To Julius Caesar on bias, perspective and deification.

Book 2, letter 18

Part 2 of 4

To Julius Caesar on bias, perspective and deification.

I can't tell you what the story of the Raven and the Buddha means, but I also think that not all stories are about answers.

Your story, Caesar, and all the Caesars who came after you....well, I've only just begun to learn.

If you didn't plan your own assassination, then the lessons we learn from your life are very different. Perhaps your murder was just popular custom. The Roman senate had been murdering popular leaders for a hundred or more years by the time they got to you. Your death actually appears to be par for the course. You strove to become a tyrant, and when you reached too far, your enemies slew you. Pretty straight forward.

But then there was all that money, and all that land that you left to the people in your will.

It all seems planned, like your real goal was immortality, and you didn't care if you had to be killed in order to achieve that goal.

Yet, in a blunt and blood spattered sequence, Brutus killed you, then Marc Antony killed Brutus, then Marc Antony killed himself and Octavian took over Rome, becoming the first Emperor. That might be a ridiculously simplified summary of events, skipping over years and years of civil war, but it illustrates something of the nature of the times; violent military force proved itself more powerful than civil process. As Pompey said, “Stop quoting the law to us, we carry swords.”

Pompey

Public opinion on your life is not so much divided, as it is diverse. There are hundreds of books about you, scholars from all over the world debate and discuss the evidence, there are plays, and movies, and novels and even comic books and children's cartoons about you. Which is to say that your story is a difficult one to untangle from the bias of your contemporaries, as well as from the perspectives of modern society.

Bias and Perspective.

Is hubris the over extension of bias? Is bias, self confidence taken beyond a measure of balance? If I am confident in Cicero's, or Plutarch's or anyone's opinion of you, am I not simply adopting another's bias? It actually seems impossible to separate the truth from fantasy in the epic tale of the decline of the Roman Republic. Our lives are made up of facts and feelings and events and stories and we are as often mislead by our own assumptions as we are guided correctly by confident assertions of fact. So what is the difference between bias and perspective, when confidence so often leads to prejudice and blind assumptions?

It would be so much easier if I could just hate you Caesar, but your story is far too complex to allow bias to dictate my feelings.

To Gaius Julius Caesar; on bias, perspective and deification

Book 2, letter 18

Part 1 of 4

To Gaius Julius Caesar, on bias, perspective and deification

*

Written: December, 2018CE

Dear Caesar,

It would be so much easier if I could just hate you. Being friends with Cicero makes me see you in a pretty bad light sometimes, but your story is far too complex to allow bias to dictate my feelings. Cicero seemed to have conflicting feelings about you, at times declaring your audacity tyrannical, at others he declared you to be a 'second self” to him, a true friend. The truth is never clear when studying history. All we have are stories, opinions, artifacts...

I've been listening to an audio recording of your Commentaries on the Gallic War. (Translated by Thomas Rice Holmes in 1908), I've been reading some of Cicero's letters to you, and about you, and I have been listening to my favourite history podcaster, Dan Carlin, he has a lot to say about you too, Caesar.

Anthony Trollope says in his biography of Cicero, that there is no better way to understand someone than through their own words, and certainly that seems to be the best way to learn about how you viewed the events of your own life. However, having read Plutarch's biography of your life, Caesar, having watched movies about you, and having read your story summarised by many historians, I have a set of assumptions which I must be aware of, a bias.

I guess that's a good way to open this letter to you, Julius Caesar.

Beware of bias

I should have those words engraved in bronze and put on my desk. But then I ask myself, what exactly is the difference between bias and perspective? Could we say that bias is an unconscious influence, while perspective is conscious? Or is it better to say that bias is prejudice, while perspective is...what?

The consequence of our whole life story?

My perspective is unique to my time and my culture, and though history shows me that people are pretty much the same all over the world, and throughout all time, I believe that my perspective is unique and I assume that my perspective has a relationship with facts and with truth. I also believe that objectivity, while not truly attainable, is approachable and a goal worthy of striving towards.

