"Only soldiers understand how the terrors of war and the horrors of the battlefield affect the soul"

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.startribune.com/local/36350869.html?elr=KArks:DCiUHc3E7_V_nDaycUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiU

Dwan Fairbanks, widow of Specialist Jacob Fairbanks, a soldier from St. Paul who died in Iraq. Jake was battling depression and anxiety after his first tour in Iraq, and went back for a second tour convinced he might die. He did, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, leaving Dwan and the couple's children struggling for answers. In August, on what would have been their anniversary, Dwan spent the day at Jake's grave at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, lost in grief. Said the chaplain at Jake's funeral: "Only soldiers understand how the terrors of war and the horrors of the battlefield affect the soul."

[babylonsister]

1. Rec'd with so much sadness. And the chaplain is an idiot. nt

[qwlauren35]

2. Why is he an idiot?

It's not 100% true. But definitely it's the ones in the middle of it whose "souls are destroyed". It's not just the soldiers. It's also those they are fighting against.

But I think the chaplain was trying to be sympathetic. What should he have said?

[babylonsister]

4. Because only soldiers are feeling the pain? No, the families suffer

tremendously. Include the families in the mix, because they feel the pain, too.

[Rabrrrrrr]

6. He didn't say that at all.

Here's what he said, which I quote from above so you can read it again: "only soldiers understand how the terrors of war and the horrors of the battlefield affect the soul."

Nowhere does that say that soldiers are the only people who feel pain.

What he says is that only soldiers can understand the horrors that soldiers go through.

And that's just common sense. Some experiences in life can be imagined, but never fully understood unless one actually goes through it. I have a good idea of childbirth; but I will never go through it, and so I can never really know what it means to give birth to a child.

[JackRiddler]

16. So I guess the Iraqis didn't have souls to affect in the first place?

[qwlauren35]

24. Frankly, I don't think their souls are nearly as stained

as those of our soldiers.

Possibly not at all. The Iraqi victims of this stupid war probably feel unimaginable pain and anguish. But I doubt that they feel any guilt. They didn't start this sh*t. We did.

[JackRiddler]

25. This is too much philosophy for my taste.

Frankly I see no point in coming up with harrowing, complex reasons why the American invaders are special in their suffering, not even if these reasons make them look like the villains. (The villain gets to feel a special suffering!)

This war happened and is happening in Iraq. They are the ones who died and were traumatized, damaged and driven from their homes in the millions. Their "tour of duty" never ends. They don't get medals or benefits. They don't escape to a relatively rich and peaceful country where they can contemplate the morality of whatever they did or did not. They made no choice. Their nation was raped, and they along with it.

[Rabrrrrrr]

26. No, neither he nor I said that. Look, people, this isn't fucking rocket science.

Only a soldier can understand what a soldier goes through. That's the point.

Only a family who's lost a loved one to war can know what it's like to lose a loved to war.

Only a family who's had a member murdered understands what it's like to have a family member murdered.

Only a person who's been through college knows what it's like to go through college.

Only a guy who's spun out his Mustang at 120 miles an hour on an icy bridge and almost flipped it over the guard rail knows what it's like to drive a Mustang at 120 miles an hour on an icy bridge and almost flip it over the guard rail.

Only a parent who's lost a child to SIDS knows what it's like to lose a child to SIDS.


Fucking hell, people. It's not dismissive of anyone else's pain and suffering to recognize the pain and suffering of one person.

Christ.

Why do you all think is so fucking complicated?

[JackRiddler]

27. Also easy to get: Who is the aggressor, who the victim, what is the crime.

Fundamentally I disagree it is impossible for human empathy and imagination to at least partly understand the pain and feelings of others, without directly going through the experience. Otherwise I doubt even rudimentary notions of right and wrong would have ever arisen.

Empathy and imagination are not easy, but to call them impossible serves to mystify the human condition. It also lets people off the hook of trying to understand others: you can't, so why bother? It provides a magic excuse for anyone's actions, including their voluntary choices, since their feelings are so impenetrable that we have no right to judge.

But to be honest about my own attitude, the truth is I don't care all that much "what it's like to be a soldier," being taken up more with old-fashioned questions of agency and responsibility. Thanks to soldiers I know I didn't have either grandfather, and a lot of other relatives I would have liked to meet.

I'm definitely not the one to feel empathy for soldiers who volunteered (whether in ignorance or out of a misguided sense of "patriotism") to take orders like machines and take part in the invasions and genocides of an openly criminal, terrorist government. I find this culture's near-exclusive focus on their pain and suffering, often coming from people who do not even try to estimate the vastly higher number of people they killed, to be perverse and self-serving.

