Volume 6 number 5: May 2004 (this article received 2nd place from the Alaska Press Club for Best Editorial Writing, small newspapers) Duty It’s a peculiar, almost sneaky feeling: Elvis has left the building, so it’s time to talk about Elvis. With comfort, that is, because Elvis will never know what we say. This is how Dave signed off: “Deirdre: Please cancel my subscription to the Republic immediately. I will not support those who do not support America’s sons and daughters. That is my freedom, choice and privilege.” Finally, I can talk about Dave without Dave’s knowing what I’m saying. For those readers far distant from Ester, or those who’ve spent the last several months in a deep cave, Dave Hyland is the immediate past mayor of Ester. He left office to go to war. Cheerfully, we called him the Sergeant Mayor. It’s been an astounding and entertaining thing to see a career military guy dig so well into the Ester community, an unruly set of people who harbored many and mighty suspicions about the Gummint, never mind simple organization and order. But, all right, Dave worked hard at being himself, not a representative of the great military establishment lying asprawl the taiga east and south of Fairbanks. So he showed up at Ansgar’s final coffees, and Bob’s last chats on trapping, and many Fridays (to Mondays) in the Eagle. Watched, heard, enjoyed, Dave was accepted—so much so that his eventual election to mayordom seemed entirely appropriate and unremarkable. But Dave was not like most of us, in a way that counts; he truly, comfortably, is career military. For most of Ester, this is not an easy state to understand. In fact, when Dave told the laid-back Thursday-martinis crowd at the Eagle that he was heading off to the combat zone, some perfectly sincere friends offered to take a sledgehammer to his shins so that he wouldn’t have to go to Iraq. To which kind offer he reacted with What? No! I want to go. I need to go. I’m a soldier. Well, now he’s there. And, I genuinely think, it’s a place where he shouldn’t be reading the Republic. If I were he, I wouldn’t want to read it either. However, it’s not at all because the Republic doesn’t “support America’s sons and daughters” in the military. It does. Furiously. But it does so in a way that is not acceptable to anyone’s military establishment. The Republic acknowledges the curious nature of the nation’s relation to its military: Our armed forces exist to defend and protect the civilian population, but the chief defense of the men and women in our armed forces is the civilian population. The troops have their military duty; we readers of the Republic have our civic duty. We civilians did not do our job, and our military is in peril because we bought into a fine story about terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The local rag is fighting hard to follow the red lines of truth wherever they lead through this mess, but even when the right lines can be found, they may not lead to pretty places. Hey. Dave isn’t watching, so I can be perfectly candid. A soldier doesn’t want to hear that he’s been sent to dubious battle. Those of you who know me well may be thinking, Uh-oh, there she goes, being snide. But I’m not. I sure as hell couldn’t look Dave in the eye and say, “Yeah, I know what you’re going through.” I haven’t a clue. I can’t imagine what it’s like to find the people I’ve risked my life to liberate deciding I’m the enemy who should be assassinated by any means at hand. I cannot imagine life under the conditions of urban warfare he confronts every day. But the lapse in imagination doesn’t equate with a lapse in thought process; I don’t think he should be at war in Iraq at all. (Afghanistan, I think, was a righteous war; Iraq is not.) For Dave, what I think—or what is true, since the two may not be identical, hard though that is for me to believe—shouldn’t matter. History shows it is honorable duty for a soldier to fight as well as he can under the command he has, for the comrades he knows are fighting with and for him. Sure, an honorable fighter has to disobey a clearly dishonorable order (shoot the prisoners, rape the women, kill the children), but mostly he or she does not—should not—question, or even think about, the orders received. If you stop to think, you could end up killing your comrades in arms, or even yourself. So instead, you do your duty. You honor your training, your comrades, your mission. I am not saying that a soldier should be unthinking, brainless, stupid; far from it—farthest from it. But we know that it is not a soldier’s duty to question the basic premises that have put him in harm’s way. That is the duty of the civilians for whom the military works, according to the principles upon which this country operates, and the press (free, aggravating, as uncontrolled as it can manage) is the civilians’ most powerful tool. I believe no one in Ester who knows him thinks Dave is doing anything less—or other—than his duty. It is totally inappropriate to say we’re proud of him; pride is a wrongheaded emotion in the Iraq war in general, and in the town’s relationship to its battling mayor in particular. To say we support him is even more silly: I daresay for those who pray, he’s not been passed over in a single nightly chat with God; to those who don’t, he’s not missed a set of crossed fingers when the latest casualties are announced. Even I, who can’t claim to be a close friend of his, have awakened in a predawn panic, thinking of him and turning on CNN with a cold question: What happened? I s he okay? He is one of us: he is in danger; we care. To read what the Republic has to say about the agenda of his commander in chief or the collateral damage from the continuing warfare could well make his doing his duty more difficult. He doesn’t need that. It’s tough enough. No, it’s unimaginably tough. When Dave writes to his e-mail list about confronting the empty seats at dinner in the mess, the most shielded among us tear up. Brave people have gone forever. Dave may not believe it, but they are honored—and supported—all of them: the living and the dead. But. But from those of us who have not enlisted, the questions he should not ask must be asked. No matter how important it is for his survival, and that of his comrades, that Dave not question the honorable intent of the president (a.k.a., his commander-in-chief), the behavior of his colleagues in arms, or the utter justness of the cause, The Ester Republic has another duty. It must question all those militarily unquestionable premises. Its duty to ask those questions is, however infuriating to the military establishment, one of the things for which Dave and his comrades are risking their lives. It is the pursuit of a truth that does not depend upon the name and nature of the enemy, or the national leader. The Baghdad correspondent for the local newspaper has been telling stories that no soldier should have to believe, but so have the correspondents for The New York Times, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Time, CNN, PBS, and MSNBC. Don’t tell Dave. I insist again that I’m not being snide or ironic. We who read should know by now that our leaders have lied to us—again—and have sent us into the wrong war—again. We can discuss that with Dave once he’s home and safe. I’m older by far than both Dave and the Republic’s publisher, and have perhaps more vivid memories of the horrors that the war in Vietnam visited on America. It is, in ugly ways, a war we’re still fighting, and shall never win. We have to work hard to keep Iraq from being another such disaster. So, behind his back, I can say how much we respect what Dave and the brave young people with whom he serves are doing, say that he was right to cancel his subscription to the insubordinate local newspaper, and tell its publisher to keep up the good work—all in one breath, and with no sense of hypocrisy. Support? You betcha—for both the brave ones who are putting their lives on the line in a battlefield supposedly pacified, and for those who bravely point out that peace evidently hides behind those mythical weapons of mass destruction. | ||
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