But subjectively, in my uneducated opinion, you Caesar, are:

heroic/homicidal

genocidal/thorough

power mad/perfectly confident

You seem to be self aware, you seem to know exactly what you are doing, every step of the way. Almost as if you walked to the senate on that day in March, knowing, having planned, having prepared yourself for death. I suspect you deliberately kindled the very idea of your own murder.

The ultimate in espionage, to arrange your own assassination.

Could you see the future? Did you know that the Republic was rotten to the core, and that nothing short of divine hubris could break it apart and rebuild it?

What sort of God were you, Julius? You led armies that crushed whole nations, were you are a God of war? At whose temple could you worship, once you became divine?

Who do the Gods bow to? If anyone might know, it seems prudent to ask you, Caesar.

I have a story to share with you. It is a little segment from my new novel.  This story is called 'The Raven and the Buddha'. The Buddha, is a human who became a god through the practice of meditation and the breaking of his karmic cycle. I thought you might like to hear a story about someone who, like you Julius, aspired to divinity, though with very different outcomes, and very different intentions.

The story is also about the Raven God, who was a human once, but that is a story for another day...

*

The Raven and the Buddha

Sometime in the past, the Raven had to enter hell. It is not known why, but it is safe to assume that he had no other choice. The gates of hell are guarded, and the keeper asks a price. The First Demon - The Blackness, Despair - demanded the toll.

"What price now?" The Raven asked.

"The price is for later. One day we will ask for our due, and it will be paid. That is the price."

Having no other choice, the Raven paid the price, and shook hands with The Black.

In Hell, The Raven bore witness to the furthest reaches of life without boundaries, without reserve. Everything in Hell is an extreme of itself, there is no middle ground, no passive stance, no ceasefire. There he met with a Demon of Greed who asked him to deliver a message to the Buddha, inviting him to dinner. The Demon sat in a great feasting hall where every extinct species ever known upon the earth had been burned black in ovens too hot for clay, and served, smoking, upon broken plates. The Demon stared down with compound eyes, listened with compound ears, and spoke with a compound voice. His form was greedy for space, greedy for sound, consuming everything. The Raven felt his breath begin to leave his body as the Demon rasped in multiple mantras:

Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha...

The Raven, with eyes averted, took the invitation from the Demon and left. Passing the gates of Hell again, the keeper nodded and reminded him of his debt.

The Raven delivered the invitation to the Buddha, who sat upon a Lotus Throne in the gentle uplands of heaven's great empire. The Buddha laughed, not touching the message.

"I dined with him last night, and he invites me to dine again tonight! Ha! He is greedy even for enlightenment."

"Will you go?"

"Of course I will."

So the Raven returned to Hell, and was told at the Gate that payment was not required a second time. The feasting hall was thick with the smoke of extinction, an obscuring haze preventing the Raven from having to look upon the Demon a second time. "The Buddha will dine with you tonight." Said the Raven.

You may leave, was the reply.

The Raven made to leave the hall, but, obscured by the smoke, he decided to hide himself in the cavernous ceiling, and folding himself between two shadows, he lay in wait. The smoke boiled thick from the endlessly burning meat, so thick, that when the Buddha arrived, the Raven could only see a blurry dark shape, and hear muffled voices as the Demon and the Buddha conversed. Gradually, the smoke began to clear and the feasting hall became visible. The tables and chairs were gone, the wretched, inedible death feast had vanished.

Upon the floor sat a solitary man dressed in heavy robes, staring into a mirror, and speaking to himself.

The Raven left hell.

To Tacitus: on the treatment of the dead

Book 2 Letter 17

Part 3 of 3

To Tacitus: on the treatment of the dead

Tacitus, this letter has been about war, but I also love to write about music, and everywhere I look, I find stories of music in war. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, such tales are always instructive of deeper values, and of the nature we all share as humans.

Again, the article by Friedman provided me with this story that made me laugh.

Miami Herald writer Guy Gulotta recalled his experience with PSYOP in a feature piece entitled “Master of the Game,” written for his newspaper in 1989. Guy was a Navy reserve lieutenant (junior grade) assigned as commander of a small navy Patrol Craft Fast, also known as a PCF or "Swift Boat." He was stationed on a semi-permanent base on pontoons moored in the Cua Lon River in 1970.

