Roger’s Reality: Dancing with the Devil, Part 5 (final)

The battle is over

By Roger Owens

For the greater part of a year, my wife, Cindy, and I have been dancing with the Devil as we battled the specter of her breast cancer. I include myself, because all caregivers to cancer patients should be included, for the perfect reason that it is our battle as well. No less than a war correspondent or an unarmed medical corpsman is subject to the same enemy fire as any soldier, are those of us who care for cancer victims we love vulnerable to the destruction of the afflicted. Arguably the greatest war correspondent of modern times was Ernest Taylor “Ernie” Pyle, and that great soul was killed at the very end of the war in the Pacific, at the battle of Ie Shima (eeyayshima), at a time when the area was believed to be safe. Pyle was speaking to a regimental commander when enemy machine-gun fire ended his storied life. We all take risks, and losing a friend in combat is as common as dirt.

Roger’s Reality: Dancing with the Devil, Part 5

The long march

By Roger Owens

Much is written about the vagaries of war, the battles, the heroism, but I have chosen today to focus on some of the more mundane realities of war. Mainly, the constant marching, the privation, the drudgery. Earnest Taylor Pyle was maybe the most widely-known war correspondent in the modern era, and a perusal of his columns, such as “Digging and Grousing,” reveals some of that odious, behind-the-scenes labor without which wars could not be fought. (I know; we can only wish it were so odious that wars were not fought, but there you have it.) “Digging out here in the soft desert sands was like paradise…the ditch went forward like a prairie fire…a plain old ditch can be dearer to you than any possession on Earth.” (E. Pyle, 1943)

Killing for peace is like...

Yesterday in Chapel Hill, on a car with a Connecticut license plate and a big "CAROLINA" sticker on the rear window, I sighted the bumper sticker:

Killing for peace is like
screwing for virginity

Hmm, of course most screwing isn't "for virginity" but (unconsciously, of course) to relieve one's testosteronal imperative (so to speak). Could something similar be going on with man's (not so much woman's) bellicosity (whether on the field of war or on the field of sport)?