In the long, dew-wet grass.

I won $20 in a bet arising from the onset of the Falklands War in the early '80s. Out of an argument in a radio newsroom I predicted (correctly, as it turned out) that there would be fatalities in that ridiculous conflict -- begun on one side by a woman who wanted a bigger, long ago, flacid empire-penis, and on the other by a country that wanted a bigger nation-state penis).

I still have the Pound notes used to pay the bet.

The argument that day in a radio newsroom wandered into the realm of whether wars come in two packages -- just and unjust. Simply, whether war can be an honourable thing, something that brings a powerful sense of accomplishment or meaning to combatants lives, versus the combatants being nothing more than instruments of a nation-state exercising its ability to unleash violence on another. One grain finer, whether a soldier feels s/he is fighting a just cause, can justify his/her violence, or whether s/he feels no more than a used pawn there simply to pull the trigger for someone, something else.

Take examples: Of course there was nothing honourable about the Falklands War -- people died for some sheep-shit covered rock, and sabre rattling idiocy -- while the Second World War, perhaps was honourable in that it worked (even if not its initial or actual aim) to purge a large chunk of the world from what would have been undeniable and lasting tyranny.

Something that has always bothered me is that I have an undeniable -- and I can only describe it this way -- nostalgic yearning to have been tested in war. And I realize I have the opulent luxury of feeling that way -- as gloriously distant is my longing and the chance of my ever having to go, or to have had to go. Still, it is with envy that I view war veterans -- at least those of "just" wars.

I have struggled to capture this feeling in prose and poetry before, and with great failure. So, I doubt I'll capture it here with much success either. Language fails and the position must appear as a paradoxical idiocy. The sense in me is best captured in those moments when stories of hell of war come from veterans, which most always seems to end with the "Of course, I hate war, I've been there, but I'd go again tomorrow if I had to."

And that's it, isn't it. The "if I had to." Perhaps my want is not to know war personally, but to be given the opportunity to know if I would go, given the chance. Still not there, is it.

I cannot recall what conflict or action made it possible that Canadians might be called into war, but there was that possibility (remote as it surely was) when I was near or at conscription age. I announced to my parents that I would go to war for my country, sure, that my war-veteran father and war-bride mother would be supportive, even proud of my decision.

The response was profound anger, especially on the part of my father, who suggested that (more than a bit ironically) if he had to he would physically restrain me to keep me from joining. My mother began to weep and my father joined her. Their little boy off to war. I argued that dad had said more than once that he'd go to war again even though by that time in his life he was quick to point out the war was fought for commercial interests. And he responded he'd still go again, that day, but no son of his was going into such hell.

I came across accounts of my father's regiment (Essex Scottish) and their campaigns in WWII. I discovered the Essex Scots suffered more casualties than any other Canadian regiment during the war. One particularly chilling account of engaging the Germans in France tells of enemy tanks lumbering into the regiment and firing at point blank range. Tells of men running and crawling for their lives through thick, wet, knee-high grass in retreat, while others stayed put firing useless round after useless round of ammunition against the tank armour.

My father was an incurable alcoholic and I hated him for it. It terrorized my childhood and robbed me not only of my father, but effectively my mother too. The single point in my father's life into which I can sink an anchor of respect for the man is that he volunteered to go to war. That and the the fact that folks in my small hometown lined up around the block for two evenings to file past him at funeral "viewings." From his war experience -- never shared in any real way -- and the experience of seeing all those people line up to say good bye to the man in death, I understand my father was more complex than the single frame my experience with him allowed -- complex enough that I might forgive him, or at least understand him.

The Essex Scottish were wrongly credited with reaching their objective (getting off the beach and into Dieppe) at the Dieppe landing and thus were not as quickly withdrawn as they otherwise should have been. They were thus mistakenly left on the main Dieppe beach where the they landed under the now historic killing fire in the Dieppe debacle for much longer than they needed to be. (Given what is now generally known about that battle, I wouldn't be surprised if the British command wasn't testing helmets by leaving the men on the beach.)

I will always wonder after those personalizing descriptions how deeply my father's military spats (all left now of my father's uniforms -- the rest, sadly, discarded only relatively recently!)sank into the sand at Dieppe, or what noise they made as they swiped the long, dew-wet grass as he ran from point-blank-range tank shelling.

I asked my father about bravery or heroics or I think it was about officers and non-officers -- the difference. In any event his answer was a story of being in a foxhole with a buddy and their Lieutenant (pronounced LEF-tenant, btw) when a "pineapple" dropped into the hole with them. My father said his buddy was making to climb out the hole with panicked noises and motions, while he (my father) was furiously trying to dig himself into a hole in the corner. The Lt. Meanwhile pulled my father's pal back into the hole with one hand and with the other grabbed and tossed the German grenade over the lip of the hole where it almost immediately exploded. "That," my father said, "is an officer."

On the anniversary of VE Day I heard a segment on CBC Radio One which aired interviews with men shipping home to Canada after the war. Asked what they would miss about Europe they all said the new friends they made, the fun they had with their buddies. Somewhere in those answers, wrapped up with honour and duty and some human want of challenge, is answer to the old yearning I have -- and of which, frankly, I find myself ashamed -- finding it regrettable that I won't have that experience of war.

Now, if you'll indulge me, a poem that fits this blog today:

November

What if memory lacked personal boundaries?
floated free like dandelion fluff, uncorralled
by grey borders, title-less until nourished
by curious, foreign soil
(and not some odd notion of collective
memory -- but
self in past-tense, roaming)

Would you finally be accessible?
Dieppe concussions, rippling
along the paths of my memory
as they did down your spine
French and German and Dutch dirt
under my nails
as you scrambled to die (but didn't)
Reaching to my own face
your scar pulsing
anger and Crown Royal, shards of highball glass

And what did you know
of me?


steven heipel