Today comes the news that Corporal Phillip E. Baucus, a U.S. Marine scout and team leader at the age of 28, has been killed in Al Anbar province, Iraq. Nephew of Senator Max Baucus, Phillip is the son of John and Nina Baucus, owners and operators of the historic Sieben ranch at the end of the narrow valley through rock leading to Helena, an ideal place for a toll road.
Over a century ago this is the ranch where Malcolm Clarke, married to a Blackfeet woman, was attacked and killed by her nephew -- you might call the young man an insurgent, though that would be rather grandiose -- thus justifying the winter massacre of Heavy Runner’s innocent band by Major Baker. The nephew is said to have motivated by revenge for either deaths or sexual violation.
The Baucus family is nominally Catholic now, though it was Unitarian a few generations ago, before the boys found Catholic wives. I don’t think they will mind me putting on my Unitarian minister’s head to reflect on this death -- not this specific death, but the context.
My first “text” for reflection is the movie Black Hawk Down, which I recently watched a couple of times in an effort to understand what war is all about -- or at least to find some point of entry to the subject. The theme of this movie, as I see it, is to illustrate the very close relationships among men in war and what the loss of 18 compatriots meant to them. It’s a complex and vivid tale, extremely well acted, directed by the remarkable Ridley Scott. There are moments of total shock and horror. “Leave no man behind!” is the command, inner and outer, personal and official. But does that mean a blown-off hand and wrist, complete with wristwatch? Yes. Does that mean only the top half of a man who doesn’t know he’s dead yet? Yes.
My Div School classmate said that when he was in Vietnam, he and another man had the task of finding the pieces of bodies and trying to sort them into individual men. Shellshocked into hysteria, the pair began to deliberately mismatch tops and bottoms, so that they looked ridiculous, absurd, laughable. No such high jinks in this movie. It has a WWII-heroic tone. This is not a jungle war, but a sand war, like Iraq or the first Star Wars. Traditional tropes pertain: the green kid, the close buddies, the Old Man, the goof, the loner, and the guy who goes native (“Hoot” Gibson) and speaks the local language. I have never seen a top commander (Sam Shepherd) so vividly illustrate his awareness of what his commands have caused: uselessly mopping spilled operating-room blood around and around. It’s a brilliant moment. No specific political content.
The second time I watched this, which is recommended because it all happens so quickly that stuff gets lost the first time, it dawned on me what the classical reference was: The Labyrinth, the one with the Minotaur in it, a tale that formed in the Mediterranean, not so far from Mogadishu, Iraq, or Lebanon.
King Minos on Crete ridded the Mediterranean Sea of pirates. Everyone was grateful because now they could return to commerce and become prosperous. He was proud and prayed that a bull would come out of the sea so he could sacrifice it to Poseidon. Sure enough, a huge white bull swam in out of the surf, so striking that Minos couldn’t bear to kill it and sacrificed a different bull.
Poseidon, as revenge, caused Minos’ wife to lust after the bull. She got Daedalus the Athenian (an early scientist? Certainly an inventor.) to make her a wooden cow she could get into and, positioned properly, entice the bull to breed her. (I can’t believe I learned all these legends as a little curly-headed girl trotting back and forth to the neighborhood library.) She gave birth to the Minotaur, a chimera (half-bull, half-man).
Picasso loved this figure and put it in Guernica. The Blackfeet had a creature they called a “water bull” that might have been a mastodon or even more spooky, one of those paleo-mammals that look like something out of Alien, another Ridley Scott movie. Minotaur=Other=Ghastly Death.
Daedalus then built the labyrinth to contain the minotaur. Minos had another son by this same queen. He came to the Olympics in Athens and won everything, though he was only human. His name was “Androgeus.” (Man.) He flirted with Athenian insurgents so Aegeus, king of Athens, killed him. War. Famine. Earthquake. All ensued. (Some things never change.) It ended only with Athens promising to send 7 young men and 7 young women (the National Guard?) to be sacrificed by sending them into the labyrinth (war) where the Minotaur would destroy them.
Aegeus went home but stopped on the way with Pittheus of Troezen and spent the night in Aethra’s bed. Poseidon was also there, but they didn’t know it. (Those gods were fond of threesomes. A randy bunch.) The product was Theseus. When he is of age, he is able to raise a huge rock and find under them a sword and sandals left him by his father(s). (Think King Arthur and the sword in the stone.)
He goes to Athens, engaging in many heroic Visionquest feats, and ends up volunteering to be among those sacrificed to the Minotaur. (He enlists.) Minos, hearing that Theseus is supposedly the son of Poseiden, throws his signet ring into the harbor and demands that Theseus prove his genes by retrieving it. (How can a Montana ranch boy whose uncle is a U.S. Senator not enlist?) With a little help from dolphins and Neriads, Theseus does.
When he comes out of the water dripping, Minos’ daughter falls in love with him. She asks Daedalus to help save her hero, and Daedalus supplies a magic ball of string. In some versions of the story it’s a yellow ribbon, but I think in Black Hawk Down it’s more like the tenuous threads of communication that connect the soliders. She, again with Daedalus, also supplies a magic sword (Black Hawk), which proves able to kill the Minotaur. In the meantime, the 14 youths, some of which are cross-dressers only pretending to be helpless girls (!), overpower their guards. The whole crowd is able to find their way out.
There is much more. Theseus’ feats are credited with creating the first democracy in Athens. Minos, sick of the shenanigans of Daedalus, confines him and his son in the labyrinth, which they try to escape by making wings. The son flies too high, melts the wax that holds together his feathers, and plunges to his death. Even so do the schemes of the old men cause the deaths of the young men.
None of this is recorded in movies, of course. In those days they celebrated their gods and heroes by painting them onto vases. All cultures tell stories, but in different ways.
So -- in Mogadishu and Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon -- the soldiers themselves are caught in the maze of war. Even with guidance from above the convoy of Humvees loaded with wounded can't turn the corner without facing the Minotaur. No more Black Hawks (magic swords) can be brought to the battle, so the Minotaur cannot be slain and goes on raging in the labyrinth.
"No man left behind," is the cry. After 2,000 years, after a hundred years, the women still mourn (Phillip only married a year ago). The men salute. The coffins come home.
But where are we going? How do we get out of the maze?
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