I decided to take down the start on the short story that I put up yesterday. It’s something that I’d been scribbling down notes and ideas for back in 2000 and 2001, but reading it over today, with all the guys dying in Iraq, it seemed wrong to post a comedic story so closely linked to that context and using the idea of a ‘dead’ (i.e., war game pretend kills) platoon. When I was in the Army, there was a lot of funny stuff that happened, but a lot of unfunny stuff, too, and this just doesn’t feel like the time to be cracking jokes.
Post Deleted
For what it’s worth, Mike, I didn’t get the impression of impropriety at all. As someone who’s never been in uniform, I’m perhaps not the best judge, but the absurdity, poignancy, and salutary silliness seemed to me absolutely appropriate to time of war. It’s when we’re nestled in a zeitgeist of coddled imperviousness that making fun of war is tasteless and stinks of obnoxious schadenfreude.
I’d love to see the rest of the piece.
I’m with Mr. B. S. on this one, Mike, though I do applaud your sensitivity. Today’s Washington Post had an article on its front page about Pat Tillman, and I wondered if you’d seen it.
Since Tillman is a local guy, the San Jose Mercury News featured the post story at the top of the page on the front page of the Sunday edition. It was the first thing I read this morning.
One thing my own military training inured in me was a deep fear of the combination of enthusiasm and inexperience (the cluelessly gung ho guys were always a danger to themselves and others).
Thanks for the supportive comments, Chris and Joanna. If I can find the time to finish it in the next week or two, maybe I’ll post it on a Friday — but right now, it still feels not quite right, and maybe it’s just because I know some of the guys. I was lucky: no one ever shot at me.
Joanna, at your prompting, I took a look at the Post story. Grim stuff, and sad, but not entirely unexpected: I had a couple opportunities to train with the Rangers, and the fratricide picture the story paints is — well, if you know a Ranger, you know their inclination to pour bullets on any problem. Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down is well worth a read: it’s a disturbing picture of what the Rangers actually do, and Penguin made him sanitize massive portions of it, because of worries that the story wouldn’t sell, even as terrible as it was. Some estimates suggest that the Rangers killed three times the number of civilians described by Bowden.
You might have heard about the nasty little op-ed UMass grad student Rene Gonzales posted, arguing that Pat Tillman deserved to die. That’s the class hypocrisy that sickens me here at UMass; the fact that a graduate student in a position of economic privilege (yes, Gonzales owns a house) can sneer at someone who gives up a massive salary to join the Army as an enlisted man. It’s not the only reason for me to be disgusted by Gonzales, but — well, it’s a reason. And the sad thing is that the privileged perspective is so common here: many people, like Gonzales, feel happily free to condescendingly attack any political perspective they do not share as somehow stupid, rather than as something with which they disagree.
And Chris, I gotta say: for density of twenty-five-cent-words per comment, you win, pardner.
Snicker. I never can find my way from one end of a sentence to another without stumbling over sesquipedalianisms. :p
I regret that I missed it.
The Gonzalez piece is disturbing, Mike. First, her claim to speak for young Puerto Rican males is suspect. I doubt they would generally look at Tillman as she claims.
But it’s the ideological arrogance that allows her to write ignorant of the life Tillman lived. I’ve read a lot about him here, because his family lives here, he went to high school here, lots of his friends have spoken and written about him. He was an admirable person, one who had a strong sense of himself and a concern for others. The fact that when he realized his own unit was shooting at him he yelled, “I’m Pat Fucking Tillman” shows his ironic understanding of the celebrity status he walked away from.
Anyone who cannot distinguish al-Qaeda from Iraqi nationalists clearly needs more graduate schooling. In the end, heroism lies not in the form of death, but in the life lived. Tillman deserves recognition for the life he lived, even if he was unlucky enough to end up in a unit with inexperienced, but rabid Rangers.
Her tone is so hateful that it diminishes any attempt at critique on her part. After the first few paragraphs I wanted to reach through the screen and throttle her (with words)for being so needlessly cruel and belittling of a young man who had just died violently. And, after reading those paragraphs, I had no faith in her credibility as an intellectual.
It’s nice