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 get a lot of e-mail.
It comes in all varieties: praise, blame, adoration, abuse, "Right
on, dude!" and 2,000-word treatises
on Hegelian epistemology. I deal with it all as best I can and move
on. Once in a long while, though, there is one that lodges itself
in my mind and won't go away until I've talked — or, in this
case, written — about it.
This particular e-mail arrived in response to a piece I wrote the
day after that U.S. reconnaissance plane was brought down over the
South China Sea on April 1st. My piece was titled "Trash
That Plane". To preserve any secrets that might be left on the
plane, I wrote, the U.S. ought to destroy it, and this would be
much better done with a ground assault than by air attack.
My military and ex-military e-mail on that one was nearly unanimous
in favor of such a mission. The civilians split about fifty-fifty.
(This is not very surprising, when you think about it. Military
people, who are trained to combat, and whose careers can be wonderfully
advanced by a spell of combat experience, are less reluctant to
see themselves put in harm's way than their parents, spouses, sweethearts,
children and friends are to see them so put.)
The writer of the particular e-mail that got my attention is a serving
officer in the U.S. Navy. I cannot, therefore, publish his name.
I have also dropped or disguised some facts that might give away
clues as to his identity. I have further corrected a couple of spelling
errors. (Which should not be taken — I certainly don't take
it — as reflecting badly on the sender. To paraphrase the great
Johnny Carson: A person who spell-checks his e-mail is a person
who back-washes his water-pik.) Here is the body of the e-mail,
thus adjusted.
I'll give you another reason the military won't mind doing a job
like you described. I've been in the Navy since 19—. One of
the reasons that I joined, got my commission, and stayed in is that
the U.S. is a force for good in the world. This may look like a
naïve statement to some, but, sometimes, the U.S. is the only nation
in the world that gets it. Sometimes we're the only nation that
isn't falling all over itself to imitate Chamberlain or trying to
socialize itself to death. Not only do we want to do our job because
we've trained for it and it looks good on a fitness report. We want
to do our job because it's the right thing to do.
The frank, unselfconscious sincerity of those words stopped me in
my tracks. Further, it made me think of something I had read long
before, and have hardly thought about since. I tried to move on
to the next item of business, but couldn't fix my mind on it. At
last I went up to the attic where I stash old books (I have the
utmost difficulty getting rid of books). I dug out the book I was
looking for, found the passage I recalled, and read it to myself,
for the first time in 15 years. Then I teared up and had to stay
in the attic a while till things cleared.
Yes, folks: This cynical, crusty, stiff-upper-lip Brit, snarling-reactionary
Derb, pitiless scourge of the Left, of feminists, of poofs, of the
Irish Republican Army, of 21-year-old ex-presidential daughters
and of the Chinese Communist party, fearless bren-toting weekend
warrior and skydiver, this cold-blooded curmudgeon, sitting in his
dim attic among all the dust and crap — broken toys, cardboard
boxes full of winter clothes, piles of books speckled with dead
flies, abandoned exercise equipment (what's the world record for
continuous use of a piece of domestic exercise equipment? Three
weeks?) — actually blubbed.
The book I had gone in search of was Margarete Buber's Under
Two Dictators. Buber was the wife of Heinz Neumann, a leading
figure in the German Communist party during the early 1930s. Buber
herself was a Communist, too, of course. (And formerly the wife
of Rafael, son of the theologian Martin Buber.) When Hitler came
to power, the couple had to run for their lives, and naturally they
ran to Moscow. There they lived until Stalin's great purge started
up in 1937. Foreign Communists were a special target of the purge,
and in due course Neumann was pulled in. He was never heard of again.
A short while later, Buber herself was arrested by the N.K.V.D.
She spent the next two years in Soviet labor camps.
When Stalin and Hitler signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in September
1939, one of the subsidiary clauses allowed for an exchange of each
other's nationals. Russians who had fled to Germany to escape Stalin,
and Germans who had fled to the U.S.S.R. to escape Hitler, were
rounded up by the two dictators and repatriated. So, having survived
two years in Soviet camps, Buber now found herself in Ravensbrück.
Miraculously, she survived that, too, and was still alive when the
camp guards fled to avoid the advancing Red Army in 1945. (Of the
hundred-odd German Communists handed over to the Gestapo by Stalin
in those exchanges, Buber is the only one known to have survived
the war. The Russian "counter-revolutionaries" repatriated to the
U.S.S.R. by Hitler fared even worse: They were all shot without
ceremony.)
Having already tasted Stalin's hospitality, Buber decided to head
West herself. With a friend from the camp, she began the long walk
to the Allied lines. The two women had only their camp rags to wear,
and only such food as they could forage or beg on the way. Eventually,
after several days' walking, they came to the American lines at
Bad Kleinem. Buber approached one of the G.I.s, a noncom, and told
him that she and her friend had been five years in Ravensbrück.
She added that she herself had previously been in a concentration
camp in Siberia, and that if the Russians caught her, she would
be sent back there. "OK, sister," said the G.I., "go through." Joyfully,
the women hurried through.
Then the G.I. called after them: "Hey, girls. Wait a minute." Their
hearts sinking, the two women followed him to a house with a sentry
at the door. Obviously he was going to check with his superiors.
Would they be sent back? Or something even worse? To grasp these
women's frame of mind at this point, you have to understand that
for many years their everyday experience had taught them to expect
nothing but the worst from men in uniform: an interrogation and
beating if lucky, gang rape or a firing squad if not.
We waited in a fever of impatience. …After a while he came
out again with a tall, smiling officer, who looked at us, but said
nothing. Our soldier went round behind the house. A few minutes
later there was a sound of horse's hooves and he drove out with
a farm cart and pair.
"Get in," he said. "You've walked enough by the look of you. You're
going to ride now."
Scolpisci nella tua testa a lettere adamantine…. Carve
into your mind in great stone letters: This nation is the hope,
and the conscience, of the world.
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