Brother Tom

1. Brother Tom 
   By Nate Bender 
   11/25/2013
   
   
   Brother Tom, being a year younger than me,
   Stands out as my first friend, making for early and enduring ties.
   
   
   Calm and gentle in the core of his nature, 
   Tom’s manner often balanced my own rough edges.
   
   
   Liked by all, loved by most,
   Tom’s nature became an interpersonal strength, when reception was allowed.
   
   
   Via the leanings of his genetic makeup, and the Divine,
   A basketball player Tom became.
   
   
   His near-seven foot frame took him to college and beyond,
   Landing in far-away lands of Australia, Europe and Israel.
   
   
   Tom was more than an athlete,
   He was far and away, a child of God.
   
   
   Tom touched the lives of ever so many people,
   Friends, students, colleagues and relatives alike.
   
   
   Tom’s mark on the world community is immeasurable, yet profound,
   Held in the very fibers of all who received his glowing touch.
   
   
   Thanks for being my brother, 
   For being the person who knows me most.
   
   
   Here’s looking to meet up with you in the great beyond.
   
   
   Deep love from your brother Nate

Veteran's Poem

AND THE BAND PLAYED WALTZING MATILDA And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda Cords When I was a young man I carried my pack And I lived the free life of a rover From the Murrays green basin to the dusty outback I waltzed my Matilda all over Then in nineteen fifteen my country said Son It's time to stop rambling 'cause there's work to be done So they gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun And they sent me away to the war And the band played Waltzing Matilda As we sailed away from the quay And amidst all the tears and the shouts and the cheers We sailed off to Gallipoli How well I remember that terrible day How the blood stained the sand and the water And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter Johnny Turk he was ready, he primed himself well He chased us with bullets, he rained us with shells And in five minutes flat he'd blown us all to hell Nearly blew us right back to Australia But the band played Waltzing Matilda As we stopped to bury our slain We buried ours and the Turks buried theirs Then we started all over again Now those that were left, well we tried to survive In a mad world of blood, death and fire And for ten weary weeks I kept myself alive But around me the corpses piled higher Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over tit And when I woke up in my hospital bed And saw what it had done, I wished I was dead Never knew there were worse things than dying For no more I'll go waltzing Matilda All around the green bush far and near For to hump tent and pegs, a man needs two legs No more waltzing Matilda for me So they collected the cripples, the wounded, the maimed And they shipped us back home to Australia The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay I looked at the place where my legs used to be And thank Christ there was nobody waiting for me To grieve and to mourn and to pity And the band played Waltzing Matilda As they carried us down the gangway But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared Then turned all their faces away And now every April I sit on my porch And I watch the parade pass before me And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march Reliving old dreams of past glory And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war And the young people ask, "What are they marching for?" And I ask myself the same question And the band plays Waltzing Matilda And the old men answer to the call But year after year their numbers get fewer Some day no one will march there at all Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me And their ghosts may be heard as you pass the Billabong Who'll come-a-waltzing Matilda with me? copyright © Eric Bogle Note: If you're curious about the song Waltzing Matilda, a great deal of information and lyrics can be found here and here. Additional Note: I am saddened to report that Alec Campbell, the last known survivor of the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli (and the last known survivor of Gallipoli) died on Thursday, May 16, 2002 at the age of 103. Mr. Campbell enlisted at 16, and served at Gallipoli in 1915. He led Hobart's ANZAC Day parade three weeks prior to his death. More information about Mr. Campbell can be found here. But year after year their numbers get fewer Some day no one will march there at all Thank you Jonathan.

Learning How to Die in the Anthropocent

By ROY SCRANTON

Jeffery DelViscio

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

TAGS:

GLOBAL WARMING,GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS, HURRICANE KATRINA (2005), IRAQ, IRAQ WAR (2003-11), NEW ORLEANS (LA), PHILOSOPHY,WEATHER

I.

Driving into Iraq just after the 2003 invasion felt like driving into the future. We convoyed all day, all night, past Army checkpoints and burned-out tanks, till in the blue dawn Baghdad rose from the desert like a vision of hell: Flames licked the bruised sky from the tops of refinery towers, cyclopean monuments bulged and leaned against the horizon, broken overpasses swooped and fell over ruined suburbs, bombed factories, and narrow ancient streets.

