Tweeting for history, Chapter 2

The twitterverse is a strange place. I happened to be on Twitter intermittently last Wednesday when the young soldier was murdered in Woolwich, and following the #Woolwich trend was, ah, fascinating.

One of the tweeters I noted was a rapper named Boya Dee (@Boyadee), who was logging comments apparently in real time:

(This is social media—you have to read from the bottom up.)

As with the case of Sohaib Athar, who live-tweeted the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Abbottabad two years ago, Boya Dee became quite the media sensation. He was apparently beating off reporters & TV presenters with a carpet-whacker.

Because of that, what news stories you can find about him are basically rehashes of his tweets. Interestingly, if you go to his Twitter feed today, all the real-time Woolwich tweets have been deleted. The Rodney King-like call for everyone to just get along is still there; everything else is gone.

Here's his header & feed from the 23rd; all the tweets have disappeared (& as of this writing, he has 25,051 followers):

So I don’t know what to make of it. Like Twitter itself, it’s pretty much just out there.

Gratitude Monday: It's called service

It’s Gratitude Monday; I’m so thankful for the men and women who have served in our armed forces—past, present and future.

Americans have an uneasy relationship with the military; we don’t like standing armies. In general, we pay our combat services crap, we treat them like potential criminals and we would prefer to pretend we don’t need them. We ask everything of them and their families.

Then we send them out to do the most ghastly jobs imaginable on our behalf.

And they do their duty.

The war writes hard

For Memorial Day I have a reading recommendation for you: Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, & the Home Front, in the Words of US Troops and their Families. It’s not an easy read, which is why I commend it to you.

Operation Homecoming was an NEA project sending writers (including Tom Clancy, Stephen Lang, Jeff Shaara and Tobias Wolff) to teach writing workshops to serving troops and their families. The sessions were held in country, on Navy vessels and at various locations around the US. The result was thousands of pages of essays, short stories, poems, letters, journal entries and emails. Editor Andrew Carroll distilled these down to this book.

If you ever want to explore the nature of war from the most granular human level, this is your introduction. You get everything, from the banality and stultifying boredom to “pink mist” (someone who steps on a land mine and explodes in a shower of flesh and blood); the sand, snakes and spiders in your tents; and having to walk a thousand yards out to the latrine in the middle of the night over rocks and stuff you don’t want to think about. And, of course, there’s the fighting and the destruction. You won’t get closer to it—without being in it—than reading these pieces.

The book starts with an account by a Navy captain at the Pentagon on 9/11 and moves on from there. It’s not precisely chronological, because Carroll didn’t want to imply that the wars went to a certain point and stopped. As we know, mission is not accomplished.

One of the last was an essay by a Marine colonel who accompanied the body of a 21-year-old Marine killed in Iraq home to his funeral in Wyoming. (It’s since been made into an HBO film, Taking Chance, starring Kevin Bacon.) From the staff at the mortuary at Dover AFB, Del., who prepare the body (including X-raying the coffin before opening—they found a live grenade in one) to the people at the various airports who treated the coffin with such respect to the funeral held in the gym of the local high school…well if you can read it without crying then you’re way tougher than I.

One of the early entries is from a doctor on a Navy hospital ship, 27 March 2003, waiting for casualties. I loved this comment: “Mike from Massachusetts thinks an attack on our ship is a near given, with a 50 percent chance of success. However, he is a proctologist and Red Sox fan and naturally pessimistic.”

There was another account by a Guardsman returning on a charter flight after his tour in Iraq. Their plane developed mechanical problems in Germany and they had to wait for the next flight, which wasn’t until the next day. Here’s what he relates:

“Thirty-six hours after our scheduled arrival, we landed in Bangor, Maine. It was 3 a.m. We were tired, hungry, and as desperate as were to get to Colorado, our excitement was tainted with bitterness. While we were originally told our National Guard deployment would be mere months, here we were—369 days later—frustrated and angry.

