The Procession
Sag Harbor, New York, Saturday, April 26. It is spring where I live on Eastern Long Island. The magnitude of the change of seasons is shockingly palpable. The colors are vivid, finally alive again after the dull leaden gray and pewter of winter. Forsythia, that vibrant manic-yellow member of the olive family rises up against newly blue, newly warm skies -- a reminder of what renewal looks like. Magnolias are blossoming, as are Russian olives with their silver-fish green leaves catching the sun and gleaming, incandescently. Today, however, my little town is draped in a palpable air of wrenching sorrow, juxtaposed against the ebullience of spring. There are American flags everywhere today, and a procession just came through town. Traffic stopped. Everything stopped. Life seemed to stop, and the air was suddenly much colder, literally.
A 19 year old boy from our village, a Marine, deployed for less than a month, died at 7:30 a.m. Iraqi time on Tuesday, blown up by a suicide bomber in Ramadi. He is the first Sag Harbor resident killed in action since World War II. Jordan Haerter was just a boy -- one who loved history, his truck, and his family. He wanted to come back home to Sag after his tour was over to be a cop, a village cop. He had never been overseas before his deployment. According to the local paper, just a month ago, the boy's father had driven down to Camp LeJune to pick up his truck for safe-keeping.
At noon today, the gathered residents of the village looked dumbstruck, standing on Main Street in agonized and silent grief. You could feel the all-encompassing sorrow descend like an army of ghosts, and I thought of Albert Camus's plague-ridden seaport as I watched the procession pass. The assembled survivors and friends, school-mates, teachers, all silently marking the procession of police cars that were bringing the body to the local funeral home. The flags hanging from the buildings looked lifeless in the spring sunlight, as though they were in mourning too. The whole village is suddenly ashen, usually blessed in so many ways, but not always, and certainly not today. Today, we are inescapably part of a nation at war.
At first I didn't know what was going on, and stuck at a stop light for fifteen minutes, honked gently/impatiently at a police-officer directing traffic, and made a gesture of "what's going on?". Someone explained it. The cop came over to me, and through clenched and furious teeth said, "I bet the boy in that coffin wishes he were stuck in goddamn traffic, mister." I agreed, apologized, sick to my stomach, and drove on. I thought of Henry Reed's great and terrible war poem, "The Naming of Parts", which contrasts Spring in a garden with the assembly of a rifle, playing on the juxtaposition of image and word, with a ferocity of precision that manages to perfectly contain the magnitude of tragic loss at the center of war. One section in particular came into my head as I drove away from the procession:
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.
I will refrain from a discussion of this war here, of how it came to pass, and of the unthinkable series of ideological and strategic mis-steps, and the tragic deceptions and blind zealotry of an entire class of leaders who will, one prays, have to eventually face the dictates of either their own, or at very least, the nation's consciences. Instead I will report that I saw an entire village holding small American flags. Children and women, local merchants, artists and writers, plumbers, contractors, public servants, mothers and fathers, collectively gathered, to mourn a life that meant so much to those who loved him and those who knew him, and even those, like me, who did not. I will report that on this bright day, the light of spring was occluded by a procession that showed us what will never be for one family. The sense of what was cut short in Ramadi -- the promise of future laughter, of future springs -- is palpable on Main Street. I saw in those faces watching the procession move slowly by, the certain knowledge that, as in Henry Reed's poem, our point of balance is gone, and for one of our own, all that is left is past, just a bank of memories of one happy childhood -- nineteen years in a small village on the edge of Long Island.
(photos- Joe Mantello)
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The U.S. occupation of Iraq won't end unless we proactively demand it.
U.S. troops have achieved victory by completing the primary objectives as defined at the beginning of the Iraq war. President Bush has said the troops should “return on success.” It’s time to do exactly that.
Representative Lynne Woolsey (D-CA) has drafted an Iraq troop withdrawal bill called HR5507. It would withdraw all U.S. troops within one year, send in peacekeepers for two years, and cancel the outdated Iraq Authorization for Use of Military Force. HR5507 would direct the Bush Administration to treat Iraq as a sovereign nation, instead of a U.S. colony that we presume to micromanage.
This month, Congress will vote on Iraq War appropriations. That debate will be the last round of Iraq war funding debates this year, so we have a "use it or lose it" opportunity to end the war now.
