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Personal Statement #2

My Uncle Joe:

The Korean War: Fire & Ice

September 26, 2008

I have a few things to say about the general subject of war - but first I'd like to mention my Uncle Joe who served in Korea.

A few years ago I created the following tribute to him (also posted on the War and Peace page):

Uncle Joe was my Dad's elder brother - those two were very much alike, both good men. Uncle Joe always loved me, and I knew and felt that. His boys, Jerry and Tom, my cousins, were among my best childhood friends. We had such good times on many occasions. Our two families would often work in the fields together, which was a highlight of my youth.

Not all of Uncle Joe's corn was to be found in his fields - he had plenty of it in some of the stories he told. I remember as a boy laughing at his jokes, mainly because he had such a good time telling them - and I can still hear him laughing. He would treat the youngsters to the yarn of "Fuzzy Wuzzy" ha, ha! and "The bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see..." I came to hope that it would be a one-way trip, as I got pretty tired of that one - ha! and, I would be remiss if I failed to mention his favorite joke, the story of the "Sooner Dog"!

(circa 1936) at the old little white schoolhouse. There's Uncle Joe, center back row; Dad is on the right; Uncle Leo next to him; it appears that little Uncle Anton is in front of Uncle Joe... as you can see, these boys, at this exclusive preparatory school, suffered under a most strict dress code, one that none dared even think about circumventing... one concession to them, however... designer jeans, of course...

Uncle Joe returned from the Korean War to marry his sweetheart, Frances Kuntz. He and his beautiful bride began their lives by moving into one of those old ND farmhouses, habitations without even basic amenities such as running water. I well remember that old house - it was very much like our own (P.S. #1).

New neighbors for the newlyweds

I recently spoke to Aunt Frances on the phone, and we were laughing about the primitive conditions that we all endured in those days. But she informed me of a special torture that she and Uncle Joe suffered...

As newlyweds in their drafty and uninsulated farmhouse, they were greeted by unexpected guests. The house had no basement; in fact, it had no proper foundation, and had been built on a collection of large rocks. Well, this living arrangement suited a family of skunks just fine, as they moved into the "lower level" of Joe and Frances' honeymoon suite. Winter was coming on, and these fuzzy little intruders could not be removed until spring!

Frances audibly groaned as she recalled her daily duty, for the entire long ND winter, of burning incense and sugar to ward off the pungent aroma of their unwelcomed guests!

Fire and Ice: memories of war

Uncle Joe found it difficult to speak of his war experiences. But he once told me a little bit of it; something of the terror and suffering that he endured, how he found it easy to pray his rosary while waiting in frozen foxholes for the next fire-fight.

I didn't know much about the Korean War; or, officially, the Korean "Conflict." I don't think most Americans do. A few years ago I bought the A&E documentary Fire And Ice , a history of that "forgotten war." I was appalled at the dangers, the extreme physical hardships, that those men endured; moreover, the Korean War was another one of those entanglements fought for limited political objectives, with the GIs as pawns in a game - one played by politicians in boardrooms.

I can hardly contain my anger as I read things like the following:

• General James Alward Van Fleet, Commander, 8th Army, Korea:   Fire and Ice reports that, after the stalemate which began in July of 1951, General Van Fleet, who had replaced the promoted General Ridgeway, believed that the morale of his soldiers would decline unless they were actively engaged in regular operations; for this reason, Van Fleet encouraged the taking and retaking of strategically unimportant hills. These "moral builders," bloody, never-decisive fire-fights, lasting the better part of two years, claimed 60,000 Allied casualties as "peace-talks" wore on.

I am not a pacifist. I understand, in this imperfect world, that evil unanswered becomes evil abetted, with the end result placing us in a worse condition than a present war.

History makes that very clear. But I also understand that we cannot police the entire world - we have neither the manpower nor economic resources to do so. Currently, the US has troops stationed in 130 countries! I believe that such "imperial overreach," of the sort that has brought down every other empire in history that has tried to do this, goes beyond matters of self defense and devolves into simple meddling in the lives of people around the world.

A big part of our problem is that we have set aside the Constitutional safeguards put in place by the Founding Fathers. Have you noticed that we don't have "wars" any more? - now we have "conflicts."

Why is that?

Congress as jury

The Constitution mandates Congress to ratify a declaration of war. But a President can unilaterally involve us in a "conflict." Today Congress' war-making authority has been effectively delegated to the President, who now acts as a "king," one man making momentous decisions alone! And if that person is unscrupulous, or incompetent, what check-and-balance will reign him in?

