Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 1
Dear Professor Guenther,
I’m now three fourths of the way to the
When I was a school boy my mother had one outside my window. We slept with the windows open in those days – there was no money for air conditioning – and I would inhale the delicious scent of it each night as the school year neared its end. Cupid dips his arrows in such sweet poison, I believe, for every time the smell of gardenias wafted through my window I would fall in love with the lovely and shy Elaine. She was aloof as a goddess, though, and I strained to find ways to demonstrate my devotion. When I was twelve I walked her home from school and defended her honor against the insults of one of our school’s big bullies. She continued home as I grappled and punched in the dirt and the blood, to much of a lady to witness the brawl. I battled until I had routed my long-legged opponent, proving once again the maxim of our famous Confederate Cavalry General Jeb Stuart: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” The prize was worth the duel: Elaine gave my first kiss, the only of hers I would taste, as Beauty’s reward to her loyal Beast.
By high summer the gardenias had finished blooming. With the return of school I could pretend to be as cool as my Elaine – until the gardenias returned next spring. We repeated this annual cycle, with all its inspiration for me, and all its inconvenience for me, until high school, when she became girlfriend to some unworthy boy or another. Goddesses come and go, alas.
I have carried your letter with me on my
journey. I quite agree with your
observation that mankind’s progress
over the millennia is a dubious matter.
I think again of the
What’s so tragicomic in the whole business is that
any European conqueror of note, from Napoleon to Guederian,
would have seized the priceless art for himself and his nation, thereby
preserving it for humanity! Some would
decry the theft, but well-conceived theft (and murder) is what war is all
about. For example, take the
The whole business of the museum demonstrates the difficulty of being American conqueror: we spend so much time trying to convince ourselves that we’re not conquerors at all, we’re liberators. Many conquerors have found this a good argument, but woe betide anyone who takes the foolish ideal to heart. The “liberated” people generally find their clarity of purpose soon enough.
As you know, the Wehrmacht
liberated
I am sick and tired of seeing my country stumbling
into imperial briar patches. Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of
politics. As often as not, confused
politics lies at the bottom of it all, and confused conflict is what
ensues. When I return home I’m going to
take down Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on
the Gallic Wars and remind myself just how to do the job right. “Gallia
est omnis divisa in partes tres” – “Gaul is divided into three parts,” he begins,
and before the has reached the end of the book he has pretty much subdued all
three, wiping out whole tribes, women and children as well as warriors, to
level the populace enough to bear the weight of a Roman foundation. He even made an attack on Briton, the rude
backwater of
It fell to his distant successor, Claudius, to finish the job of bringing Roman rule to the island. At the end of hostilities, an enlightened Roman asked a now-subject chieftain what he thought of the Pax Romana, the famous “Roman Peace.”
“Solitudinem faciunt, et pacem vocant” he replied: “They make a desert, and call it peace.”
I hope you smile to see the little Latin and less
Greek in my prose. It’s you to whom I
owe my knowledge of the languages. Do
you remember how you described your language studies in Europe to us in
“There were two courses, ladies and gentlemen. There was the modern curriculum, in which we studied three years of Latin, then three years of Greek, the three years of French and then three years of English. Then there was the classical curriculum, in which we studied three years of French, then three years of English, then three years of Latin, then three years of Greek.”
I took you at your word, and resolved to take up the classical curriculum. I took a bit more than three years of Latin and three years of Greek. As for my modern languages, like any good officer I learned languages that were militarily significant: Russian and Spanish.
You may recall our last phone conversation, when I told you that sometimes I believed our species, labeled homo sapiens – “the smart man” – by optimistic anthropologists, should be renamed homo sapiens et suicidalis, which I loosely translate as “the man just smart enough to kill himself.”