By the same token as your statements, why can't you admit the following revisions of your first few statements -- and give the actual victims of your military's crimes the primacy they deserve?

Revisions

"Only a victim of the soldier can understand what she goes through. That's the point."

"Only a family who's lost a loved one to invading soldiers can know what it's like to lose a loved one to invading soldiers."

"Only a family who's had a member murdered understands what it's like to have a family member murdered."

As for the rest, I'll quote directly:

"Only a person who's been through college knows what it's like to go through college."

This is complete bullshit. I hadn't been through college and then I was, and I had a very good idea what it was like, both before and after. I've met people who didn't go to college who nevertheless had an excellent idea of what it's like.

"Only a guy who's spun out his Mustang at 120 miles an hour on an icy bridge and almost flipped it over the guard rail knows what it's like to drive a Mustang at 120 miles an hour on an icy bridge and almost flip it over the guard rail."

Mustang driver, eh? Does an accident in a different car qualify? This is nonsense -- sorry. This involves basic physical experiences we all can in fact very easily imagine. Pretty much all of us have at various points fallen, hit ourselves, been on very fast vehicles, seen or felt them slip on ice, been in minor or major accidents, seen footage of actual accidents, seen big things fall and crash, been on roller coasters, experienced shock and blackouts due to shock, etc. etc. These experiences allow us to construct a very vivid imagination of such scenarios. I don't know what it's like to take off for the moon in a rocket, but I sure as hell know what your car accident would be like. Even the part about doing something incredibly stupid and suicidal and macho (sorry, that's what you describe), and romanticizing it after the fact as something cool (sorry, that's the subtext readable in your words).

Basically if you follow what you're saying it ends up at us having no language of common concepts and no reason to bother communicating whatsoever. Yet you're still trying to make a point here to others. These views provoke me sufficiently to give you a very long and serious answer. I expect you to read it seriously.

"Only a parent who's lost a child to SIDS knows what it's like to lose a child to SIDS."

No. And you're denying that the parent who has lost a child to SIDS can know what it's like for the Iraqi mother who lost her baby to a different cause, like the criminal bombing of the American military. This notion conveniently lets everyone off the hook, and yet you still think it important to claim a special place for the suffering of the soldier.

"Fucking hell, people. It's not dismissive of anyone else's pain and suffering to recognize the pain and suffering of one person."

Nope. However, it is also not dismissive to understand who is the aggressor, who is the victim, and what is the crime. Soldiers of an invasion can also suffer. So?

"Why do you all think is so fucking complicated?"

It's not. It will go down in history very clearly, and the first charge will read something like this: criminal government sent naive (and not-so-naive) young people to use overwhelming technology against civilians on the other side of the planet, where it had no business, on behalf of imperialist aims, with predictable murder of these civilians and great suffering -- 99.9% of which took place inside the invaded nation.

Put yourself in their shoes. You might aim yours more accurately.

.

[Rabrrrrrr]

33. There's no reason to talk of aggressor, victims, or crime

The chaplain said that only a soldier can understand what a soldier goes through.

That's just truth.

He said nothing that no one else suffers from what a soldier does, said nothing about families not suffering.

You all are reading way too much into it.

As to your assertions about empathy and imagination - obviously, yes, we can try to imagine and, therefore, empathize with one another about experiences. Sometimes we can have a pretty damned good idea. A guy with pancreatic cancer probably has a fairly good idea what someone with lung cancer is going through, even though different.

However, it is pure arrogance to suggest that one can know fully what another is going through, and the beginning of true empathy is to recognize that fact while at the same time trying to imagining it.



And even more seriously, in the context of this thread, I simply have absolutely no understanding why so many in this thread are taking a chaplain's factual assertion that only a soldier knows what a soldier goes through and turning that into a claim that families and innocents don't suffer.

Seriously. I don't get it.

[JackRiddler]

34. To answer your last question there...

because in the context of present day US society, including even within the antiwar movement, the American soldier's suffering (never the Iraqi's or the Vietnamese's) is constantly elevated to a special status, as though the worst thing about sending US soldiers to places where they have no business and having them kill a million people they don't know is that these soldiers will suffer terrible traumas and injuries afterward.

You can say you're not doing this much as you like, you can't get around it: the public emphasis on the soldier's (American only) suffering serves an attempt to silence dissent, to distract from the reality of who is suffering and why. This doesn't diminish his suffering; we need not to diminish the 1000-times greater suffering of the soldiers' victims (and they are victims of the soldiers as well as of the policy that sent the soldiers to kill).

