Eleven Years...

Eleven years ago today, we were packing to leave the beach.

Princess and I, and two of our friends, had just spent a lovely post-Labor Day week at my grandfather's beach cottage in Delaware, and our vacation was over, and we spent the morning packing up to return to our "normal" lives.  (I didn't know it at the time, but that was the last time I would ever set foot in that cottage on the beach, where I had spent part of every summer of my entire life up to that point.)  When we were finally ready to leave, and packing up the car, I turned my cell phone back on for the first time since I'd arrived a week earlier.  About a minute later, I found I had a dozen voicemails from my father, all from that morning.  I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and heard recording after recording of my father telling me that the United States was under attack, to turn on the TV, and whatever I do, not to come home.

We hadn't turned on the TV once the entire week.  When we finally turned it on that morning, we were all horrified, and dumbstruck.  And as we stood there, watching the towers burning, I remember thinking to myself, with odd clarity, That son-of-a-bitch is going to use this as an excuse to invade Iraq.  My hand to gods, that exact thought crossed my mind, followed immediately by, No - no way - that's ridiculous - even he wouldn't do something that horrible.

We decided to stay another day, because no one was quite sure what was going on at that point, and it just felt a lot safer out there in that sleepy town on the seashore, then back home, next-door to D.C.  That was one of the most surreal days of my life.  We were glued to the TV all day, watching what looked like Hell Come To The U.S.  But where we were, it was a beautiful, just absolutely gorgeous late-Summer day.  It could not have been more peaceful, or serene.  It produced a strange sort of cognitive dissonance that permeated the entire day for all of us.  Nothing we did felt right - if it fit with the scene around us, it didn't fit with the way we felt about what we knew was going on at home; and if it fit with how we felt about the attacks, then it seemed really out-of-place with where we were at the time and what we were experiencing just then.

Not knowing what else to do, we partied that night like it was the end of the world.  We did shots and got wasted and played Truth-or-Dare until we were all drunk and naked.  (Trust me, it was a lot more fun at the time than it sounds now.)

And the next day, we went back home to a world that had completely changed, in ways we would have a hard time understanding or coming to terms with for many years.  I still haven't completely come to terms with a lot of it.


Addendum:  I didn't want to make my post today about this, because I didn't want to be perceived as disrespectful.  But I feel like I have to say it, for several reasons.  It's just been on my mind a lot lately, and I don't want to bottle it up and pretend it isn't there.  And yes, some people might perceive it as disrespectful, but I don't agree with that opinion, and if I start basing my decisions about what to say or believe off of what other people might think about it, then I'm lost.  In my opinion, today is the most appropriate time to address it; the only appropriate time to address it, really.  It would seem oddly out of place on any other day, and waiting until next year will not have changed anything one way or the other, and by then I might have forgotten it, and lost the opportunity to express these feelings for good.

Let me preface this further by saying, I am not a conspiracy theorist.  I do believe that conspiracies can and do occur, but I am also a skeptic by nature, and 99% of the conspiracy theories I hear are clearly, demonstrably, ridiculous.  However, that said, there is something about the official story of what happened that day that has just never sat right with me.  I know a lot of people are going to consider me an ignorant, monstrous anti-patriot for saying this, but that doesn't change the way it appears to me.

I have never believed the story of United 93.

I am truly, truly sorry if that bothers you in any way.  I don't want to upset anyone, and that certainly has nothing to do with why I'm writing this here.  But it also doesn't do anything to change my perception of the situation, either.

It just always struck me as too neat, too tidy, too... American.  It's like something out of a storybook, or a fairytale.  Or a Hollywood movie.  It's just too perfect to be real.  The fact that they just happened to be lucky enough to crash in an uninhabited area.  The fact that the one plane that didn't hit its target just happened to be the last one, and just happened to be the one headed for the White House.  The fact that on that day, of all days, for this story that is fairly dripping with patriotism and Americans-Are-The-Greatest glory to come out, from the government, has just been a little hard for me to swallow.  From the first time I heard it, it has felt exactly like the "your dog went to live on a farm upstate" story a father would tell to his child.

