My first assignment out of the Marine Corps Basic School and Infantry Officers Course was with Company G, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines (or Golf 2/8 as Marines would say). Shortly after I reported aboard in 1981, the battalion deployed to the Mediterranean.  It looked for a time that we would land in Beirut, but it didn’t happen, and we went back to North Carolina after an uneventful six months of cruising, liberty call, and a few training anchorages. When 2/8 went back to the Med in 1982, however, we did land in Beirut. Someday I’ll write about that experience, but today I will fast forward to our return. By the time we got back, I was nearing the end of my tour with 2/8 at Camp Geiger/Lejeune.  I spent a few months as CO of Headquarters Company, 8th Marines, wrapping up with a “Solid Shield” Exercise and departing for Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island in April of `83.

2/8 deployed to the Med again a few months after I left.  They made history this time, landing in Grenada enroute to Lebanon, and getting involved in significant combat operations when they got back to Beirut.  In the course of this, four Marines I had known were killed in action. With Memorial Day coming up, I’d like to write about them.  Even on Memorial Day, the one day we set aside to remember, the dead are too often forgotten. This is my effort to preserve some of the memory, for myself as much as for anyone else who reads this, of four good Marines I knew.

The first to die was was Major John Macroglou.  Maj Macroglou had been the Deputy for Camp Affairs (DCA) at Camp Geiger when I was CO of the Headquarters Company.  Our jobs put us together, and he was kind of senior officer who was a friend of junior officers. He was later reassigned to 1/8 and deployed to Beirut .  On 23 October a truck loaded with explosives crashed into the building that the battalion was using as a command post.  220 Marines, 18 sailors and 3 soldiers were killed, John Macroglou senior among them.

Next to go was Captain John Giguere.  Captain Giguere was the Forward Air Controller (FAC) for G 2/8 when I was with the company.  One Christmas we were on air alert, and Capt Giguere and his wife invited all of the single lieutenants in G Co. over to their house on Christmas Day.  Just days after the Beirut bombing, 2/8 invaded Grenada, and by then Capt Giguere was back to flying his Cobra.  The other Cobra in his section (his “wingman”) was shot down on the island. Capt Giguere and his co-pilot continued to suppress enemy ground fire and direct rescue efforts for the downed ship, even continuing to make strafing runs at the ground after they had run out of ammo, in order to draw off fire from the rescue aircraft.  Capt Giguere’s ship was shot down. It went into the sea, killing both him and his co-pilot 1st Lieutenant Jeffrey Scharver. One of the Marines in the other Cobra was rescued and survived. John Giguere received the Silver Star posthumously.

Last were Sergeant Manuel Cox and Corporal David Daugherty. Shortly after the bombing, 2/8 relieved 1/8 in Lebanon.  On a day in December units of 2/8 were engaging the enemy. When the shooting started, Cox, Daugherty, and some other Marines ran to the roof of the building they were in to return fire.  A rocket hit the roof, and Cox, Daugherty, and several other Marines were killed.  Cpl Daugherty was a big, happy guy. I’ve looked up some pictures of him and the other 3, and he almost always has a smile. That’s how I remember him.  Sgt Cox was a serious career Marine with a wife and son.  I wish I’d made the effort to get to know them a bit better, but the atmosphere of the Marine Corps generally doesn’t encourage that between officer and enlisted. Anyway, I won’t forget them, and on Memorial Day I’ll make a special effort to hold them in my heart.

Veterans for American Ideals recently did me the honor of posting this interview on their site.  My thanks to Scott Cooper and  Kate Horner.

http://www.vfai.org/blog/leader-spotlight-reed-bonadonna

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, was also a veteran. At the start of WWI, he left Cambridge to return home to join the Austrian army. I enjoyed auditing a graduate philosophy course on Wittgenstein while an English doctoral student at Boston University, and I’ve retained an interest in him. As with other great philosophers, it is the life that fascinates as much as the work. Wittgenstein is obviously an exceptional, even an extraordinary figure, but he is in some ways representative of many veterans, perhaps especially those returning from war. Wittgenstein’s life and work illustrate a turn towards questions of ethics that is often experienced by veterans.  Prior to his military service, Wittgenstein had been primarily interested in logic. In Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius, biographer Ray Monk identifies a change in Wittgenstein’s thinking at the point when his unit took heavy casualties under a Russian assault.  Wittgenstein did not surrender his involvement in logic, but his wartime service led him outwards to a greater interest in the world of real things and people. Logic itself acquired for Wittgenstein an ethical basis, as it became clear to him that the accuracy of statements reflecting the conditions of the world was not only a logical requirement, but an ethical imperative.  The army put the somewhat sheltered young man into contact  with a broad cross-section of humanity, and as an NCO and officer he was responsible for the men in his charge.  He found that service on the front lines, with its dangers, lack of rest, and harsh living conditions, was actually more productive of his philosophical thought than the safer, more comfortable and leisurely service in the rear.  The nearness of danger and the high-stakes environment lent a seriousness to one’s thinking that was often absent in ordinary times.  Along with the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, another post-war product was his “Lecture on Ethics.” In it, he describes two states of mind he sees as ethically desirable: that of wonder at the world’s existence, and of feeling completely safe. We can see how these ideas might be inspired by wartime, which sometimes seems to grant glimpses of eternity through the smoke and fire; feelings of invulnerability, of essential safety even in danger; and wonder along with fear.

