The specter of war gets Orwell's attention

Over on the Orwell Diaries, George is allowing the storm clouds of war to blot out his sunny fixation on egg production, hollyhocks and ducklings.

The diary, which recorded Orwells thoughts 70 years ago, day by day, is an astonishing document — as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does.

Orwell locks onto ominous events by pasting often obscure newspaper clippings into his diary. You can see the faded newspaper stories on the web site. He has little to say about them. He treats them almost as journalistic specimens. It's as if suddenly, out of the corner of the gardener's eye, he senses an intruder, plucks it up for inspection and then pins it to his ever-growing collection of pests.

It's not that he has been naive these many weeks. Quite the opposite. Read "Homage to Catalonia" for proof positive that Orwell had grabbed danger and combat by the throat. And fighting had grabbed him by the throat. In the ranks of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, he took a bullet in the neck.

Still, the reader wonders why for days on end in the spring of 1939, Orwell, one of the sharpest observers of the 20th Century, shared so little of his worldly awareness in his journal.

Now, ever so slowing, that is changing. The danger is creeping into is pastoral writing. It's curious, and even haunting, to read.

Beyond "War is NOT the Answer"

The phrase on the bumper sticker “War is NOT the answer” has always left me perplexed — bumper sticker-wise.

First, it assumes that we know what the question is. War it NOT the answer to what? Injustice, rape, pillage, invasion, dictatorship, cruelty?” If war is NEVER the answer, it should say so. (More on that in a moment.)

Second, and worse, the phrase, by focusing on the wrong answer, doesn’t get us closer to the right one. I want to know what to do, not what NOT to do.

Third, war is not only NOT the answer, it shouldn’t even be on the list of answers, ever. It should be a concept that is not conceivable to human beings.

The bumpersticker, in a backhanded way, helps make war conceivable.

Recently I’ve been reading “Going Solo,” Roald Dahl’s memoir of his time in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He’s a fighter pilot in a small, doomed squadron stationed in Greece. Everyone in the squadron knows that the German Luftwaffe has the RAF contingent, the only British planes in the Greek theater, outnumbered many times over.

And help is not on the way. In fact the pilots are ordered to remain in order to provide air cover for the retreating British troops.

The RAF aviators are, in essence, dead pilots flying. Indeed, of the 15 in the original squadron, only two survive. All the pilots can do is bemoan the hopeless absurdity of their plight and prepare to meet their doom.

But the absurdity began long before their arrival in Greece. Once they (and the Germans for that matter) accepted war as the answer, once they agreed to participate in its inhumanity, they lost any right to argue about or resist the hopelessness of their situation.

You can’t argue about the methods of war once you are at war. War is as amoral as it is immoral.

The bumper sticker “War is NOT the answer” was produced by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker-affiliated organization in Washington, D.C.

I think FCNL can do better.

My bumper sticker reads: “Make war … unthinkable.”

Veterans Day addenda

On this Veterans Day, I turned to the small cardboard carton stuffed with my Dad’s neatly arranged letters home during World War II. My mother had saved them all. They got passed on to me after she died.

I don’t know exactly what I was looking for in those yellowing letters from 1944 and 1945. If it was Veterans Day inspiration or patriotic pride, I didn’t find them.

Dad’s been dead more than 20 years now. He lived into his late seventies, but dementia and palsy haunted him for the last 10 years of his life. He rarely and reluctantly spoke of the war. In his mid-30s, he was a flight surgeon on B-29s. (Dad, Capt. — and later Maj. — William F. Seifert, MD, is the tallest of the three men in the front row of the photo taken somewhere in the Pacific theater of war.) He was first assigned to India, flying “The Hump,” or the Himalayans, on bomb runs into China. Then he was in China itself and finally on the small coral island of Tinian, where the B-29’s assembled for the decisive air raids on Japan.

The “Super Fortresses” there included the two that ended the war by obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.

Dad’s letters to Mom were censored so he was left to write about boozing, gambling, dysentery, his buddies, his eagerness to come home, his longing for Mom and me (I was a toddler), the oppressive heat, the foibles of his medical colleagues and the pettiness and bureaucratic demands of the military.

It’s a side of war we don’t hear much about. The parts that Dad had to censor largely make it into the history books and are celebrated on Veterans Day.

Dad’s letters are Veterans Day addenda, remembrances that war, in addition to being hell, bravery and sacrifice, is also, diarrhea, drug abuse, drudgery and bureaucratic in-fighting.

An Embrace of Peace

One of my fellow worshippers at this morning’s Quaker meeting shared with us that she had spent her Memorial Day with her father, a World War II veteran. He loves war , she said, and part of her visit to Indiana entailed enduring a VFW event where all things militaristic were venerated.

My Friend/friend had suffered through the ceremony in silence and in respect for the dead.

When it came my turn to speak this morning, her ordeal moved me to share that my father also had been a World War II veteran.

He had come home from the Asian theater with a deep, abiding hatred for war. A flight surgeon, he often had the duty of rushing to the wreckage of B-29s that had crash-landed at the air base.

He would search through the burned out hulks, searching for the broken and charred bodies of his friends.

He found no glory in war.

