Monday, May 27, 2019

THE MOST FORGOTTEN VETERANS

When my mother became interested in genealogy, she was pleased to discover sea captains in the ancestry of both her and my father's history.  It was not until after she had been gone for years and I began to look at her materials that I realized that there were separate histories through the grandmother's families as well as the grandfather families who supplied the names with which she began.  The two sets of grandparents never met each other because of enmity on the part of my mother's warlike father who didn't approve of her marriage because my father kept insisting he was an atheist.  So he said.  More likely he just didn't want to give up my mother to any other man.

The point in this case is that each grandmother had a brother who fought in the Philippine War, the one in the sequence of wars after Spain finally gave up trying to be an empire since their own failed struggle to colonize the archipelago of islands just east of SE Asia countries.  Their intentions of dominating the people were complicated by the indigenous people, who were semi-modern, then developing two sub-groups, a middle-class that didn't like to be pushed around, and an intense Catholic community with a Spanish flavor.  When Spain became embroiled in a Mexico-based rivalry with the USA, the Philippines became a territory of the US, plunging into revolution.

Each of my grandmothers had a brother who fought in this war, the Vietnam of its time.  They didn't know each other, were from different parts of the country, but were both badly damaged by what we now call PTSD.  They became alcoholic.  My mother remembers traveling past the Roseburg, Oregon, cemetery, probably riding in a wagon rather than an automobile, and seeing several men digging graves.  Someone whispered that one of the men was her uncle.  They did not acknowledge him nor did he give any sign of recognition to them.

I know even less about my paternal grandmother's brother except that his alcoholism made her a devoted member of the WCTU -- Women's Christian Temperance Union.  This couple, Sam and Beulah Strachan, were self-described but non-churched Christians more involved in patriotism than theology.  My mother's parents, John and Ethel Pinkerton, were conventional congregational members, but Ethel came from a warm and rather Universalist Baptist background and John was a political Presbyterian.

Again, the point is the dark stream of destruction that were a secret grief to the women of the generation at the shift from the 18th century to the 19th, the Edwardian period that included both Progressivism and the preceding rural small town culture.  Those women were taught that the obligation of every man was to go to war for the country, while the duty of every woman was to have children so there would always be soldiers.  We are just seeing the tail of all that, dragged offstage as though a remnant of a hideous reptile, a minotaur.

This is all pretty much covered-up by displays of sentiment and patriotism, poppies with their ironic darkness of opium addiction, and brass bands, the grand music of war.  We celebrate the military, but not the empire's hunger that the military must defend.  WWII meant that Japan seized the Philippines in 1942 and then the Allies drove out Japan in 1945 and set up an independent Philippine republic.

By then my parents and their sibs had little consciousness of where their uncles had fought and were deep into the recovery efforts after the WWII, which transformed the two worlds around the two oceans in ways that are just ending now.  The treaty structures are failing.  Men with mustaches want war so they can claim glory like their own ancestors.  These are nuclear Victorian times.

Even in these days of designer drugs and meth labs in neighborhoods, alcohol remains one of the most significant and dangerous drugs.  Recognition of this, determination to get drunk drivers off the highways, and the opiate of screen narratives celebrating violence and crime, have changed our youngsters.  They no longer expect to be drafted and plan babies for their own reasons.  Their scripts come in the dark as they sprawl on sofas.

On Memorial Day we are meant to remember other warriors in other times, but not those with allegiance to our enemies.  Until now -- and even now in some circles -- that would be a form of treason or even heresy, because so much of nationalism gets tied to religion.

I want to remember two great-uncles, failures by some measures, "walking dead" killed in a colonizing war over irrelevant issues.  War in tropics, war on islands, war with Asians, are nothing like the traditional European wars where the soldiers once met on a field to fight while the upper classes watched from a hill with parasols and telescopes.  Nothing like the chariot wars of the early Biblical countries that left plains strewn with bones.

So my mother's uncle, gently raised in a pioneer family well-established in the luxurious economy of the Willamette Valley, and my father's uncle, also rural but in the tougher ag world of Dakota homesteaders, went to confront a people of a different kind, more devious, more desperate, more covert, and more willing to accept a very un-Protestant understanding of the world that justified and even celebrated torture, even self-torture as in the reenacted crucifixions every Easter, the merciless outlook that Europeans always deny they have and project onto others, esp. Asians.

A lot of people reflect on these dynamics and try to understand how to shut them down, but they don't think of the individual soldier who is dumped into a climate and culture he can barely survive, a challenge he can only meet if doped with booze, a method honored by many centuries of men who found boisterous relief or cherished blotto in it.  Then there's the genetic vulnerability of some people, more men than women, a little knot of genes that gets various names and is kindled into destruction in some bodies.  Veterans of wartime who only seemed to come home, but home wouldn't have them.


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