Nothing moved except the eyes which were enormous the pupils shiny black and dumb
Shoot them for what?
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The March Against Death began on a Thursday night fifty years ago today at Arlington National Cemetery where we make the graves very handsome and where driving by one day around the time of the 2016 election Donald Trump Jr. was reminded of the sacrifices his own family had made as he notes in his new book.
There are roughly 400,000 ugly bodies in the handsome ground there and fifty years ago at least that many living people marched on D.C. that weekend in a series of protests because the dead weren’t available to march for themselves they were otherwise engaged.
This is unrelated but I just thought of a scene in the most recent Watchmen series where a father is making breakfast for his young children and one of them asks where their uncle figure who was killed is now and the father said before he was born he was nowhere and now he’s nowhere again and you never see that sort of casual shit on TV between a parent and a child. Then he made the waffles and the kids were like yay.
Many of the protesters on that Thursday in D.C. carried signs with the names of people who had killed and been killed in Vietnam and would perhaps have their bones shipped all the way to this very cemetery before all was said and done. There was a lot more killing and being killed to do as it was only 1969 and it wouldn’t all stop for another four to six years depending on how you count bodies.
Wait maybe Watchmen is related because the Vietnam War plays a big role in the plot I don’t know who gives a fuck.
I think about the Vietnam War sometimes and it seems as distant in history as the invention of the automobile to my life but it wasn’t I was almost starting to be born a year or two after the last person was killing or being killed there. My mother was a teenager and she was almost ready to have her second baby but this one she would get to keep.
I guess almost 60,000 of our brave heroic soldiers died over there and people always say we lost that war but around two million Vietnamese died so I don’t know what it really means to lose under that type of accounting. Some of the signs the marchers carried also had the names of Vietnamese villages that had been destroyed.
“As we drove past the rows of white grave markers, in the gravity of the moment, I had a deep sense of the importance of the presidency and a love of our country,” Trump Jr. thought as he drove by the cemetery that day.
It was cold that day in 1969 I am guessing because in videos I watched of the protestors marching single file from Arlington across the bridge to the White House they are bundled up pretty good and as they passed the fence around the president’s house they paused and yelled the name of one of the dead. Some of them are quiet and timid in doing so and some of them are so angry their voices go hoarse and their bodies shake.
The May Lai Massacre had recently been exposed and people weren’t very happy about that as you might imagine. We used our helicopter guns against kids. I understand obviously why machine-gunning civilians to death is worse than machine-gunning “the enemy” to death of course and I guess the thinking behind that is the civilians aren’t capable of or actively trying to hurt us and so there is no justification to slaughter them but I never understand why the people who make that distinction don’t also extrapolate it out to its inevitable conclusion when it comes to starting wars in the first place.
“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America,” Muhammad Ali said around 1967 of his refusal to enlist. “And shoot them for what?”
“The candles flickering in the wind, the funereal rolling of drums, the hush over most of the line of march—but above all, the endless recitation of names of dead servicemen and gutted villages as each marcher passed the White House — were impressive drama,” Time reported later that week. “Jay Dee Richter”… “Milford Togazzini”… “Vinh Linh, North Viet Nam” … “Joseph Y. Ramirez.”
Elsewhere in the country some parents of those who killed and were killed in Vietnam tried to bar the protest group from speaking the names of their dead children due to they didn’t like the idea of their children being used for politics I guess.
One by one each of the protestors deposited their signs with the names of the dead into coffins and I guess Nixon was up late into the night watching it all unfold on TV like a sweaty nervous pervert and I was going to say and now he’s in Hell with the rest of our presidents but the truth is he’s nowhere.
Nothing particularly violent happened that weekend — at least in D.C. anyway lots of particularly violent things happened in Vietnam — as the protest grew into the hundreds of thousands but the military and the police were on hand and ready many of them hiding out of sight in case they had to ambush what must have seemed like an occupying force.
