlets,” which then became “free-fire zones,” which meant that anything, or everything, that moved—human or animal–could be fired upon. As the song says, “will they never learn?” In the name of so-called freedom, is there no shame?

I understand Michael’s disgust at the tactics armies adopt when they find themselves in situations no one can understand and where the only apparent solution is force.

There’s special irony in another news report I heard today in which it was made clear that there can be no military solution in Afghanistan — only a political one.

But today we remember the soldiers who served in the two world wars. Neither of these wars should have occurred. The first resulted from diplomatic stupidity and arrant nonsense spouted by the generals. It sowed the seeds for the second one. That war could have been averted, had the leaders of Britain, France and the Soviet Union been able to work together to stop Hitler.

Canadians are especially mindful of the two battles in which our troops played such a great role in the First World War — Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge.

My father served at Vimy Ridge. He was wounded there, invalided back to England, and so missed the even more deadly confrontation at Passchendaele. Here’s a bit from a letter he wrote me about that freezing, foggy morning when we took the Ridge:

“At zero hour it seemed as if the heavens opened with one huge crash. It became light as day and after, only one thought, press on, get going. I do not remember how long we were getting to the top of the Ridge but it did not seem very long. By this time it was broad day and you could see across the plain to the towns and villages on the other side.

“The Germans thought the Ridge could not be taken, the dugouts and shelters were impregnable to shell fire, but what are you going to do when someone sneaks up to your back door and lobs a stokes mortar down your stairway? Lots of Germans were buried alive this way because after a Stokes mortar exploded in a dugout it caved the whole thing in.”

Today, we wonder what our involvement in Afghanistan can lead to, and whether Barack Obama will be able to lead the Americans out of Iraq. A book that Amazon is promoting as one of the ten best of the year is The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins (Knopf).

I haven’t read the book so I can only pass on this quote from Publisher’s Weekly:

“His (Filkin’s) richly textured book is based on his work in Afghanistan and Iraq since 1998. It begins with a Taliban-staged execution in Kabul. It ends with Filkins musing on the names in a WWI British cemetery in Baghdad. In between, the work is a vivid kaleidoscope of vignettes. Individually, the strength of each story is its immediacy; together they portray a theater of the absurd, in which Filkins, an extraordinarily brave man, moves as both participant and observer.”

Chapter One of the book is here.

Have they all died in vain?