The soldier is a killer, plain and simple.

[Rabrrrrrr]

36. Ah, I see - it isn't what the chaplain said, it's the lens through which you see the world.

No matter what is said about the military or soldiers you simply will spin it somehow to fit your paradigm. Your methodology is really no different than, say, the super hardcore Christian fundy nutbags who feel the need to interpret every Disney movie as being anti-Christian.

You're not alone. Many people have certain issues that they simply cannot speak about rationally.

[JackRiddler]

37. Speaking of spinning...

The chaplain is easy enough to understand. He is also peddling romantic delusion about the special insight or experience of the killer for hire in a foreign land where he or she has no business.

We all have a paradigm. You're right to say I don't share the chaplain's. Now. Does your paradigm have any room for the real victims of the Iraq invasion -- the people there? Can you bother once to acknowledge their suffering, which is as a bottomeless ocean compared to the real teardrops of some American volunteer who, if he survives, gets to leave behind the hell he has created in Iraq?

[Rabrrrrrr]

38. Yes, I can value their suffering; part of me values it more than the American's suffering

because we shouldn't be there in the first place, and so we're bringing it on ourselves. The Iraqis didn't ask for it.

Why would you ask such a loaded asinine question as "Can you bother ONCE to acknowledge..."? There is no reason for that question. I never acknowledged the suffering of the Iraqis (or any victims of war) because is that is not the point of this thread.

Your complaint is no more valid than if we were in the cooking forum and I posted a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and you said, "Iraqis can't even get chocolate! Can't you for once acknowledge the fact of the lack of chocolate in Iraq?!"

Which is to say, it's a total non sequitor, and it's fucking silly.

Some people find it fun to bring in only tenuously connected but yet still totally irrelevant points in a discussion and think that they have therefore scored major debate points (that's you), while the rest of the people sit back and laugh at them (that's us).

The truth is, you are still misreading and misinterpreting what the chaplain said, and from that making huge ass assumptions about that particular chaplain's political and worldview and from that the political and worldview of me and many others.

That's a hell of a lot of assumptions piled up on assumptions piled up on a false premise to take seriously any more.

[JackRiddler]

39. Go easy on the strained metaphors.

Your complaint is no more valid than if we were in the cooking forum and I posted a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and you said, "Iraqis can't even get chocolate! Can't you for once acknowledge the fact of the lack of chocolate in Iraq?!"

It's more like this: We're in the cooking forum and you post a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that leaves out the chocolate. Then you say only soldiers know chocolate, so I should shut up.

This isn't about cooking, it's about the crimes of your government and the justifications people find for their part in them. Among these, the myth of the special knowledge and suffering of the US soldier plays an important role.

"tenuously connected but yet still totally irrelevant points"

Yeah, keep telling yourself that the murder of one million people and the displacement of five million by US-UK armed forces at the command of a criminal regime is not relevant.

[Rabrrrrrr]

40. LOL!

No, this conversation is more like I said "Let's talk about American Idol" and you say "Oh, so the Rolling Stones 40+ years of history has no value?"

That's what this conversation is like.

And that's why I'm stopping. It's become laughably stupid with you hammering home your irrelevant-to-the-conversation point no matter what anyone says. A point that is not without its validity, mind you - as is abundantly and obviously clear, I agree with you - but irrelevant to the issue at hand.

I cease conversations with people who insist on constantly going off on irrelevant topics. That's not conversation, that's proselytizing. And it's rude.

You do realize it's okay to talk about topic A, even though it means topic B doesn't get talked about, without disrespecting the validity of Topic B? I hope you realize that. Because I could just as easily say that your obsession with the suffering of Iraqis shows your inhumanity because you are utterly ignoring the plight of the 30,000 people who die of hunger every day, or the millions who die of cancer, or the millions who die of malaria. And you said you were the one with the empathy. Can you bother ONCE to acknowledge the suffering of malaria victims? You haven't mentioned them at all.

[JackRiddler]

41. Your problem is the attempt to make an artificial distinction between Topic A and B...

"Let's not talk about the genocide my country committed and continues to perpetrate. Let's talk about how our poor soldiers suffer. That's the only Topic I want to allow."

The "soldiers only know" meme is one of the tools of denial to cover the knowledge that it's your country that has committed genocide over there. That's relevant.

Fare thee well.

[LanternWaste]

42. Eisenhower wrote in a letter to his wife...

Eisenhower wrote in a letter to his wife during the African campaign... "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity can."

