WAR STORIES

It's Veterans Day, so we're telling war stories. Everyone loves war stories. Life, death, courage, you know the drill. We grew up playing war games. Some went off to actual wars to kill or be killed. Here are some war stories interwoven with the words of Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran and author of The Things They Carried, and Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award in 1979. I was fortunate to study with O'Brien at the Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee, where he meticulously line-edited 75 pages of my novel-in-progress. I can assure you, the man is obsessed with "getting it right," and his work reflects a precision of emotion and truth one rarely encounters in writing of any kind. O'Brien has written extensively about his experiences in Vietnam, the moral dimension as well as the combat, and he often speaks about the difference between "story-truth" and "truth-truth."


"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." -Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried



"You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.

For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters."

"You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen - and maybe it did, anything's possible even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, 'The fuck you do that for?' and the jumper says, 'Story of my life, man,' and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead. That's a true story that never happened."



"Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until, say, twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the point?"

Read Tim O'Brien's books. Buy them here and here.

SUPPORT THE TROOPS, LET THEM TALK

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan was the title of a conference held recently in Washington, DC, that allowed vets from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to tell their stories. The conference hearkened back to the "Winter Soldier" testimonies held thirty years ago during the Vietnam War. Iraq War combat veteran Jon Michael Turner told his story.

"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."

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried



In related news, here is a list of the most vicious war profiteers. Click HERE for the story.

If you're still in denial, you're hopeless. Have a nice day.

HILLARY AGONISTES

Barrack Obama found himself on the defensive in his debate with Hillary Clinton Wednesday night. She hammered away at his lack of experience, his patriotism, his lack of a flag lapel pin, his remarks about the bitterness of small town America, and his association with bomb-throwing 1960s radicals, the Weathermen.

For his part, Obama didn't get down and dirty. He defended himself, but didn't aggressively attack Hillary. He acted like an adult. It can be argued that this wasn't his strongest debate, but it's hard to tell how it played in the heartland.

For her part, Hillary pandered to gun nuts and churchgoers, something politicians have always done. If this is an example of the "change" she is promising, I'm not convinced. In both style and content, it sounds like more of the same.

Here is an interesting column from the Chicago Sun-Times about Hillary's use of polarizing politics.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/mitchell/894548,CST-NWS-mitch15.article

FIDEL CASTRO RESIGNS

After surviving invasions, assassination attempts, and embargoes, old age has forced Fidel Castro to announce his retirement. For nearly fifty years, the tiny island ninety miles off the coast of Florida has remained a socialist country, ever since a small band of rebels led by Castro overthrew the US-supported dictator, Fulgencia Battista, on New Years Day, 1959.


President Bush predictably called for "democracy," a word he doesn't seem to fully understand worldwide (since the US picks and chooses which dictators to support) and certainly doesn't understand in regard to Cuba, where the US controls Guantanamo military prison (see map); in "our" Cuba, prisoners wait years for secret "trials," experience torture at secret CIA "black sites," and systematically lose rights guaranteed by the Geneva Convention.

I'm just saying, if you live in a glass house...

Photograph: Castro and friend, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who was killed by the Bolivian Rangers directed by the CIA in 1967.

BUSH, NO ROCKET SCIENTIST

According to a report just released from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that corroborates an earlier report from the UN, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program back in 2003.

"The IAEA says a new U.S. intelligence report saying Iran stopped a secret nuclear weapons program four years ago confirms what the U.N. agency has been saying for years." (VOA News)

"A senior IAEA official said Tuesday in Vienna that the report validates agency statements that inspectors have found no secret nuclear program, and that there is no imminent danger, leaving time for negotiations."

The finding is "a bombshell." It means the Iran-war scare is over for the time being, and the World War III camp has been slapped on the nose. Right?

You would think so, but President Bush stuck to his talking points in an early morning press conference.

"I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program," Bush said. "The reason why it's a warning signal is they could restart it." (from ABC News )

“I still feel strongly that Iran’s a danger,” Bush said. “I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program, it would create a danger for the world.”

EX-DRUG COP CHANGES TUNE

Texas narcotics officer Barry Cooper must have had a change of heart. He changed from being an eager enforcer of current drug laws to actively opposing them, and telling people how to avoid being busted. Cooper sells a DVD on his website called Never Get Busted Again. He says it will teach you "drug enforcement tactics; how to avoid narcotics profiling; how to conceal your stash" and more. He was on Geraldo Rivera's show, and the first clip begins with his introduction, and then the news segment as it aired on FOX.



The second clip is an actual segment from Cooper's DVD, Never Get Busted Again, and is included for informational purposes only, and as such is protected as Free Speech under the United States Constitution.



Barry Cooper's website can be found here:
http://www.nevergetbusted.com/