Editor's note: This is a repost of hecate's open thread from last Saturday. It is too fine of a piece to not republish on this day of reflection.

Among the German prisoners captured in France there are a certain number of Russians. Some time back two were captured who did not speak Russian or any other language that was known either to their captors or their fellow prisoners. They could, in fact, only converse with one another. A professor of Slavonic languages, brought down from Oxford, could make nothing of what they were saying. Then it happened that a sergeant who had served on the frontiers of India overheard them talking and recognised their language, which he was able to speak a little. It was Tibetan! After some questioning, he managed to get their story out of them.

Some years earlier they had strayed over the frontier into the Soviet Union and had been conscripted into a labour battalion, afterwards being sent to western Russia when the war with Germany broke out. They were taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to North Africa; later they were sent to France, then exchanged into a fighting unit when the Second Front opened, and taken prisoner by the British. All this time they had been able to speak to nobody but one another, and had no notion of what was happening or who was fighting whom.

It would round the story off neatly if they were now conscripted into the British army and sent to fight the Japanese, ending up somewhere in Central Asia, quite close to their native village, but still very puzzled as to what it is all about.

Several years ago radio hate-show host Michael Savage—harbinger of The Hairball; his John the Baptist—became obsessed with the old Kinks chestnut "Living On A Thin Line." Particularly with these lines:

all the stories have been told
of kings and days of old
but there's no England now
all the wars that were won and lost
somehow don't seem to matter very much anymore

Savage, because he's a simpleton, believed the song to be some sort of war chant, calling upon the English people to rise up and sally forth to recapture lost glory; he many times expressed the ludicrous notion that "only the soccer thugs can save England."

Savage rarely played, and certainly never reflected upon, the lines that follow:

all the lies we were told
all the lies of the people running round
their castles have burned
now I see change
but inside we're the same
as we ever were

In truth, and as the songwriter, Dave Davies, could have told him, among what the song is actually saying is that all the wars, all the bloodshed, all the deaths, all the lies, perpetrated in the name of "England," were all a waste, every one, because "there's no England now." All that's left today of "England," what all that fighting and dying was for, comes down to an old, tiny woman, fond of sherry and surrounded by corgis, tippling in a high-backed chair, an iPod bud impacted in the wax of her ear.

Everyone, who ever automatoned off to war, there to die "for England," died in vain. Every one. As everyone, who has ever died in any war, died in vain. Every one.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mprQmXuFON8]

In 1962, WWII South Pacific combat veteran James Jones stood before the Lincoln Memorial, reading the words of the Gettysburg Address, probably the most famous collection of syllables to emerge from the conflict that sparked Memorial Day. Jones' friend William Styron recorded Jones' reaction to the Memorial:

Jim's face was set like a slab, his expression murky and aggrieved, as we stood on the marble reading the Gettysburg Address engraved against one lofty wall, slowly scanning those words of supreme magnanimity and conciliation and brotherhood dreamed by the fellow Illinoisian whom Jim had venerated, as almost everyone does, for transcendental reasons that needed not to be analyzed or explained in such a sacred hall. I suppose I was expecting the conventional response from Jim, the pious hum. But his reaction, soft-spoken, was loaded with savage bitterness, and for an instant it was hard to absorb. "It's just beautiful bullshit," he blurted. "They all died in vain. They all died in vain. And they always will!"

In The Thin Red Line, Jones writes of a young soldier, Bell, crawling through the carnage, "whistling over to himself a song called I Am An Automaton to the tune of God Bless America," and thinking:

They thought they were men. They all thought they were real people. They really did. How funny. They thought they made decisions and ran their own lives, and proudly called themselves free individual human beings. The truth was they were here, and they were gonna stay here, until the state through some other automaton told them to go someplace else, and then they'd go. But they'd go freely, of their own free choice and will, because they were free individual human beings. Well, well.

There in the South Pacific, Jones one afternoon went off a ways to take a shit. Squatting, pants down, he was attacked by a Japanese soldier. It was a long, bad fight: Jones survived. He killed the man. Then he went through the dead man's effects. Looked at pictures. Realized he had killed himself. Went back to his CO and told him he was out of the war. No more war for him.

Back in the States, Jones determined to become a writer, to speak for the dead. As he once wrote to his publisher:

The dead, frozen like flies in plastic, realized—at the moment of death when of course they stopped—that humanity must grow to feeling, to empathy, or become extinct. But the dead cannot speak.

Jones himself died before he could finish Whistle. What exists, and closes the book, Jones narrated into a tape recorder, shortly before his death.

Rather than return to combat, a soldier slips down the side of a troopship, to drown at sea. As his life ebbs away, he is granted a vision in which he swells, and swells again, until he eventually encompasses all the universe, and then he shrinks, and continues to shrink, until he is the size of an atom, and finally he is nothing at all.

Willi Heinrich knows how to properly observe such a thing as Memorial Day. Heinrich, he is best known in the US, if he is known at all, as the author of Cross Of Iron, which Sam Peckinpah made into the film that Orson Welles pronounced the finest anti-war film ever made. Too bad no one wanted to see it. Because it was up against Star Wars. A film that opens with the blithe obliteration of an entire world and all the creatures on it, and closes with a sequence that apes, frame-for-frame, an infamous portion of Triumph Of The Will. Mark Hamill—Luke Skywalker to you—felt so ashamed of appearing in that festering dungheap that he ran off to sign on to Sam Fuller's anti-war The Big Red One: "One of the reasons that I had to do it is that I was very aware that I was becoming very famous for a role in what was essentially a fantasy war movie, the 'fun' side of war, and I started to feel this strong sense of responsibility for the image that I was helping to perpetuate."

Anyway. Heinrich. He served four years as a combat infantryman in the German army during WWII. He tramped over 8000 miles of Russian territory: to the suburbs of Moscow, and back again. Over the course of his service in it, his division lost 12 times its original strength. He was severely wounded on five separate occasions. Like Jones, once he was out of the madness, he determined, as a writer, to speak for the dead. And so, in his The Crumbling Fortress, a character observes:

"For the French Verdun is something like a national shrine, but in the wrong sense, it seems to me. Instead of pointing a warning the military achievement is glorified. But that is not the way to speak for those who paved the road to Verdun with their bones. When we sing the national anthem in a military cemetery it is, of course, a very moving event, but it distorts the true nature of the matter. We should rig up giant loudspeakers and relay recordings of the screams of the wounded and dying and then no one would ever forget that cemetery.

"We ought not to play anthems over their graves or make solemn speeches in remembrance of them. A people which is proud of its war dead has learned nothing from the war. As long as we have no stronger feelings than a bad conscience about our dead when we talk of them, then there will always be other wars. It all began with falsehood and it will one day finish with falsehood. Lies breed death, death breeds lies and so it goes on. By distorting the meaning of our existence we have legitimized mass murder."

That is what should be played, all and everywhere, on all and every Memorial Day, and all over the globe. The screams of the wounded and the dying. And there can appear on big screens—because the humans, they so love their big screens these days, when they are not gazing at the screens of their phones, screens the six of a gnat's eyelash—the process by which surgical assistant James Hagenzeiker prepared the dead, there in Vietnam.

Then I had to put him in a shroud. You tie the hands together, tie the feet together, take the penis and tie a shroudpiece of cord around it real tight. Because everything goes, they lose their muscle control, and if there's urine there he'll urinate all over everything. So you tie it off like it was a hose. You take cotton and stuff it down his throat. Take cotton and stuff it up the nose. Stuff cotton in the anus, because immediately they start to ferment, to bloat out. Then you put them in a sheet, and you have to wrap them up real tight so they can't flop around.

There is of course an easy enough way to put an end to all this. And that is for people to stop going to the wars. It is pure unadulterated horseshit to deflect the blame to politicians, generals. Those people are just mouths, completely impotent, without the legions of automatons willing to stumble off to kill whomsoever they're told to kill. Every war on this earth would end in this instant if everyone in them would simply heed the words of G. I. Gurdjieff, who, when asked during WWI what would happen if those fighting were to become awake, replied "they would drop their rifles and go home to their families."

Harry Behret knows this. Now.

Harry Behret in the late 1960s was the president of the College Conservative Club at Queens College, vice-president of the Young Republicans. He wrote his draft board telling it he no longer wished to avail himself of his student deferment; once drafted, he enlisted for three years, rather than two. And he asked to be sent to Vietnam.

Behret was assigned first to a base at Dau Tieng, next to the Michelin rubber plantation, twenty miles from the Cambodian border. He was an artillery meteorologist, tasked with sending up weather balloons packed with flammable hydrogen gas. Sited right behind the base ammunition dump.

Behret learned early that the war in Vietnam—like all wars—was lost.

Some VC mortar team lobbed three mortar rounds on us. Only three rounds—that means they're out there with one mortar tube. And one mortar tube—that means two Viet Cong, each maybe five feet two in height, 110 pounds, between sixteen and eighty years of age. With a rusty piece of metal, popping three rounds on the base. Pop-pop-pop. The helicopter gunships go off and strafe the area, the jets come in and napalm, the eight-inchers and the 175s and the 105s go off, and the .50-calibers are strafing. Then everything dies down. And you hear pop-pop-pop—they fire three more rounds at us.

At that point I knew there was no way we could win that fucking war. You had these two guys in sandals with a rusty piece of metal, and they take on these gunships and these batteries and all this technology. We've just blasted the surrounding countryside all to hell, and what do they do? They shoot back. I was awed. It was one of those incredible moments when a human being does something you think is just impossible. I was kind of proud. I said, "There's no way we're going to beat them." I could see them firing the first three rounds and di-di mau-ing, which means getting the hell out of there. But to stay there, take it, and then shoot back! Forget it. They've got more than we've got.

Behret was sent next to a small base in Ninh Hua. There, the American artillery went off every day, as it had at Dau Tieng, but this time it was aimed at no one at all. There was no enemy. The guns were firing at ghosts.

They hadn't seen a Viet Cong in ages . . . [I]t wasn't really a war. You were getting combat pay, and the guns were going off and blowing up monkeys and trees and whatever they were blowing up. But it was meaningless. The psychological toll on you was incredible. For me it was worse than Dau Tieng. At least there you were getting shot at, there was some rationale behind the insanity. This was just plain insanity.

An alcoholic American soldier was assigned to drive the base rations truck to Nha Trang to pick up perishables. He kept getting into accidents; it was decided he could no longer be trusted to ferry food. Instead, he was assigned to drive to and from a nearby village to transport the Vietnamese workers who labored at the base.

"He had an accident and killed twelve people," Behret recalled. "I was selected to ride shotgun for the medics down at the accident site. The first thing I saw is somebody's brains lying in the roadside. Bits and pieces of people all over the place. When I got back to the base, somebody was upset because there was a big inspection that day and we didn't have the Vietnamese to clean up for us. It was a real inconvenience."

After that, Behret signed out of the war. He began drinking heavily. With his poker winnings, he lent money. He dealt dope. "In rifle inspection, they would pick up my rifle and find cobwebs in it." Behret piled up the Article 15s; with one more, he could be sent "to Long Binh jail with a bad discharge home."

It was then that he was ordered to shoot his dog.

They said, "We have too many dogs on the base, we've got to get rid of some. Behret, we're gonna get rid of your dog." I was supposed to take it out and shoot it. What they wanted me to do was refuse to shoot the dog, so they could bust me and send me to jail. I shot the dog.

Behret's time ran out, and he was shipped home. Back in the States, at the airport bar, he was unable to order a beer, because he couldn't produce an ID.

Governments will never end war. Governments are war. The only way to end it, to end them, is for individual human beings to sign right out of the program. That's what Harry Behret has done. And for all of his people.

The thing that hurt me the most was that I put myself to the test and I failed. I felt responsible for the things that were done and the people who were killed. I never protested that this alcoholic was put in charge of driving people. I laughed on the sidelines like everybody else. I saw twelve people die, just out of a racist mentality. And it was something I subscribed to, or at least I went along with it. You always have an image of what you would do in a situation like that. You think you won't let it happen. And you let it happen. Then you know that if you had been with Lieutenant Calley, you would have been shooting people, too.

You realize you're a human being. And in the proper place, and the proper time, with a gun in your hand, you will act like the animal a human being can be.

It took me a long time to accept that I was a shylocker, that I dealt drugs, that I saw people as gooks. That I let myself be put in a position where I shot a dog. Every test I had to face, I didn't do what I should have done. I went along with the military. I resisted to the point where they were going to chop my neck off, and then I went along.

The only thing I got out of it is that I have a five-year-old son, and he ain't gonna do what I did. My experience will help in that respect. I think there's been a Behret in every fucking war in this country's history. But there ain't gonna be no more Behrets in no more wars.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTsXAVrfwpc]