October 31, 2004
quickly
finished the marine corps marathon in three hours, fifty minutes, and forty-five seconds.
1464th out of 22,000 registered runners. who knows how many ran? how many finished?
if 22,000 started, i finished in the sixth percentile. someone told me there were 18,000, which puts me in the eighth.
i'm perfectly thrilled with my time. and i had a wonderful time in my first marathon. better weather would have been nice. sunny and mid-seventies? no, thanks.
more later. many many many thanks for the support from our good friends, whose patience with us for beginning most sentences with, "on our long run this sunday..." has been remarkable.
[update]
1,464th of 16,385 finishers - 8.9%
1,187th of 9, 689 male finishers - 12%
212th of 1,577 30-34 year-old male runners - 13.4%
i've only seen anecdotal reports on temperatures, but i do know that crossing the 14th street bridge at mile twenty-one was pretty warm and that by the end i had seen many people laid out flat under the swarm of medics. one runner in my training group apparently got an IV drip at mile twenty-one. i've heard anything from 70 degrees to near eighty. i'd put good money on upper-seventies. after months of training runs on cold mornings and a nearly record-breaking cool summer, yesterday's temps were awful. apparently the race winner's time was the third-worst victory on record.
thanks for the barrage of nice comments already. so thougtful...
note: natalie says she'll write her marathon story soon.
additional note: go, kerry!
October 21, 2004
the winter soldiers
The commonplace notion that both Presidential campaigns are by now competing storybooks, in which John Kerry is either an uncertain internationalist or a thoughtful statesman and George Bush is either a brainless crusader or a resolute man of faith, seems to have surrendered to a discourse of outright mendacity. Apparently, John Kerry loves nuclear terrorists and hopes we all die, and George Bush has kept Christopher Reeve from resurrection.
I confess that rehearsing that sort of back-and-forth is the worst sort of false balance, so I’ll apologize for behaving like NPR and not adhering to the Halperin memo and get on with it.
John Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the response it has engendered has become an especially frustrating indication of this season's reading away from the text.
His critics insist that he commits the sin of disloyalty. Perhaps more significant, they interpret his testimony as a blanket indictment of all Americans who fought in Vietnam. If anything, his testimony accomplishes the opposite; it indicts the war's structures and provides an important outlet for those who had already made their first-hand accounts of war crimes public.
The text of Kerry's presentation and discussion simply does not accommodate the view in which the returning soldier betrays his peers. An uncritical pass at the transcript might leave the reader with the (accurate) sense that Kerry believed war crimes were a regular phenomenon in Vietnam and that a large number of soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen were guilty of committing them. A careful survey of his language makes it fairly clear that his accounts of atrocities (and that over-worn noun regains some of its precision in Kerry’s examples) are his reports of the testimony of others. That is to say, John Kerry did not tell this committee that he witnessed these horrors. He makes the context of his report more than clear.
Most important, reminiscent of Michael Herr’s meditation on interpreting useless maps in Dispatches, Kerry knows that Vietnam is a mediated story, one that doesn't surrender too easily to control:
There is one other body that has tremendous power in this country, which is a favorite topic of Vice President Agnew and I would take some agreement with him. That would be the fourth estate. The press. I think the very reason that we veterans are here today is the result partially of our inability to get our story out through the legitimate channels.That is to say, for instance, I held a press conference here in Washington, D.C., some weeks ago with General Shoup, with General Hester, with the mother of a prisoner of war, the wife of a man who was killed, the mother of a soldier who was killed, and with a bilateral amputee, all representing the so-called silence majority, the silent so-called majority which the President used to perpetuate the war, and because it was a press conference and an antiwar conference and people simply exposing ideas we had no electronic media there.
I called the media afterward and asked them why and the answer was, from one of the networks, it doesn't have to be identified, "because, is, new business is really partly entertainment business visually, you see, and a press conference like that is not visual."
Here is the context of Kerry’s mediation:
I am here as one member of the group of one thousand, which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony.
