Tetsu No Ame

08-01-09  Brooklyn, NY

My latest read is called Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester. It’s a touching memoir about a former Marine Sergeant who fought throughout the Pacific in WWII. Aware that his mind has obscured war’s many traumas, he revisits the sites of major battles (Guadalcanal, Saipan, Betio, Guam, and Okinawa) almost forty years later to see what kind of memories and emotions can be stirred within.

Recently I realized where I got my macabre fascination with violent ends, last words, last actions, and the atrocities and tragedy of war. This came from my father, the one who gave me Goodbye, Darkness as a Christmas present. While we never fought in any wars, our curiosity on the subject of mortality is cat-like. Those who know me well enough know about my thoughts on plane crashes. When I’m old and grey, I wouldn’t mind if my number came up on a doomed commercial flight. I think of it as an opportunity to (literally) go down in a blaze of glory. Whenever I fly, the flight number will usually indicate how much I’ll think about actually going down. Some numbers just sound like ones you would hear in the headlines the day after a crash. Numbers that only have two or three digits, identical digits back-to-back, and consecutive digits are almost a sure-fire ticket for some kind of drama. This evening I’m flying down to Fort Lauderdale and have an excellent “crash number”, 151, god help us! During lulls at work, I will look at NTSB crash investigations, paying special attention to the blackbox recordings contained within them. Reading (and hearing) people’s last words is such a privilege to me. Here are a few actual examples from the archives…

Pete, Sorry… Oh gosh, we’ve lost a wing…

We’re hit man, we’re hit. Tower, we’re going down, this is PSA… Ma, I love you

Larry! We’re going down, Larry! … I know it!

Hit the water! Hit the water!… Hit the water!

Oh sh!t, this can’t be!

Amy, I love you…

Uh… where are we?

Aaaaah… Allah Akbar!

I rely on God

It’s an odd obsession, but one that helps me appreciate life a little bit more. Living each day as if it were your last is a tough thing to do, especially if you have a family. Death is not something that should constantly occupy your thoughts, that would be unhealthy. However, I’m a firm believer in focusing on thoughts of mortality as an inspiration to lead a fuller life.

As a soldier in WWII, death surrounded you, it was hard not to dwell on it. These men fought hard regardless, almost with wanton disregard for their own safety. “Our father’s” war might have been the last one that wasn’t mired in controversy and opposition. In almost everyone’s eyes back on the home-front the allied powers were good and the axis powers were evil. As a result, these men fought with amazing fervor and fierceness on the battlefields, even though they were often put through hellish conditions. America was different back then, and the author, William Manchester, describes the blissful ignorance that was entrenched in American culture perfectly:

The United States was a different country then, with half today’s population, a lordly father figure in the White House, and a tightly disciplined society. A counterculture didn’t exist, as a word or as a concept… Standards were rigid; everyone was determined to conform to them because the alternatives were unthinkable… The bastion of social stability was the family… There was plenty of time for the householders, the doughboys of 1918, to explain to their sons the indissoluble relationship between virility and valor… Violent death, including death on the battlefield, was unsparing on the next of kin. The man killed in action cannot observe the five stages, so those who loved him must do it for him, or at least try to. Those who succeed are fortunate, and few… It was bad form to weep for a fallen buddy. We moved on, each of us inching on the brink of our own extinction, never speaking of what we considered unspeakable. Today’s children are baffled by our acquiescence then in what, to them, appears to have been a monstrous conspiracy against our lives. They are bewildered by those waves of relentless young men who plodded patiently on and on towards Betio’s beach while their comrades were keeling over on all sides. They ask: Why? They are convinced that they couldn’t do it… and they are right.

I suppose the automatic thought of giving up your own mortality for the sake of patriotic duty just doesn’t cross many people’s minds today. I wondered after September 11th if I could do the same thing my grandfather did two generations earlier in joining the marines? Even though I do consider myself a patriot, I think it would take much more for me to die for this country. Perhaps that is the one thing about protesting that is beneficial to our world. I have never been a complete dove, but think that blindly stepping into conflict without weighing the consequences is a terrible and dangerous thing. Reading war books and envisioning the ravages of war through a soldier’s eyes is a sobering experience. It brings you to think about your own mortality, what you’re willing to lose, and at what cost? My only conclusion is an accordance with the old phrase war is hell. As far as I’m concerned, the less it happens, the better off we’ll all be.