“As I walked off the plane, I was taken aback; in the small, dimly lit airport, a group of elder veterans were there waiting for us, lined up one by one to shake our hands. Some were standing, others were confined to wheelchairs, and all of them wore their uniform hats. Their now-feeble right hands stiffened in salutes, their left hands holding coffee, snacks, and cell phones for us.

“As I made my way through the line, each man thanking me for my service, I choked back tears. Here we were, returning from one year in Iraq where we had portable DVD players, three square meals, and phones, being honored by men who had crawled through mud for years with little more than the occasional letter from home. A few of them appeared to be veterans of the war in Vietnam, and I couldn’t help but think of how they were treated when they came back to the U.S., and yet here they were to support us.

“These soldiers—many of whom had lost limbs and comrades—shook our hands proudly, as if our service could somehow rival their own.

“We later learned that this VFW group had waited for more than a day in the airport for our arrival.

“…Looking back on my year in Iraq, I can honestly say that my perception of the experience was changed; not so much by the soldiers with whom I served—though I consider them my saving grace—but by the soldiers who welcomed us home. For it is those men who reminded me what serving my country is truly about.”

We’re winding down the war in Afghanistan, and they tell us that Iraq is…a success? Over? Whatever.

But you should read Operation Homecoming. Really.

The war? It was in all the movies...

This being the Memorial Day weekend in the US, not at the moment having any home DIY projects to attend to and being disinclined to go shopping or incinerate slabs of meat outdoors, I thought I’d commemorate the holiday by listing some of my top picks in war movies.

Back in college a visiting Russian professor of films said something that really stuck with me: you can tell a lot about the prevailing attitudes towards the nation and the world by how the motion pictures of a country view some iconic events or eras. The example she gave for the US was westerns—think the 50s and 60s and any flick with John Wayne; pure Manifest Destiny. Starting in the 70s think Little Big Man or The Wild Bunch; all sorts of ambiguities seeping through. (For the Soviet Union she cited the Russian Revolution and the Great Patriotic War.)

But I think this holds true also for how we (and especially we in America) portray any war—those films are a sign of the times, regardless of which war, exactly, a picture is about.

Anyway, here are the ones I particularly recommend (in order of conflict chronology):

Henry V, 1989. Yes, it’s Shakespeare, but the depiction of the battle of Agincourt is absolutely stunning, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Kenneth Branagh’s take on the story whips Laurence Olivier’s ass—that 1944 propaganda piece is effete and antiseptic by comparison. (Don’t get me wrong—Henry V itself is propaganda; Shakespeare was pumping up the Tudors big-time when he wrote the play. But Olivier just over-egged the pudding.) And this one was made before brilliance and success expanded Branagh’s ego to the point he permanently lodged his head up his own butt.

(George MacDonald Fraser, in The Hollywood History of the World, waxes poetic about Olivier's film. The book was published before Branagh's version came out. I hope Fraser saw the light and would have amended a second edition.)

Everyone knows Henry’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech at Agincourt, but I really like his warning to the burghers of Harfleur; it’s very like what you’d expect from a commander who’s pissed off by civic resistance and really wants nothing so much as a hot bath and a bed. He basically describes their choices, up to them: you can surrender now & lose nothing but some face and supplies, or you can continue fighting and I’ll personally see that my soldiers make Harfleur a wasteland.

"What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?"

Carthage, anyone?

(BTW—they surrender.)

Napoléon, 1929. Abel Gance’s film was meant to be the first of six chronicling the life of the Emperor of the French; he never got the readies to complete the series. Pity, as this one is just brilliant. Back in the 80s Francis Ford Coppola rediscovered the film and reissued it with a score written and conducted in live orchestral accompaniment by Carmine Coppola. You can get it on DVD.

Gettysburg, 1993. Yes, it’s long, and a Ted Turner vanity-piece. But it’s really a good overview of the seminal battle of the War Between the States (or “the war of northern aggression”, as my thesis director referred to it). Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee is cringeworthy, but let that go. Focus on Jeff Bridges as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a professor of classics at Bowdoin College who turned out to have a superb gift for command.