Before the war, my father had been a religious man, my mother confided in me. After it, he was cynical about the spirit and a benevolent God. Life had become a kind of fool’s game. He seemed to hold much of it at bay.

I told my colleagues sitting in our circle at the meeting this morning that my father’s hatred of war was a major reason for my being among them, for my being a Quaker. He had instilled his aversion to war in his son.

When, in my teens, I had occasion to visit the vast and somber World War I military cemeteries in northern France, I again witnessed the evil of war. When I became acquainted with Quaker beliefs in college, I found a spiritual refuge.

I remember when I was faced with a middling draft lottery number during the Vietnam War, my father had advised enlisting in the Coast Guard. A safe alternative, it seemed a “patriotic” accommodation with what he saw as, at best, a dubious conflict.

I had served three years in the Peace Corps in Africa. My work among the Kenyan people had nurtured “peace” in my heart. I told my father that I would either flee to Canada or go to jail.

As events played out, I never had to make the choice.

To this day, I cleave to the Quaker Peace Testimony of 1660: “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fighting with outward weapons for any end or under any pretense whatsoever; this is our testimony to the whole world . . , ,”

If only the whole world would accept our testimony. In our quiet, persistent way, Quakers extend the invitation, urging the embrace of peace.

A World War II letter home

On this Memorial Day, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. For the first time, I've dipped into my dad’s wartime correspondence to my mother.

During World War II, William F. Seifert was a flight surgeon with the rank of a major in the U.S. Army Air Force. His 58th Bomb Wing of B-29s was stationed in eastern India with the job of flying “The Hump” (the towering Himalayas) and delivering bombs and supplies to bases in China. Later, the wing’s Boeing-made “Superfortresses” bombed the Japanese in Thailand, China and Japan itself.

In the last stages of the war, the 58th was stationed on Tinian, where the planes were being readied for their fateful A-bomb missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dad survived the war and went on to practice urology in Rockford, Illinois. He died in 1989 at the age of 77. My mother saved every letter he wrote during the war, packing them into a cardboard box that was passed on to me when she died.

I picked a letter at random from that box today.

The letter, pulled from its envelope, is crisp and creased and in remarkably good shape. The words jump off the page. Dad was an excellent writer. He even dabbled in writing fiction later in life before depression, even paranoia, and tremors brought him down.

I’m looking at a letter dated Sept. 13, 1944. It describes the debilitating humdrum of war. The unremitting, sweltering, sleep-destroying heat of Calcutta. In the letter, Dad admits to having medicated himself to induce sleep. When realizes that he is becoming addicted to the drug, he stops taking it. The result, he writes reassuringly, is that he “feels like a new man.”

Then there is the dysentery and the diarrhea and “severe abdominal cramps.” Again, he manages to cure himself through his own regimen of drugs and diet.

A paragraph describes a strange incident of nocturnal noises in the corner of his sweltering tent:

“I had gone to bed at 9 p.m. when I heard crunching in the waste basket. Thinking it was a rat, which I’ve been chasing with a crowbar, I grabbed same and switched on the light to find a good sized wild cat. He made a bolt for the door. I let him have it as he went by, but I missed his head. Though he rolled over a couple of times, he kept going. Afterwards, I was sorry because I prefer wildcats to rats anytime, and this fellow should be very efficient at killing rats. Besides, maybe I can tame him.”

There’s a request that my Mom have prints made of photos of two airmen who were killed and that she send them to the men’s families. “I know you don’t like the assignment,” he wrote, “but it’s the last thing we can do and you know it’ll be appreciated.”

There’s his account of a pick-up volleyball games (“…my side lost — largely because they had to carry me. I truly played for the hell ‘off’ it….as I hate the game.”) followed by rounds of bridge. “You know — all-around athletes — and I should do better.”

He offers advice to my mother, who had written about how those who had been isolationists prior to the war and had managed to avoid fighting, were now celebrating V-Day in Europe. My mother had expressed her anger, and Dad writes her, “… and you are right, but we mustn’t forget that we were charter members of the isolationist school, although, of course, we have seen the light and done an about face… even if I lose the decision [Dad’s way of say he could be killed], which I won’t, you will always be able to tell Rick [I was 2 1/2 at the time] that the old man believed in giving it the full treatment, and that’s going to mean a lot to us….Don’t ever forget, we have ourselves to live with, and our country to live in, and if it’s as fine as we say, then it’s worth fighting for. Patriotism? Sure, but the kind that’s been raised by good, solid thinking, not just over-night.”

Mom used to recount how the war changed Dad from being a religious man to being a skeptic. He rarely talked about the war but he once bitterly recounted how the battered and shot-up B-29s would limp home only to crash land on the runways. He told how he and the medics would jump into the ambulances — they called them “meat wagons” — and how they would be left with the agonizing task of collecting the scattered remains of their buddies.

As is evident in his wartime letters, he clung to his humor and tried to brightened my mother’s life on the home front during his service.

I have no idea what I would have done in his position in those years before, and days immediately after Pearl Harbor. I know what he did. I have an idea of what the war did to him and that knowledge has influenced me.

In the years and wars that followed — Korea and Vietnam — he would occasionally speak of terrible costs of war, but without elaboration. I know this box of letters will fill in some of the blanks.