Please ask your representatives to block Iraq war funding. Urge them to ignore Presidential threats to furlough personnel if funding is withheld. Remind them that House leadership has the power to block funding bills from being introduced. Remind them that Democrats were elected to end the war, not fund it. Remind them of the 4/28 SFGate poll which shows 88% opposed to funding the war in Iraq.
Please ask your representatives to block war funding and pass HR5507.
Please ask Hillary and Obama to block war funding and endorse HR5507.
"I will refrain from a discussion of this war here, of how it came to pass, and of the unthinkable series of ideological and strategic mis-steps, and the tragic deceptions and blind zealotry of an entire class of leaders who will, one prays, have to eventually face the dictates of either their own, or at very least, the nation's consciences."
It's all about Jordan Haerter, Mr. Baitz? Seems as if you did a good job of putting your spin on the story to me. Having said that, I don't doubt that your emotions are sincere. I pray for Jordan's family.
I wish I could let some of these comments go, but I can't. If you agree or disagree with what this administration is doing...that's our right as Americans. I am not replying to argue that point. I wouldn't want to live anywhere where we couldn't voice those opinions. But Jordan did not die for oil fields or in vain. To suggest that is an insult to him and his service to our country. He fought and ultimately died for his buddy to the left and right of him. That's it.
Jordan, Rest in Peace brother.
Semper Fi,
Mike
Quote, "so he was a volunteer" unquote. Source, Dickless Cheney.
Although I don't always agree with editorials written on this site or the comments made in reply to them, I see value in exploring what's on the other side of the coin so to speak. I may read something here that makes me see an issue in a new light, which can be a good thing. I have no delusions that my opinion is always the best one. I have read many the insightful comment on this website. "Dickless Cheney" was not one of them.
You missed the whole point bogananda by trying to politicize something that is very personal to me and the other men and women that serve our country, the passing of one of our own. I am sure that you can come up with another clever response to this comment, and I encourage you to write it, friend. I probably won't read it though, because I don't see how you can top the "dickless" thing and I don't want to be let down. Happy writing.
Thank you for your comments. So poignant and so true. We are surrounded these days with fair weather patriots. Jordan Haerter was no boy. He was a man. He raised his right hand like many soldiers, marines, sailors, airmen and coast guard do every day and sometimes for decades and he swore to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He followed orders like generations of patriots before him.
From and old soldier to a young Marine. Semper Fi. God bless you and the Marines.
GW Bush had his father pull strings to get him into an Air National Guard unit that would never be called to active duty during the Vietnam War. Even this plush assignmment was too tough for him, so he went AWOL. Dick Cheney refused to serve his country in any military capacity. Considering his incompetence with guns ( he mistook his hunting partner for a bird and shot him in the face with a shotgun ), our army was better off without him. Cheney might have shot our own soldiers. Bush and Cheney were not willing to risk or sacrifice anything for their country in time of war. How dare these two freeloaders start an unnessary war which has caused so much sacrifice and grief for so many families (but not theirs).
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To paraphrase George Carlin, who got it exactly right.
War is rich old men protecting their property by sending lower class and middle class men and women off to die. It's about owning things, it always has been.
Stop volunteering, stop trusting the government to be responsible. They don't care about your life, so don't give it to them. The last real threat to American way of life was the Nazi's. Every war since then has been a political contrivance that has only made certain people richer, and other people dead.
someone linked this article yesterday in a comment on huffpo illustrating the origins of big business controlling the masses.
a great read:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/03/8686/
19 years old and no longer with us. Sent into a war created by a small cadre of neocons, most of whom had never heard the sound of war louder than, comparatively speaking, the feeble click of a stapler. 19 tears old and sent to Iraq to protect an army the neocons say we have been training for four years.
lovely words,a sad story.I dont know why people tend to wax poetic at the beauty around them when they are grieving...or witnessing tragedy unfold.Trying to find some normalcy in our madness...maybe
i for one have no words..only regret that those who started and continue this war will never pay any price.No they will be rewarded with a nations complacency..and they laugh all the way to the bank.
You get used to it. God knows the soldiers do.
But it doesn't get any easier, any less jolting or grievous or unbelievable and unacceptable, and it shouldn't.
