The Undocumented Mark Steyn (33 page)

For some reason, there was a bureaucratic mix-up, as there often is, and the army neglected to inform the families. Then, on their final journey home, the bodies were taken off the train at the wrong town. It was a Saturday afternoon and the station master didn’t want the caskets sitting there all weekend. So a man who knew where the Grants lived offered to take them up to the next town and drop them off on Sunday morning.

When he arrived, the family was at church, so he unloaded the coffins from his buggy and left without a word or a note to anyone. Imagine coming home from Sunday worship and finding three caskets waiting on the porch. Imagine being young Caroline Grant, and those caskets contain the bodies of your brother, your cousin, and the man to whom you’re betrothed.

That’s a hell of a story behind the bald dates on three plain tombstones. If it happened today, maybe Caroline would be on Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric demanding proper compensation, and the truth about what happened, and why the politicians were covering it up. Maybe she’d form a group of victims’ families. Maybe she’d call for a special commission to establish whether the government did everything it could to prevent disease outbreaks at army camps. Maybe, when they got around to forming the commission, she’d be booing and chanting during the officials’ testimony, as several of the 9/11 families did during Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s statement.

All wars are messy, and many of them seem small and unworthy even at the moment of triumph. The sight of unkempt lice-infested Saddam Hussein yanked from his spider hole last December is not so very different from the published reports of Jefferson Davis’s capture in May 1865, when he was said to be trying to skulk away in women’s clothing, and spent the next several months being depicted by gleeful Northern cartoonists in hoop skirts, petticoats, and crinolines (none of which he was actually wearing).

But, conquered and captured, an enemy shrivels, and you question what he ever had that necessitated such a sacrifice. The piercing clarity of war shades into the murky greys of post-war reconstruction. You think Iraq’s a quagmire?
Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” bogged down into a century-long quagmire of segregation, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan. Does that mean that, as Al Gore and other excitable types would say, Abe W. Lincoln
lied
to us?

Like the French Resistance, tiny in its day but of apparently unlimited manpower since the war ended, for some people it’s not obvious which side to be on until the dust’s settled. New York, for example, resisted the Civil War my small town’s menfolk were so eager to enlist in. The big city was racked by bloody riots against the draft. And you can sort of see the rioters’ point. More than six hundred thousand Americans died in the Civil War—or about 1.8 percent of the population. Today, if 1.8 percent of the population were killed in the Afghan-Iraq wars, there would be 5.4 million graves to decorate on Decoration Day.

But that’s the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren’t a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screw-ups worth re-examining, but they weren’t a nation that prioritized retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn’t lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree, as the Democrats do over Abu Ghraib. They were not a people willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it’s pain-free, squeaky-clean, and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we’re supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day.

Time passes, and moss and lichen creep across ancient grave stones. But the men beneath them are forever young. As I mentioned above, at Memorial Day observances in my neck of the woods the veterans are honored by the fifth-graders, who read verses for the occasion—both the classics and their own poems. The latter can be a bit hit and miss, and one has to be alert, given the dispositions of some of my neighbors, for give-peace-a-chance war-is-never-the-answer not-so-subtle subtexts. But a few years after the above column my then fifth-grade
daughter was asked to write something, and so she did. Nothing to do with me—I was away in Chicago all that week—but I was pleased to see that all the rhymes are true. She is older now and has gotten a little teenagey, as they do, and today she would try to write it more sophisticatedly. But I have always liked its heartfelt directness. So this is my daughter Ceci’s fifth-grade poem, as a ten-year-old girl delivered it on a small town common in New Hampshire for Memorial Day:

         
The stars and stripes, red, white, and blue

         
Wave above our heroes true

         
It makes us cry, it makes us weep

         
But in our hearts we will keep

         
The sacrifice our soldiers gave, they shall not die in vain

         
For they have given us the freedom they have fought to gain
.

SAY, IT AIN’T SO JOE

Maclean’s
, September 24, 2007

IT
’
S BEEN A WHILE
since I played with GI Joe. At my age, it tends to attract stares from the playground security guard. Nevertheless, I vaguely recall two details about the prototype “action figure”: (1) he was something to do with—if you’ll pardon the expression—the U.S. military; and (2) he had no private parts.

Flash forward to 2007 and this news item in
Variety
about the forthcoming live-action GI Joe movie:

         
While some remember the character from its gung-ho fighting man ’60s incarnation, he’s evolved. GI Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international coed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer. The property is closer in tone to X-Men and James Bond than a war film.

Golly. So much for my two childhood memories: (1) he’s no longer anything to do with the U.S. military; and (2) the guys with no private parts are the execs at Paramount and Hasbro who concluded that an American serviceman would be too tough a sell in the global marketplace. “GI Joe is not just a brand that represents the military,” says Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s chief operating officer. “It also represents great characters.” And nothing says great characters like a Belgian bureaucracy.

The “evolution” of GI Joe is an instructive one. The term “GI” stands for “Galvanized Iron” (which so much army stuff was made of that the initials became a routine speed bump in military bookkeeping) and not, as many
assume, for “General Infantry.” But it was certainly the poor bloody infantry who embraced the abbreviation, initially for the stuff they were on the receiving end of: In the Great War, U.S. troops used to refer to incoming German artillery shells as “GI cans.” By the next global conflict, it was firmly established as an instantly recognizable shorthand for the regular enlisted man, as in Johnny Mercer’s hit song:

         
This is the GI Jive

         
Man alive!

