War for Peacetime

War for Peacetime

I’ve been terribly troubled lately. I want to help, I see the news, and am terrified by the events in Syria, the razing of Aleppo, the chemical attacks, and the perceived impending crisis between the US and Russia and others…interminable, it keeps OK.

I’m a step above the arm-chair advocate, social media indignities, one every day, or at least three a week. I managed to micro-lend through KIVA, to a resettled refugee in Beirut. I micro-lend to Burundi and the Congo, underfunded, economic exclusion or conflict zones. I feel better. We give $30 bucks a month to World Vision here in Taiwan. It goes to emergency family relief funds for rural families whose kids need shoes, schoolbooks or food to make it to school and get a chance at something.

I continue to be haunted, anxious, unsettled and driven to isolation by dwelling on the events unfolding in Syria, and another dozen locations around the globe. My son feels it, my wife feels it, she knows I care and want to help, yet it’s gotten to the point of disrupting my happy existence with my family. I look for an outlet, something with meaning, substance which propagates some measure of harmony to counteract the swirling chaos.

I do what I can, I could do more. A little about my current life. I’m an expat who moved to China about 10 years ago. After 18 months I moved to Taiwan with a woman who later became my wife and we are raising an eight year old boy, Chevalier. We live in Taichung, a city of about 2 million, very dirty air in winter due to wind currents in the ocean strait, but as we live outside the inner ring, we are 8 minutes from the bustling and modern uptown, and 8 minutes from Rice fields and forests in the opposite direction. Fresh fish is incredibly cheap here and universal health coverage for all three of us runs about $100 a month, total. I teach at a small elementary school which has a strong English program, attached to a regional university. There are trees, parkland and neighborhoods on campus, it is like a garden. There is no crime, the birds and singing as you watch people run the track at the local high-school on Sunday as I pitch an orange foam rubber ball to my son. It is the essence and quality of all that defines peace. The most maddening thing about life here is the bad driving, so if I’m careful, nearly everything is a breeze.

I’ve been forced to look much deeper within myself. I’m a sensitive person, and having had a rocky childhood, drugs and alcohol in the family during the late seventies, I spent a lot of my youth searching for normalcy. For me at 11 years old, blasting ‘Just One Night,’ by Eric Clapton and watch people yell and screaming in delight or misery was normal for me. I am happy I was raised on rock and roll but the intensity of the party, the intensity of the despair made me a sad kid. I went to a good school and grew out of it over time. I am predisposed to that sort of behavior, extreme binging, on whatever that might be, drugs, food, intimacy, collecting, there is a consuming dedication to whatever it is I undertake, whatever it might be for as long as it lasts. And I fly to the next thing. I’m stretched a bit thin.

Back to the point. Why does the Syrian War affect me so? I think I know why. My dad is a Vietnam War combat veteran. He was drafted at 19 and went over in ’67 at towards the peak of deployment and was present in Siagon during the winter Tet offensive of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. When he told war stories, I loved to hear them, and remember several in detail to this day. They are told and retold and the details change a bit, but the theme remains the same. He wanted to help, but it came down to doing whatever he had to, including terrible things, to survive, protect his friends, and get home again. As a kid, the idea of war was romanticized for me, not so much Vietnam but tales of the Civil War and the Great Confederate victories, yes, I’m from North Carolina, and the might have beens, and we really weren’t fighting for slavery but honor and a way of life. Some of my family were slaveholding planters and others were craftsmen and most were likely farmers and the most ordinary people struggling to survive in a hostile world. So I dreamed of colorful banners, red breeches, the Swamp Fox and the battle of the Alamo. Glory and heroes was a part of my young narrative. To be clear, my dad was a conscript and although he did his duty, he was by no means pro military, nor did he expect me to be, it was just the stories that we told.

He taught me to shoot, never to hunt. We fished a bit though. We made bows and arrows, tomahawks and other Native gear. His Grandma James was one quarter Catawba Indian so he had a direct connection to some of the old ways. Since 1977, he has lived in a little 1940’s era farmhouse in rural Orange County, NC. Not much around but farms and forests. We had animals, chickens, ducks, goats, and cows, but he never liked to eat them. Nor did we camp. As a teenager he finally told me he had had enough of sleeping outside in Southeast Asia.

