Chapter 52
It's funny how a bunch of Joes can endure all
this and still keep a tight hold on the continuity
of normal living. They know that what they left was
not ideal and what they will go back to will
not be ideal and that the chances are they will
never live to see anything ideal ever realized. But they
know that what they had was substantially better than what
they have now, and they trust their memories to relinquish
the bad and retain and even improve upon the good.
And so they talk and think and dream of a
scheme of things they would like to fit themselves into,
and even though a tabulation of their desire would seem
like a compendium of trivia, it all adds up to
what is necessary and fitting and worth their holding onto.
The words they use to express these sentiments are in
the accents of the North and the South and the
Middlewest and the Southwest and New England and the coast,
and they are the blasphemous and obscene and the terrifyingly
simple words that men use when they can't quite put
their fingers on what they mean and when they haven't
got time for fancy stuff and when the immediate events
are in themselves too heavy with drama for elaborate dramatics.
Nobody stands up and strikes an attitude and says, "This
is what I'm fighting for." All the phrases, all the
mouthings, all the ideas in the world are patently ridiculous
when the only thing that counts is keeping alive from
one day to the next. And why should it be
a matter of conjecture in the first place about why
they are fighting? They are grown men, not driveling morons
or romantic poets or analytical highbrows. They'd don't need a
glib spokesman to tell them that their country is involved
in a war and that in accordance with a legal
provision they have been called upon to fight that war.
It's like paying a license fee or filing an income
tax return or respecting the value of a piece of
paper that claims to be a dollar. It's law, it's
government, it's a duty of citizenship. To them it's absurd
and wholly unreasonable to say that they have traveled five
thousand miles to protect their homes and families when they
know perfectly well they could have better homes and happier
families by not going anywhere at all. Ask a Jap
what he fights for and he will tell you that
he has also come a long way to protect his
home and family. So there you have it. Americans and
Japs fighting for the things they had before they started
to fight and giving them up in order to fight
for them. Christ, it doesn't make sense. The ordinary American
wants no part of a Jap's house, and the common
Jap would be miserable living in America. And yet one
of them commits an act of aggression in response to
an order, and the other rises to retaliate in accordance
with national conscription and they both endeavor to kill each
other when commanded to do so. There are little people
and there are big people, and the little people are
in the overwhelming majority, but just the same they always
do what the big people tell them to do. And
that is at once the silliest and the most outrageously
impertinent form of tyranny the world has ever known, for
it is the persecution of the many by the few.
Battle doesn't determine who is right. Only who is left.
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