My Poppy is Red
Posted By Randy on November 11, 2013
“It takes no more than one generation of removal in time to distance human understanding from any heretofore common experience, no matter how horrific, and history has shown that people can function through pretty much anything, using it as a motivation for improvement (As Winston Churchill said, “If you are going through hell, keep going.”) Two generations of removal will also remove most of those with direct experience to relate from the late unpleasantness, and so the new reality becomes the expected one. The real one. The only one. The one that’s supposed to be owed to you and yours. ~ Dark Sentiments 2013 – Day 16: The Dark Side of Child Rearing
I was born in 1957, and for Canadians of my generation, World Wars 1 and 2 can be compared to what can be said today of cancer, in that it would have been a difficult task during our formative years to swing the proverbial dead cat without hitting a member of a family that had been touched to its very marrow by war. Someone near and dear had died or been indelibly changed for the worst by it.
As I’ve previously written on the occasion of another Remembrance Day:
“… most of what matters to me in life was shaped by growing up surrounded by people who lived through, and/or served in some capacity during, World War 2. Of the next door neighbours, one couple consisted of a British engineer who had flown bombers for the RAF, and his Canadian wife. She had been a military nurse who met her husband in England while tending to his wounds in hospital after his bomber was shot up. Those two taught me how to fish and I spent many happy enthralled hours in their company.
On the other end of the block was another couple, the husband of which had served in the Royal Canadian Army, finishing out his service as a small arms instructor to the end of the war. A founding member of the Lunenburg Rod & Gun Club … he taught me to shoot, and I am privileged to own the service pistol he carried during his time in uniform.
In adulthood, I either am, or have been, honoured to know a Lancaster pilot, a US Navy F4U Corsair pilot who served both in World War 2 and the Korean War, two men who went ashore on D-Day, and another who landed with an armored unit the following day. Along the way, I’ve also spent some enjoyable hours with a Spitfire Mk.IX pilot and a week getting to know a retired RCAF Sabre pilot while we were attending the same course and practicing our drinking and limerick recitals in the evenings. No bombast or chest beating. Just ordinary people who did extraordinary things. Things we all need to be eternally and unforgettingly grateful for ….”
To this list of people who matter to me I would also like to add Esteemed Friends I have come to know who have put their asses on the line in Vietnam, Israel, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in places where they were called upon to do their Duty as they saw it. If you think those wars and the things these people were or are called upon to do, are horribly wrong, then I would suggest that every one of them might agree with you, for let it never be forgotten that the soldier hates war worse than anyone, but being good at waging it does not make the soldier the cause of war, only the one who puts a temporary end to it for as far as he can see from where he’s standing, and justifiable pride can be found in winning the fight without it being misinterpreted as a glorification of war itself. My maternal Grandfather, who served as a sniper in WW1, when sufficiently provoked was wont to tell the provocateur, “I killed better men than you in the war,” meaning that while he never got to know the full measure of those men, he knew enough to make a comparison with what stood before him in the present moment. Think on that sentiment.
I began this piece with a reminder that time distances those now living from the lessons to be learned from the lives of those who have come before. Let me add this – Adolf Hitler didn’t invent genocide, and ideals of world domination exist as strongly today as they have always done. If it only takes a single generation to forget this, then the same can be said of anything, including skill at arms and a willingness to stand in harm’s way. When the Wolf is at the door, you will be happy that a few have never forgotten.
Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Today, the word “hero” is entirely too freely flung about, but its true meaning has been thoroughly defined, and I will give the closing spotlight to crime novelist Raymond Chandler as I have previously quoted him:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean; who is neither tarnished nor afraid. (He) must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man…. He talks as the man of his age talks; that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”
“… He is the hero, he is everything. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour; by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
“… he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honour in one thing, he is that in all things….
“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. … his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
Take this to your heart before you condemn this day of Remembrance as a celebration of war.
I have such mixed feelings about that day, and not only because the allies kicked our ass – as Mike likes to – lovingly – remind me of from time to time.
I like this post and agree with it wholeheartedly, including how misused the word hero has become, but as the wife of a retired military man who has seen action in Bosnia (The History Channel had a documentary Sunday and Monday), I have also witnessed the glorification of war and its participants. Not all soldiers are pure in their hearts and morally sound – there are a good number of ordinary jerks like they can be found anywhere, who are soldiers for another reason than to be of service, and I am hard pressed to celebrate them even if they killed a, proclaimed by the state, enemy.
I also argue that young boys’ fascination for war exists because it has a certain glory/hero aura to it. We give medals to soldiers like we give gold stars to grade school kids, and they wear them with the same pride. Many soldiers who have never seen action will tell you that they were excited when they were sent to where action happened – until they realized what it is really like. After the fact, no glorification, before there surely is.
Adults who want to remember and give thanks – fine by me. I do too, mentally not to the jerks, but I am against brainwashing children and teaching them only fragments of the whole.
In a global way of thinking, ensuring someone’s freedom is a noble thought, but in war whose freedom is taken away at the same time?
If we really want peace – which I doubt is true for some people – our minds and teachings need to be occupied with peace, not war.
Oh that Mike of yours, such a Man you married.
I too am all too aware of how thoroughly Human frailty and the flaws of character pervade every endeavour, and any pretense that soldiering is excluded from that is akin to the hypocrisy of showing up at the funeral of someone you hated, speaking highly of them now that they’re gone, when you really know you only came to assure yourself that the son of a bitch is really dead.
I believe that this time in history needs to find its way back to a remembering of what heroism is, that Manhood is actually a learned skill, and that children need powerful personal heroes to emulate. In the present void of this absolute need, the latest first person shooter video game, or bling flashing rap artist, or shit head “reality” show star need not apply.
I speak to this from a masculine perspective only because it is traditionally boys who fall afoul of it, or at least are blamed so. As a Swordsman I hold that the ability to fight, and fight well, is as important an aspect of education as is literacy, but only as the lethal art is grasped and understood as an improvement of the self and the society one inhabits. I hope I’m making sense here.
The risk is now, as it always has been, that those in power will subvert the martial spirit, as naturally manifested in its youth, to feed the cauldron of greed. Conflict is Nature, and in this only a transient response, not a consistently existing state. War is the malignant cancer that can grow on conflict, especially when greed is served by the growing, and it brings with it a thirst for its own survival as an accepted state of being.
Back during WW1, a lot of the people living in and around my home town of Lunenburg turned their backs on their German ancestry by Anglicizing their surnames and laying claim to Dutch ancestry instead. It has always been a point of pride for me that my own surname – only slightly modified WAY back from the original Weihnacht (possibly explaining why I’m such a jolly bastard) – survived nearly intact in a latter day sea of Whynots and Whynaughts. There are 11 different ways to spell the name in Lunenburg County alone.
When you said, in closing, that, “… our minds and teachings need to be occupied with peace, not war,” you said a mouthful. It’s said that one sword keeps another in its sheath, and there is a Polish saying that asks, “God grant me a good sword and no use for it.” There will always be conflict. It must be understood by all that he risks not being pricked by the thorn who leaves the blossom alone.
Let’s join in being respectful of those, on all sides, who stood in harm’s way and lost all for what they believed was right, and likewise give thanks to the inevitable percentage of jerks who at least did the world a favour by being removed from it.
“No bombast or chest beating. Just ordinary people who did extraordinary things. Things we all need to be eternally and unforgettingly grateful for ….”