My father was a combat veteran, though you would never have known it.
He joined the Army in early 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and he came home in 1946, after duty in the US occupation of Japan. In between, he served as an instructor at the Officer Candidate School in Fort Benning, Georgia, and then in combat as a paratrooper in the campaigns in the Philippines and on the island of Okinawa.
Days after Pearl Harbor was bombed, my dad wrote a front-page editorial in the college newspaper he ran, The DePaulia, of DePaul University in Chicago. “Youth and War,” he called it. I found it online a few years ago, and I’ve written about it before, here. I’m always struck when I look at the piece by the seriousness and solemnity of that 21-year-old man, and by his realization that the world would never be the same—that all the young men and young women of his generation, which came to be called “great,” would never be the same.
“And now, again, the United States has gone to war,” my father began his editorial, while the broken battleships still smoldered at the docks in Hawaii. “For almost a quarter of a century we have been at peace…We have come, many of us, to fancy ourselves among the select few, to sneer at sentiment, and to relegate patriotism to the limbo of lost illusions.”
He is talking there of the pseudo-sophistication that university students since the Middle Ages—since ancient Athens, probably—enjoy as a right. It’s normal, even helpful, for young people to be dismissive of the old ideas and old values of the generations they stand poised to replace. But Daddy (as his ten children called him to the day he died) was different. He was the kind of young person who married idealism with tradition.
The tradition that shaped him was Catholicism. My father was a deeply religious man—though you would never have known that, either. Joe Moran hated cant of all kinds, especially the religious kind. Any ostentatious display of holiness raised his suspicion, even his ire.
But the power of his faith was evident in his response to the outbreak of war.
“We are fighting a war,” my dad wrote days after Pearl Harbor. “And war in this world has come to mean hate. But for us, there can only be love, and the greater love which lies in Christ.”
That’s a deliberate echo of the Gospels: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Of the 324 men and women in my father’s class of 1942 at DePaul University, 70 were killed in the war. Every year, my mother would recite the names of several of them on Memorial Day, and where they were killed, and at some point in our lives she told each of her seven sons that they were now older than one or another of the many “boys” she knew who died in that war. She wanted us to understand how close it was to us, how real, how many and how much had been lost.
But my father never talked about his experience of war. He never, in my presence, said a single word about the combat he had seen in those years. It was bad—that we knew from my mom; after he died, she told us a story or two he’d told her. But my father kept all that close. All that horror. Out of respect, I think. Sometimes, reality itself deserves our respect.
I’ve seen a bit of war myself over my years as a reporter. From what little I know, Daddy had the right idea.
And this is one reason why I am so angry and so dismayed by Pete Hegseth and his prosecution of the attacks that he, President Trump, and their servile lawyers have launched against alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
There’s a great deal of excellent analysis that eviscerates the legal justifications those pliant administration lawyers cooked up to cover these operations with a veil of law. Charlie Savage at The New York Times wrote this thoroughgoing takedown last week. And the online journal Just Security has an entire collection of articles on the topic, here. And there’s plenty more right here on Substack.
But I’m not talking about law now. I’m talking about killing. And about how Pete Hegseth orders men to kill, and how he responds to their success.
He speaks with a juvenile bravado about these boat attacks—”We’re putting them at the bottom of the Caribbean”—and, veteran online troll that he is, posts memes on social media like this:
We are governed by an administration of trolls. The giddy, infantile glee that some people get by being cruel or ugly—first online, then inevitably in real life, too—has become the Trump administration’s primary tone in addressing the slightest whisper of disagreement by the American people with their policies or actions. Hegseth is, of course, a troll from way back.
He is also a combat veteran, with two Bronze Stars, and so you’d think he’d know better. Maybe he used to, maybe not, but one thing is certain: MAGA loves the Hegsethian attitude about killing.
So it’s important to understand that these boat attacks, are not just unlawful. They are an expression of where our country is heading. And of what is happening to America’s old “warrior ethos,” where the reality of killing was respected, not memed.
Poets have written about the reality of war for millennia. Homer wrote the death scene of Patroclus, the best friend of Achilles, like he was an eyewitness to the battle for Troy, sparing nothing as the wounded Greek warrior tries to get away from the battle, but is caught and killed by Troy’s great hero, Hector (in the Richard Lattimore translation here) :
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published"Now Patroklos, broken by the spear and the god’s blow, triedto shun death and shrink back into the swarm of his own companions.But Hektor, when he saw high-hearted Patroklos tryingto get away, saw how he was wounded with the sharp javelin,came close against him across the ranks, and with the spear stabbed himin the depth of the belly and drove the bronze clean through. He fell,thunderously, to the horror of all the Achaian people."
Homer respected reality.
World War I was such a horrific conflict that it broke the spirit of Europe for generations, and ended the poetry that portrayed war as only glorious. The poets of The Great War (as they called it, not imagining there could be a greater one coming twenty years later) reached for language that was true and terrifying about the experience of combat, none more vividly that Wilfred Owen, who himself was killed in 1918 when he was 25 years old, and who wrote these lines about a man dying in a poison-gas attack:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published"In all my dreams before my helpless sight,He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could paceBehind the wagon that we flung him in,And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cudOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues...,
Owen here accomplishes something Hegseth seems to want to forget, or maybe never truly knew: All the dead in war—even our enemies, even “narcoterrorists”—were human once. They were brothers and fathers, mothers and sisters, children. Anyone who has seen the dead of the battlefield and does not feel some kinship with them shouldn’t be in command.
We close with one of the shortest and ugliest poems about the reality of war: “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The American poet Randall Jarell wrote it; he’d served in the Army Air Forces in World War II. A ball turret is a Plexiglass bubble on the bottom of a bomber where a gunner was positioned to defend the aircraft.
I read it first in college, I think. Many years later, I came across it again. And I thought right away of an Iraqi soldier I met on a night patrol in Baghdad twenty years ago now. He was in the vehicle ahead of me, which was hit by an IED. After the attack, we went forward. I’ll never forget it.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunnerby Randall Jarrell
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.