Civilizations have marched blindly toward disaster because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today.

With “shock and awe,” our military had unleashed the end of the world on a city of six million — a city about the same size as Houston or Washington. The infrastructure was totaled: water, power, traffic, markets and security fell to anarchy and local rule. The city’s secular middle class was disappearing, squeezed out between gangsters, profiteers, fundamentalists and soldiers. The government was going down, walls were going up, tribal lines were being drawn, and brutal hierarchies savagely established.

I was a private in the United States Army. This strange, precarious world was my new home. If I survived.

Two and a half years later, safe and lazy back in Fort Sill, Okla., I thought I had made it out. Then I watched on television as Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. This time it was the weather that brought shock and awe, but I saw the same chaos and urban collapse I’d seen in Baghdad, the same failure of planning and the same tide of anarchy. The 82^nd Airborne hit the ground, took over strategic points and patrolled streets now under de facto martial law. My unit was put on alert to prepare for riot control operations. The grim future I’d seen in Baghdad was coming home: not terrorism, not even W.M.D.’s, but a civilization in collapse, with a crippled infrastructure, unable to recuperate from shocks to its system.

And today, with recovery still going on more than a year after Sandy and many critics arguing that the Eastern seaboard is no more prepared for a huge weather event than we were last November, it’s clear that future’s not going away.

This March, Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, the commander of the United States Pacific Command, told security and foreign policy specialists in Cambridge, Mass., that global climate change was the greatest threat the United States faced — more dangerous than terrorism, Chinese hackers and North Korean nuclear missiles. Upheaval from increased temperatures, rising seas and radical destabilization “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen…” he said, “that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

Locklear’s not alone. Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, said much the same thing in April, speaking to an audience at Columbia’s new Center on Global Energy Policy. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, told the Senate in March that “Extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly disrupt food and energy markets, exacerbating state weakness, forcing human migrations, and triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism.”

On the civilian side, the World Bank’s recent report, “Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience,” offers a dire prognosis for the effects of global warming, which climatologists now predict will raise global temperatures by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit within a generation and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit within 90 years. Projections from researchers at the University of Hawaii find us dealing with “historically unprecedented” climates as soon as 2047. The climate scientist James Hansen, formerly with NASA, has argued that we face an “apocalyptic” future. This grim view is seconded by researchers worldwide, including Anders Levermann, Paul and Anne Ehrlich,Lonnie Thompson and many, many, many others.

This chorus of Jeremiahs predicts a radically transformed global climate forcing widespread upheaval — not possibly, not potentially, but inevitably. We have passed the point of no return. From the point of view of policy experts, climate scientists and national security officials, the question is no longer whether global warming exists or how we might stop it, but how we are going to deal with it.

II.

There’s a word for this new era we live in: the Anthropocene. This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The Economist and the The New York Times, represents the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earth’s geological history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force. The Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term in 2002, and it has steadily gained acceptance as evidence has increasingly mounted that the changes wrought by global warming will affect not just the world’s climate and biological diversity, but its very geology — and not just for a few centuries, but for millenniums. The geophysicist David Archer’s 2009 book, “The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate,” lays out a clear and concise argument for how huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and melting ice will radically transform the planet, beyond freak storms and warmer summers, beyond any foreseeable future.

The Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London — the scientists responsible for pinning the “golden spikes” that demarcate geological epochs such as the Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene — have adopted the Anthropocene as a term deserving further consideration, “significant on the scale of Earth history.”Working groups are discussing what level of geological time-scale it might be (an “epoch” like the Holocene, or merely an “age” like the Calabrian), and at what date we might say it began. The beginning of the Great Acceleration, in the middle of the 20th century? The beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 1800? The advent of agriculture?

Every day I went out on mission in Iraq, I looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole.

