Just bottle the smell of war

By DOLPH HONICKER

It matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what president holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers: we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how; but we intend to keep it.

--Frederick T. Martin,

The Passing of the Idle Rich (1911)

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

--Jay Gould, railroad financier

Virtually every American wartime president from George Washington on has expressed abhorrence for the killings and atrocities that go on. This current president, George W. Bush, and his chicken hawk vice president, Richard Cheney, are the exceptions.

This administration does not even question the use of torture.

The closest either man has come to hearing a shot fired in anger is Cheney's mistaking a hunting partner for a quail.

As our treasury sinks as deeply into the red as the blood being shed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush blithely demands that Congress pluck money out of thin air to pay for the endless carnage, unheard of during previous wars -- but shun the wallets of his wealthy benefactors.

There's no rationing; shop 'til you drop; no dollar-a-year industrialists as there were in World War II, which right-wing pundits favorably compare to Iraq by citing the lower number of deaths. It's the high percentage of permanently wounded that's going to hit home in the long run.

While Cheney is off getting a heart tune-up, Bush visits a military rehab center to play video war games with some of the legless and armless warriors.

Video games. If this is as close as Bush can get to war, I suggest he read a novel, Once An Eagle, by Anton Myrer, who graduated from Boston Latin and entered Harvard College in 1941, but left to join the Marines soon after Pearl Harbor. He served more than three years in the Pacific, took part in the invasion of Guam, rose to the rank of corporal, and was wounded.

The book, first published in 1968 by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, was published by the Army War College Foundation in 1997.

The Army War College? Yes. The novel, about the making of a general, Sam Damon, is one of the textbooks. Why?

Listen to Army Gen. John W. Vessey Jr. (ret.):

"First and foremost, this is a consummate anti-war book. ... His descriptions of combat based on his personal experiences engage all our senses. Myrer forces us to smell and feel the battlefield as well as hear and see it. His narrations horrify, provoke and frighten. No one who has experienced combat directly, or even vicariously, would seek it."

If you wonder what America is today with Democratic and Republican presidential candidates strutting across a stage like semi-trained seals, spitting out sound bites, each vowing not to raise taxes, you have to ask: How do you pay cops, firefighters, teachers and, yes, troops without taxes?

Consider these prescient words by Damon's mentor, Gen. Caldwell, on page 537:

"... what would emerge from (postwar America) would be a vast, impersonal juggernaut of industrial cartels, a mountainous administrative bureaucracy and a prestigious military junta -- and beneath these, far beneath, an emotional and highly subservient citizenry whose attitudes and actions would be created, aroused, manipulated, subverted by the roar of the mass media ... whoever rode this wave deftly, keeping just ahead of the boiling crest -- would hold the future securely in his fine right hand ..."

If only there could be a way to bottle the stench of the Iraqi war and release it full blast in the Oval Office, Congress and boardrooms of arms manufacturers.

Fortunately, Myrer's Colonel Beaupre has captured it all during a jungle battle. Don't turn away. Read:

"It was impossible to walk without stepping on the bodies--this tumult of crushed heads and sheared-off legs and tight bouquets of guts flowering from ruptured bellies. Flies clung in loose, weaving masses, like slick blued bees swarming; the whole valley hummed with their odious presence. Maggots worked in gross struggling chains at the gaping wounds, bloated and intent. ...

"If you could bottle it, Beaupre thought savagely, swallowing, fighting the hot clutch of nausea with all his might, trying not to breathe ... This smell. If you could bottle it, store it in some tanks just outside Washington or New York City or Chicago; and then when the drums began to beat, when the eminent statesmen rose in all their righteous choler and the news rags and radio networks started their impassioned chant, if you could release a few dozen carboys on the Senate floor, the executive offices of Du Pont de Memours, Boeing ... the trading posts on Wall Street; and seal off the exits. Repeat every three hours as needed. Rx. By God, that would take some of the fun out of it. If you could only bottle it and feed it to the fire-eating sons of bitches, jam it down their throats."

Don't leave yet, Mr. Bush and Cheney for Myrers has a special message for you. Listen to his character named Bill Bowdoin:

"Every war has to be a gleaming crusade, with a hovering Grail of Joseph of Arimathea for only the holiest of eyes to behold. When the plain fact of the matter is the war resembles nothing so much as a big corporation going full blast, with its board of directors meetings and reports and prospectuses, its graphs and charts and shipping sections, layout and advertising--right down to the final product."

Anton Myrer spent 30 years researching and writing his novel. He'd never heard of Bush, Cheney, Haliburton, tag-team presidential debates and sound bites. But he sure got it right.

Dolph Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer.

Pythian Press.