Our aggression is perpetual, and does not seem at all
barbaric. The same
[Note to R.E.L.: Cite: “many are the marvels, but not so marvelous as man” from the Lattimore translation. CPTMAY]
It’s a bight picture of man, but it’s a chorus from Oedipus the King by Sophocles. By the play’s end the man who thought he would see all is literally blinded by the revelation, confidence is revealed as arrogance, and all the normal human bonds have been stood on their heads. Aristotle called it the greatest of all tragedies, but I think it only rates the second place. For the greatest I nominate human history.
The Israelites waged genocidal war from Moses to David in the name of the Promised Land and their God. Mercy was deemed weakness by the upright. Three millennia later Hitler waged genocidal war against the Israelites in the name of the Promised Land and Race. Mercy was weakness again.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” people are fond of saying, and they’re right. “Omnia mutantur,” said the poet Lucretius, “Everything changes,” and he was right, too. “There is nothing new beneath the sun,” lamented Ecclesiastes, and he was right too. Nietzsche proclaimed that man must become superman, and he was right, too. And so you, my dear teacher, are right in writing that you doubt man’s progress. Everyone seems to be right but me. I’m just confused.
If only the people who had lived and thought enough could steer nations… But who am I kidding? Socrates argued for philosopher kings and the most civilized state in history made him drink poison. Jesus preached humanity until the secular and religious powers pinned him up like a butterfly in the display case of history. As for me, I think I’ll just try to beat the odds against such odd people as I, and continue to observe my species, learn from it always, and maybe even teach it a thing or two.
Who knows, I may turn out to be as witty and elegant as you, and live to be as wise. I rather doubt it, though. I have that adventurous streak that is probably the essence of the suicidal ape, homo sapiens or ubermensch, whatever you prefer. I like to gamble. Not in the casinos, though. I don’t have the wit to win in those games, but I like to game in other things. I suppose this bicycle tour is a sort of gamble.
While I can’t imagine anything so terrible as life must have been for you at the front, I can say that the possibility of grave injury or death is never far from my mind out on the roads. Momento mori, said the Romans, “Remember that you must die.”
I ride my bicycle some fifty miles a day. It probably compares, in effort, to hiking
fifteen, sometimes twenty, if I fight a headwind or have to climb hills. Thank God there’s nothing going this way to
match the Rockies, which my new bride Gretchen and I traversed last year on an
Odyssey from the Gulf of Mexico to the
Here where the population is denser I regularly see the reality of our modern ways. I smell death every five miles: road kill. I bet I’ve seen more than half the major species of the South, everything from alligators, turtles and snakes to deer, bobcats and possums. We are a busy, hurried people, and we will get where we need to go, damn the occasional impact we have on others. We already have our windows rolled up against the odors. We heedlessly hurtle to our momentary interests in two tons of steel.
This whole line of reasoning is what I call traffic analysis, and it can only be done properly by someone who is riding a bicycle or walking. I believe my interest in this new venue of exploration began with an off-hand remark you made in class one day about the absurdity of what we called a freeway. “How on earth can we call ourselves free when we’re locked up inside metal boxes with smelly air and obnoxious noises? And the drivers one meets are often so angry. You’d think everyone was driving a German Panzer tank! They should rename them slaveways!”
And then a chilling reminder: “Among the horrible crime of the Third Reich was the crime of euphemism. Only euphemists can calmly talk of euthanasia – and even euthanasia is a euphemism.”
These hasty people are the ones with whom I must
share the road if I’m to travel my country freely, under my own power. If I’m going to be an ubermensch, I’ve got to take my
risks with the perils of the road. I
suppose it has been the same since the journeys of Theseus,
Odysseus or Aeneas. You never know
whether the next person up the road will be as polite as Penelope of as cruel
as Cyclops. I have to worry about my
giants in the form of huge trucks, but Odysseus had to worry about getting
gobbled up by Scylla or swallowed by Charibdis! So I’ll quit my whining and complete my
(minor) epic feat of riding from
I sometimes wonder if you veterans of war haven’t had enough risk taking for a life time. Did fighting through a dreadful war make you more cautious, or did habituation to danger make you crave it? From what I’ve seen, war leaves dreadful scars on the human soul. I had a lady friend once, and she had been a lady friend to many officers before me, most of who had been in the Vietnam War. It was her opinion that it was impossible to go through sustained combat and not become mentally ill.
