Remembrance Day

It is Nov. 11. I bought a red poppy this week.  My father was in the RCAF in WWII.  I wanted to join the Canadian ROTC program that was officer training and would pay for my medical education as well. The catch was that I’d serve a few years after I finished .I was impressed with a classmate in Medical School.  The ex wife didn’t like the military and didn’t like the idea of her husband in the military or the prospect of our having to deploy away from her mother. It was just a thought.  

I confess the Vietnam war was a major influence on my choice to be a doctor. I was an intellectual in my teens as well as spiritual.  I was studying martial arts and various religions and philosophies. I’d loved war games since a child and hunted with my father and brother.  At a young age I received my Bronze for target shooting. 

I was also a ‘hippy in my mind and loved the Beatles and the songs of the day.  Country Joe and the Fish was the best.  My friend at the time was a bright jazz guitar playing fellow who’d go on to teach math then become an IBM executive.  I’d learned Draft Dodgers Rag from him and played it in coffee shops along with Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne.  I met draft dodgers back then. We’d have discussions late at night. I wanted world peace.  I didn’t want war.

But personally I was concerned that I might get maimed or that I might like it really.  I didn’t want to be a killer but I knee I had it in me.  I had read history.  I wasn’t naive like so many I met in the peace movement.  Stilly sentimental girls who were easy and the guys who’s total interest was saying and doing whatever it took to get laid. I liked to get laid too but i was a poet and a wrote poems about war.  I was afraid that the Vietnam War would expand. 

I’d grown up in the Kennedy Missile Crisis and we really thoujght there was a possibility of both nuclear war and Russians invading across the pole.  We did drills as children hiding agains the walls in school. Dad had built a reinforced room in the basement for a ‘bomb shelter’.  The city would tax it if it had a door so Dad never put a door on it. It served as mom’s preservative room.  She canned every fall.  

Dad’s gun case upstairs held his 3030 lever rifle, the pump action shot gun and the 22 rifles. I imagined if there’s as a war Dad would take the rifle, my older brother the shot gun and I’d have the 22 rifles to defend our mom.  If we were bombed we’d wait together in the windowless room in the cellar with all the preserves.

I asked Dad about what we’d do after the nuclear bombs and radiation. What would we eat. I remember him looking scared and saying he didn’t know, ‘canned goods I guess’.  

On Remembrance Day we’d read In Flander’s Field in school. It was a very solemn time.  So many of our parents had fought in WWII or the Korean War.  The Communists of the USSR and China wanted to kill us.  We all knew immigrants who’d fled from Communist countries and described the corruption and brutality torture and jails.  Years later I’d read Solzhenitsyn.  

I’m glad I became a doctor.  Saving lives was an easy decision.  I once did a workshop on Urban Combat Meeicine.  I eventually had medical friends who’d served in the military. I admired them. They were down to earth.  They weren’t flakey like some of my friends.  Too many of the women were silly but here and there I’d need women who’d served in the military and they weren’t. They were down to earth.  I studied suffering at Regents College with a woman who’d been a combat nurse all her life.  Conversations with her about Christianity never had any of the cowardice so common in the places where girls talk tough but the guys protect them and they use men as proxy weapons.  Too few around me understood Jung and the Shadow. They were despite being adults developmentally at the stage where they were good and bad was the other.  I liked learning that Job was the least taught book in the Bible.  

As a psychiatrist I studied ethics and bio ethics.  I’d learned morality in my home but also believed there was an innate morality.  

The oldest law of the world was the Chinese Law of the Fish, There are big fish and little fish. The little fish must be fast and numerous.  

I knew the peace movement was infiltrated by the enemy when the discussions were usurped by ‘unilateral disarmament’ folk.  I liked that Chruchill said that ‘if you weren’t a socialist at 20 you had no heart but if you weren’t a capitalist at 40 you had no brains. :”. Being in charge of the dangerously insane ward in the asylum and the dangerously insane ward in the jails made me almost loathe the silly girls and boys who Lenin called ‘useful idiots’.  I liked studying Dr. Hare, the foremost researcher on psychopathy.  In the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and Raiders across the 8th Dimension, a character is asked what is a psychopath. The answer came ‘someone who would just as soon kill you as play golf with you.”  Looking back at some of the folk I rode motorcycles with I know they’d be called ‘sociopaths’.  My dad would describe them as ‘hard hearted’.  Scarred hearts.  Not psychopaths.  They are reptilian and miss a bit of the brain associated with empathy.  In Goldman’s book on Kindness he quotes fMRI studies comparing normal people and psychopaths.  Normal people’s brains light up in a particular way when they see their own toe being hit with a hammer and when an other persons toe is hit with a hammer,  By contrast the psychopath’s brain is the same as the normals when they see their toe hit with a hammer but when they seen another person’s toe hit with a hammer the pleasure centre , a different part of the brain, lights up.  Psychopaths are inherently sadistic.  

Idealists and intellectuals don’t grasp this.  On Killing by psychologist Lt Colonel Dr. Grossman writes how moderns methods of training can override the natural tendency of most people to be compassionate. certainly working with drug addicts especially those with the tombstone eyes, you can see they will do whatever they’re told to get ‘more’.  Our society has promoted narcissism and regression.  

I’m thankful that the soldiers risked all to stop the invasion of the Nazi and later the Communists.  I loved going with my dad to the Canadian war museums. My dad was the bravest man I knew but he mot admired his childhood friend Billy who did several tours as the rear gunner in a bomber flying over Germany.  

One of the greatest honors and privileges I had was working as a physician and psychiatrist consultant with Veterans Affairs.  I got to hear stories from men and a very few women that would be censored by governments.  The heroism and stoicism I learned of was so incredible it’s was beyond human.  I am humbled by the soldiers.  

I would like to take people to meet the real psychopaths I had met , the Hannibal the Cannibal sorts that every prison guard knows but that somehow the college and university professors protector in their bunker minds simply refuse to know. Like so many women especially those who repeatedly have abortions as birth control they don’t acknowledge their own shadow and don’t see the psychopaths truly.  I like tthe veterans.  They are ‘real’ and don’t live their fantasy worlds. 

So Remembrance Day I really appreciate that today I can be silly and live in a safe and frilly world protected by the service and sacrifices of the military now and before.  

Thank you.  Thank you for your service.