What it is Like to Go to War (33 page)

70.
Medals have a hierarchy. In the Marine Corps the order of medals for valor in combat, from top to bottom, is Congressional Medal of Honor, Navy Cross, Distinguished Flying Cross, Silver Star, Bronze Star, Single Mission Air Medal, Navy Commendation Medal. Once you’re in the service, you can read a person’s ribbons and quickly know where you fall in the hierarchy.

71.
Forward Air Control.

72.
The official commendation makes it sound as if I took a bunch of bunkers all alone. I did lead the charge, but I often remind people that none of those kids who wrote the eyewitness accounts could have done so if they hadn’t been right there with me.

73.
I stayed with the company until we were relieved, I must say feeling very sorry for myself. Luckily, the blindness was temporary. The surgeon on the hospital ship, the
Repose
, later told me that several metal slivers were just microns from the optic nerve.

74.
Aircrews are armed only with pistols, virtually useless in a fight like this. They may as well have been unarmed.

75.
To be clear, I know the stupid headline was completely out of the control of the pilot and crew, who, like all aircrews, were risking their lives to help us.

76.
Upon being asked back then if I’d ever fight again, I remember saying yes, I would, when the enemy crossed the local river. I’ve since extended my geographic constraints. Metaphorically, it is better for my family if the fighting is on the other side of the river.

77.
Nonspecific urethritis.

78.
I can take you “left-handed,” with my disadvantaged side. Possibly, I can take you with the hand I wipe with.

79.
I am paraphrasing or quoting from Thomas Kinsella, trans.,
The Táin
, 1982.

80.
Army, Long Range Reconnaisance Patrol.

81.
Tim O’Brien, “Speaking of Courage,” in
The Things They Carried
, 1990.

82.
Norman Maclean, “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky,” in
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
, 1976.

83.
A person who “cruises” through uncut timber estimating its potential for harvesting.

84.
There are sound psychological reasons for this, namely that if the initiation rite is demystified there will be little psychological transformation when it is undergone, and of course the whole purpose will be lost. You can’t scare someone to death if he knows ahead of time that it’s all a trick.

85.
Childbirth held much of the same mystery, terror, and transcendence for the girls. It, too, is disappearing as a means to womanhood. Women can now choose not to be mothers and large numbers will so choose. In addition, bearing children can now be done while a woman is unconscious or heavily sedated (although this choice is not generally taken), with much decreased risk of death in first-world countries.

86.
She no longer feels this way.

87.
From
Life on the Mississippi
, 1883.

88.
Hans von Luck, “The End in North Africa,” in
The Quarterly Journal of Military History
(Summer 1989).

89.
I am a German.

90.
Ares is the Greek god of war. Mars is the Roman equivalent.

91.
Homer,
The Odyssey
, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, 1963.

92.
I refer the reader to the works of authors such as Alice Miller, John Bradshaw, Gershen Kaufman, Adele Faber, and Elaine Mazlish.

93.
This is one reason why the advent of science so shook most religions. Science proved that what was in fact global didn’t fit the old mythologies based on a false sense of what was global.

94.
H. R. Ellis Davidson,
Gods and Myths of Northern Europe
, 1984.

95.
Robert Graves,
The Greek Myths
, 1955.

96.
Perhaps with the same myopia. Someday people may be amazed that we didn’t think of trees as “people.”