I have a friend who became a warrior as a Navy SEAL
in
A lion and a legend while his career lasted, he fell all the way into the bottle after it was over. I love the man, and think of him as a man once thought of the opium-wasted poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Why do you weep?” his friends asked him when, after much solicitation, he had finally met his idol. “I weep because I have seen a god in ruins,” he replied.
Mattress Mack, one of my odder friends, also loves the man. “He’s a warrior without a war,” he says, “let him drink if it makes him feel better.” So the man drinks heavily, and I used to drink heavily with him.
One night he and I were nearly through the case of Budweiser we had bought that evening to last until next morning and he went into a trance. When his eyes flickered with consciousness again I asked him where he had been.
“With the dead men…”
The 300 men you killed, Mike?
He stared at me without comprehension for a minute, and then his eyes flickered again.
“No, the 32 men of mine that they killed.”
He loved his comrades as Orpheus loved Eurydice. By the end of the myth it was Eurydice who was the lucky one.
Master Yu also spent many years in
Master Yu was, like you and me, a captain. Like you and Mike, he was also wounded in war;
the Viet Cong ambushed his jeep, killing his driver and his radio-telephone
operator. He spent the next six months
recovering, then went back to
I answered him in the English he uses: “Inside he scared, Master Yu, so he get sick, throw up, be better. I’m go check.”
Master Yu grunted, and I could tell that he doubted the spunk of a youngster who would ask for a war story then run out of the room when he got it.
Yet for all the cruelty he has seen and partaken in,
he is a consummate martial artist and he is my stern but fair master. He cares not at all if my hands leave
bloodstains on the heavy bag or in the cement floor. If I stupidly break a limb, then I’ll be so
much the smarter for it. He has taken me
as an earnest apprentice of Mars, and in requesting that honor, I have
submitted to a traditional Korean regime that most Americans would call Spartan
if we read enough to know what
After training, he is affable, feeds his turtles,
whom he keeps out of Korean faith in the good luck they bring, speaks tenderly
to his wife, and talks every night to his daughter, a cadet at
Is there some inscrutable Oriental world view that makes him able to harmonize what has so clearly haunted my SEAL friend? No, I think not, for I have asked Master Yu about war and he has told me that he, too, talks with ghosts. They will never age, or fade until he does fades from life. I admire the man thoroughly; for I have seen him caress a turtle lovingly, then with the same hand, five minutes later, shatter a dozen boards with a blow.
And then, my dear Professor Guenther, there is you. I have so admired your eloquence and learning that I find it hard to believe that some of your depth and presence does not come from the experience of being a warrior yourself. I am glad that some treasures escape the hand of Ares, butcher of men.
I used to want to see my own war, for that was an appetite stimulated by a violent boyhood, drummed into us all in basic training, and idealized when I was a young hot-headed officer. I was never at the right place at the right time to see combat though. I volunteered for the First Gulf War and didn’t get to the front, then felt myself greatly abused by fortune. Now that I’m done with the Army I realize that I was exceedingly lucky.
Well, tomorrow I should be in
I hope this letter finds you and your kind wife in good health and spirits, and that one day soon, after your surgery, I may have the honor of meeting you again.
Sincerely,
Eric May
PS: Tonight I’m staying in a roadside motel run by a Hindu family. After my dinner I went into a corner of the property and began practicing my cane and flail – I’m armed like pharaoh, who took both to the afterlife. The mom and dad have grandma and a four-year-old daughter, and this pair came outside with me to tend the flower garden. Grandma dutifully watered and weeded, but the little girl never took her eyes off my whirling weapons. After half an hour I stop. When I leave she laughs, waves and speaks: “I like your toys.” Toys…