THE GREAT BIG SEA

by joan mitchell

Today I played vegetable all day. Didn't do anything. Napped once. Did a little painting. Went to watch a movie and decided to look at disc 2 of Victory At Sea, the WW2 documentaries of war film footage. Richard Rodgers composed the theme music. Copyright 1952. I have seen all of these Victory At Sea episodes on tv then and the years that followed. They were on tv every Saturday for quite awhile. This was the Navy's war experience. The Big Picture was the Army's part of the war. I liked the wartime documentaries. They showed what my daddy, uncles, and the guys of their generation did while they were away from home. I learned a good bit watching them, too. Like, I don't want to be in a war. Watching today, the 50s comedy hit Please Mr Custer played in my head, "I don't wanna go. There's a redskin waitin out there, fixin to take my hair."



The narrator, Leonard Graves, was sufficiently dramatic. A lot of times the script meant to be poetic, and almost was, in a cowboy poetry kind of way, using words like Victory the way a sports announcer reports a touchdown or homerun or a basket. One of the things he said was so good I had to write it down, "Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land." Sounds like it was picked up from a war poet. The early 50s were less than a decade out of the war; people who had lost a boy still missed him. Victory at Sea was my favorite of the war documentaries, because I loved to watch the ocean, see the ships bobbing from side to side, the prow of the ship going under, then up out of the water and back under. In childhood I wondered what those waves were like. I wanted to see them and ride them. Looking at the ships in rough sea now, I remember what it was like on a small WW2 destroyer, up, down, rolling side to side, the front of the ship goes under and the turning screws come out of the water in back. The front rises out of the water and the screws set back down in the water, again and again.

They don't tell about the whole interior of the ship smelling of puke and 3/4 of the crew laid out in the agony of seasickness. Nobody in shape to clean up the mess. The 1/4 that didn't get seasick, one of them me, we were so busy keeping the ships business going we didn't have time to clean anything, and we had to stay at it round the clock 2 days and nights. I didn't want to go into the compartment where the racks (beds) were occupied by guys wishing they were dead. The smell got to me worse than the moving boat. I enjoyed the up and down, side to side. I told myself if they had this ride at an amusement park I'd pay to ride it. In this case, they're paying me. How can I beat that? By the time the storm calmed and everybody started waking up and cleaning up, I'd regretted I didn't get seasick, because I never got a minute's rest. Still, I'd rather work than have a churning belly all the time.

The word was that seasickness came from liquid sloshing back and forth in the stomach. We were advised to eat saltines, because they settle like bread and don't move around. It worked for me. I always consumed a mess of saltines when the weather was rough. I did not like seasickness and I did like the ship in rough water. Had it made. One time at night I had to stand watch on the top deck where the semaphore people roost. I had a steel hand rail to cling to watching the front of the ship go under, then receive the giant wave that covers the entire ship. It was like standing in the water at the beach receiving the waves. I was all the way at the top of the ship's structure and the wave went over my head. I clung to the rail when it hit me, every time. They were Yee-Haw moments. It wasn't the sort of thing I could mention I enjoyed. Y'aren't supposed to enjoy anything in the Navy. I spent a lot of time gawking at the ocean, attempting not to be noticed. For me, the only good thing about being on a Navy ship was the ocean. I have to admire people who take a sailboat round the world, whether they stop along the way or not. That is just about the ultimate challenge, self-sufficient on the great big sea.

I have no specific recollections from those years from about 10 to 15 seeing Victory At Sea with the same zeal some people watch the Andy Griffith Show. I do remember, however, my feelings, some of my thoughts from then and some of the conclusions I drew then that I still live by. First thing it told me was I did not want to be in a war. It looks cool to be tossing depth charges off the back of a destroyer and watching the surface of the water bulge and explode. But I tend to think about what it's like in the submarine, in a bubble under water about to be popped. Never in my lifetime have I wanted to be in a situation that I had to kill somebody or be killed. That's too extreme. I'm not of warrior mind. Never have been. Since my daddy and some uncles were in the war, I figured there would be a war for me. There almost was. I was set free from my sentence just as Vietnam was cranking up. Slipped out by a frog hair the way Jet Li walked out of prison in Romeo Must Die. 

It still bothers me now like it did in my boyhood to see guys just out of boot camp, not long out of high school, not much older than me, running out of water craft troop carriers onto the beach, bent over running toward the dunes and fall down like a knee gave out, and not get up. I thought then as I think now: I don't wanna be that guy. In that time of my life, life itself was everything. I lived on waiting for time to go by until I'm out of high school and on the way to self-sufficiency. When I'm free, ready to start my own life, the draft subjects me to 2 years of involuntary servitude. Of course, I signed. It was that or behind bars prison. At least on floating prison I was able to visit Valencia, Rome, Napoli, Athens, Nice and some other places. That was worth it, being able to walk among people of Rome, of Athens, be in their midst, see how they live, their shops, their houses, their traffic, their churches, their nightlife, the varieties of people, hearing another language. Wherever I was, it was the same moon overhead at night as the moon at home. The full moon on a clear night at sea is a sight to behold. It's, like, cosmic.   

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REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE

Over the last couple weeks I've been idly looking at war films made in the field during WW2 and Vietnam. The WW2 footage is the tv shows in the 50s, Victory At Sea (Navy) and The Big Picture (Army) and You Are There, narrated by Walter Cronkite. Victory At Sea was my favorite. Saturday tv viewing in the time of b&w tv. Every time I see an episode or 2 now, seldom watch more than 2 in a row, I remember the time in childhood, 11 and 12, how seeing the war my daddy went through made me afraid there would be a war for me. Looking at American history, going to war has been a rite of passage. Discipline. The Army was the key to a young guy learning discipline. Discipline at home had nothing rational to it, becoming thus an anti-discipline. Mine was not the only home like that. Boys in America tend to be raised without guidance for being a responsible grown up man. Perhaps it is the ongoing war pattern that left discipline to the military the way parents leave teaching to the schools and reverence for God to church.



All through my teens I was afraid of having to be in a war, though by good fortune slipped in and out between Korea and Vietnam. There was no way I could know that in advance. By then I knew USA was about a war for every generation and I was next. Looking back from my late 60s, seeing these anti-war films at ages 11 and 12 made me all the more afraid of going to war. I knew by then I have no such thing as "good luck." I never won anything. If there were a hundred chances on something and I had 99, the o1 would get it. It taught me at an early age never to gamble. War was a gamble for your life. Everyone goes into it knowing the chance of survival or not being made a cripple for life is uncertain. It was the kind of odds I did not see worth betting on. But the draft gave me no choice. Like Bruce Springsteen, I was born in the USA. By no will of my own, I was an American boy and war is what you go through when you're American.



Now that generals are no longer presidential material, the presidents turn out to be men who didn't have to go to war. They are more ready to set a war in motion than the generals. Got an economy problem? Start a war. John Wayne, the great WW2 hero of the movies, was a draft dodger. I didn't have a choice. The draft was on. Daddy saw to it I was enlisted in Navy Reserve before high school graduation. By then, the military was about the same as absolute evil where I was concerned. Because I was born American I had to join the war machine and be an active cog. I was not a good sailor. Graded for my performance in those 2 years active duty, I'd give myself a D-. An F would be dishonorable discharge. I fell just short of that and going to the brig for incompetence and absence of interest. I was that guy in the 50s pop song, Please Mr Custer, I don't wanna go. There's a redskin waitin out there fixin to take my hair.



I didn't want any of it. Never wanted to wear a uniform. Never wanted to march. Never wanted to salute somebody just because he went to college and I didn't. Never wanted to kill anybody. Never wanted to live in hierarchy. Did not want my life to be about death. Did not want to die young. My desperation to live in that time is extraordinary to look back on from here. I wanted to live. Wanted a chance to see who I would become. Wanted to have a life. As far as I could tell, I hadn't had a life yet. In fact, I felt like the day I was released from military obligation for being born in the wrong country was the beginning of my life. Up to then, I had lived by other people's directions, had no idea of my own, except to be outside the constrictions of reliance on war and money, and the false religion that goes with it. It was like all that was sacred was my enemy. All 3 systems, plus, wanted me dead.



I'm not proposing this as rational thinking. It was the thinking of a teenager who felt no support from any quarter, but a grandmother, the grandmother who came from these hills. She taught me things I needed to know, like don't be looking around in church, how to transplant something so it would live. Parents never taught me anything but to stay away from them and church. By age 23 I was finally able to live by my own decisions, however poor and uninformed they might be. I wasn't going back. That's when I was released from involuntary servitude and decided that to live on I needed education, needed to learn something worth knowing besides how to hold a rifle or kill the enemy. The enemy was all around me, the whole system of servitude for bullshit reasons I'd grown up in. Everything around me was unreal. I wanted to be real, whatever that meant. Authentic, maybe. Sincere, maybe. I don't believe those questions ever got settled. Even today when I call something real or unreal, I don't know exactly what I mean. Maybe it's what we call gut response. I know it down deep, but not on the surface in the world of words.



One of my apprehensions, now, about growing old is they say memory of the distant past is present. I've consciously kept my mind out of that era before age 23 as much as I'm able. What memories from then jump to the surface leave me in a bad mood. I've spent my adult life reparenting myself, exploring in the mind, learning as much as possible without it being a fixation, unplugging mental / emotional logjams, staying outside society. Patti Smith's song, Rock & Roll Nigger is playing in my head, Outside of society--that's where I wanna be! Baby, Baby, Baby, I'm a rock & roll nigger. Patti didn't make no bones about it. Recalling at a Papa Roach concert ten or less years ago, when they did the song with the lines, I know my mother loves me, but does my father really care?, it became a male chorus. The crowd was louder than the band, and it was all guys singing. That moment, I realized this is not just my issue. It's a national epidemic. Born in the USA.