I hope those who mourn on behalf of families like this one remember to make their voices heard in getting more of our military's funding to the soldiers (and their equipment upkeep and upgrades) rather than to the contractors; and don't forget to demand improved soldier and Veteran medical (and mental) health care so those who survive the war don't fall on the homefront.
In 1968 my best friends brother was killed in Vietnam. He was 20. He had only been there for 2 weeks, transferred from a Germany station. At first he was MIA. The Army car with two NCO's drove up to the house when a woman from across the street starting screaming. Her husband went to her and said" It's not are boy, those are Army men. She had thought they had come to give her bad news about her son in the Marines. Luckily for them it was the neighbor who was getting the devasting news. My friends parents were proud of their son for who he was, his heroism and any celebration of it was never enough to ease the pain, nor did they ever feel that their son's life was worth that unecessary war. It was wrong and all the flags in the world would never make it right.
So sad. Iraq has been made so antiseptic. We get so few stories like this, so few images, so little information about the reality of what this administration is doing. What you've written is a simple truth. Well written. Multiply this story a million times over and we get close to the whole truth.
I just threw up. A small village! A dead soldier! If you cared so much, you would stop 19-year-olds from going off to be killed for idiocy.
How about a central web site for photos like the ones that accompany this post? We can whine about how the Bush Administration won't let coffins be photographed, or instead we can use our numbers of angry, frustrated, grieving citizens, and post our photos somewhere together. Think of the flowers people leave at an accident site, or the ones they left for Diana in London, or the photos taped up on fences in New York after 9/11. We need a virtual wall for photos like the one in this post.
what a bunch of mealy mouth crap, the author has no honor nor any sense of it. Marines serve for the honor and the glory, not personal rewards. For the personal honor that comes from within, and the glory of the Corps. If the author wanted to do other than blow his own horn, he could have at least written in support of the young hero and his mission. I honor the sacrifice of this young Marine, he will be blessed and his name remembered in the hallowed history of the Corps. Jordan Haerter, we'll miss you brother.
There is no honor in fighting and dying for a lie. There is no honor for a country that does not take care of those who serve, while profiteers and mercenaries dance on their graves. There is no honor in hiding the coffins of those who die in battle. The young man was just a teenager when the lies began, and the president thought it funny to make jokes about weapons of mass destruction? Did this young man know about WMD?
You must not have actually read the post.
ironjunkman,
Will he also get 72 virgins?
Yea, I agree with you and besides he was a volunteer, "so", in the immortal words of Dick Cheney.
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My sincerest condolences to the Haerter family.
My son is 19 so it's difficult to read your post without tears streaming down my cheeks. Since graduation last June, five kids from our small town have chosen to enlist. Two of them had started college and after one term dropped out. Another was told by his parents to make a choice, so he did. And two others just enlisted in the Navy.
These are kids who may not have been the brightest bulbs in class, but their opportunities to make a decent living have dwindled to almost nothing. If parents cannot afford to pay for college, what choices do kids have? I believe this is an intentional act by this administration's efforts to defund their educational mandate, then shrink the economy. Thank gawd that will be left behind as the new Democratic administration and Congress start ramping up school funding next year. All kids can be reached in school one way or another, that's my firm belief. I've seen it happen as a teaching assistant.
I TOTALLY respect a young person's choice to join the military. It's not for everybody, but I am grateful they've committed themselves to protecting our country. It's the government's totally cold and calculating mindlessness and lack of concern for human life that I resent... "resentment" doesn't even come close to what I feel for these criminals.
You seem to think our "government" is some highly intelligent future seeing being. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it is not. It is a massive organization of individuals, who, believe it or not, are doing what they think is right for the country.
Young people join the military for a wide variety of reasons, some of those being the GI Bill. Perhaps if our parents, you know the self-indulgent "me generation" has saved even a little bit for their childrens college, we would have more options. But, it does no good, because what's done is done.
Yes, if the dems win they will throw a ton of money at education. But, do not fool yourself, it will solve none of the problems facing our public schools. The bulk of this money will never reach the classrooms, but will be absorbed by the unions to provide fat retirement funds for the "me generation". Do you see the theme here.
BTW what generation is running this war?
Thanks for your input.
