For one reason or another, the draft of Debra’s article reminded me of John Lennon’s well-known quotation, “Life is what happens while you are making other plans.” The plans that I made when I was young kept changing. Nothing went quite the way I had planned. I am not even able to determine how much—or whether—my planning influenced the outcomes I ended up living with. A very old saying is,”Man plans; God Laughs.”
Also a long time ago, a Scottish poet, Robert Burns, wrote a brief poem about a field mouse whose house had been destroyed by a farmer’s plow. The well-known line is the saying adapted from a line in “To a Mouse,” by Robert Burns: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” The common expression in the military is “the fog of war.” No matter how the generals plan, nothing in a military operation ever goes quite as planned.
When I was stationed at Long Bihn, Vietnam, we were told that our sector was going to be “hit” (attacked) on a certain day and time. I was told to take a 2.5 ton troop transport to the perimeter and prepare to receive casualties. We went to the designated place and waited, but nothing happened. The Viet Cong had hit the base in a different location. Life is what happens while you are making other plans.
I was one of the lucky ones. The entire time I was in Vietnam, the attacks were always where I wasn’t…. That was one of the weird things about war. Both my father and two of my uncles saw combat during their tours of duty during WW II and Korea. My father and a buddy of his were sitting on a log eating lunch when they were strafed by a Japanese fighter. My father was unharmed. His luncheon companion was killed. It hasn’t been that many generations, of course, since most men spent at least some time in the military engaged in combat or combat support. So far, at least, my son has not been called to serve, and I’m glad for that.
One thing war and combat make clear: Everyone is influenced by circumstances. We don’t think about that when we are driving down the street or on the highway. In “Heart of Darkness,” author Joseph Conrad has his protagonist say, “One can’t live with one’s finger constantly on one’s pulse.” That’s one thing combat does: It focuses the mind on those things that are of immediate importance.
Fortunately, most of us don’t need to worry about the hazards we encounter daily. The “Law of Averages” is usually on our side. We can usually safely assume that we and those care about will be safe. In the grand scheme of human history, however, that is a fairly recent accomplishment. We all owe an incredible debt to our ancestors who made our progress as a species possible. It has definitely been a long journey. My mother grew up knowing older male relatives who had fought in the Civil War.
We owe all those older relatives an incredible debt of gratitude for making it possible for us to live without the sense of needing to keep one’s finger constantly on one’s pulse. Perhaps one of these days we will realize the hope expressed in the old spiritual, “Ain’t gonna study war no more.”