(Stephen Lang as George E. Pickett is also excellent. Following the criminally futile charge up Cemetery Ridge ordered by Marse Robert, when Lee urges Pickett to reform his division for defense, Lang’s delivery of the reply is scathing: “General Lee, I have no division.”)

What’s particularly good about Gettysburg is some of the detail. When Chamberlain gives the order to fix bayonets you hear that metallic clicking sound all up the line. Listen to that and think about what was going through the minds of the 20th Maine Regiment: you fix bayonets because you know the fighting is going to be hand-to-hand, you’re going to meet your enemy face to face and blade to blade.

(Forget the prequel to Gettysburg. Gods and Generals is all over the place. And you can discuss Gone with the Wind amongst yourselves.)

The other WBTS film of note is Glory, 1989. This is a stunning picture, about the 54th Massachusetts regiment, a unit of African Americans commanded by white officers. It’s a good study not only of the war, but also of the psychological strains imposed by putting freed slaves through the rigor of military training. Think about it: you spend a good part of your life having every aspect of your existence dictated by a master; you escape one way or another & start experiencing the new world of freedom; and then you join the army, which demands you surrender your life to your commander.

Zulu, 1964. Leave aside the fact that this was Stanley Baker’s paean to the 24th Foot, a Welsh outfit, and that there are some extraneous bits that make no sense storywise. It portrays the defense of a small station by 140 British soldiers against a force of more than 4000 Zulu warriors, fresh from a major victory against the Brits at Islandlhwana.

Zulu has, without question, the single best battle scene ever filmed. As in Henry V, the battle is filth, blood, fury, luck, fear and some degree of strategy and tactics. The camera focuses in on the three lines of riflemen formed by the two commanders as they alternate firing—front rank, fire; second rank, fire; third rank, fire. Then fire, fire, fire, fire. Focus on the faces and the gunpowder smoke. When the shooting stops, the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the pile of twitching bodies mere steps from the firing lines.

During the aftermath, Colour-Sergeant Bourne whispers, “It’s a miracle!” To which one of the commanders replies, “If it's a miracle, Colour-Sergeant, it's a short-chamber Boxer Henry point 45 caliber miracle.”

(Something I discovered only recently was that Colour-Sergeant Frank Bourne, the actual Colour-Sergeant Bourne, was 25 at the time of the battle. Gesu.)

World War I got more attention from filmmakers outside the US than here. Of the movies out there, the one you must see is Gallipoli, 1981. If you know nothing about the actual campaign, it was an attempt by the Brits to unhinge the alliance among the Central Powers by invading Turkey. As Kitchener refused to shake loose any troops from the Western Front, most of the invading forces were Australians and New Zealanders. It was bungled from the git-go.

Gallipoli is Peter Weir’s homage to those Anzacs who fought and died there. It stars a very young Mel Gibson (back in the days when he acted rather than postured) and is utterly heartbreaking. Weir is brilliant and he had a devastating story to tell.

La Grande Illusion, 1937, is an interesting study. Here’s an example of that understanding-national-views-thru-war-films thing: Jean Renoir made this picture about French POWs in the First World War during the immediate run up to the Second World War, when France was really struggling with how to deal with an increasingly bellicose Germany. No one really wanted to go to war again, and Grande Illusion speaks to this.

The Shooting Party, 1985, isn’t strictly speaking a war film; it’s a pre-war film. If you want a taste of what that last summer before the four years of carnage was like, this is your introduction.

And it’s taken its hits, but I like the 2001 TV mini, The Lost Battalion. Again—filth, fear and men carrying out their duty because that’s what’s expected of them, no matter the cost. Colonel Whittlesey collecting the dog tags of his dead men at the end sums it up visually.

And King of Hearts, 1966, about a British soldier holing up in an insane asylum, is quite the commentary on the Vietnam War.

There’s an embarrassment of riches on World War II. Saving Private Ryan, 1998, was Spielberg’s apotheosis, and it’s fine. But check out The Big Red One, 1980. This is Samuel Fuller’s cinematic memoir of his own experiences, and it’s very good indeed.

I also like A Midnight Clear, 1992, about a small group of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. It’s focused and I’m getting frostbite just remembering it.