I tend to agree that only soldiers who have fought in wars understand particular aspects and perspectives of war that no one else can or will ever fully understand.

Empathize with? Maybe. But not understand.

[Raskolnik]

44. Recognizing that there may be a unique aspect to a person's suffering

does not diminish the suffering of others.

You seem to be trying to turn this into an either/or proposition where one may recognize the particular type of suffering that some of our soldiers endure because of the war, or one may recognize the suffering of Iraqi civilians.

I don't know about you, but I have the capacity to recognize both.

[babylonsister]

17. OK, but the family was 'lost in grief'. Great. The soldier got it.

"leaving Dwan and the couple's children struggling for answers. In August, on what would have been their anniversary, Dwan spent the day at Jake's grave at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, lost in grief."

[nadinbrzezinski]

21. You realize that the families of those who commit suicide, regardless of

WHY... have those questions?

[qwlauren35]

9. Yes, families feel pain, but they aren't seeing war.

I cannot imagine what it's like the first time you shoot and kill a human being. Or the second time. Or you miss one and s/he kills someone next to you. I've heard that in the moment, you might not actually think about it. But at some point, I think it catches up with you. I don't think you can forget that you saw it, or did it.

I think that's the experience the chaplain is talking about, and how it could cause someone to decide that s/he just couldn't live with him or herself any more.

I don't think the victims are ever that conflicted. Or the families of the soldiers. I think they only feel pain and sorrow. And perhaps incredible rage. But they have no real reason to feel guilt. Or a sense of being spiritually stained. The stain doesn't come from defending yourself. It comes from firing the FIRST shot. Sometimes, that's what our soldiers did, and they either find a way to live with themselves... or they choose not to live.

Shooting and killing someone who never did anything to anyone - except get in my way, because I was ordered to, isn't something I could live with.

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. Hey kudos you did it better than I ever could

:-)

And I didn't shoot anybody, just got caught in the getting shot at

Yes, somebody wanted to KILL ME... because my job was to get those idiots from open ground, where they lay after getting shot

It was not personal... just a target

[Gwendolyn]

22. It's only one small quote. I'm sure he said words to comfort the family...

and acknowledge their pain as well.

[DS1]

3. No he is not.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. I hate to disagree but those who have seen combat

whether they are civilians caught in the middle of the shooting, or soldiers doing the shooting, partake in a special panic and horror that the families of those troops don't

The families are pained by the trooper leaving and coming, but they can never (unless they themselves have been in the midst of that horror), understand what that means

It is a special bond... one that unfortunately I share with my husband due to the war on drugs, which is a very real and hot war.

But my sister does not presume to even try to get involved when her husband (vietnam,) mine (the current war, Grenada, Desert Storm) and me (that war on drugs) start talking

And as much as we try to splain what those horrors are... to others, we never can

Moreover, we are the damn exception. Most who've been there, done that, never talk about it

So no, that chaplain is not an idiot

[babylonsister]

7. OK. Families should not be considered. Got it. Sorry, but

what has happened to families because of service that has torn families apart begs the question why their opinion doesn't count. Whatever.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Seen it on both sides

families suffer a different kind of pain, but not the actual one inflicted by combat

It is different

And don't ask me to explain it, because I have tried

When you are getting shot at you don't have time to do a thing but do your job and training takes over

Families worry... it is different

Get it?

But it is not the maddening, drive you crazy, PTSD inducing, five seconds of hell that feel like five hours.

To put it simply, most family members will sleep after the events are over, and their relative is home FINALLY

My hubby still sees those he faced at night when he tries to sleep

I still see the face of the LT I transported out of a hot zone with bullets whizzing or the idiot I pulled out of a shootout.. that is the major difference

[babylonsister]

12. Hmm.

I take my 'knowledge' from 2 people. One retired as a Master Sgt from the Marine Corp, gunner, and went on to a second career after volunteering for 2-3 tours in VN. He never talks about it. He did have 6 kids, and has a brazillion grand- and great-grand kids.

The other guy, married to my sister briefly, was a tunnel rat for one year. Went on to teach, shake drugs and alcohol, had to retire, and will never be normal because of his former job.

:shrug:

[nadinbrzezinski]

15. For me it is my husband

my brother in law who did the Nam (and other conflicts)

And my personal knowledge of being used as target practice, thankfully their aim sucked, by the drug cartels, a couple times... more times than I care to remember in fact...

Yep, medic, so what? Target... a few were funny, yes we find humor in some of this... it is that or cry.

