`That Whole Damned War Business'

I had a conference with my 6-year-old’s first-grade teacher Tuesday morning. Like his father, Michael has lousy handwriting so I assured her it was a genetic failing and there was nothing we could do about it. We were laughing and marveling at Michael’s newfound insatiability for books when I asked how her son was. She has two sons but she knew which one I meant – the one in the Marine Corps. She froze and her eyes watered. They learned last week her 19-year-old will ship out for Iraq on Feb. 28.

She and her family knew it was coming but there’s no way to prepare for news like that. I could offer no consolation and she asked for none, though she thanked me for being interested. I worry every day when I drop my younger sons off at their schools, and I worry about my 19-year-old son at college in New York City. Stripped of sentiment, being a parent amounts to little more than anxiety management, whether the threat is drunken drivers, pedophiles, the kids’ own foolishness or the fanatics in Iraq.

As a sick old man, living on Mickle Street in Camden, N.J., Walt Whitman talked a Niagara of recollections – nine volumes, thus far – to his friend Horace Traubel. Whitman spoke often of his years as a volunteer nurse in Civil War field hospitals. He told Traubel on Dec. 13, 1888, a little more than three years before his death:

“I was in the midst of it all – saw war where war is worst – not in the battlefields, no – in the hospitals: there war is worst: there I mixed with it: and now I say God damn the wars – all wars: God damn every war: God damn ‘em! God damn ‘em! … I shouldn’t let myself go – no, I shouldn’t – but I say God damn ‘em anyway!”

Later the same day, Whitman said:

“O God! That whole damned war business is about nine hundred and ninety nine parts diarrhea to one part glory: the people who like the wars should be compelled to fight the wars : they are hellish business, wars – all wars.”