What's in a Number? An Entire Life.
On Veteran's Day, reflecting on the massive number of lives lost during the 20th and 21st Centuries.
On September 10th, 2001, on the cover of the New York newspapers was a girl named Lizzie Grubman who intentionally ran her car into a crowd outside a Hampton’s hotspot. What a shitty world we live in, to pay attention to this asshole, I thought while at the newsstand for the subway, and stomped away. Lucky for Lizzie, that was the last day anyone aside from those she slammed into cared. The next day changed everything, and a paper full of vapid sort-of-celebrity junk seemed like a far away era that was only 24-hours dead. Right now feels like that time all over again. October 7th, 2023, ushered in the same feelings after the initial horror and disgust. A major global conflict seems destined to ignite at any moment. Now is a time of waiting and knowing worse things are to come. I’m praying there is a solution to current events that avoids as much bloodshed as possible.
Today is Veteran’s Day in the United States, and Remembrance Day in the UK, where we honor our past and present men and women serving in the armed forces, and especially those who gave their lives to protect the values that shape our society. War is a great reaping of young men. Each November 11th, I sit silently for those lost, those young souls who were sent into dark places only to lay aside their bodies in trenches, jungles, the sea or on sandy beaches and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
In 2018, over 888,000 ceramic poppies were displayed at the Tower of London to commemorate the beginning of the First World War in 1914, one poppy for every soldier killed. Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by Paul Cummins was seen by over five million people before the poppies were sold to benefit charities. The poppies, spilling from the Tower of London onto the green lawn created a stunning visual that’s hard to ignore when one attaches a life to every one of those red flowers. Imagine almost 900,000 men standing in those fields. Imagine approximately fifteen stadiums with every seat filled. The Civil War is the closest America has come to that number of war dead, and even that doesn’t touch the number of UK dead in just the First World War. The Civil War’s death toll was approximately 620,000, more than the number of American casualties in all other wars combined.
The installation is reminiscent of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Numbers represent the aspects of our lives that need validation by hard and indisputable facts: age, current weight, phone number, bank balance. We know the casualties on an intellectual level, but the number is never truly understood unless it is seen by your own eyes.
Poppies spill from the Tower of London on November 11, 2018
I first saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial when I was thirteen years old. Vietnam was my father’s generation. Although my father served in the Navy in the early 1960s, he hadn’t served in Vietnam, but he had friends who did. In the ‘80s, there was a great resurgence of art intended to exorcise the collective demons that Vietnam wove through society. Movies such as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Good Morning Vietnam, Full Metal Jacket and television shows like China Beach and Broadway’s Miss Saigon all attempted to engage the viewer to a place of understanding, not just knowing the numbers or the hard facts, but the feeling of that war and the cultural contradictions and turbulence that defined the 1960s.
As a young girl, these films and television accomplished their intended purpose which was to give the viewer a sense of the horror that was Vietnam, but they also reduced it to entertainment. War veterans saw their experiences validated. But for those of us outside of that experience, we could feel empathy for fallen friends and imagine the devastation of Ron Kovic’s paralysis in Born on the Fourth of July, but we would never be able to truly understand the feeling of disassociation when Kovic returned stateside to a lukewarm to openly hostile reception, or how to reconcile witnessing violence against innocents as Charlie Sheen’s character did in Platoon.
On that day in the mid-1980s, the long wall of the Vietnam Memorial shone like a river stone. Flowers littered the ground and people with wax paper gently glided rubbing sticks over a name. Who was it? A father? Brother? Son? Friend?
Recently, I waited for my son to finish his baseball practice in a park in northern New Jersey named after Kenneth Schauble who was killed in action in Vietnam on July 6, 1969. Fall baseball ends early when long shadows swallow white balls whole and as the crickets sounded, I wondered if Kenny Schauble played baseball on this field in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s. Wondering if he had hit any ‘dingers,’ as the boys say, and if he collected baseball cards and gave the cardboard-tasting gum away. He has been gone for over fifty years, longer than I have been alive. Had events gone differently in July of 1969, he might be a grandfather now, enjoying retirement and cheering at the sports games of his grandchildren. And the park would remain nameless.
My brother is a veteran of the Iraq War. He was with the Marines during the first invasion in 2003. Thankfully, his tour was short and he was returned to us alive and without any injuries. I think of what it would have been like had the opposite occurred. The black hole that would have swallowed our lives is unimaginable. My parents would never have been the same. The older I get, the more I realize that throwing the cosmic dice is what determines more than we think, and those millions of boys just had a bad roll. Today, I bow my head in reverence to them all, and listen. The poppies in the field, the names on the wall and the American Cemetery at Normandy’s white crosses are tied together in time by the keening of loved ones, echoing in their collective sorrow.
🌺 beautiful