…in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes … not isolated incidents but war crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
I just know, I don't want to get into the game of saying I represent everybody over there, but let me try to say as straightforwardly as I can, we had an advertisement, ran full page, to show you what the troops read. It ran in Playboy and the response to it within two and a half weeks from Vietnam was 1,200 members. We received initially about 50 to 80 letters a day from troops there. We now receive about 20 letters a day from troops arriving at our New York office. Some of these letters- and I wanted to bring some down, I didn't know we were going to be testifying here and I can make them available to you- are very, very moving, some of them written by hospital corpsmen on things, on casualty report sheets which say, you know, "Get us out of here." "You are the only hope we have got." "You have got to get us back; it is crazy." We received recently 80 members of the 101st Airborne signed up in one letter. Forty members from a helicopter assault squadron, crash and rescue mission signed up in another one.
And the by now well-known account of what the winter soldiers said:
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
The uproar is that Kerry made up horrors in order to betray his fellow soldiers. Let's see how much sense this makes. The hypothetical "you" goes to war. You believe the war is both unjust and unsuccessful (Kerry testifies to both). Upon return, you hear accounts of unspeakable crimes. Those accounts are made in public. They do not contradict your own sense of the war, given your own experiences. You, as a leader-spokesman, report to a Senate committee that you have heard these accounts and offer a brief catalogue.
Are you a traitor?
Maybe I'm guilty of fashioning a straw-ish man. Maybe the problem is that Kerry didn't keep his mouth shut because he didn't witness a rape. Perhaps he should have only testified to events that took place in his presence. Even if he'd taken that approach, though, the bulk of his argument, that the Vietnam war had become a disaster, the hopeless manifestation of its messianic architects, would stand. His presentation of supporting evidence, borne of hundreds of winter soldier witnesses, only bolsters that argument.
Why Kerry testified:
…we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
An exemplary case of the question of culpability:
Senator [Claiborne] Pell: Wouldn’t you agree with me though that what [Lieutenant Calley] did in herding old men, women, and children into a trench and then shooting them was a little bit beyond the perimeter of even what has been going on in this war and that that action should be discouraged. There are other actions not that extreme that have gone on and have been permitted. If we had not taken action or cognizance of it, it would have been even worse. It would have indicated we encouraged this kind of action.Kerry: My feeling, Senator, on Lieutenant Calley is what he did quite obviously was a horrible, horrible, horrible thing and I have no bone to pick with the fact hat he was prosecuted. But I think that in this question you have to separate guilt from responsibility, and I think clearly the responsibility for what has happened there lies elsewhere. I think it lies with the men who designed free fire zones. I think it lies with the men who encourage body counts…
More on responsibility and the abdication thereof:
The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never even leave their dead. These men [McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others] have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputation bleaching behind them in the sun in this country.Senator Pell: It is interesting, speaking of veterans and speaking of statistics, that the press has never picked up and concentrated on quite interesting votes in the past. In those votes you find the majority of hawks were usually nonveterans and the majority of doves were usually veterans.
Sound familiar?
I'm surprised by how eagerly this entry bows to the authority of the text, something this reader rarely treats so reverently, particularly given all of the discursive pressures on Congressional testimony. Then again, even the most ardently anti-foundationalist part of me gets that this text has become an uncentered center, revised so recklessly that it has been written over by another story altogether. If you believe John Kerry was a commie-traitor-hippie-dope-fiend, fine. I don't pretend to want to change your mind. If, however, you believe he was disloyal to his comrades and that this document supports that view, you might look elsewhere for evidence.
October 19, 2004
the documentary record
The past three bus rides have been spent re-reading John Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I am utterly astonished by the fact that some have called that testimony traitorous at worst and un-brotherly at best. Later, I'd like to post a more thougtful response (at the very least, much should be said about the -- surprise! -- ways Kerry's and Senator Fulbright's observations might easily apply to Mr. Bush's dangerous folly in Iraq). For now, only the most basic, the most unadorned, will do: those who call that testimony improper would be well served by more attentive reading.