"Flags, American, UN, peace, a pale blue, with the dove in the center, and Vietcong, are waved all along the route of march,” a UPI radio program explained of the march. “But just a few blocks from here in the basement of the US capital, a contingent of Marines wait in full battle gear, ready if needed. A mile and a half route, from the capital to the Valley Point at the Washington Monument, remains a sea of humanity.”
I’m pretty sure the whole thing about protestors spitting on soldiers when they came back from Vietnam was made up or else greatly exaggerated but if it did happen I’m sure they all would have much preferred to spit on Nixon they just didn’t have a good sight on him which is exactly how war works you have to shoot whoever is closest and it’s almost never the powerful guys.
Nixon was asked a few weeks earlier whether or not any of the burgeoning protest movement had convinced him to reconsider the war and he said lol no. It’s just the snowflakes and SJWs on college campuses he said it’s not real people.
“I have often said that there is really very little that we in Washington can do with regard to running the university and college campuses of this country,” he said. “We have enough problems running the nation, the national problems. Now, I understand that there has been, and continues to be, opposition to the war in Vietnam on the campuses and also in the nation. As far as this kind of activity is concerned, we expect it, however under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it.”
UPI asked some people on the street what they thought of the marches and the protestors.
“I think it’s disgraceful, and I have backed the President,” one said. “The reason is that I think he -- that they are on the way to making peace, certainly not the beatniks that are on the streets, and he is right when he said its anarchy when they allow this sort of thing to happen.”
“There are also people who are collaborating with the enemies of freedom,” another said and it’s funny to see that the Boomers had Boomers of their own who hated them all the same.
Another thing that happened on November 13 which is today is that the televised impeachment hearings against Donald Trump began.
“In that moment, I also thought of all the attacks we'd already suffered as a family, and about all the sacrifices we'd have to make to help my father succeed - voluntarily giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals to avoid the appearance that we were 'profiting off of the office,’” Don Jr. wrote in his book about the time he saw the bones in the handsome dirt.
“Frankly, it was a big sacrifice, costing us millions and millions of dollars annually. Of course, we didn't get any credit whatsoever from the mainstream media, which now does not surprise me at all.”
On the Saturday of that week in 1969 around 500,000 gathered across from the White House and lots of performers were there like Pete Seeger and John Denver and Arlo Guthrie and they all sang Give Peace a Chance and shit like that and maybe it worked I don’t know but around that same time Nixon was escalating our project of carpet bombing the absolute shit out of Cambodia and that would go on for a few more years so who is to say.
Four students at Kent State were murdered by the Ohio National Guard in May of 1970 during protests against our bombing of Cambodia.
Neil Young wrote a song about that shooting which you know of course. A young college kid doesn’t count as a person basically they are too dumb to understand what they’re doing I guess is how the thinking then went and still goes today.
Here are some recent thoughts of mine about Neil Young.
I was thinking about Neil Young more than usual this week because I saw that two beloved contemporary emo-ish acts Jeff Rosenstock and Laura Stevenson just put out an EP of Neil Young covers and when I got an email about it I had to stop for a minute and think wait did I will this into being through wish fulfillment? then I remembered no that can’t be right nothing I wish for comes true.
“For a while, I knew I was supposed to like Neil Young but a lot of the ‘standards’ admittedly are not for me,” Rosenstock said in a statement via Pitchfork. “Eventually I asked Laura and her husband Mike to get me started somewhere, and months later, I would spend nights traveling alone on tour with After the Gold Rush on repeat in my headphones, simultaneously allowing me to feel grounded and as if I was floating away” and that is pretty much how I also feel about that particular record.
Another thing that happened on this day was in 2001 when George Bush issued the military order "Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-citizens in the War Against Terrorism” which essentially meant military tribunals for anyone we or rather he suspected was a terrorist.
