A Good War is Hard to Find
It's taken a little while, but folks are starting to realize how goddam brilliant this little book by David Griffith is. There's now an excerpt up at Utne, a profile in Pittsburgh City Paper, Sojourner's gets it, and Colleen Mondor is working in it.
Here's a bit of the bit that Utne picked up:
...One day I was walking down the hall at school and a kid passed me wearing the jacket. "That's my jacket," I said. "No, it's not," the kid sneered. One of the deans of the school was walking by and asked what the problem was. "Look in the sleeves," I told him, since my mother had written my name in black marker in each sleeve. Sure enough, when the dean looked, there was my name.Things were like that then. Open and shut. Yes it is. No it isn't. Everything seemed good, clean, and orderly. I learned that there was such a thing as justice-I had witnessed it.
At night, I was learning that war could be humane and just. Footage from the noses of smart bombs allowed me to see with my own eyes that American bombers weren't dumping their payloads indiscriminately over cities, like the Germans did to Britain and the Brits did to Germany and we did to the Japanese during World War II. These were "smart" bombs. This was a "smart" war in all the various connotations of "smart": intelligent; shrewd and calculating; amusingly clever; with a neat and well cared for appearance; fashionable and stylish; vigorous and brisk; causing a sharp stinging sensation.
Our history teacher didn't talk about the Gulf War. She didn't even pull down a map of the world and point to the Middle East. Then again, I suppose she had bigger problems to worry about-some kids in the class couldn't locate Illinois on a map.
Neither do I remember talking about the war with my friends, unless it was to ask whether we'd seen the latest awesome press conference footage-General Schwarzkopf standing in front of a television monitor narrating the flight of a bomb as it entered the chimney of a building or the window of a munitions depot.
I thought about the war the most when I was at band practice. That fall, the band director passed out the sheet music for Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam, Dresden, 1945), a piece by Daniel Bukvich dedicated to the firebombing and subsequent obliteration of the German city of Dresden...