By the time I was 15, my dad and I were great friends. We worked together in summer, climbing on houses, fixing windows and installing vinyl siding and other various contraptions. We drank beer together and shared many things together, kind of us against the world. My dad would be violent, not towards me but others, and as a kid it scared the Hell out of me, I felt so sorry for the recipients and I’d either be silent, or try to calm my dad down or the other person, my mom or step-mom. This part went back to my earliest memories. The verbal and physical abuse wasn’t sinister or premeditated, just triggered by the drugs, alcohol and his own experience at the hands of his abusive father. But this is not even the point. As I got older, we drank together and became confidants, I heard the real war stories the real combat stories, not the guns and glory, the horror, the madness, the unimaginable struggle of men locked in Death’s embrace, trying to live, losing your humanity, and doing anything you had to do, just to have the right to go back home. He had a buddy named Jerry who was cut down by heavy machine gun fire while out on patrol, and dad’s agony and helplessness and despair were present for me too. I could see it feel it, empathize with my dad, and perhaps unfortunately, I could imagine it too. My dad was locked in a struggle for his soul’s survival, he suffered mightily from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and used drugs and alcohol to assuage his pain, his guilt, and his own abusive childhood with war laid on top and shattering what perception of serenity he had left from his small town upbringing. My dad is a real survivor and though he trusts few, he has many friends and is well liked. And after over 10 years of treatment at the VA hospital in Durham, North Carolina, he has conquered most of the symptoms of PTSD and lives a simple yet fulfilling life. Believe it or not, now he needs to go back 20 more years to 1950, to sort out his family stuff, which may be a steeper hill to climb.

So I got the war stories, and I saw my family shriek with ecstasy intermingled with fear and self-loathing, the drugs a balm to regret and lost dreams. I learned about the horror of killing and the animal fear of the hunted first hand. Believe it or not, as a teen, I got it together pretty good thanks to my attendance of a small progressive high-school near Durham. I read about war, the Civil War, WWII, The Revolution, Napoleonic, Vietnam, anything I could get my hands on. I unconsciously hoped that I would learn something that would help me understand my father, help me understand him better, or put me in a position to give him peace or comfort in some small way. We did a bit of trout fishing up in the mountains together; he did in fact sleep outside a couple more times. We worked together and continued to be friends into my 20’s. I trusted him and considered him to be a good buddy. He figured we were cool and we were for many years. In my 30’s we became estranged. I don’t know it matters so much now and I’m honestly not sure why, but we are close again, although I see him rarely, remember I am an expat.

So, in Syria, I hear about the battles, the struggles, the death, I can see it in my mind, not because I’ve seen Saving Private Ryan or Passchendaele, but because I’ve felt the terror, seen the inescapable predicaments, and the loss of humanity, that all in warfare undergo. My service was being a peacetime son to my dad. I looked into his eyes, and saw the lost soldier, the one who has nothing, where life means nothing- the death shone from his green eyes like Charon’s beacon. There is no coming back, only living with it. Living with it. Luckily by the time I was 25, I’d figured out that war was a losing proposition for all involved, except in the utmost extreme circumstances. I venture to say, diplomacy is an afterthought in the majority of conflict today. There was no romanticism left, but still a morbid fascination. I read, and read, and read. None affected me more profoundly than Guy Sajer’s, The Forgotten Soldier. Guy was a Frenchman from Alsace whose mom was German, and he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to Russia to fight. Despite the atrocities committed there, I couldn’t help but see Guy and his comrades as victims. They were not the Einsatzgruppen, the ones who terrorized and murdered civilians, but line soldiers in the regular army, who did what they were told and just a few survived retreat from 1943-1945, where deprivation, death and loss of humanity were the duty of a soldier.

“A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.”

Perhaps from him I hardened my sense of empathy. When I think of the combatants in Syria now, short of the few fundamentalists who hate everyone equally and want to kill all. They think they are serving God, but their action make them the worst sort of nihilists. But mostly just ordinary people, pressed into service or called upon by God and country, wherever the battle lines are drawn. And in this case, many can’t go home. They fight to victory or death, most of the smart ones accept their death and become all the more fearsome fighters. It is the way of way. There is no winning, the good guys fall with the bad, and all of them had mothers, wives and children.

When I heard about the gas attack I was enraged. And slightly gleeful at the launch of the cruise missiles. What an idiot I felt afterwards.

A little more about why Syria has been nagging at me. My dad is a writer, more in lifestyle and presence than marked by his published works. Henry Miller, the iconoclastic writer of the 1930’s modernism, was among the first to proclaim writer friends who never published a word, or perhaps Neal Cassidy, the original Beat and hippy pioneer, who lived his art, until his heart stopped one night in 1967 on some train tracks in Mexico.

We all are writers, my mom, dad and me. My mom did publish her first book recently, good for her. Anyway, he has been telling several stories simultaneously for 30 years- among the topics are his narrative of Vietnam, his hometown, Mebane, North Carolina, a historic furniture town in Central Carolina, and finally, not least important, a story of my great-great grandfather, Aquilla Jones, a Civil War veteran, married into the Catawba nation, protector of the weak and general multi-skilled pillar of a man, who lived into the 1890’s. He raised six children I believe, the youngest of which was Caroline Owens Jones, with whom my dad spent his early childhood with. My dad had stirred my interest in family history so I began searching, using the sites from Utah as a base, and dipping into State and National archives as well. Aside from the Jones’ and the Rogers’- the Catawba line- I am directly related to a group of Massachusetts Armenians, via Turkey and Syria, the Kashishians and Karajians. My reat-granddad and grandma came over about 1909, and 1912 respectively. They made it over, had money for passage, and possibly had family here. Within the Ottoman Empire, Turkey primarily, the Armenians there were a merchant and civil service class, as well as Christian. This could be part of the reason why there was an 1896 pogrom and then a comprehensive cleansing of Armenian people in 1915. The 1896 purge was less violent, which begs the question, how many need to die before it is considered very bad? My great-grandfather Harry, lived in Edessa, the ancient biblical kingdom, crusader city and modern day Urfu, in Southwest Turkey. Harry walked with his mom across the Syrian Desert. They escaped violence to take their chances in the desert. Aleppo would be less than 150 mile away. These human convoys usually carried what provisions they could, and were accompanied by soldiers. The soldiers were known to weave around villages, partly to deprive the marchers but also to keep secret what was happening to the people. They made it to Aleppo. I don’t know if Harry met Rose there, or if they met later in Massachusetts, probably the former. Rose Karajian, a young Armenian teen was 16 when she emigrated to America in 1912. There was violence in Aleppo, reorganizing, but Aleppo was far from Istanbul, and the Syrian citizens may or may not have assuaged the severity of the violence in 1896, the year of Rose’s birth.

Going back to early February, Trump had been president a short time when he announced his travel ban. I was struck inside and felt sick to my stomach. I’d followed the tragic stories of Refugees, sunk in boats, faced with vitriol by Western nationalists, reviled as terrorists by the loud voices within America. Aleppo has been in the news cycle very recently, as a months’ long struggle for it had ended in December or January, pulverizing large sections of this ancient trade city. First, I found Grandpa Harry’s naturalization papers and made the connection between the refuge ban and my family’s successful immigration. Then I dug again and found Grandma Rose’s naturalization papers. ‘City of Birth, Syria, Ottoman Turkey.’ And I flipped my shit. I was enraged and saddened, my emotions were torn, ripped in two, and I couldn’t focus, think, nor function properly. Here we are literally one century after one of the greatest extermination of an ethnic group in human history, ending the sixth year of a Civil War claiming 600,000 lives, and 5,000,000 refugees, and we cut them off, done, can’t take them until we reevaluate. I was apoplectic, raging inside and I felt so helpless. I donated to KIVA, I posted on Facebook, what could I do, What could I do? I don’t know.

The systematic purging of the Armenians from Ottoman territory and Turkish society is a footnote of the imperial annals of 20th century history. I’m not saying it was whitewashed by the West, it was just not comparable to sacrifices made by the West during the Great War, 1914-1918. History is written by the victors, and while the Turks lost the War, they won their country and created a constitutional parliamentary system which brought them into the 20th century. Their denial of the Armenian persecution takes away all of their integrity for me. Fine, I don’t know much about their country, I go to school with a Turk named Yagiz who I like just fine, far removed from this bloody history. But what did it do to the Armenian people themselves? Three in four were murdered or died during the pogroms. There were beheadings, crucifixions, hangings, mutilations, and cold blooded murder in the streets. Teen girls, the pretty or perceived fertile ones were taken, raped, married, and even kept in slavery by Turks and Syrians alike. And they continued to live, make babies, convert to Islam and survive as the human spirit drove them to do. The survivors who made it out lived with this trauma, every moment, every day; it clung to them like a shadow, draped like poisonous mist, infecting every pore of their being. They may or may not have talked about it, like some war veterans don’t talk about their experiences. But it was there, in their lives and that of their children, the names of the dead carefully noted, perhaps written down in a book, a family bible for the children to discover, to ask, ‘mama,’ why isn’t Aunt Mariam here now?’