That shit was eventually ruled unconstitutional years later due to it essentially stripped anyone the president wanted of habeus corpus and protections under the Geneva Convention at least as far as I can tell I am not a legal scholar of any kind I’m barely even legally literate. Fun fact though after a U.S. District Court said this wasn’t cool in 2006 that ruling was overturned by an appeals court that included John Roberts who was appointed by Bush to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court the very next day! When the case made its way to the Supreme Court Roberts recused himself and the original District Court ruling was affirmed.
I don’t know how you feel about any of that but you have to admit it worked out pretty good for ol’ John Roberts promotion-wise.
One time I was walking across a bridge in Arlington probably not on this same day in history but close to it anyway because it was starting to get cold in the fall and me and a girl I had just started seeing were coming back from a date it would have been around 1998 I guess when I was working as a White House intern lol I know I know and I don’t remember much about the date in question except that we probably had something for dinner that didn’t agree with me because halfway across the bridge from D.C. back to Virginia where I lived I was paralyzed by sudden onset diarrhea poisoning and there aren’t many hard and fast rules about the mating rituals of young humans but I am fairly certain one of them is don’t shit your pants in front of the other person and so I smuggled this dark secret of my bowels and its boiling stew of turds across the bridge marching as stoically as I could manage and after what seemed like ten miles a McDonald’s appeared in the distance and I hustled inside and said I’d be right back and as I was opening the door to the stall of the bathroom and pulling my pants down in one motion I sprayed a torrent of shit all over the wall like a firefighter who lost control of his hose but then it was out of me and I felt better. I tried to clean up as best I could but I don’t think I did a good enough job hiding the evidence so I am sorry to whoever was working at that Arlington, Virginia McDonald’s that night if you’re reading this.
I just took a break to go outside where it’s currently 18° to scroll through my Instagram feed which I never do unless I’m especially bereft of other distractions and I saw a nice bowl of moules-frites and a drone photo a guy took of his wife laying on the beach in Puerto Rico and some foliage in Massachusetts and a pop star in lingerie riding a mechanical bull which I gather was supposed to be suggestive of something and a rum cocktail someone had poured into a hollowed out gourd and a sunset on the Florida Keys and the shadow of a figure in the tall grass on a gray marsh and the charred remains of a car destroyed by a fire in Australia and a gay guy’s abs looking pretty good and an ad for knives and an ad for pants and an ad for sneakers and an ad for blazers and somebody’s dead grandfather and everybody’s dead David Bowie and I thought about how it was all supposed to make me covetous of something I don’t have and then I saw someone in Costa Rica posted a series of photos and videos of some hatchling turtles or tortoises I don’t know the difference and they were crawling out of a hole on the sand confused and blinking in the new sun and some struck out instantly for the ocean and some lingered and reached out with their flippers to pull the next one close and didn’t seem to know what direction they were meant to go.
Another thing that happened on November 13 is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in 1982. Have you ever been to it it’s pretty devastating to go and look at all the names etched there and there is often a guy there crying like some old veterans and such. It’s a very handsome wall but as I’ve said before that type of thing is a lie.
And then after you go to see the Vietnam wall someone in your group starts talking about where people want to get lunch.
I don’t think anyone in my direct family was in Vietnam. I think an uncle that was married to one of my dead father’s dead sisters was but I don’t really know him anymore. I think I remember he gave me a POW/MIA sticker or something that I put in my bedroom window when I was a child. I didn’t really understand what the concept meant but I remember Rambo was real sore about it.
The other day I was talking to my living father and he told me his golden retriever Stella had died that week. He had rushed her to the animal hospital and they couldn’t save her and he was fucked up about that because I think he honestly loves his dogs more than he loves us not really but you know what I mean. He told me whenever he took the dogs walking and running on the fields near the high school where I used to play sports that all the kids would know the dogs and pat them and stuff and I think he was proud that the local student athletes knew who his dogs were.
