A Door Shuts, A Door Opens

Father's Day 2023

My father fought in WW2. He was a medic, and worked to save lives. However, since he was stationed in the Pacific theatre, the enemy was Japan. The Japanese soldiers took aim at medics.

The idea that medics were shot at whilst trying to save another man’s life, stressed my dad out a great deal.

Many soldiers suffered during that war, and every war. PTSD is an old condition among soldiers everywhere, and thought all time.

My father also saw the aftereffects of war, from the losers perspective as he deployed to Japan after the surrender. The people of Japan, he said, were very quiet, and humble in a way that left him feeling uneasy.

Any nation’s people that is on the losing side of a war is uneasy and stressed. They have no idea about what is next for them. During the war, especially when it comes to one’s own land, the soldiers fight hard to save their nation. We Americans, however, have no perspective of a war on our land since the Civil War. Unless we call the Indian wars a struggle for a nation.

But that would be a lie. Still, soldiers and warriors will feel the same stress as all fighters have felt. Each soldier is always fighting for their very life, and not knowing when the bullet they don’t hear will come their way. Or the arrow, or javelin or sword, it is all the same in war. The weapons are immaterial to the dead.

But it is the survivors in a losing war that I will address today.

Vergil’s Aeneid is rather like Homer’s Iliad: these are two stories about the destruction of the ancient city of Troy, and its aftermath.

Both are sad, sad tales of war, death, destruction, and what follows after. If you have not read them, I suggest you do. Especially on days when we honor a parent. On Mother’s Day, you can be thankful that your mother is not living such a nightmare as to have aggressive invaders on her doorstep. Or that she will have to watch her son slaughtered by the enemy, and her daughter raped, and then dragged away as a war prize.

There are mothers that now suffer such a fate as to see their children killed by aggressors. Think Ukraine, and Yemen, to name two.

In America, we have not had a war on our soil since the European population aggressed against the native population. We were the Greeks to their Trojans.

When I was in school, after I had read the Iliad for the first time, I could not understand how anyone could think of this as a glorious war. In college, I had a wonderful teacher for my Greek literature class, who had us read Iphigenia. Oh my! Indeed, it confirmed my idea that the war against Troy was an excuse to plunder, to destroy the competitor, and to take their lands and trade routes from them.

We would see that again in Carthage versus the Romans.

The Iliad was really an antiwar story. Since human civilization was new when the fall of Troy occurred, the morals of the day were, shall we say, lacking?

Homer did not moralize. He wrote a story instead, that laid out the motives for war, as plain as day.

What is our modern day excuse for war and destruction? Ideology? That holds water as well as going after Helen did. It is wrong to destroy a people because your wife ran off with a rich prince. True, that is rough on a man’s ego, but to destroy an entire people, and then take the bitch back?

Something stinks here. Like, she took the dude back because now he had the money?

If you are a parent, and your son died on the fields of Troy, just so a king could get his wife back, that amounts to child sacrifice. If your father died for Menelaus’s folly, where is the glory in that?

There is none. And that was Homer’s real message.

The recorded reading is from Vergil’s Aeneid. The Aeneid tells the story from the Trojan’s perspective. It is just as strong in sentiment, about the true results of wars, as is the Iliad.

Aeneas is a young man, a husband and a father. He is of an aristocratic, Trojan family. Aeneas is, supposedly, the son of the goddess, Aphrodite. His father is Anchises.

Funny, isn’t it, if a man sleeps with a goddess, one would think he would be favored by the gods? And wouldn’t the boy he fathered with the goddess, be protected? You will have to refer back to the Iliad for that one, as the gods fought as much as the humans in this war. But then the gods represent humanity on an upper level. We must then ask ourselves, whose fight is this? Ours? Or theirs?

Anchises and his son, Aeneas, get no breaks. Indeed, as you will hear from the reading, the end of Troy is no easier for them, than for anyone else. It is a genuine, heartbreaking tragedy, these results of a war lost.

Vergil wrote this story to relate the myth that the Romans were a race that sprang from Aeneas when he fled Troy, and ended up in Italy. However, this is not such a myth after all, as a DNA study done of Italians demonstrated there is some truth to this legend. Many Italians share some DNA with the people of Turkey! (Troy was in the southern tip of Turkey.)

I always say the real truths about us, lie within our myths.

The reading is from the end of Book II of The Aeneid. The translation is by Sarah Ruden. It is the last day in Troy for Aeneas and his family, as well as hundreds of other families who will flee the burning city as the Greeks plunder it.

The theme of Aeneas’ story is this: when a door is shut, another one will open.

Close your eyes as you listen to grasp the scene in your mind. If you agonize as I do, then act to end warring on our planet.