The challenge the Anthropocene poses is a challenge not just to national security, to food and energy markets, or to our “way of life” — though these challenges are all real, profound, and inescapable. The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses may be to our sense of what it means to be human. Within 100 years — within three to five generations — we will face average temperatures 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today, rising seas at least three to 10 feet higher, and worldwide shifts in crop belts, growing seasons and population centers. Within a thousand years, unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases wholesale right now, humans will be living in a climate the Earth hasn’t seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago, when oceans were 75 feethigher than they are today. We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping and energy networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off in the biosphere that’s already well on its way, and our own possible extinction. If homo sapiens (or some genetically modified variant) survives the next millenniums, it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have inhabited.

Jeffery DelViscio

Geological time scales, civilizational collapse and species extinction give rise to profound problems that humanities scholars and academic philosophers, with their taste for fine-grained analysis, esoteric debates and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill suited to address. After all, how will thinking about Kant help us trap carbon dioxide? Can arguments between object-oriented ontology and historical materialism protect honeybees from colony collapse disorder? Are ancient Greek philosophers, medieval theologians, and contemporary metaphysicians going to keep Bangladesh from being inundated by rising oceans?

Of course not. But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to live?” In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — “What does my life mean in the face of death?” — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?

These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They are philosophical problems par excellence. Many thinkers, including Cicero, Montaigne, Karl Jaspers, and The Stone’s own Simon Critchley, have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that’s true, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age — for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The rub is that now we have to learn how to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.

III.

Learning how to die isn’t easy. In Iraq, at the beginning, I was terrified by the idea. Baghdad seemed incredibly dangerous, even though statistically I was pretty safe. We got shot at and mortared, and I.E.D.’s laced every highway, but I had good armor, we had a great medic, and we were part of the most powerful military the world had ever seen. The odds were good I would come home. Maybe wounded, but probably alive. Every day I went out on mission, though, I looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole.

“For the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him,” wrote  Simone Weil in her remarkable meditation on war, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force.” “Yet the idea of man’s having death for a future is abhorrent to nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face.” That was the face I saw in the mirror, and its gaze nearly paralyzed me.

I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”

I got through my tour in Iraq one day at a time, meditating each morning on my inevitable end. When I left Iraq and came back stateside, I thought I’d left that future behind. Then I saw it come home in the chaos that was unleashed after Katrina hit New Orleans. And then I saw it again when Sandy battered New York and New Jersey: Government agencies failed to move quickly enough, andvolunteer groups like Team Rubicon had to step in to manage disaster relief.

Now, when I look into our future — into the Anthropocene — I see water rising up to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots, hurricanes, and climate refugees. I see 82^nd Airborne soldiers shooting looters. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste, and plagues. I see Baghdad. I see the Rockaways. I see a strange, precarious world.

Our new home.

The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.

The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.

If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.

---

Roy Scranton served in the United States Army from 2002 to 2006. He is a doctoral candidate in English at Princeton University, and co-editor of “Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War.” He has written for The New York Times, Boston Review, Theory & Event and recently completed a novel about the Iraq War. Twitter @RoyScranton.

Desert One: Evolving from Tragedy

By Nate Bender

11/7/2013

The year was 1979.  I was 36 years old, and had completed all the requirements in being awarded a Ph.D., including dissertation and intensive internship.  Two years into functioning as an Army Psychologist, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, my spirit became deflated.  I started questioning my chosen career, whether I was in the right niche and whether I was in the right organizational structure.  I refer to those dark days of my development as a form of post-traumatic stress, as the rigors of academic study were behind me and the realities of being a psychologist had a chance to be tested.  Something was not right.  My body, mind and spirit, collectively, revealed an imbalance; my energy levels were diminished, I was becoming short tempered and life outside the military seemed as unappealing as life within its structure.  While not a fully formed conclusion at that time, I needed a more compatible, a more non-traditional forum in which to apply my talents and abilities.

Unknown to me, answers to my evolving needs were in the making, as decision makers in the Pentagon and the Surgeon General’s Office were considering who, among all Army Psychologists, would best fit a new, highly sensitive, secretive, position at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  In short order, I received orders to report to this mysterious Unit, to be evaluated for possible assignment.  The organization was revealed to be The Delta Force, a newly formed, top secret counter-terrorism assault force with a global mission to disengage hostage taking terrorism incidents, which were then growing in number.  