And my Grandma Lillian was like this. She was American, born in 1919 in Boston. Harry had a small shoe factory there, in Revere, MA. I have pictures of Lillian as a teen. She smiled, but I rarely saw her smile. Life is complicated, we can rarely foresee the events that place us where we are, especially in terms of adversity. Grandma Lil lived in this cloud, this darkness, there was no joy in her life. She said she loved me and I believed her. I just couldn’t feel it. Nor could she feel love in her life. I was dutiful grandson. But didn’t know how to embrace this sad, gloomy person. It wasn’t until many years later I understood what all of this meant.

A little more about what really happened in Turkey. During the Great War, World War I, the Ottoman Turks were allied with Germany, fighting against the English and Russians among others. There was a front in Eastern Turkey, through the area that was historical Armenia. Some Armenians are thought to have fought alongside the Russians, over 100,000 are known to have fought in the Turkish army, as there were about 2 million Armenian citizens of the empire. Talaat Pasha as Prime Minister, among the 3 pasha’s who ruled Turkey, decided it of vital military importance to deport the entire, non-Muslim population of Turkey. It took precedence above all else. The trains were diverted to carry them to Syria and beyond. The main road to Egypt was clogged with refugees and could not be used for the army. They did shoot outright many of the men, certainly any which resisted. People were ripped from their homes with only a moment’s notice. And they marched, or where packed in livestock cars, given no food or water, steered away from any villages that could give them food or sustenance. It was in fact a death march, and for those few that reached the end, The South Syrian desert awaited them. There was no end, only death, misery and suffering. The ones that survived were children, as they were taken in by German, American, and Danish relief or Christian organizations. Thousands of extant documents in Berlin detail these events, including American nationals and members of the Entente or Allied powers of the time. The Germans watched it all happen, and while it disgusted them, the war was more important. To a large degree, it was the children, the children only that survived, as they were the ones that had a chance at protection by the foreign missionaries and aid agencies. Death by starvation and marching- that was it, and brutality, as mentioned before.

Out of roughly 7 million Armenians in the World today, only 2 million live in Armenia, what remains of their traditional homeland. The rest settled in a wide global diaspora. While Harry and Rose missed the violence of 1915, there were troubles before, never to be forgotten, coded in DNA, predispositions for depression, despair, and silence.

I’m not here to get the Turks to confess. The facts bear out the stories, yes, but I really have a hard time coping with war, especially the Syrian war. Perhaps there are very few of my ancestors left there, if any. But I see the death, the cracked skulls, the gut wounds, the pulpy, bloodied extremities. Yes, I am imaginative, but I lived it, every day I lived with my dad, whom I love very much, or remember sitting with Grandma Lil, the sadness coded into her very being. I have a hard time finding the happiness I am supposed to share with my wife and little boy. The death, and the destruction is too much. I suffer from PTSD. I have not killed a person, but I have lived with the killer, I have lived with survivors of the killed, I see it, dream about it, what can I do but medicate myself and try to understand when there is no clarity?

The existential me functions. I look around and I see the peace, but it is fragile, cuddled inside a mica shell, ready to snap. Taiwan is peaceful, very high on the individual, with high living quality indexes. 2000 miles to the East, Muslims are getting deported in Burma, the North Koreans and Trump and ready to go a few rounds, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad. Fuck it, it’s all going to Hell, it’s over, pack it in. Give up, the gasoline will stop arriving, as will the food, its Fucking over, done. How’s that for meaning? Only occasionally, do I not feel the end coming, I look into the light of my child’s eyes, I see a glimmer of hope. And KABOOM, down goes another neighborhood in Damascus, Djibouti, fill in the fucking blank. You don’t want the Truth, there is no such thing. The truth is, it’s over, give it up, the ethos of the proletariat, economic justice, somewhat pretendable equality, fuck it. Done. Ursula Le Guin was right, we cannot have our way, if that little child is not locked in the closet, starving, mottled with suppurations, alone, stinking and afraid. Because my daddy died for that flag, and those people are Godless, and they ain’t my problem, here in my bass boat, or the cultural relevant equivalent of Bass boat, that is mine- SE United States.

Fuck you, it’s over, done, the Grim Reaper has arrived and he’s coming for all of us. Don’t save yourself, give yourself to your dog, at least he’ll be fucking happy, see where justice gets you? #warforpeacetime