“We are heartbroken!” my mother wrote on Facebook and I made sure to not look at anything else she had posted recently just in case it was about impeachment. “This weekend our beautiful dog Stella, left this world very unexpectedly. She was the most loyal, gentle and sweet dog and our pack has lost its heart.”
Here’s Stella. I’m not sure which one she is but I bet my parents could tell.
Then we talked about a high school classmate of mine who had died the day before I think from an overdose and I think her husband had died from an overdose a couple years earlier. My friend who is a firefighter in the town I grew up in said he was on the call to her house the night she died and one of her daughters was asking him why they weren’t rushing her mother to the hospital and it was because it was too late.
My sister’s young daughter had been over at the girl with the newly dead mother’s house hanging out the day she died and her friend texted her the next day “my mom’s dead.”
Then my living father told me he was doing fine with his leukemia and from the way he tells it he has some sort of luxury leukemia that is basically nothing and I used to freak out about it when he first got it but now I barely even remember he has it. Then he joked about me dying young didn’t all your aunts and father die at sixty he said and I said I think so. Then he told me about how when one of my dead aunts the one who had been married to the Vietnam vet for a long time before they got divorced was on her death bed and her sister my other aunt who is also now dead went to see her to try to make amends like and the first aunt was basically like no fuck you too late for that bitch and she wouldn’t see her and then she died and then not too long after the other one died.
I don’t know if this is just a Massachusetts Irish thing but a weird part of getting older is finding out just how many of the people who used to watch you open Christmas presents went on to hate each other’s fucking guts.
I remembered another thing about my aunt who was angry on her deathbed and I think she had lost one of her legs by then maybe because of diabetes but the thing I remembered is that the last time I saw her she was in a coffin and I hugged her daughters who I was very close to go growing up but don’t really see any more and then the next time I saw them it was at the funeral of one of their husbands who died from an overdoes a couple years ago at like barely over thirty. I haven’t seen any of them since then but probably will at the next funeral I guess.
I don’t know what type of music any of those people I mentioned just now like or liked besides my living father. He likes Neil Young pretty good I think and sometimes he plays “Old Man” on the piano. I think he likes Van Morrison the best. At one point he must have liked Arlo Guthrie who was at that protest in D.C. a lot because the first dog of his I remember having was an Irish Setter named Arlo and when it died I got pretty fucked up about it. Sometimes he’ll learn like an Oasis or Goo Goo Dolls song and play it for me maybe to bond with me and I sometimes sing them with him but that doesn’t happen as often as it used to anymore.
The last time I saw his mother alive we wheeled her down into the basement of the nursing facility where there was a piano and he played some songs for her while she sat there but I don’t know if she knew anything about it or anything at all. Sometimes toward the end she would confuse him for her husband who had been dead for like twenty years and he would bust her balls sometimes about it like joking around and my mom would have to be like cut it out.
Everyone has read The Things They Carried the Famous Book of Stories About Vietnam by Tim O’Brien. I haven’t read it in twenty years or more but I was reminded of it earlier this week when it was Veterans Day because I saw a story from 2010 titled The Things That Carried Him was being re-shared online and I thought ah that’s a clever play on the famous title we all know. I guess it’s about a dead troop’s journey home or whatever but I didn’t read it because it’s in Esquire and I still get sore about my whole thing with them sometimes.
Even though O’Brien’s book was one of the most impactful books of short stories I have ever read in my life it’s been so long since I’ve read it I don’t remember many details besides one which is the scene where the guy shoots a water buffalo to pieces bit by bit shooting it in the knee then the mouth then the tail and so on but it just won’t die and the rest of the platoon or whatever watches him doing it and are like what the fuck is this guy’s deal but they know because it was their deal too.
I remembered this morning that I remembered that scene and you probably do too and I was embarrassed in a way because it’s such a big dangling meatball of a metaphor about mankind’s cruelty and indifference to life like it’s the scene that’s supposed to punch you in the gut but it seems silly that it takes the systematic disinterested and casual slaughter of a dumb brute beast to drive the point home. Why did I only remember the water buffalo dying for twenty years of all the things in that book? And why do we always hang such heavy metaphors on the death of animals I thought and the first thing I could think of is that we think that in war the people on the other side are supposed to die and that is the natural order of things but the animal didn’t do anything to deserve its violent death and I’m not sure why we don’t also extrapolate that out to its inevitable conclusion when it comes to starting wars in the first place.
Anyway here’s the scene:
A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.
This one does it for me. I’ve told it before—many times, many versions—but here’s what actually happened.
We crossed the river and marched west into the mountains. On the third day, Curt Lemon stepped on a booby-trapped 105 round. He was playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead. The trees were thick; it took nearly an hour to cut an LZ for the dustoff.
Later, higher in the mountains, we came across a baby VC water buffalo. What it was doing there I don’t know—no farms or paddies—but we chased it down and got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted village where we set for the night. After supper Rat Kiley went over and stroked its nose.
He opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn’t interested.
Rat shrugged.
He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was just to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo. Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal letter to the guy’s sister, who would not write back, but for now it was a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth, and deep greenery, and the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly and butt. Then he reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up, but this time it couldn’t quite make it. It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby buffalo was silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where the nose had been. It lay very still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny black and dumb.
Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his rifle and went off by himself.
The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buffalo. For a time no one spoke. We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it.
Somebody kicked the baby buffalo.
It was still alive, though just barely, just in the eyes.
“Amazing,” Dave Jensen said.
“My whole life, I never seen anything like it.”
“Never?”
“Not hardly. Not once.”
Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders picked up the baby buffalo. They hauled it across the open square, hoisted it up, and dumped it in the village well. Afterward, we sat waiting for Rat to get himself together.
“Amazing,” Dave Jensen kept saying.
“For sure.”
“A new wrinkle. I never seen it before.”
Mitchell Sanders took out his yo-yo.
“‘Well, that’s Nam,” he said, “Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin’s real fresh and original.”
Another thing he says in that chapter is this:
Elsewhere O’Brien writes:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
I just took another break and went outside where it’s currently 23° and I scrolled through Instagram again and I saw a lineup of daiquiri shots on a brass bar that I’ve sat at too many times to count and a series of photos and videos of a young mother’s baby either a boy or girl I don’t know the difference and it was crawling around in the grass confused and blinking in the new sun and didn’t seem to know what direction it was meant to go and a bunch of troops sitting on a tank with the caption “thank you for your service!” because even though it’s three days later it’s still Veterans Day on Instagram. Then I saw Julian Edelman who I love very much as a football player and not much else had posted a series of photos of himself shaking hands with troops in various types of troop hats and he wrote “Sacrifice and service for your country is the most noble of causes. To all the Veterans who have lived to protect our freedom, we thank you!” and I saw my same gay buddy’s muscles again and a fancy hotel in Newport Rhode Island I stayed in one time offering a holiday special and the gang from the funny improv podcast yucking it up and a sad bowl of miso soup and Rod Stewart looking fashionable in a coat and then I saw another photo from the Florida Keys of some scuba divers unfurling a giant American flag under water at the site of the sunken USNS General Hoyt S. Vandenberg a place I have snorkeled at.
It was a transport ship during World War II and they sunk it on purpose in 2009 to create an artificial reef in part to reduce the strain on the natural reefs that so many scuba divers and tourists visit. I guess it didn’t work though I just read and the reefs are still basically fucked. If you want the reef can be a metaphor coral are even dumber than water buffalo they’re even dumber than golden retrievers.
“Home of the free because of the brave” the caption on the photo says and the flag is billowing out from the focal point of the camera like an enormous poisonous jellyfish and the guys yanking it along all look so proud. They have masks on but you can still tell they’re really happy about what they did.