I tend to follow the "Occam's Razor" style-guide when it comes to conspiracy theories:  the simplest explanation is the most likely.  That's one of the many reasons why I've never believed that 9/11 was an "inside job" (even though it would've felt so good to blame Cheney and Rumsfeld for it); the idea that the federal government could organize a conspiracy on that massive a scale is simply ludicrous, and laughably so.

But the idea that they might shoot down a passenger plane that they believed was on a suicide mission to crash into the White House, especially after three other planes had already hit their targets, and without knowing how many more there might be?  And that if they did, in fact, shoot down that plane, that they might, on such a tragic day, tell us an up-lifting story of everyday American heroism, rather than the truth - that the United States government had been forced to kill some of its own citizens, in order to prevent the murder of far more?  Those really just don't seem that far-fetched to me.  In fact, they seem kind of plausible.

And the more I've been thinking about it lately, the more I've come to realize, that if that is what happened, I wouldn't even blame them for it.

Even if the U.S. shot down United 93, they wouldn't be responsible for those people's deaths.  The terrorists who hijacked that plane, and pointed it at the White House are the ones responsible.  There is simply no argument about that.  I mean, honestly, what else should the government have done?  Let the plane destroy the White House, just so that those Americans on that plane could live another hour?  Is there anyone who could truly argue that there was some safe way to quickly bring that plane down without injuring anyone?  If the government had the means and opportunity to take down that plane - and I don't think there is any reasonable argument to be made that they didn't - then, if I'm honest with myself, I don't see what other choice they had.

And you know what?  I wouldn't even blame them for lying to us about it.  Those men and women on that plane are everyday American heroes, no matter how they died.  Just like every single person who died in New York or D.C. that day is a hero.  Don't they deserve to be remembered as heroes?  Don't they deserve better than to be remembered as innocent victims caught in the crossfire between their government and a handful of sick assholes?

Yes, you could make the argument that the lie was self-serving to the ones who told it.  And I don't necessarily think you'd be wrong.  But I think it's just as true that the lie honors the memories of those men and women in a just way; in a way fitting of Americans who gave their lives, willingly or not, so that others could live.

The official story of United 93 might be a mythology, but they deserve that, and much more.  A beautiful mythology to honor their deaths is, literally, the least we can do.

In Toto Memorium...

There's a War Memorial in the middle of my town.

It's a park, actually.  It's filled with dozens of memorials, each one for a different conflict.  Apparently, it's the only park in Maryland that commemorates soldiers from every American war; from the French and Indian War, all the way to the first Gulf War.  There's even a monument dedicated to the residents of Frederick County that lost their lives fighting the Barbary Pirates.

Apparently, there are also some soldiers buried under that park.  Which I guess is fitting, considering its purpose.

I first discovered the park a few years ago, on another Walpurgisnacht, while drifting through town in the middle of the night, in my usual state of psychedelic illumination.  It was knowledge of the bodies buried there that actually drew me to investigate it; tickling my sense of ghoulish voyeurism.  But I ended up having an entirely different experience.

I imagine most people have been to war memorials at one time or another.  Living in the D.C. area, it's an especially common occurrence; I'd lost track of the number of memorials I'd been to before I'd even made it to high school.  After a while, they just start to blend into one another, and it's easy to become desensitized to their meaning.  But, usually, those are memorials dedicated to one, single, specific war or conflict.  I found that the effect of a memorial dedicated to All American War to be powerful in the extreme, even to someone as jaded as I sometimes pretend to be.

The first effect I noticed is that there are simply so many monuments in this park.  And when you realize that each one is dedicated to a different war, then you begin to get a sense of the scope of just how much of our history we have spent trying to kill other people before they could kill us.  And you can't help but start to ask yourself, Have we ever been at peace?  Is peace even a realistic possibility?  Or is it just an idealistic fantasy we tell ourselves to soothe our sense of fear and alienation in the face of a violent, hostile, uncaring world; just like "God" and "Heaven"?  (How ironic that those two concepts in particular, so often the direct cause of so many wars, are actually responsible for all wars, in a way.  Would it be so easy for us to kill one another so often, and in such numbers, and for such ridiculous reasons, if so many of us didn't believe with such absolute certainty that they wouldn't really be ending forever, but simply traveling to "a better place?"  I would wager that Life means more to the atheist, who understands its true finality.)