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Those dam unions , it most suck when people get pensions when they retire. I prefer no pension just a bankrupt social security system which I hope will be there when I retire. Those people that want pension are just fools and greedy. You should be able to survive on bread and water alone , this should sustain to your good and ready to kick the bucker. Buddy if we did not have unions in this country then 90% of the population would earning minimum wage. Go research why the unions came into existense before bashing them. Though they are not perfect ,without them alot of people would suffer at the hands of this corrupt capitalist system.
Well said. We have been ill used by the people of this administration. They don't govern, they use. And they use brutally and murderously. It will change in November.
No, it won't change in November. We will be presented with three candidates who will keep the war going on and on and on: Hillary, who suggests the "total obliteration" of 65 million Iranians if they folks would dare touch our good old ally Israel (blood into votes!). There is Obama, who will keep us there until things "stabilize" -- but don't hold your breath, there will always be a crazy religious war going on in and around Israel -- they have been going on for the past several thousand years (hope into votes). And finally, McCain, who along with his "On to Iran" buddy and string-puller Lieberman, will have us at war with Iran within minutes of slipping into the White House (war into votes). Well, the American people are sheep. As sheep, they can expect to be herded, sheared, and slaughtered.
Ah, nearly forgot, there is a forth candidate who has been ridiculed and ignored by the corporate media, his name , if I dare mention it, is Ron Paul. He alone has the honesty and the courage to want our brave young people to come home to their own nation -- NOW.
"unthinkable series of ideological and strategic mis-steps, and the tragic deceptions and blind zealotry of an entire class of leaders"
what is real is not unthinkable. it must be resolved; in so very many ways. when the unthinkable reality is the product of "tragic deceptions" giving rise to an "unthinkable series of ideological and strategic mis-steps" then anger, fury, uncompromising revulsion are as appropriate as overwhelming sadness. maybe more.
then there's the side of us that wonders why they go in tacit support of the liars and thieves who subverted the interests of the constitution they swore to serve by asking the volunteers to participate in the scurrilous plans known only to their rulers. that, sir, is an oligarchic monarchy -- as in "unitary presidency" promulgated by the republican elite.
sure, a member of the middle class died in the republican's war. in a very real sense, he and his peers are the only way the republicans can carry out their illegal, immoral and unstated goals. he was a pawn, an enabling pawn, but a pawn nonetheless. do them all a favor. bring them home. do us all a favor, stop calling them heroes. start telling them to tell their masters to find someone else. then, they'll be heroes.
suppose they had a war and no one came? we can't afford this one. but bin laden knew that when it started.
There has been a lot of reports (of course not in many of the US medias) coming out from Iraq by those brave and true journalists from '''Reporters Without Borders''', or '''RWB''' and other organizations like these who have conducted a thorough and long lasting investigation about these kinds of children mass death caused by these kinds of American weaponry. It might be called "collateral damage", but that only stands until the true test emerges.
Until it is YOU OWN child who is shread to tiny pieces.
hey US, Think about that!
Are you suggesting that we not have a military?
Of, if we have one, that is should never fight?
What about those of us who joined knowing full well that if there was a war, we could die or be maimed? You don't think we know what the possibilities are when we join?
It is not a matter of having a military. Few disagree that we should have one, BUT sending young men and women to invade a country that the rest of the world and a lot of U.S. Citizens realized was pure folly is what is WRONG with THIS war.
These young men and women who have joined up to serve our country are being WASTED (*sorry if that offends anyone but that is the truth) on a WAR OF CHOICE! Not a war of necessity. Not a war of defense. NOT a war that was needed.
WASTING the lives of young men and women and of course the older ones as well is purely criminal. It was done for political purposes and nothing else.
WAR IS A RACKET far too often.
I keeping hoping and wishing Huffpost would post a permanent link to Marine General and TWO TIME CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR WINNER Smedley Butler who wrote an amazing piece on what war has become for the most part.
And if any war defined what he wrote, the Iraqi invasion is it.
BILLIONS being put into the pockets of war profiteers who all contributed heavily to this criminal in the White House up to and including the freaking VICE PRESIDENT.
So while my heart goes out to this young man's family and the town that's grieving, those who voted for this criminal in the White House are the ones who should be hanging their heads in shame.
Obviously if we have a military we must have wars. It only makes sense.
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