“My crew pointed this out to me the first time we were instructed to cruise the canals playing tapes of "The Wandering Soul," a howling banshee sermon promising eternal damnation to any Viet Cong who didn't lay down his weapons and join up with us right away. Nobody on the boat understood the words, but any boat that played it usually got hit with rockets. "The Wandering Soul," as Seaman Sherwood J. Drumheller told me, "is Number 10, and dropping off the chart.”

Unfortunately, I pointed out, we were the only boat on duty that had a functioning PSYOP system - a loudspeaker. "We’re going to have to play something," I said.

"Great," said Drumheller, who was 19 and the only normal person on the boat besides me. He favored Steppenwolf, Credence or the Stones, but would also go with Santana because "some of the words are foreign."

Boatswain's mate Hogan, who was from Lubbock, and had no known first name, hated Steppenwolf, but offered Buck Owens or Dolly Parton in exchange.

"Not heavy enough," I concluded. I chose Ike and Tina Turner (Workin' Together), pointing out that Tina, like Dolly, was a girl, and she sang Honky-tonk Woman (Stones) and Proud Mary (Credence), which, incidentally, was about a river boat. Besides, she had a voice that could melt steel; Charlie would love it.

And it worked. For six hours in the middle of the night Tina Turner ripped through the forest like a chain saw, and we didn't hear a single gunshot or see a single muzzle-flash. "The Wandering Soul" was never heard again on the Cua Lon River.”

*

In 15CE, Germanicus and his centurions buried their comrades on the battlefield, their bones having lain undisturbed for six years where they fell. The centurions worked together in this, they shared in the grim task and all who were present knew the truth of it. This kind of work is written about frequently by many ancient authors, the stripping and burying of one's dead allies was a common part of every soldier's wartime experience. Together they shouldered this burden. In my reading of modern sources I have found a different kind of story though, that of the army mortician, whose work takes place far from the battlefield, and whose struggles are far more lonely than that of their front line comrades.

From an article on the subject of Vietnam wartime morticians, written by Matthew M Burke for Stars and Stripes, I found the following.

The mortuary men got through it by trying to shut down their emotions. However, they still had to have respect for the grim task at hand.

“We treated the remains of the soldiers that were killed with respect,” Fruendt said. “It was sad but you had to do the job right and you had to treat them like a member of the family.”

For Redlinski, it was cathartic to talk to the dead.

“I would say, ‘Sorry I have to do this. I have to get you back to your family.’”

The Army mortuary personnel were outcasts, shunned by their peers because of their job.

“We stayed to ourselves,” Redlinski said. “People thought, ‘Oh there’s death, I don’t want to be near you.’”

Fruendt remembers heading to the chow hall with the members of his unit one day after work. They had all showered and were wearing fresh clothes. They sat down and started eating. Before long, they realized that everyone had cleared away from them.

“The smell was vicious,” he said. “No matter how much you wash your hands or clothes, it permeates you,” Redlinski added. “It permeates your skin.”

Redlinski said that the smell even reached the troops outside the mortuary.

Just before Fruendt left Vietnam in the fall of 1968, a new, bigger, better mortuary had been built at Tan Son Nhut. This one was far away from the other troops.

“We were kept away from the main body of troops because it was demoralizing,” Redlinski said.

“Most guys never knew we were there.”

The Army’s mortuary personnel are still the experts in recovery, identification, preservation and safeguarding remains until a deceased service member can be sent back home to their family. It is one of the most important missions during war, Ellerman said.

“There is no better way to honor the fallen than to return them back to their home,” he said.

That is still the mission, one that is still largely unheralded.

*

So I guess that's what I wanted to write to you about Tacitus. Two paragraphs from your book sent me on an incredible journey of discovery, uncovering stories from a war I thought I was already quite familiar with. Every day it seems I am shown the incredible scope of my own ignorance. It is impossible to draw conclusions, or to make judgements. I am a student, perpetually seated at the feet of teachers far more knowledgeable than myself. I am particularly grateful to SGM Herbert Friedman for his writings which have featured heavily in this letter.