But then I began to wander through the monuments, one-by-one, down through the history of our wars.  The Persian Gulf War.  The Vietnam War.  The Korean War.  Each one filled with names chisled in stone.  Names of people who lived here, in my town.  Who wandered these same streets at some point in their youth.  Some who even wandered the same school hallways.  Maybe some who had even lived on my street.  Fools and Heroes, every one.  Strong, and Doomed, and so unbelievably Brave.  Braver than I will ever be.  Braver than I ever could be.  And just boys!  Just boys.  They'd only just started.  They had so much left to do.  Just boys.  How is it possible that this country, of all countries, that coddles and insulates and over-protects its children to such a ridiculous, obsessive degree, could do all of this?  Could still be doing all of this?  It is literally, staggering.

And so many names.  So many names.  The World War II memorial is the largest in the park, by far.  A wall, ten feet high, and fifty feet long.  Entirely filled with names.  Our names.  And I wandered down that memorial, reading those names, trying to take it all in.  It was almost too much.  I could barely comprehend so many people, just from my tiny little town alone(!), all fighting and dying all over the world, not much more than sixty years ago.  How could that possibly have happened?!  And this, the most moral and just of all the wars!  The one where we were most clearly combating an Evil; the greatest Evil the modern world had ever seen.  It was still almost too much to believe.  But I finally got to the end of that immense list, and the end of that long wall... and then I realized - the list of names had stopped at "L."  Oh, no, I thought, it's not possible.  But I rounded the corner of that wall to discover, to my horror, that the entire other side was filled in, as well.

It felt like a lead weight had been inserted into my chest.  It was all I could do to keep myself from breaking down into tears right then and there.  I simply could not comprehend that amount of pain and suffering, on that enormous scale.

But the memorial that affected me most, and that I will always remember, was the memorial to the soldier boys of World War I.

I've always had a bit of a fascination with WWI.  It was, by far, the most gruesome and horrible conflict that humanity has ever seen.  The brutal combination of trench warfare and the advent of modern weaponry - the machine gun, the tank, the flamethrower, the grenade, the fighter plane, chemical warfare, etc., etc. - created an environment that was, quite simply, more akin to a meat grinder than what we think of as "war."  Almost forty MILLION people killed, wounded, or missing-in-action.  By the end of the war, Europe was running out of fighting age men.  So they were drafting men as old as seventy, and boys as young as fourteen.  More meat for the grinder.

At the time, they called it "The Great War."

The memorial dedicated to this human atrocity is obviously the oldest in the park.  It's almost certainly the first one built there.  It was sculpted in the style of classic monuments, with a bronze statue of a doughboy standing atop a large, octagonal concrete base.  Onto each of the eight sides of the base has been affixed a bronze plaque, each about three feet wide by four feet tall; and each plaque is, again, a list of names.  The names are so small that they are impossible to read without climbing up onto the memorial itself.  They had to make them that small in order to fit them all on the monument.  And unlike the other monuments in the park, which list the names of everyone involved in their conflict in any way, the WWI memorial is from an earlier time in America's history - it only lists the names of the boys who never came home.  Boys from my hometown.  Dozens and dozens and dozens of them.  All slaughtered.  Gone now, even from memory.  All that's left of them are names on a plaque, that you can't even read.

As I wandered around the memorial, trying to comprehend the weight of it all, I came upon one plaque that was different from the others.  It had fewer names, and was in a larger font.  I noticed it had a title across the top that was large enough that I could it read it:

"The Negro Men of Frederick County, Who Gave Their Lives In The Great War of 1917"

I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes, trying to come up with my response to that; to sum up how it made me feel then, or how I feel about it now.  I'm sorry, but I can't.  I just don't have the words.  I guess I should try to concentrate on feeling grateful that they were even included in the memorial at all.

I'll leave you with this thought for this Memorial Day.  Sums up my feelings pretty well.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.  And while you're out there, barbequing, and sunbathing, and partying - try to be good to someone.  Just because you can.

And just because, it's something.