Fireworks for Gun Control
Something about the smell of fireworks on the Fourth of July – today! – makes me think of gun control.
“I believe in absolute gun control – no one should have a gun but me,” says Eliot Cobb, protagonist in my Vietnam war novel Poisoned Hearts. “Because I don’t trust all of you out there. The war taught me that.”
That’s what the war taught me, too.
I really ought to call Poisoned Hearts a pre-war and post-war novel as it’s as much about what happens to a young man in love and in confusion during the turmoil of the 1960s and what happens to him in the long years after as it is about his time in the Vietnam war.
War. Trust. Untrust. That’s the awful story of the Sixties. If you were there to fight in Vietnam or if you protested in the streets risking prison to try to stop the war, you know the awfulness.
But if the Sixties are the Stone Age to you, let me tell you about the gun control in the United States in those war years. Oh, I won’t go into graphic detail about what an assault rifle – say, an M-16 (or a civilian AR-15 illegally rigged for automatic fire) – does to the human body. To the bodies of little children in their classrooms or parishioners in their pews shot to pieces – literally to pieces – by deranged mass killers or vicious racists. Ie, the news stories we hear about nearly every day.
No, let me tell you about the gun control back then. It was called Never Happen to Me. For true believers in that idea, getting shot to pieces never happened because they were lucky enough never to be in a place where it could happen. They never stood on “hot ground.”
Take a look at the Vietnam war statistics for officer deaths by rank and you’ll see what I mean. Young combat officers – like Eliot Cobb – in the infantry, artillery and cavalry died at a substantially higher rate relative to their numbers in the officer corps than did higher ranking officers.
That’s not just absolute numbers but “in proportion to.” Meaning that 18- and 19-year old lieutenants leading platoons were cut down wholesale, and their captains – the company and battery commanders in their 20s – with them.
But, reach the rank of major, not so many risked dying. Ranks above major, even fewer faced risk. In proportion to their numbers in the combat zone.
Of course, I’m not saying that everybody must face the same risk in war. But it might not be a bad thing. When I was in Vietnam, lieutenants and captains were plentiful in the fighting areas. But it was a rare thing to see a major on hot ground, meaning tramping his polished boots across the dirt and blood of a firefight just ended.
Lieutenant colonels – battalion commanders – were rarer still in the field. Seeing a full colonel out there was as much a surprise as seeing a ghost waft by. If you spotted a general on the ground, you knew Bob Hope or Walter Cronkite was right behind him.
We lost that war for many reasons – and we still have not learned our lessons. But chief among them is that the men (and now women) who plan and lead combat operations must stand on hot ground to know the task to be done, its possibilities and impossibilities. The senior officers in my war rarely stood on hot ground.
Which brings us ‘round to Eliot Cobb, a broken politician, yearning lover and furious veteran worn down to, well, his cob, and his radical attitude on gun control. He stood on hot ground.
Fourth of July fireworks, their gunpowder bang! and smell and glitter, make me happy to remember 1776 and all that the date promises. But the fireworks also ought to remind us to stand up with Eliot Cobb. And to say, Let those who oppose any sensible control of weapons in civilian hands stand on hot ground.
Let them stand among the ruins of children in their classrooms, among the ruins of worshippers in their churches, synagogues and mosques, among the ruins of shoppers in malls and ordinary people on city streets – and then dare let them say, Never, no gun controls. Because it will never happen to me. Or those I love.
Hot ground teaches a different lesson.
© 2020 Steven Hardesty