Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day (or Veteran's Day, as it's known in the States) is fast approaching, and I am seeing a lot of plastic poppies out there. They're on the lapels of TV sportscasters, the chick at Starbucks, and the old lady I saw at the mall.

The poppies, of course, are a symbol of WWI dead, thanks to Canadian John McCrae. He was a surgeon-major during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. After a friend died, McCrae sat down on the back of a truck and wrote a poem, casting his eyes on the poppies and graves around him.

The poem was In Flanders Fields, and it almost didn't get published. McCrae tossed the poem away, but it was retrieved by another offer. In England, the Spectator rejected it, but Punch picked it up and published it on December 8, 1915. Three years later, McCrae (now a Lieutenant Colonel) died of pneumonia.

From Ypres, to Starbucks. I'm not sure if the Starbucks chick knows what the poppy means, but I don't really care. I just hope that she goes on wearing it every November. Down in the States, you're accused of being a neocon warmonger if you wear the flag on your lapel. So it is somewhat surprising to still see people wearing a symbol of war on their Canadian chests.

But Sean, you will say, the poppies are not a symbol of war. They're a symbol of war's futility, and a hope for peace.

Fat chance.

McCrae wasn't born in 1998, so he didn't have that kind of blood running through his veins. Though he was tormented by the screams that he heard and the endless line of dead bodies that left his dressing station, McCrae wasn't a pacifist. When In Flanders Fields brought him fame, he hoped it "would show men where their duty lay." When he was taken away from the artillery and ordered to open a new field hospital in Dannes-Camiers, McCrae told a friend, "Allinson, all the goddam doctors in the world will not win this bloody war: what we need is more and more fighting men."

Those words don't sound strange coming from a fighting man's lips. In all the history I've read on war and conflict, I don't find too many examples of men stating that war is futile. Mainly they are broken up about losing friends, but it is very rare to find them saying that war should not be fought. That is, when you can find them saying a word about war in any context. Fighting men know that we civilian pussies won't get the picture, and therefore don't speak of it to us.

I don't blame them. Some years back, after the US invaded Afghanistan, I was sitting in a bar with a friend of mine. He'd left the Marines the year before, but he had told me some odds and ends about the fighting he'd done overseas. It wasn't top secret stuff, but it wasn't always stuff you found in the papers, either. After going to Afghanistan and fighting there, he called it quits and decided to get a cushy job. He loved the Marines and didn't have a bad word to say about them.

Anyway, we were having a beer. A bunch of friends were around. CNN was on the TV. It was the night the US invaded Iraq. Bombs were dropping on Baghdad, surgically placed so as not to hurt anybody. Just then, a friend of ours walked by. As he passed, he clapped my buddy on the shoulder and said, "Thanks for the war, you assholes."

He didn't mean me. He meant my American buddy and his asshole American friends, family, and comrades. Then he shook his head in disappointment and went on his way.

I wanted to kill him. My buddy just laughed and shrugged him off as a loser.

That moron's statement shows the difference between wars then and now. In WWI, nobody was walking by anybody and saying, "Thanks for the war," then wandering off to drink beer and forget all about it. In WWI, everybody had a very good chance of ending up on the front line. Between the draft, peer pressure, and societal expectation, you would have needed a ton of good excuses for not signing up.

Not that I'm all pro-American on this one. I watched a trailer for Robert Redford's new propaganda film, Lions to Lambs. It sounds like a history film from the last twenty years of the Democratic Party, but I doubt that's how Redford intended it. In the trailer, Meryl Streep makes the old comment that WWII took five years, while the war in Iraq has been going on forever.

First thing's first, Meryl and Bob. Not only are WWII and Iraq two completely different wars, but you don't have the right to get on your high horse about WWII, either. Five years, huh? Hmmm. So where was the US for the first three?

History lesson: WWII started in 1939. The US didn't enter it until 1941 was almost up. The War ended in 1945. Do the math, please.

Comparing wars is lame. Yes, WWII took 6 years to fight. The conflict in Iraq and around the world might take 50. But so what? That's 50 years shorter than the Hundred Years War, so by that standard, things are going splendidly.

Meryl's line is right up there with, "Thanks for the war, assholes." They're both symptoms of the same cultural disease that has been afflicting us since the media turned Vietnam into the new B.C./A.D. The idea that no war should be fought ever, for any reason, and if it must, then it has to be over before anybody gets killed.

Saying that WWII took only five years, but Iraq is taking longer is like a kid asking, "Are we there yet?" on the family trip. The adults know where they're going, sometimes get lost, check the map, re-route, so forth. The kids sit in the backseat, piss their pants, fight amongst each other, and can't see out the windows.

McCrae wouldn't recognize much today. His talk of "duty" and "more fighting men" would fall on deaf ears. In his poem he asks that the torch he passes upon his death be picked up by those who will carry on. The majority of people today would not take the torch for fear of burning themselves.

Remember McCrae and the sacrifice he and his brothers made. Remember that if you don't see where today's conflict is headed, McCrae didn't see where his was going either. He just knew it needed to be won to be stopped. The difference between us and him is that while we think about it, we have the luxury of flipping the channel and watching the football game. McCrae thought about it while watching poppies blow between the graves of dead men.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch, be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields