Woe is the wage of www.war

Sixty years later, after we’ve sat across each other to partake of the sushi bar, and downed Asahi’s brew, jointly remembered and produced the stories surrounding tora! tora! tora!, and hordes of red-sun-on-white flagged Nihonggo-speaking tourists kept the memorial store of the USS Arizona solidly on the ground and financially afloat, we could not sit down to share a bite of hot dog and a slice of sashimi on the North Field of Tinian where Little Boy, the symbol par excellence of depersonalized warfare, was launched? After enthroning Sony in Hollywood, and the double arches of big McDo in many urban centers around Tokyo and the nation, COMNAVMAR would shrivel up at the prospects of sighting a couple of Hibakushas, and the CNMI governor would capitulate to the jingoistic rantings of a few “WWII inebriated relics”—a characterization I heard used during the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. in the mid-‘90s

Since Germany started saturation bombing against the Republicans in the Basque region of Spain before World War II, the consequences of which is immortalized in Picasso’s painting, Guernica, the art of war had moved from the domain of personal bravery and courage, to the realm of robotic precision mechanics and sophisticated technology.

When we stare across the barbwires of the demilitarized zones of our minds, we discover the silhouettes of our rapacious greed and romantic ethnocentrism. The warrior has now come to be trained like an android whose expertise is the control of a projectile laser beam guided into a GPS-determined target. The warrior exemplar of my youth sensitizes his/her body to deal intuitively with the challenges and ambiguities of any given moment. The soul is tuned to the same sense of awe and wonder that is also the reserve of the valiant opponent. The mind is schooled in anticipating patterns of movement and behavior and strategizing for ways to overcome adversity where the opponent is afforded a gracious exit rather than annihilation. The will is directed to looking death straight in the eye without flinching, honoring and facilitating the opponent’s will to self-sacrifice, before offering one’s own, and if need be, flinging one’s body across the barbwires of history so that comrade-in-arms may cross into the other side stepping on one’s back. Such notions are gone, replaced by the air-conditioned comfort of digitized panels and directions, while launching devastation, despoliation and destruction at the click of a keyboard button.

Like most human inventions whose original intent changes, or is perverted in time, the jihad of the Muslim faithful was originally meant to root the corruption of the infidel in unfair business practices and unjust social affairs. The delicate discipline of the samurai was in the service of the daimyo, who promoted and presided over the artful adequacy of the simple life in resources-challenge Nippon. In the health and nutrition deprived masses of the South and Far East Asia, the motion meditation of the robed contemplative, who developed deadly martial arts skills, was primarily to assert the freedom of the spirit, the preeminence of the mind over matter. The Spartan soldier was trained to defend the homeports from invaders, not the later conquering psychopaths in Homer’s telling. The heroic knights of our Iberian and Anglo-Saxon fairy tales are out to protect the damsel in distress. We did change our military establishment’s name from the Department of War to the Department of Defense.

The warrior was birthed to ensure the continuation of life, not the termination of the same in physical death, or its other manifestations. War as an effective instrument in settling disputes went the way of the African tribes when they said, “A tooth for a tooth makes everyone toothless.” The difference now is that while the suicide bomber’s body becomes the incendiary carrier that is blown to smithereens as well, the F-18 pilot pushes the button to unload its payload that wipes out combatants and civilians alike. The pilot and many a soldier from tanks and humvees return home to talk about it in the loony rooms that now dot many veterans’ health facilities. When one does not see the face of the enemy, they are often haunted by them in their dreams. And the walking dead habitate among the living.

The depersonalization of the killing is what the Enola Gay’s payload came to signify. Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern directed U.S. military filmmakers in 1945-1946, collected and managed footage taken by Japanese filmmakers, and then kept watch on all of the materials kept top-secret for decades by the government. When the materials finally surfaced out of the censors’ control, it become evident that in the weeks following the atomic attacks, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage of the Hiroshima holocaust taken by Japanese filmmakers purportedly destroyed by the American occupying forces but copied and hidden before the original was handed over, for many years, all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited. The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. We refused the face of the foe. Ninety percent of them in Hiroshima were women and children!

McGovern would be quoted as saying, “I always had the sense that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force—it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done—at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because … we were sorry for our sins.”

As Japan is often accused of wearing historical blinders in telling its role in the Asian conflict of WWII, we might also point out that the mythology of the bombs shortening the hostilities, though patriotically admirable and correct, is nevertheless, historically inaccurate. Record shows that it was the opening of the Russian front of Aug. 8 that convinced the Japanese War Ministry to desist from conducting further the defense of the homeland.

In a country that venerated the seppuku and the harakiri, and developed the devastating banzai and kamikaze attacks, glorious death is a spirit virtue. The prospects of ignominious death in the hands of the Russians, whose military forces had already exhibited less than exemplary conduct in Europe, and the improbability of opening a second front in the north when all materials and resources have all been diverted to the south where the Americans were expected to invade, made surrendering a wise tactical judgment. It was informed and calculated military and political strategy.

Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura would express this official policy and widely shared sentiment: “As the only country to have ever suffered nuclear devastation, Japan firmly maintains the Three Non-Nuclear Principles—not possessing, not producing and not permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan.” In this 60th year commemorative period of the A-bombs, let us hope that Japan will continue to refuse use and possession of nuclear weapons, and maintain its passion forswearing any ambition to acquire them. Would that the rest of the world, my nation, my home included, follow.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School