"This Republic of Suffering"
A sermon by Mr. Ted Fetter from the UU Congregation of Princeton
May 24, 2009
SERMON:
As our nation observes Memorial Day this year, we must think again
about the ways in which our country calls on its citizens to serve,
and especially how our country calls on its citizens to consider
military duty and to risk a soldier's death. This is a tough subject
for many of us, especially in this time of long, unwanted, and unclear
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Let me be clear that I am one of millions who oppose the war in
Iraq and are dubious about the war in Afghanistan. I am convinced
that the war in Iraq reflects bad foreign policy, badly carried
out. The war in Afghanistan is more confusing, with any notion of
success seemingly impossible to identify or measure. Clearly, both
wars carry an enormous cost. Let us focus today on the human cost.
Thousands of those who have volunteered for military duty are back
on their second tour of duty, their third tour, and perhaps more,
risking again the loss and the grieving which war inevitably requires
many to suffer.
A remarkable history book was published a year ago called This
Republic of Suffering, by an American historian who is now the
president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust. She writes of
the Civil War and particularly of death in the Civil War. Her account
is important as we try to understand the meaning of war, the meaning
of the suffering and the death, and the result that emerges afterwards.
As Faust reminds us, the impact of the Civil War on American society
was huge. More than three million Americans were soldiers, about
100 times the number of soldiers in the Revolution. An equivalent
percentage today would be 30 million. And the losses from the Civil
War were truly staggering, having an impact never seen before or
since in the United States. The deaths directly due to the war,
on the battlefield or from disease, are estimated at 620,000, or
about 2% of the population of the United States at the time. That
is six times more than the American casualty rate in World War II.
Such a toll had to change the nation, and it did. First, of course,
with the use of photography, Americans actually saw war for the
first time, terrible and cruel. There is a quote from the New York
Times on Matthew Brady's pictures of the Battle of Antietam, "If
Brady has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and
along the streets, he has done something very like it." Parallels
are plain to the Vietnam War, said to be the first war fought on
television, and to the war in Iraq, when embedded reporters at the
start, seemingly many years ago, allowed us a virtual participation
in the actual battles. But there was more. The Civil War was the
first in which Americans paid special honor to those who fought
and especially to those who died. Americans had to find the mechanisms
to manage the deaths that accumulated - the process of dying, killing,
burying, numbering, and remembering those who sacrificed, both the
soldiers who died and the loved ones who grieved. Means were developed
to keep records, to identify the dead, to inform the families, and
to honor them. A system of national cemeteries grew up after the
war, and more than 300,000 Union soldiers were reinterred in 74
national cemeteries.
And the nation created a day each year to honor the dead. In 1868
General John Logan ordered that May 30 be set aside as the date
"for strewing flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of
comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion."
Decoration Day later became Memorial Day as we observe it today.
But what does it all mean? What does that service and those deaths
signify for us? Faust's book helps us to understand the Civil War
experience, and it very much established a culture we recognize
today. The prominent Unitarian Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. had much
to say on this topic. Holmes fought in the Civil War and was wounded
three times, before he returned to Massachusetts to undertake a
prominent legal career capped by three decades on the United States
Supreme Court. In a famous Memorial Day address in 1895, he gave
us these three insights about his military service:
--War, when you are it, is horrible and dull. It is only when time
has passed that you see that its message was divine.
--I do not know what is true. But in the midst of doubt, in the
collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, and that
is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to
throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in
a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which
he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the
use.
--We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt,
we still feel, the passion of life to its top. This is also part
of the soldier's faith: having known great things, to be content
with silence.
Faust's new book expands on these thoughts. The war itself was
mostly a time of waiting for something to happen - sometimes anything
to happen - waiting in the worst of environments, with mud and misery
and disease. And yet when battle occurred it was awful, horrible
and filled with awe. Bodies piled up, wounded lay untreated, and
the work of friends and comrades was to deal with the wounded and
bodies, and to notify the loved ones.
A strong concept of the Good Death formed in the Civil War and
remains in our culture today. Soldiers died for God and Country.
One Southern soldier wrote, "I come into this war to lay down
my life. My first desire should be not that I might escape death
but that my death should help the cause of the right to triumph."
