The Loin & The Limb: Peace

“Pacifists are often jealous of the fact that Bhutan has more monks than soldiers, Monaco’s national orchestra is larger than its military, and Costa Rica must borrow a cannon from El Salvador when saluting a foreign dignitary. But if oil or gold were ever discovered in any of these three countries, I’d recommend investing in an army. Imagine where Ukraine would be today without its military, fighting for peace. It’s a fight it will ultimately win, just as North Vietnam and the Taliban won their wars against us, for they were more willing to die than we were to kill.”—Dr. Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Dr. Skip Eisiminger

I. “By the Dawn’s Early Light
Let the starlings and crows     wage a raucous war
without a rocket     over Baltimore.”
—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Hubris)—April 2024—Browsing a file folder of family photographs my aunt Clarice had left me, I came across two that I found unforgettable. I pulled these two out and assembled a small, translucent diptych which now occupies a prominent place in my study. The left half consists of a picture taken on the day my father left Camp Gordon, Georgia for the war in Germany. Major Eisiminger is in full combat gear, and I’m standing beside him with a thumb in my mouth wearing his helmet liner. I’m almost three years old and most likely have no idea what is happening. I certainly have no memory of it. On the back of this photograph, Mother wrote, “October 22, 1944, Daddy and Skipper [me], my world.” 

Five days later, she wrote on the same picture, “Oct. 27, 1944, I’m sick. I just sold the rattler [our old car].” I have no idea why Mother would have made that second, half-serious notation on the back of what might have been the last picture she had of her husband. I imagine she was in denial of the fact that she with her high-school education might soon be a widow with a thumb-sucking kid to raise. Faced with the unthinkable, it’s often easier to deny it exists. At funerals, I sometimes find myself with tears in my eyes . . . stifling a laugh.

The right half of the diptych is a photograph of my bare-headed father in his rumpled, summer khakis with his arms outstretched overhead and me about ten feet in the air where I’d been flung. On the back, my aunt Edellyn, who took the photograph, wrote, “Skipper and Sterling [Dad], Broadwell, Illinois, September 3, 1945 [about three weeks after Japan surrendered].” My pregnant mother must have bought herself another “rattler” because I have no record of our taking a train or plane from Georgia to Illinois where my paternal grandparents lived after Dad, recently promoted to lieutenant colonel, returned from the war.

Without that second picture of me suspended in space and time, I’m sure I’d have no memory of that tropospheric flight, freezing forever the joy and relief of Dad’s return and the war’s end. For me, these two black-and-white pictures represent several dualisms that frame my reality: war and peace, male and female, loss and gain, bad and good, death and life. In a war that claimed some sixty million lives, it all could have ended very differently for millions, including Mother and me. Several years passed before I learned that Dad had volunteered to help finish the war in Japan, but that somewhere in the Caribbean on August 15, 1945, the captain of the troop ship Dad was a passenger on announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention: Japan has surrendered!” A few years later, angling for another promotion, Dad volunteered to fight in the Korean War, and he returned from that one as well. I don’t have any photographs of his return, but I was witness to the stress Mother was under in both wars, which may have led to a miscarriage after World War Two and thyroid cancer after Korea. Like Dad, she survived her wars, and I was blessed by the luck and courage of both. I don’t have pictures of these victories, just some indelible images that haunt my brain.

Though I’ve offered to make a corresponding diptych for my wife, whose father fought for the Germans in World War Two, and who may have crossed paths briefly with Dad, she has declined my offer. I have a picture of Otto taken when he was a young recruit and one of him celebrating his release from a POW camp in Southern France. Interesting as this binary would be poised beside mine, some things are best forgotten.

II. “A colonel’s wrinkle     is a private’s crease,
but where the two meet     let’s call it peace.”
—The Wordspinner

I lived with a proud career officer for 17 years before I was called to serve in the military. As an enlisted man, I spent 1960-63 on the East German-West German border during the Cold War monitoring the electronic activity of various armed units in the East. I like to think I helped win that war even though some embers were never doused. East Germany was eventually returned to the West, but Russia is still angry over the way the Cold War ended and the subsequent loss of its colonies. 

As for me, I soon realized I wasn’t called to make the military a career as Dad had; I figured I was better at peace than war, which was something of a disappointment to Dad who, at the time, was fighting the war in Vietnam from a desk in the Pentagon. I think I reached my tipping point reading war novels in the company day room between duty shifts. Once a month, the USO would ship a box of paperbacks to our unit in northern Germany after which my buddies and I would fight over the best of them. One of the most evocative for me was Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or, as Remarque wrote, Im Westen, Nicht Neues (In the West, Nothing New).

He chose that wording because that was the verbatim lie some safely ensconced German officer had used in reporting the war news to his superiors while his soldiers were being shelled at the muddy, rat-infested front. Like my mother, I’d spent my childhood hating the Germans, and here I was almost twenty years after World War Two had ended dating a German woman and hoping Remarque’s protagonist would survive a war he’d been conned into. When I read that the Nazis had banned this novel and revoked Remarque’s citizenship because All Quiet was a “Jew novel/film” and a “pacifist tract,” my decision to declare a separate peace was confirmed.

The day I left my German duty station in July of 1963, I paused in the lobby of our billets to study a colorful poster featuring palms lining a tropical beach. The caption read, “Re-up and see Southeast Asia.” I asked myself what Remarque, safely ensconced at the time in Hollywood, would have thought of the war being fought in Vietnam and hurried to catch the duty run.