Just as Germanicus helped in the digging of graves and so shared in the grief of all present, I hope that I, in discussing these difficult stories from our collective history, can share in the burden which is all too often, heaped unsquarely upon the shoulders of our soldiers, and who, long after the fighting is done, must bear the weight of the tragedy of war.

We are all the inheritors of traditions which can be traced back to the earliest of our ancestors. Theseus, the ancient Greek hero, is named as the first commander of antiquity to declare that the bodies of the enemy dead should be returned to their families. Now, some two and a half thousand years later, the Australian army is continuing what Theseus started, and through the courage and dignity of peacetime service, are attempting to restore to our past enemies, the spiritual resolution they have craved for decades.

Perhaps some of those wandering souls can find their homes again, and perhaps their whispered prayers of thanks might reach our living dreams, and perhaps together we might find peace.

I think it is worth the effort.

Thank you Tacitus, your book is a magic mirror.

With gratitude and respect.

Morgan.

PS.

For further reading, the articles I have quoted from can be found here:

The Wandering Soul tapes of the Vietnamese War (Article by SGM Herbert Friedman)

http://www.psywarrior.com/wanderingsoul.html

Operation: Wandering Souls (Australian Army operation)

https://vietnam.unsw.adfa.edu.au/the-operation-wandering-souls-project/

The article about morticians experiences during the Vietnam War

https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/vietnam-stories/features/for-those-who-prepared-vietnam-s-fallen-a-lasting-dread-1.309701

P.P.S Cabanatuan, the Philipine POW camp during WWII, also has some interesting stories relating to the recovery of the bodies of dead soldiers.

Book 2, letter 17 - To Tacitus: on the treatment of fallen foes

Book 2, Letter 17

part 2 of 3

To Tacitus: on the treatment of fallen foes

*

Tacitus, we go now from the bones of one story to the soul of another.

In my broader reading, I keep finding references to the manner in which the dead of war are treated in different ways. From the earliest Greek references of Theseus returning the bodies of fallen enemies to their kin, to the modern day accounts of atrocities committed during the Vietnam war, the way people feel about dead soldiers makes for an interesting analysis of our sense of humanity and honour.

I hadn't originally planned to write about this, I was hoping to get to the weird black magic curse that killed Germanicus, but in reading further about modern practices regarding the bodies of fallen enemies, I discovered something truly fascinating.

Operation Wandering Souls, is an Australian Army initiative where mementos and artifacts taken by Australian soldiers during the Vietnam War (1965 – 1975CE), are being returned to Vietnam in an effort to locate some of the 300,000 Vietnamese missing war dead. A further part of this project, is a map of overwhelming detail of every single combat encounter involving Australian soldiers during the war. The Australian Army documented every enemy body found, and recorded details of the burials which were done at the combat sites. The map links photos of the location, photos of the soldiers involved, and images of any mementos or artifacts taken from, and now returned to the site.

Link to: Australian Army Battle Map - Operation Wandering Souls

I have a fascination with certain aspects of war. War seems to encapsulate all the worst things about the human species, but what interests me is the way that in the middle of all that horror, some people are capable of both nobility of purpose and compassion for their enemies.

Some of these stories cast long shadows across time, and whether we know about it or not, we stand in those shadows every day.

The lost souls of war are buried in shallow graves, and Vietnam has ghost stories enough to send chills down my spine. You see, the Australian Operation: Wandering Souls, is not the first of that name. During the Vietnam war, the American and Australian armies also had an operation under the same name, but their goal was not to return lost artifacts, or to help locate the missing bodies of fallen foes. Quite the opposite.