         
It starts with the bugler blowin’ reveille over your head when you arrive

         
Jack, that’s the GI Jive

         
Root-tee-tee-toot

         
Jump in your suit

         
Make a salute

         
Voot!

Who wouldn’t love the American GI? He was the citizen soldier—the hapless farmer, the befuddled accountant, the amiable grease monkey, pressed into service to save places like Belgium from the depredations of darker forces. It was the cartoonist David Breger who made him the formal embodiment of the men in uniform. “GI Joe” debuted in
Yank, The Army Weekly
, in 1942 and planted a phrase in the language:

         
When the war was over

         
There were jobs galore

         
For the GI Josephs

         
Who were in the war . . .

That’s Bing singing Irving Berlin in
White Christmas
, a big Hollywood smash in 1954, with a score that also included the slyly titled “Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army.” But here’s another movie—from 2006, Oliver Stone’s
World
Trade Center
—as reviewed by my colleague Brian D. Johnson: “Karnes comes across as a vigilante GI Joe action figure—a born-again Christian soldier who says things like ‘We’re going to need some good men out there to avenge this.’” Whoa! That’s quite the etymological trip, from shorthand for the little guy to psychotic Christofascist mercenary in a mere half-century. What happened? Well, there was Vietnam, after which Hasbro decided the army was a bummer and relaunched Joe as the head of the “Super Joe Adventure Team.” But, when that sputtered and died, he returned as “GI Joe, A Real American Hero.”

Question: Can “A Real American Hero” be based in Belgium?

It’s often said that what Americans call “globalization” the rest of the world calls “Americanization,” and you can see what they mean: if you’re French, there doesn’t seem anything terribly “globalized” about every airport on the planet offering the same half-dozen American fast-food franchises. The rest of the world knows the routine by now: you’re in Hollywood pitching Helen Mirren as the Queen, but the studio exec sees it as a great vehicle for Angelina Jolie, maybe with Ben Affleck as the Duke of Edinburgh. That fellow who wrote
The Horse Whisperer
was a bloke from Yorkshire or some such but he knew enough to set it in Montana. And, sitting through
Saving Private Ryan
or
Pearl Harbor
, I long ago stopped wondering when we’d get an epic tale of derring-do by the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry or Lord Strathcona’s Horse or any of Canada’s storied regiments: you can live to 130 and you won’t see
Lord Strathcona’s Horse Whisperer
at the multiplex.

But cultural globalization cuts both ways. If Hollywood is making product for the planet, in what sense is it any longer “American”? When conservatives complain that the movies’ dreary biases are not even in the studios’ commercial interest, they correctly point out that the U.S. is pretty much a 50-50 red state–blue state split, and there’s a huge underserved market waiting for a picture in which Brian D. Johnson’s vigilante GI Joe born-again Christian crazy kicks Islamobutt from Ramadi to Jalalabad and back. But, back at corporate HQ, the vice presidents look at the real market, and throw in all the bonus blue states—Canada, Europe, Asia—and commission yet another
lame-o conspiracy thriller in which the stereotypical young Saudi male everyone thinks is going to blow up the plane turns out to have been framed by one of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton subsidiaries to distract attention from global warming.

That’s not to say there aren’t any movies about regular GI Joes. Brian De Palma’s just made one. It’s called
Redacted
, and it’s already won a couple of prestigious prizes in Venice. To be honest, I’ve never been able to take De Palma seriously since he used that ridiculous body double for Angie Dickinson in the nude shower scenes of
Dressed to Kill
. But he’s certainly come a long way since then.
Redacted
is based on real events: the brutal rape and murder of an Iraqi girl at the hands of four good ol’ GIs. Sergeant Paul Cortez was sentenced earlier this year to one hundred years in jail for the killing, which suggests that the U.S. military takes these things seriously. Statistically speaking, American soldiers rape and murder at a significantly lower rate than the citizens of America’s “liberal” cities. Nonetheless, for De Palma these events represent the larger U.S. adventure in Iraq, and only he has the courage to speak out! “I have done something that just cannot be done,” he crowed on the BBC the other day. “You can never say anything critical of the troops.”

Oh, come on. You can say what you like about American troops: among U.S. senators alone, Ted Kennedy’s compared them to Baathists, and Dick Durbin to Nazis. What you can’t do is make a movie showing them as a force for good in the world. So the great iconic shorthand for the American fighting man has to be appropriated and “evolved” into an acronym for some multilateral Belgian action team. Talk about suspension of disbelief. Do you know what the chances of basing any kick-ass “joint operating entity” in Brussels are? This is a country that in the spring of 2003 announced it was considering war crimes prosecutions against Rumsfeld, Powell, and America’s commanders—at least until Rumsfeld quietly remarked that maybe the new American-funded NATO headquarters didn’t need to be in Brussels after all. Any Belgian action team would be constrained by rules of engagement drawn so tight (see the Norwegians et al. in Afghanistan) that they’d be spending most of the movie sending memos to each other. So instead the planet’s moviegoers will
be subjected to a fiction more absurd than any comic book: American-style action, yes please! But no American values.