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  very
man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not
having been at sea." An interesting aspect of
the fuss over
what Sen. Bob Kerrey may or may not have done in Vietnam is the opportunity
it gives us to take out Samuel Johnson's apothegm and see if it still
applies. Very few American men — one in fifty? one in a hundred? —
have any experience of being in combat. (I have none myself.) For
those who have, it's awfully tempting to pull status and say: "You've
no right to judge these things. You can't imagine what it's like."
This temptation has been widely succumbed to. After doing a segment
on the Kerrey flap, Bill O'Reilly reports getting a lot of mail from
veterans saying: "You have no right to pass comment. You don't
know."
You'll walk
a long mile to find anyone who has more respect for fighting men
than Derb has, but I think that's bull. God endowed us with the
power of imagination so that we could think ourselves into situations
we have never experienced. Both fiction and non-fiction testify
to this power. Patrick
O'Brian, who wrote those wonderful novels about the British
Navy in Napoleon's war, was never in combat; he had a desk job in
WW2. The best non-fiction book about how men actually feel in combat,
John Keegan's The
Face of Battle, has been praised by military men of all kinds,
including combat veterans like my old editor Bill Deedes; yet in
the book's first sentence Keegan confesses: "I have not been
in a battle; nor near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the
aftermath."
A related fallacy
is the one that says: If you've ever actually been in battle, you
know how unutterably awful war is, and want nothing more to do with
it. There are undoubtedly some men who react this way, but a lot
don't. Adolf Hitler served valiantly on the Western Front in WW1,
but the experience did not seem to turn him toward pacifism. His
opposite number across the channel, Winston Churchill, saw combat
in the old Victorian horse army, and then all over again, in middle
age, as a volunteer in WW1. (Contrasting the two experiences, he
grumbled: "War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has
now become cruel and squalid. It has been completely spoilt.")
Yet he was the principal opponent of the war-averse policies of
Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s. The poet Robert Graves, who
also served on the Western Front, and wrote a funny and moving book
about it declared, fifty years later, that his service in the
trenches was the best time of his life. The British politician Enoch
Powell, asked in old age whether he had any regrets about his life,
replied that, yes, he regretted not having died fighting in WW2.
Combat, in fact, acts on individual human personalities in as many
widely different ways as does any other very intense experience
— passionate love, grief or sudden wealth. For some, it is a ghastly
nightmare they'd prefer to forget. For others, it is the high point
of their lives, cherished in memory for decades afterwards.
Of all these
you-had-to-be-there arguments about war, though, there is one that
gives me pause. It turned up in the letters column of the April
14th London Spectator. The March 24th issue of that noble
magazine had been a "Military Special Issue," with seven
good essays on military topics, including one by historian Niall
Ferguson, who wrote that fine
book about WW1 whose title I have borrowed for this column.
Ferguson deplores the de-militarization of Britain, arguing that
this trend threatens not merely the nation's security, but also
its very culture. The other essayists took similarly sympathetic
attitudes to the military, with some sneering at the soft, pacifistic
Europeans to whom Britain finds herself shackled in NATO. Well,
in the April 14th issue one Raymond Gann wrote in from Einbeck,
Germany. He observed:
The craven,
non-martial Continental Europeans actually enjoy their current
peace because unlike Britain they all have recent memories of
armed conflict in their major centres of civilian population.
... Paris and Berlin have each been occupied by foreign troops
at least four times in the past 250 years. ... These are experiences
totally foreign to Britain and certainly not conducive to collecting
regimental silver.
Leaving aside
trivialities like the Channel Islands, there has only been one case
of an Anglo-Saxon army suffering defeat and then enduring the indignity
of having its territory occupied by the victor. That was the Confederate
States, and even there, the occupying forces were not altogether
alien. Defeat and occupation by foreigners is an experience the
English-speaking peoples have yet to taste. Pray God we never do.
My impression
is that men today are much less embarrassed than they used to be
about "not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea."
The distinction of having taken up arms in combat is now so rare,
and the majority you are in if you don't have that distinction so
comfortably vast, that it's not worth being embarrassed about. This
is not necessarily a good thing. The TV folk in Tom Wolfe's brilliant
audio novel Ambush
at Fort Bragg are not embarrassed about it ... but the author
makes it plain that they ought to be.
To return to,
or at any rate to the neighborhood of, Bob Kerrey's war record,
unless some dramatic new information comes out, I'm inclined to
give him the benefit of the doubt. Certainly no credence whatsoever
should be given to these "villagers" the Vietnamese government
is trotting out. That country is a Communist dictatorship; people
know what they're supposed to say. Like the so-called "wife"
of that Chinese aviator who lost his life hot-dogging too close
to a U.S. plane recently, they may very well be professional actors
hired for the purpose. I have known a couple of ex-SEALS, and I
am in awe of their professionalism — military professionalism being
the thing that prevents wanton massacres of innocents. It
is untrained, ill-disciplined troops that perform those kinds of
atrocities. I don't insist that you love the SEALS — I imagine they
can be awful scary on a dark night — but if you think they are untrained
or ill-disciplined, you haven't a clue. In any case, it was a night
patrol, and I have memories.
The memories
don't amount to much. As I said, I've never been in combat. I did
once do a military night exercise, though. It was a pretty trivial
thing: I had to lead a squad of men through some rough country patrolled
by the "enemy," capture a "sentry" at a known
location, and bring him back. It was a clear night with a moon.
We had luminous compasses, and had planned our movements beforehand
using aerial photographs of the terrain. (These are some of the
most useless tools a soldier has ever been given. "Is that
a lake?" "No, that's the shadow of this hill.") Yet
I confess, with shame, that much of the time I had no idea where
we were, where the sentry was, where my men were, or whether the
firing we heard from time to time (blank rounds, of course) was
directed at us or not, or even whether the fire was "blue"
or "red." The main thing I learned from the exercise was
that it is impossible to move through winter woodland, with snow
underfoot, without making a lot of noise. The objective was attained
at last when the sentry, who had been standing in the cold for three
hours listening to us crashing about, yelled out in exasperation:
"I'm over here, you bloody fools." Mission accomplished,
Lt. Derbyshire? Mission accomplished, Sir.
Thank God we
were armed only with blanks. Thank God there were no civilians around.
Footnote: In
my
Passover piece I quoted the ditty: "How odd / Of God /
To choose / The Jews" and gave the riposte: "Not news,
/ Not odd: / The Jews / Chose God." Several readers e-mailed
me with much better ripostes. The all-time winner is surely Leo
Rosten's: "Not odd / Of God: / Goyim / Annoy 'im." Runner-up
is this one, apparently from the late Sir Peter Medawar: "Though
not as odd as those who choose / A Jewish God, yet spurn the Jews."
Thanks to all.
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