War Stories

One of the series recording is John Adams on HBO. But the Military Channel is running an excellent series of documentaries called Revolutionary War, which I’m also recording. I just started it playing to clear off the hard drive.

After years of Congress demanding the Bush administration release documents on torture, the Justice Department finally released a legal opinion John Yoo wrote March 14, 2003 as head of the Office of Legal Counsel. Just reading this memo shocks the conscience, and it is the declassified version. When I read it, I cringed and thought about my father and the horrific torture he endured as a POW in then-Yugoslavia during WW II.

Iraq war is the most expensive in terms of human and material costs in the US history after the Vietnam War. The official statistics released by the US Congressional Budget Office on 4 December shows that the Administration had spent some US $350 billion for military operation in Iraq. Recently, the US Congress approved an additional amount of US $70 billion for the war against terrorism, in which US $50 billion is to be reserved for the war in Iraq.

The most interesting conversation I had that day, however, was not with journalists or city officials. As I was sitting in an underground shopping center, looking over a map of the city, an old man sat next to me and stared at me as I looked at the map. I have had this experience quite often in Korea and it usually leads to fascinating conversations with retired men who love to share their experiences during the Korean war, their interactions with Americans during the Korean war, their belief that Park Chung-hee was the best thing to come out of Korea since the hangul writing system, and that the coming of democracy has sent Korea off its rails.

And during the first world war, they didn’t know anything about the concentration camps. Someone told one soldier, along with his fellow soldiers, there is a ‘Jewish camp’ over there, the way they were directly headed. They wondered what the heck that person meant when he said, ‘Jewish camp’. When they came upon the first camp, they were absolutely horrified. I can’t imagine having found out like that.

During WW I, when he was 16, my Dad, John Bryan, ran away from home and joined the Texas National Guard. That particular unit had been called up for duty in France. He was loaded on the train in Waco, headed for overseas training, when his Dad, My Grand Dad, Peyton Bryan, appeared and physically drug him off of the train. It took him 5 years and many letters to finally get a discharge from the Guard so he could join the Marines.

I say all this with a bit of self experience. I’ve been in the authors’ shoes. When I protested the Iraq war, I was called both anti-American and anti-Semitic. I remember going to synagogue around the time of the Iraq war and hearing a sermon on why Saddam was our generation’s Hitler and so we needed to invade. I went to the Rabbi to express my disagreement on the substantive merits of whether we could succeed in Iraq after Saddam was toppled. The Rabbi told me that I was not a loyal Jew.