Most of the films on my list are outside the immediate post-war years, because from the 40s to the end of the 60s WWII movies were pretty one-dimensional. One exception in my mind is 1951's Go for Broke! It's still gung-ho, but it's the subject matter that sets it apart: the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Like the 54th Mass, the 442 was all-volunteers of the disenfranchised: a Japanese-American unit, commanded by white officers. It was the most decorated unit in the history of the US military; many of the soldiers had families in concentration camps, yet they still volunteered to serve.

Go for Broke! is the Hollywoodized version, so in a purely filmic sense it's pretty much second rate. And way too much is made of Van Johnson as the commander. But the rest of the cast is largely unknown Japanese-American actors (not Chinese or caucasians with heavy make-up) and the story is mostly true overall, following the men from training to being awarded a Presidential Unit Citation from Harry S. Truman. Until a better telling comes along, this'll have to do.

(There's plenty of dreck out there on WWII. The Longest Day, 1962, and Valkyrie, 2008, come to mind as examples, both more concerned about star turns than verisimilitude. There are also a number of fine films like Best Years of Our Lives, 1946; Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957; The Great Escape, 1963; Das Boot, 1981; Soldier of Orange, 1977; and Windtalkers, 2002. You could even count The Third Man, 1949.)

Empire of the Sun, 1987, takes us to the Pacific. It’s Spielberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel, and it’s a very powerful account of a young British boy separated from his parents during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, and, who survives several years in captivity.

(I just this week read Ballard's memoir, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton. I think I understand more of the psychology of Jim, the main character of Empire, and his distance from everyone around him.)

Hope and Glory, 1987, is John Boorman’s film of his own experiences as a boy in England during WWII. Perhaps because it’s so personal, & seen from the viewpoint of a pre-teen, it’s very human.

Finally, okay—it’s TV, and it’s a mini-series; but you can’t do better than Band of Brothers, 2001. It follows Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. Each episode is filtered through one of the men’s viewpoint; it’s extraordinarily powerful.

One of the seminal moments is toward the end of the war, when Easy Company is traveling in deuce-&-a-halfs into Germany, passing columns of bedraggled German POWs, walking & in horse carts. One of the soldiers just can’t stand it any more. He stands up & shrieks at the Germans (who, exhausted and dazed, don’t even notice):

“Hey, you! That's right, you stupid Kraut bastards! That's right! Say hello to Ford, and General fuckin' Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum! What the fuck are we doing here?”

I think by 2001 we were far enough away from WWII to produce something as thoughtful as Band of Brothers. You can take a look at almost any movie from the 1940s through the 60s and pretty much find the John Wayne western viewpoint.

There’ve been a few films about the Korean War, although I’ve seen very few of them. M*A*S*H’s 1970 subject matter is Korea, but it’s actually about Vietnam.

And I have to say that we’re probably still too close to that war to produce anything but polemics. Or maybe I’m just too close to it to be able to bear anything that comes out about it. But look: The Deer Hunter, 1978; Coming Home, 1978: Apocalypse Now, 1979; Platoon, 1986; Full Metal Jacket, 1987; Born on the 4th of July, 1989—they may be stunning or stirring, but they’re all screeds.

The thing about my picks is that none of them (except possibly Grande Illusion) speaks to the "gallantry" of war. There's a moment in Zulu when the retreating warriors salute the remaining Brits, but they mostly give you a sense of what one of humanity’s oldest activity is about, what it costs. 

Something to think about on Memorial Day.

Nine point seven (except for the East German judge)

I’m ending Friday of a strange week with something that’s strangely compelling.

Don’t know about you, but I needed that.

Killing the boys with the luggage

The incident in London on Wednesday is horrifying for so many reasons. You know—two men (one a Muslim convert) attacked a young man outside Woolwich Barracks with knives and cleavers (maybe a machete), hacking him to death before anyone could stop them. Some stories say the victim was beheaded.

Then they lounged around making statements to witnesses with video cameras. Bloody hands, bloody knives, bloody minds.

