So as my sworn enemy stood in front of me, defeated and offering his sword, and me with my hand still on my forty-five, I began to feel I was missing something, something vague yet very important. I had planned and hoped for this day for some time now, and yet when the moment finally arrived, it seemed hollow somehow.
A nebulous idea began to form in my thoughts, small at first but growing, very rapidly, gaining energy like an avalanche, until it totally wiped out any concept of the things I had previously assumed were true. I found my mind suddenly racing backwards across time, looking through all of the events of the war that had led me to this point…
Until finally, in my mind, I found the old chief from the day I visited the dead hulk of the battleship Oklahoma. For a moment, it was almost as if he was standing there with us, looking at me, asking the question which had unexpectedly burned to the very core of my soul. “What are you looking for, captain?” And like a flash, the answer to his question finally came to me: “Peace, chief. I’m looking for peace.”
And as I took the sword from the Japanese captain’s outstretched hands, I began to wonder if maybe it was as much me shooting at them which made me hate them, as it was them shooting at me.
All Things Considered
About seventy to seventy-five years ago, I was in the prime of my life. I was a United States naval officer. I was a young and handsome man chasing the pretty skirts around Hawaii. Your American tax dollars hard at work! (The admiral added a wink and a grin at this point.) It was a lot of fun being a sailor in paradise in the thirties. I almost got into a bit of trouble from time to time, but overall, I kept my nose clean and my mind was mostly on my career, then later my family. But I was also brash and arrogant, which was normal enough for a young sailor of those days. It was in every way an unspoiled paradise for me.
And then came the Japanese.
I was on three ships during the war and commanded one of them.
All three of those ships combined got struck by no less than twelve torpedoes, one which sank with a third of the crew still on board.
Torpedoes were among the most incredibly violent devices you could possibly imagine at the time. Most smaller ships that were hit by them amidships blew right in half. Even the smaller aerial-launched ones could almost lift a ten thousand-ton cruiser like the Buffalo out of the water. Each one sprays thousands of sharp jagged pieces of metal everywhere that will cut through the human body like a bullet through butter. It doesn’t take that many torpedoes to get your attention and set you to wondering how this could keep happening to you.
The tricky thing about it is if you’re not careful enough to keep your wits about you, your life will change for the worse, and you won’t even notice until it’s too late. You will be too busy thinking that you’re right, they’re wrong, and won’t see the truth, even when it bites you in the ass.
As a part of military life, you are trained to be ready for anything at any time. You are always in preparation for some unseen enemy, just over the horizon, just out of your reach, waiting for the chance to attack you and kill you if possible. “What would you do if we were attacked right now?” is the total mode of operation and way of life.
You think about it and drill for it, all the time. And at the same time, you don’t think about it because somehow it just seems too terrible and unreal of a thing to do to other human beings. But you continue doing it because they are the enemy and orders are orders. They are different than you, and sooner or later, they will attack you.
Their beliefs are different, their customs are different, and they think differently. They are aggressive. Their skin is yellow, their eyes are slanted. Even “they are all myopic and thus cannot be good fighter or bomber pilots.” What a load of crap that one turned out to be!
So you keep drilling and thinking about how to prepare for an attack by the aggressors or how you are possibly going to attack them before they have the chance to attack you.
The concept really comes into play in an old Hindu philosophical doctrine that basically states, “As you think, so shall it be.” And I wonder. I wonder if you keep thinking that way long and hard enough and you keep preparing for it, if sooner or later, you will actually find somebody to do it. Then sometimes, if they don’t attack, you go ahead and attack them to prevent you from being attacked by them.
And sometimes they do attack you first, probably thinking you were going to attack them if they didn’t, and they want the strategic advantage of striking the first blow. And so it goes, round and round.
Many times you hear of the greatness and glory of battle. I never saw any glory in it—just misery and death. George Patton, for example, really was a great general. He fought in many so-called glorious battles against the Germans.
As a man who has been in combat more times than I can count, I can personally tell you most of the people who glorify combat have never been in it and have some twisted reason to try to convince others that they need to keep fighting.
Greatness doesn’t come from fighting; it comes from knowing when not to fight.
And when you are in combat and fighting for your life, it’s easy to kill someone. The hard part, for most people, is living with yourself afterwards.
During the war, I met a most interesting person. We were in Pearl for repairs, and I had some time off, so I ended up at the officer’s club for a beer. This guy kind of stood out among the rest of us, not only for his wits, which he had plenty of, but he had the reddest hair that you ever saw. He said he was the skipper on one of the smaller escorts or sub hunters, or something like that.
There was a certain indefinable quality about him that made him hard to forget, even to this day. The other officers around were making a case against him that some day time would heal all of the damage done to us in this war. He was holding his own against several others and forwarding the concept that time “is a great charlatan” and cures nothing.
I don’t know; to this day, I can still see the image of Joe Fitzgerald’s mangled body in my mind like it was yesterday. There just has to be a better way to be able to move on.
The venerable Rush Limbaugh says in one of his “undeniable truths of life” that “Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.” It postulates that people have to be aggressive and forceful to rule a country or world, or to handle a country or people who have gone insane. The problem is that with the right propaganda machines in place, who would be able to tell the difference between Hirohito, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, or Churchill? For example, if you look at the history of Germany during the time that Hitler was on the rise, a large part of the population thought he was a savior of some sort. Statement after statement can be found that he was “enlightened” and “brilliant” and would lead the world into a brighter future.
As long as this is true for this world, we will end up blindly slinging bombs at each other, both sides thinking that they are right and the other side wrong, and neither knowing the truth. I guess I would just rather sit and watch Sponge Bob Square Pants with my great-great-grandchildren on my knees than have another battleship shot out from under me.
I don’t deny this datum is true. When you look at it, you have to admit the arguments for it are undeniable. The evidence is all around us. I just wonder if it has to be true, because if you take the time to look at it a little closer, you begin to see a faint glimmer of hope for something else.