There is a popular belief in Vietnam, with its roots in Buddhism, that if a person dies while away from their home, and if their body is not buried with the proper ceremony, the soul will wander lost forever, tortured by demons, suffering the eternal hunger of the dead. The American PSYOPS division (with the involvement of other allied forces) intentionally played upon this cultural/religious belief. Through the use of loudspeakers attached to helicopters, boats, aeroplanes, or carried on the backs of soldiers, they played at incredible volumes, special recordings made to simulate the sounds of screaming hungry ghosts, with recordings of crying children begging their fathers to come home, accompanied by the religious funeral dirges familiar to all Vietnamese people. These recordings were only ever played at night, and some of the aeroplanes used in this operation were able to fly in such a way (at a certain altitude and engine RPM) as to make their engines inaudible from the ground below, while the howling sounds of wandering ghosts could be heard by the soldiers huddling even in their underground tunnels and bunkers.

In the article written by SGM Herbert A. Friedman (Ret.), entitled The “Wandering Soul” tape of Vietnam, I found many worthy stories, poems, anecdotes, photographs and newspaper articles which I would love to share a select few with you.

I will begin with the Vietnamese poet, Nguyen Du, from his poem “A call to wandering souls”

“Year after year exposed to wind and rain,
on the cold ground they lie, sighing.
At dawn, when the cock crows, they flee,
only to grope their way again when night comes”

“Strangers have buried you in careless haste,

no loved ones near,

no proper rites...

...and under the wan moon,

no kindly smoke of incense wreathes for you.”

Dan Carlin (a history podcaster) said that history doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes, (and I'm sure he was quoting someone else...), but the following story of the Jungle of Screaming Souls seems a haunted parallel to the Teutoburg forest.

Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier and author of 'The Sorrow of War' (1991), tells of an area called the jungle of screaming souls where the North Vietnamese 27th Battalion was wiped out except for ten survivors by American and South Vietnamese troops. He says:

“From then on it was called the jungle of screaming souls. Just hearing the name whispered was enough to send chills down the spine. Perhaps the screaming souls gathered together on special festival days as members of the Lost Battalion, lining up in the little diamond-shaped clearing, checking their ranks and numbers. The sobbing whispers were heard deep in the jungle at night, the howls carried on the wind. Perhaps they really were the voices of the wandering souls of dead soldiers.

But Tacitus, I would not do this tale justice if I only shared with you the written legends and poetry of war. I'm not shy of the dirty truth, so here is a recording of one of the Wandering Souls tapes. SGM Herbert Friedman summarises one of the tape scripts in this way:

Link to: Wandering Souls Ghost Tape #10

“In general, the messages were as follows:

Girl's voice:

Daddy, daddy, come home with me, come home. Daddy! Daddy!

Man's voice:

Ha! (his daughter's name). Who is that? Who is calling me? Oh, my daughter? My wife? Daddy is back home with you, my daughter! I am back home with you, my wife. But my body is gone. I am dead, my family.

I…..Tragic, how tragic.

My friends, I come back to let you know that I am dead! I am dead! It's Hell, Hell! It is a senseless death! How senseless! Senseless! But when I realized the truth, it was too late. Too late. Friends, while you are still alive, there is still a chance you will be reunited with your love ones. Do you hear what I say? Go home! Go home, my friends! Hurry! Hurry! If not, you will end up like me. Go home my friends before it is too late. Go home! Go home my friends!”

U.S PSYOP soldier stands watch as an ARVN soldier broadcasts a surrender appeal. -

I think that people do things for a reason, or rather, nothing is done at random. The experiences of humans at war are not irrelevant to civilians, rather, sometimes I feel that military customs shed light on civilian customs as well. Though we don't talk about these things, we all have beliefs about the dead, some instinctive, others deeply ingrained social ideals. The way we treat our enemies, and how we think of them alive or dead, is, I think, hugely representative of our social beliefs at large. It raises questions of self respect, compassion, nobility and justice. It is a massively convoluted subject that cannot be summed up in any sort of glib and shallow manner, but sometimes an army motto is just the thing to set the wheels of the mind turning.

The American 5th Special Operations Squadron, a group who used the Wandering Soul tapes had the official motto “The truth shall make them free,” but their unofficial motto was “Better to bend the mind than destroy the body.”

                Helicopter Tape Deck Playing a Propaganda message

There's more to come, Tacitus, but that will have to wait....