Police responded to 999 calls, but they had to wait for Armed Response Units (ARUs) before they could take down the alleged murderers. British police do not carry firearms.

Today the Ministry of Defence (MOD) released the name of the victim—Drummer Lee Rigby, 25, serving in the 2^nd Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. He leaves behind a wife and a two-year-old son.

Rigby was 25, and allegedly targeted because he was wearing a tee-shirt for the charity Help for Heroes, which raises funds to mitigate the circumstances of military men and women wounded in the line of duty.

He was 25. 

When I saw that, I was reminded of the scene in Henry V, as the soldiers discover the slaughtered boys who’d been sent to the rear of the battle, with the baggage. Fluellen cries, “Kill the boys and the luggage! 'Tis expressly against the law of arms. ‘Tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offert, in your conscience now, is it not?”

Oh, indeed it is—like hacking to death a lad in a tee-shirt.

I look at that face and I weep.

Phenomenal voice, phenomenal woman

You know, I’m not sure where I came across Ruthie Foster, but she’s got one of those go-to voices, warm and sweet as honey on a sore throat. I’ve been hitting her rather heavily, lately, because—well, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

And one of my favorites is her take on Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman”. When Angelou has recited it, she’s been high-energy and very close to attitudinal.

(As an aside, one of my colleagues at the Monolithic Enterprise Software Company once remarked to me, “We gotta get you some attitude.” I replied, “I’d have thought that attitude was the one thing with which I was singularly well supplied.” She shot back, “We gonna get you some sistah-attitude.” That’s what Angelou expresses.)

In Foster’s hands, though, it’s languid and inviting. She absolutely knocks it out of the park.

Damn.

Insuring health?

Anthem BCBS is the worst possible health insurance you can have while still having insurance. I’ve loathed them since I was in Virginia; they had the lock on the small-organization/individual market there, and they do here in California, too.

They’re snotty for both member and provider to deal with. On a recent six week round of me chasing up a claim, I was lied to by three separate member reps. Three separate, contradictory lies about the status of a claim that everyone knew in advance they were going to deny.

But imagine my surprise to receive an envelope in the mail announcing Big Discounts for Anthem Members! And finding these enclosed:

Hey, you useless example of everything that’s wrong with the US healthcare system—I do not want coupons for $1 off ice cream or mayonnaise from my insurer. I’m paying you stupid money every month for you to process my claims in accordance with our contract without a load of either stick or lies.

Imagine that!

The big questions

Attention grocery industry. I have a couple of questions for you.

Why can’t you package feta cheese in some quantity that a single person could actually use up before it starts resembling something that needs to be disposed of as a hazardous material? I’ve had to throw away more half-finished tubs of feta than the entire Greek army.

& I look very suspicious hanging out in the cheese section of Trader Joe’s, soliciting: “Psst—hey, cutie! Wanna go halvsies on some feta?”

Question numero second: Why are English cucumbers so freaking expensive? Seriously? It’s not like they’re really imported from England, you know. The last one I bought was labeled “Hecho en Mexico”.

They cost something like six times as much as a regular, domestic cucumber & what’s up with that?

Someone? Anyone? Bueller?

Gratitude Monday: Serendipitous friendships

Gratitude Monday again & I’m really happy about the kind of serendipity between friends that caused me to email one Friday morning to suggest we get together at the weekend because we’ve not had a long natter for a while.

& her to reply that she’d been thinking the same thing, & did I want to come over for dinner, as she “does a mean filet mignon”?

Well, not just yeah, but hell, yeah.

She’s a UX designer & her development team was given a long weekend because they just finished one hellish four-week pedal-to-the-metal spring, & are about to start another one today. (For those not in the software business, just think of the most intense, complex all-encompassing project you’ve ever worked on; quadruple it; condense it down to four weeks of ten to 16-hour days; & add several metric tons of caffeinated beverages & pizzas.) So making dinner for a friend (i.e., me) & talking about non-software topics for several hours made a nice change for her.

& carrying on an extended conversation that did not involve the words “latte, please” made a nice change for me.

Plus—dinner was scrummy.

So I’m really grateful for friends who look out for each other.