A soldier's family had to know that he "died well," with
exemplary behavior of patriotism and duty and with faith. Thousands
of letters back home told of soldiers' bravery and of their willingness
to die in the cause.
The concept of the Good Death was most memorably enunciated by
Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. We all know the words. "The
brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated
this ground, far above our poor power to add or detract. It is for
us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. From
these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion." The idea
that soldiers died so the nation might live, that the obligation
of citizens to the state included a willingness to risk their lives
in fighting its battles, came to be widely adopted in the Civil
War, and it has firmly rooted in our national culture.
But of course as the war pressed on it became more and more difficult
to assume that there was any divine plan in waging it. Both sides
considered the war to be just and right. The Union fought for the
preservation of the nation itself and, later, for the freedom of
the enslaved and even for the idea that all men [and women] are
created equal. Noble causes, indeed. The Confederacy fought to resist
the invasion of their homeland, and to battle those who would change
their way of life. Also, potentially noble, from a different perspective.
Yes, it can be noble to die for a cause, but as the sheer number
of dead mounted, it became more and more difficult not to react
to the carnage. Soldiers at times coped with the suffering by becoming
indifferent; they became hardened or calloused to the death around
them. "Battle changed the living to the dead, humans into animals,
and strong men into boys crying like children," Faust writes.
The survivors, of course, could be just as dehumanized as the dead
in this process, and many thousands of soldiers were never the same
for the rest of their lives. Today we share real concern about Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder, the effect of war's experience on the survivors.
Military suicides and acts of violence are growing ever more common.
Death was no longer merely an individual event, Faust observes;
its actuality became the most widely shared experience of the war.
There was a profound balance between the individuality of each death
and the mass experience of Death. The strong efforts after the war
to identify as many fallen soldiers as possible, to leave the fewest
number unknown in unmarked graves showed a commitment to the individual's
experience. Honoring individual soldiers showed respect for the
wives and parents and children for whom it was intolerable for their
loss to remain unrecognized. But that was only part of the story.
Counting the casualties and fully accounting for everyone aggregated
the suffering. The statistics give us language to express the magnitude
of the destruction. They make the loss part of one national experience.
Both aspects were important in the Civil War, and both remain so
today.
So, in the end, what can we take from the Civil War in trying to
understand the meaning of military service and sacrifice? The question
was asked throughout that war, and Faust asks it repeatedly in her
book. She prints the lyrics from a song of the war years. Entitled
"My God! What is this all for," the verse asks:
Oh great god! What means this carnage,
Why this fratricidal strife,
Brethren made in your own image
Seeking for each other's life?
Neither that song nor much else Faust cites offers a satisfactory
answer. We fight for God and country, they all said. But of course
Lincoln pointed out that both sides prayed to the same God and both
sides invoked God's aid against each other. It has been said that
war will never decide who is right; it can only determine who is
left. In the Civil War experience, eventually the memorials to the
event itself, to those who suffered and died, and to the larger
nationalism the war produced established the meaning. Honoring those
who served was purpose enough.
And yet that leaves us hungry for more, at least it does for me.
We cannot be sure that any meaning exists in the face of such loss
and grief, unless I suppose we are sure that the purpose of the
war is inextricably bound up with our own larger purpose, that for
the country to prevail in its military policy will make the world
a better place.
The soldiers said again and again that the experience of war was
incommunicable, indescribable. The experience and the suffering
exceeded language and understanding, it went beyond meaning to a
kind of pure experience, something shared only with comrades in
arms, perhaps shared only inside oneself. Once more I quote Oliver
Wendell Holmes: "having known great things, to be content with
silence."
And this perhaps is where we must leave the question of meaning.
Knowing that our soldiers, both in the Civil War and today in Iraq
and Afghanistan, are coming face to face with things they find exhilarating,
things they find abhorrent, things they find impossible to understand,
and things they find unable to communicate. We must find ways to
invite them back, back to home, back to health, and back into the
larger community of our country. We must find ways to help them
be whole.
None of this is about whether we support the current war or not.
It is about recognizing that the men and women who answer the call
to be willing to fight are part of our community, part of the whole
fabric of national life. Let us then honor them for their service,
their sacrifice, and their suffering.
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