And the nightmares are still with us, the three of us.

So for me this is personal knowledge

As to sending somebody to war... I did, see hubby

So I had those sleepless nights dreading the staff car, with the chaplain and all that

He keeps claiming that mine was the hardest job.. I beg to differ.. he is the one that cannot sleep very well

USN Chief Retired, me well... way too many hats.

[TahitiNut]

13. It can't be explained.

I've been stupid enough to try. No more. My "family" was sleeping with her lover the night I got back from Viet Nam ... so I have a little less broad-brush sympathy for "family" than many, I guess.
:shrug:

[nadinbrzezinski]

19. We still try

and I know that I have put some of it in fiction

Hell had one Short Story fully rewritten by an editor since it hurt her sensibilities...

Johnny got his gun kind of material... more fit for Abu Ghraib in fact, but hey... ten years ago it was too much reality

[qwlauren35]

10. This is personal for you.

I am sorry that this is hitting so close to home. I do respect your pain.

I think we're just hearing/reading something different in what the chaplain said.

[babylonsister]

14. It's really not.

I don't know anyone who has died in Iraq. I just know so many have died. And families suffer, American and Iraqi. Why shouldn't they count?

[qwlauren35]

23. I didn't interpret it as not counting.

I just saw it as having a different experience.

I think the soldiers have one experience, the civilians whose homes are destroyed have a different experience, the families of POWs, MIAs, the maimed and the lost soldiers have a different experience.

And they all hurt like hell.

My take on the chaplains quote is that he was trying to express a sense of why a soldier might commit suicide, or try to tell the family that they couldn't have rescued him from the madness that might have gotten inside of his head as the result of seeing combat. Kind of like an absolution.

I think many people feel guilty when someone close to them commits suicide. They think there was something more that they could have done. That's what I think the chaplain was trying to address.

[VOX]

18. Consider the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; or the Dresden firebombing; or the London blitz...

Not to mention the civilians of Iraq and Afghanistan. And I mean no disrespect to the family of Specialist Jacob Fairbanks -- I have profound sympathy and sorrow for them.

But the horrors of war are shared -- soldiers do not have an exclusive stake in this matter.

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. Read what I wrote above

the soldiers AND civilians who have shared in the horrors of war have a special understanding that the families back home simply cannot ever try to understand. It simply cannot be done.

[JackRiddler]

28. Soldiers do have a near-exclusive stake in part of the matter.

They're the ones who do the killing. They're the ones who could stop it by refusing to take orders.

[madokie]

29. The horrors of the battlefield weigh heavily on me

maybe its just me though, who knows.

[gratuitous]

30. My major problem with that statement about "Only soldiers understand"

My major problem the statement that "only soldiers understand" is perilously close to a number of other dots, one of them labeled "American exceptionalism" and others with even less savory labels. And there are a lot of people who connect those dots, perhaps innocently or even subconsciously at first. But then the connection gets more definite over time, and the next thing I begin hearing is “You fucking peacenik hippie! You couldn’t possibly understand the first thing about it. I should kill you!” And all I really wanted to say is that violence is just about the worst possible way to resolve violence, and that it is ultimately self-defeating.

[Name removed]

31. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Raskolnik]

43. What an ugly thing to say. n/t

[Hydra]

32. It's been said before, and it's true- War is Hell

I love when people talk about "noble causes" and "responsible warfare." I recall people talking about that before we invaded Iraq for their oil and strategic position.

I guess we learned ALL about that, didn't we?

War is good for one thing, though- it shows us the truth of what we are. Savage, brutal animals that eat our own.

I hate being right on most days.

[LanternWaste]

46. War can bring out the worst in us..

I think there are many, many examples throughout history that illustrate war may sometimes bring out the best in mankind as well as the worst.

[Greyhound]

35. The casualty rate of every war is 100%.

My 'lifer' grandfather said this all the time, and he was in three of them.

[Gwendolyn]

45. It's pretty much a given that no one can quite understand the horrors of war the way...

a participant on the front lines can. These are the people coming back and killing themselves in droves, or as in the case of this soldier, ending their lives before they make it home.

I don't understand some of the posts on this thread. The occupation was/is a catastrophe on every level, but Jesus, it was this man's FUNERAL. He was so unconsolable, traumatized, lonely for his family, that he committed suicide. What was the Chaplain supposed to do... launch into a speech about the inequities of war? It was a time for the family to grieve for their loved one. Maybe someone should have sent Fred Phelps just to rub it in to them how hated they are.