Delta personnel embraced my role as being vital to the overall operations of the Unit, warming my spirit.  This was quite a contrast to my previous assignment where I felt relegated to a subservient role under Psychiatry.  My new role held intrigue, presenting an expanded application of my talents, while also stretching my skills into new and different venues.  Initially, four roles were defined:  evaluation of Unit applicants in the assessment and selection phase; hostage negotiation, including management of adversarial relationships; sounding board for leadership team on matters of training and development; and, an undefined interface with outside organizations such as the FBI, CIA, State Department, DOE and city police departments.  I felt like I had entered the world from which mystery novels are formed!

Shortly after my official assignment to The Delta Force, while on an elaborate training exercise, word was received that the American Embassy in Tehran had been seized with a goodly number of Americans having been taken hostage.  Directives from the Pentagon had Delta to begin preparation for an immediate rescue mission.  Off to a secret site we went, and plans were formulated to enact a rescue attempt, only to learn of a need for additional preparation, involving other units of the military complex.  

My role during this preparation phase was vague, offering ample time to know the Unit members/operators, live in their quarters, and recreate with them in the local gym.  Ultimately, I was sent to spend time with the rescue-mission command element in the Pentagon.  Interestingly, I was a bearded, casually dressed Captain, roaming the halls of the Pentagon, sitting in on a number of planning meetings, recognized more by my role as Doc Bender than as an Army Captain!

Following my Pentagon placement role, I was sent to another site to evaluate helicopter pilots from the Marines and Navy.  I was housed with them and flew night training missions with them.  Again, my role was vague, with no formal protocol to produce an evaluation report.  Later, I was sent to assess US military Iranians, for inclusion in a rescue mission.  Again, the parameters were not fully defined, leaving me to report my ‘best clinical judgments.’

When President Carter gave the go for Delta to be the lead rescue force, code named Eagle Claw, we were sent to a remote staging area in Egypt.  From this obscure place, the complex, highly vulnerable mission was launched.  I was assigned to be part of the medical team of doctors and nurses, to be employed on a hospital-configured Air Force C-141 cargo plane, with the mission to fly into Tehran, once the rescue was enacted, and retrieve the hostages, wounded and deceased.  

Positioned in Bahrain, awaiting instructions, we learned of the mission’s desert fiasco (Desert One), in which a HH-53 Marine helicopter, loaded with a fuel bladder and Delta operators, careered into an Air Force C-130 cargo plane, also loaded with a fuel bladder and Delta personnel. This occurred after the mission had been aborted and extraction was being managed. Instead of flying into Tehran, our hospital plane flew to the island of Masirah, where we retrieved the Delta operators and wounded who were burned in the desert debacle.  To this day, I am able to re-experience the distinct odor of burned flesh when recalling the scenario.  Sadly, the eight flight crew members who were killed, were left in the desert, as the urgency and confusion surrounding the drama, made it impossible to retrieve their bodies.

After all the debriefings, including a visit by President Carter, Secretary Brown and Nat’l Security Advisor Brzezinski, and processing of the mission, it became clear to me that I was no longer enamored by serving as an Army psychologist in a specialized, non-traditional role.  An unexpected job offer to join an international Corporate Psychology Consulting firm became the final link to leaving a military career, one in which I was a mere nine years short of being vested for retirement benefits.

What did I learn from my two-year stint with Delta?  I learned that military might does not ensure victory or mission accomplishment.  I learned that resourcing military operations is costly, monetarily and with human casualties, and not necessarily effective in fostering positive international relationships.  I learned that terrorism is real and not easily contained or eradicated via military might, holding a demand for alternative intervention(s).  I learned that job security took second place to personal and professional well being.  I learned WAR IS COSTLY AND PEACE IS PRICELESS. And, I learned my experiences enriched the next phase of my life, including restarting my marital life in forming a union with my wife, Sandra.

Steven Job's Quote

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” -Steve Jobs