Perhaps the veteran returns home not just an ethicist but also a metaphysician, an ontologist laying out the boundaries of human selfhood because her experience has given her an insight into the nature of humanity sometimes pared down to the bare essentials, and also of people at their most selfless and willing to merge their identity with that of a community of souls.  Another soldier-philosopher, J.Glenn Gray regrets the hardening and coarsening that can accompany war and military service, their tendency to turn the individual into a functionary of limited concerns and sympathies, but he concludes that the war did not change him enough. He regrets that it may require the nearness of death, the violence, dislocation and sharp contrasts of war to provide the setting for certain kinds of wisdom. Finally, at the conclusion of his important philosophical work, War and Existence, Michael Gelven has this to say,

“…often it is in our darkest and most wretched ways that we find what is most precious, like the jewel in the mud: things like truth for its own sake and esteem for who we are, regardless of how grim the truth and how frail our efforts. Perhaps Plato is right: the lovers of truth must be selected only from those who first manifest the sacrificial spirit of the warrior.”

In addition to the works named, I should acknowledge J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle.  Gray received the notice of his Columbia philosophy Ph.D. and induction into the U.S. Army on the same day in 1941.   

I said I might post more about the veteran.  I’d like today to write some about my own veteran’s experience with a particular group of vets. A few months ago, looking for a way to stay active after retirement, I began looking into the subject organization. I liked a number of things about it: that its members were mostly veterans, that it was non-partisan, and that it was affiliated with a larger organization called Human Rights First, which meant that although it was for veterans, it involved other citizens too.  As of now, the big three issues for VFAI are the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program for Iraqi and Afghani nationals who worked with U.S. forces, immigrants and refugees in general, and anti-Muslim bigotry (which VFAI prefers to the more common term “Islamophobia”). It took me a little while to get my head around these issues, since none had been on the top of my list of concerns, but I came to think that the VFAI positions made sense, and also that the issues were emblematic of some others affecting the country and the world. One of these is the question of how vets will contribute to society after leaving the service. Just what can we contribute?  I think that the VFAI “big three” all relate to what I recently heard ADM Stavridis call the “inchoate sense” abroad in the U.S. and elsewhere that we need to wall of the rest of the world in order to prosper and protect ourselves.  I think this impulse is wrong on a number of levels. Take the SIV program.  If we deny aid to people who have worked with us in the past, who is ever going to want to work with us again, except for money, and that kind of loyalty goes to the highest bidder and may not be there when, as Hemingway says, there are chips that are down?  If we’ve learned one thing over the past 15 years, it is that you don’t win in a counterinsurgency or counter-terrorism campaign without local allies. You also need to go in with your own trained translators and experts, preferably ones who know about military operations as much as about language and culture.  These are exactly the people who would come into the U.S. (after a lot of checks) under the SIV program, if it is revived. I know an Iraqi man, a former translator, who came into the country on an SIV and is now a U.S. citizen. He says he’d go back if we needed him. I believe him, and I think others in his situation would feel the same way. People coming in under the SIV program are likely to be some of the most patriotic you’d ever meet. Alongside practical concerns, there is the ethical question: fulfilling our obligations, helping people who risked their lives for us.  Many of them remain at risk for as long as the U.S. denies them entry.

Since I signed on for VFAI, I’ve been in several Congressional offices talking to staffers and the representatives , done some community organizing, and written a piece for the VFAI website.  One of the reasons this rather unaccustomed activity feels right to me is the caliber of people I met when VFAI got a number of us together for training and some visits to “the Hill” in Washington. These were people not expecting to be deferred to just because they were veterans, nor looking for kudos. They were veterans from all over the country who wanted to keep serving. I think many missed, like me, the purposefulness and comradeship of military life. I know that I’ve rarely, if ever, liked a group of strangers so much.  It also looks like we may have done some good in moving SIV legislation forward.

I know that not all veterans feel as we do. Some of them embrace the narrow nationalism that is close to xenophobia.  I think we can do better than that. America isn’t just about guarding our borders.  We welcome others whenever we can. Few of us would be here now if this were not the case.  Properly understood, I think that military service should broaden the range of your humanity, of your empathy and understanding of all people, not narrow it.  Nobility and generosity ought to be part of the veteran’s creed.    I’m glad and honored to be associated with a group of vets who are trying to live up to these ideals. The VFAI vets in NY are planning some events. I plan to post about them as they come up.

Publication day for Soldiers and Civilization is 15 May, although some people and a few libraries already have their copies. I’ll be posting about readings, signings etc. shortly.  In some ways, my activities with VFAI lie close to the central concerns of the book, which is how soldiers contribute to civilization, and not just as trigger-pullers.

Happy M-Day to all you mothers!