The Founders wanted the committing of US troops to a field of battle to be a complicated affair - an action requiring the debate and approval of many thinking heads. Congress was meant to be a kind of jury which would analyze the facts and determine the truth of a matter. But we have unconstitutionally eliminated this procedural safeguard, an entire level of accountability which would tend to keep us from not only merely unnecessary wars but, worse, ones started for someone's private gain, one's hidden agenda, trumped up as a necessary patriotic action required for the national defense.

• President Richard Nixon: "The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature. [If a president is successful in bypassing the Congress] it is evident that the people are cheated out of the best ingredients in the government, the safeguards of peace which is the greatest of their blessings."

Rules of mortal combat

I believe that Aquinas offered us wisdom when he spoke of the concept of a "just war."

• Thomas Aquinas: "In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign.... Secondly, a just cause.... Thirdly ... a rightful intention."

Each person, each potential soldier, must decide for him or herself whether the latest "necessary patriotic action required for the national defense" is or is not a "just war."

Listen to the blasting words of...

• Mark Twain: "Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catchphrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country - hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of."

Another voice on the nature of proper military obedience and discipline:

• C.S. Lewis: "The rescue of drowning men is ... a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for. It seems to me that all political duties (among which I include military duties) are of this kind. A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself."

The high-court of Heaven does not allow us to delegate to another our essential personhood. There is no civil duty so important as to warrant the complete surrendering of one's mind, one's soul, and conscience. To do so, Lewis says, is a form of idolatry, a violation of one's sacred nature, fashioned in the image of God. And have we forgotten the Nuremberg Trials where the Allies condemned the notion of I was just following orders ?

• Thoreau, Civil Disobedience : "Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right...  A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars,against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences... Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts -- a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments… The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies ... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens …"

Think about this, Thoreau's "undue respect for law," the marching "file of soldiers," marching not only "against their wills" but "against their common sense" - serving the "state thus, not as men but machines." No doubt Thoreau was thinking of the European-style, very gentlemanly and proper, battlefield etiquette of infantrymen marching in orderly lines - making it easy for sharpshooters and cannon balls to butcher them like pigs in a holding pen. Think of the hundreds of thousands of hapless young men, just farm boys like my Uncle Joe, the Blue and the Gray of 150 years ago, marching, marching, waves and waves of them, cut down like animals to the slaughter, marching to virtual certain death, because some commander told them it was their "patriotic duty" to walk in straight lines into the cannon's mouth!

A thinking man's war

When I was a little boy I remember Dad talking to his friends, many of whom were WWII vets, with the horrors of that war still very fresh on their minds. And I remember a point being made by these of the "Greatest Generation" - it must have been significantly emphasized for a little guy like me to have taken note of it - that one of the reasons the GIs were able to defeat the incredibly disciplined and well-oiled killing-machine that was Nazi Germany, and also Imperial Japan, was due to the fact that the average GI was a man, a thinking man, and not a mindless goose-stepping machine; as such, the GIs were more inventive, more resourceful, in solving problems on the battlefield, more likely to "think outside the box," more, in a sense, unpredictable - and, therefore, more dangerous! ... if Plan A failed, you could be sure, they would find another way to kill you.

The primary cause of the Nazis' failure on D-Day might be traced to this one fatal flaw, systemic in their extreme top-down cult-like authority structure... everyone was afraid of waking up Hitler, and no one dared make a decision without him! The War was lost for them right there!  

Dictatorships can appear to be very efficient at times - but such a system is nothing more than a magnification of one, single man at the top, and that one man cannot compete with millions of mentally-engaged adversaries.

Bugs as adversary

I am laughing now because I am thinking of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons - the funniest, the greatest of them were, in my opinion, created during the 1940s, during WWII.

During the War, Bugs, in fact, was "drafted" as an emblem mascot for several US Army Air Force Squadrons. This, I think, is significant. 

We were entertained by this self-assured, somewhat irreverent, confidant-in-the-face-of-danger, long-eared upstart. Generally quite affable, Bugs was not the sort of enemy you wanted - because once you crossed the line and made him say, "of course, you realize 'dis means war," all of his scheming and inventive genius was marshalled against you. He didn't often lose, and throughout the process he made you laugh - even inspired you - with his cocky-confidence and self-possession.

Falling Hare , 1943

And this, I think, was the zeitgeist, the spirit of those times. Bugs represented the average American WWII and Korean War GI, the kind of self-respecting, thinking soldier that you really didn't want to have as an enemy.

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