The overwhelming popularity of the song Man Of Constant Sorrow from the movie O Brother spread the song to the city audience of men that the men of the country listening to bluegrass have known very well since Ralph Stanley recorded it not long after WW2. We are a nation of men of constant sorrow. Of course, there are exceptions. Recalling the time I mentioned to Jr I'd found Man of Constant Sorrow copyrighted by Carter Stanley. He said, "It's older than that. That song goes a long ways back." Carter must have copyrighted his arrangement. The song goes way back, but the song before it was written probably goes all the way back. 6,000 years of patriarchy, this is what men have come to, constant sorrow, which we pass to the feminine via dependence and to the next generation via dependence. Authority is how men rule, and I never wanted to have authority, nor did I want to be subject to authority. I can only tolerate someone I respect having authority over me. That's why I've worked mostly for women. Didn't make much money, but respected intelligent authority.



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HOW I BECAME A PACIFIST

Not long ago I found a 2dvd set for $5 of the early 1950s tv show Victory At Sea, one of my favorite things on tv when I was 10, 11 and 12. Victory At Sea was video footage of the Navy on the stormy sea of war. I liked both of them, You Are There of the Army, but preferred Victory At Sea, because I loved looking at the ocean. I watch an episode or two at a time, times when there was no movie in the mail that day, or time I just want to sit and watch something that's not very long. Every one of them takes me back to childhood in that time. This is where I developed my anti-war attitude toward life. I think they were on every day during the summer, or maybe every Saturday, and I saw probably all of them several times. Watching submarines blow up ships, the glorification goes to the submarine and the enemy is a cloud of smoke. They leave out the several hundred young guys that were just like the guys shooting the torpedo, just the other side of the us and them divide, though not always.



I see dead guys on the beach, dead guys floating in the surf, guys getting shot, especially the ones doing the shooting. These were made in 1952, so the sanitizing of war footage for public viewing had not yet begun. Seeing them now, a bit more consciously than seeing them at age 11, I see what I saw then and have forgotten completely, except for the vastness of what I see over and over, European and Asian cities looking like Richmond after the Civil War. Dead people everywhere, desolate people everywhere, the horrors of war captured live on film, edited into half hour documentaries with music composed by Richard Rodgers. They were serious productions. They were the writing of history by the victors and taken very seriously as not only the big war we won, but the ugliness of war in your face to make an impression, to say enough of this. Seeing them now, I see anti-war films in the earliest years of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex, just before the message became perpetual war to keep the economy going. Therefore, only the glory of war to be shown. No more pictures of our boys dead.



I watch these films now amazed at what I saw at age 11. All I remembered are billows of smoke, broken, burned out cities, planes bombing railroad lines, fighters shooting at each other, ships shooting cannons, and kamikazes, of course. There are no moments I remember, but the general impression of the whole is what I've carried unconsciously through time. I know now exactly where I got my anti-war attitudes. These films made war the worst thing I could imagine. Did I want to jump into that and get burned alive on a sinking ship? Did I want to get shot on a beach? Just because I was a boy? I didn't want to kill anybody, especially not some bozo like me on the other side who just wanted to live his life. I see the ships blow up into a cloud of smoke and while everybody on board the sub is shouting hooray, I'm thinking about the guys on the sinking ship, what they're feeling and thinking while the ground goes out from under them. Just because they're Japs wasn't a problem for me. They couldn't help where they were born any more than I could. They got caught up in a shit-happens moment just like me.



I believe these films were put together for the early years of television, 1952, seven years after the end of the war, with the intent to show us what "our boys" had been through, the horror of it, so we could appreciate the war effort, because the German element needed stopping, as did the Japanese. Both powers got out of control. This is the message. Get out of control and the whole world comes down on you. I watch these films seeing what I learned watching them, finding this is the source of some of my major attitudes toward life. The glory part passed me by. I never got that one. They show parades and people waving flags on liberation day, which is a great thing, but what a shame it was to need liberation. They show quite a lot of German and Japanese war footage too, perhaps captured film. Born too late for the propaganda before the war, I saw it all post-war when the Germans and Japs were not our enemies. I had 1/4 German blood, which I was ashamed of for a long time, until I got to Germany in my 40s and saw it was people just like us, a different culture, different language, but ultimately just folks getting by the best they know how.



What got me completely over blaming the German people for the Nazis was seeing the Bush-Cheney-Rummy takeover and how the American public fell for obvious propaganda, how well propaganda works. I watched my own country take the same path. I saw how popular fascism is everywhere, and now I am able to see fascism is not Germany specific. I watch these films made in an America that was very different from the America I live in now. Like I noticed when Obama won the election, after the week of being briefed on all the secrets the President needs to know, he has looked like a deer in the headlights ever since. Then, 1952, a working man could support a wife and kids, house payments, car payments, utilities, insurance, working in a factory, and even put away savings. Now a working man and his wife both have to work full time to keep a trailer rented. Forget savings. 30 years of inflation in what everything costs us, and wages have remained the same for the working people, while CEOs rake in many multiple millions, now billions. Our standard of living is gradually being brought down to that of Malaysia, Honduras, Nigeria, India, and will keep on going downward until we're willing to accept the wages of Indonesian sweatshops. The big wheel keeps on rolling.



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