III. “Rabin and Arafat, October 1993”
A gun may be hid     when hands are furled,
so theirs was a handshake     heard round the world.”
—The Wordspinner

Before our daughter’s divorce, her father-in-law was a man who’d served a two-year enlistment on the front lines of a Veterans Administration nursing home. As a conscientious objector, he was assigned “bed-pan duty,” where several veterans who’d lost limbs in Korea and Vietnam were recuperating or just vegetating. He told me once that there was one ward where he was bombarded daily with human waste. 

I asked him once if he had any regrets about his decision, and he said that after his father was shipped home in a box after World War Two dressed in a uniform he’d never chosen to wear, he decided he would do the same if he were drafted. I asked him if he ever witnessed his daughter-in-law being raped, would he take a club to the back of the rapist’s head. He said he would not. I don’t think we ever spoke about his conscientious service again and, since the divorce, we just exchange Christmas cards.

That question I posed was inspired by something I’d read from Rev. Frederick Buechner: “A Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if there is no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child.” As you may have guessed, the philosophical position of absolute pacifism is abhorrent to me, but I know I’m going up against some intellectual heavyweights:

• “If you are struck on the right cheek, offer the striker the left.” —Jesus of Nazareth
• “Again war. Again suffering, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for.”—Leo Tolstoy
• “Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”—Thomas Edison
• “[The Holocaust] is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs . . . .” —Mohandas Gandhi
• “To kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.” —Albert Einstein
• “[Nonviolence] is a weapon unique in history, that cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.
• “I’m willing to die for freedom, but I’m not willing to kill for it.”—Allan Ginsberg
• “I offer myself as an alarm against Armageddon and a torch for liberty.”—Kathy Chance, written shortly before she immolated herself
• “You can put us in jail! We and our sons are ready to die and not to be drafted in the IDF which is against our Torah.” —Anonymous, Ultra-orthodox Jew
  

To all these mavens and masters, I say, “I respect your position of principled pacifism; I admire your restraint, but could you have stood by for six years in Switzerland, while across the border, Hitler was killing eleven million people of all stripes who did not look, worship, or think the way he did?” I could not. Given the chance, I would defend the right of everyone to defend themselves, but that, especially when it comes to abortion, is not absolute, either.

In one version of the Arthurian legend, Excalibur is inscribed, “Take me up” on one side; “Cast me away” on the other. In other words, it all depends. Like Thoreau, who opposed the Mexican War but supported the Civil War, I consider myself a selective CO. That won’t make it easy for the draft board, but I reserve the right to shoot those I think need shooting.

IV. “Don Quixote Faces the M-1 Abrams
The odds that Venus     can circle Mars’ flank
equal those of Don ‘KWIK-suht’     lancing a tank.”

Pacifists are often jealous of the fact that Bhutan has more monks than soldiers, Monaco’s national orchestra is larger than its military, and Costa Rica must borrow a cannon from El Salvador when saluting a foreign dignitary. But if oil or gold were ever discovered in any of these three countries, I’d recommend investing in an army. Imagine where Ukraine would be today without its military, fighting for peace. It’s a fight it will ultimately win, just as North Vietnam and the Taliban won their wars against us, for they were more willing to die than we were to kill.

As often as I pray for a lasting peace, I am not optimistic for the following reasons:

• Some say that in 3500 years of recorded history there have only been 230 years, c. 7 percent of the total, without a war on some part of our planet. But who’s to know if there was a war in New Guinea or the Amazon 3,000 years ago that historians have no record of?
• Once Pope Francis II released doves as symbols of the peace he was praying for. Shortly after their release, both birds were attacked; one by a gull, the other by a crow. War is nature’s way.
• Stephen Hawking thought that with the conquest of space, wars would become less likely as we put light years between us, but the Chinese recently revealed that they have a weapon that can destroy our satellites.
• Many have become so cynical about peace that they define it as “temporary pre-hostility.”
• In 1986, light versifier Ned Pastor predicted peace would come in 2020 because we would “see better.”
• About a month after President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize, he sent 33,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan.
• Singer Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence was attacked for being “detrimental to peace.”
• Separating warring factions in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, India/Pakistan, and Israel/Palestine was thought to be a peaceful solution to decades-long strife. Alas, wars in Gaza and Kashmir are being fought as I write.
• Finally, some good news: according to Steven Pinker, more than 95 percent of all ethnic neighbors in 2015 were coexisting without violence.

I’ve long admired the wisdom of the Indian proverb, “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” However, before we beat our bayonets into plowshares, let’s be sure we won’t be needing them.

V. “View from the Window of the St. George Hotel”
From Belfast belfry
to belfry,
across slate roofs
and winter wheat,
Roman Catholic
and Protestant bells
merge and float
in fine accord.”
—The Wordspinner

To the best of my knowledge, the evil of a morbid mind is beyond the fix of pacifism. Nevertheless, in 2006, when a local milk tanker driver barricaded himself inside the one-room West Nickel Mines School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, bolted the door, shot five Amish girls, and wounded five others, the Amish parents and neighbors of these children soon brought food and forgiveness to the wife, parents, and children of the dead shooter. I wish I could say I’d do the same, but I absolutely admire the charitable example.

However, if any of these pacifists had found themselves in a position to kill or wound the shooter on that tragic day, I, sitting in a jury box, could not and would not vote to convict.

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522. For Wordspinner: Mind-Boggling Games for Word Lovers, click on the book cover.