The UFC is one of my favorite sports because it speaks to many different areas that define a man...competition, the ability to take a punch, testing yourself and how tough you really are, camaraderie among fellow gladiators, and so on. It's something I've always considered doing, and it's very likely that, even if I never try out myself to fight competitively, I still plan to do some MMA training once my living and financial situations are a bit more settled. Chuck Liddell reminds me of myself in several ways...being educated but still with the ability to defend himself and do great violence when necessary, enjoying both the manly things and the finer things in life ("Fight Club" and musicals), and loving his family, but not being forced to do anything, including love, any way but on his own terms. It was very enlightening to read, and I'd suggest everyone check out this story...I guarantee you'll be surprised.
This Guy Scares You?
By Allison Glock
ESPN The Magazine
"C'mon, you're not afraid of Chuck, are you?Chuck Liddell is dancing. It is two hours before a World Extreme Cagefighting (WEC) bout at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, and Liddell, playing the role of guest cornerman, is getting his groove on ringside. "I love dancing," he says, his hips ticking back and forth with fluidity. "I'll dance anywhere, anytime. People think I'm wasted, but I'm not. I'm just enjoying myself."
Liddell is wearing expensive, loose-fitting jeans and a T-shirt with cherubs frolicking across the chest. His head is shaved save for a tight Lohawk. He has on flip-flops, which reveal his toenails. They are painted an implausible neon pink. A WEC fighter walks by, slaps Liddell on the back, then notices the toes. "Look at that gayness," he says, cocking his head. Liddell just smiles and keeps grooving. He is a tolerant man. He can afford to be.
For the past six years, Liddell has been known as a badass, the best fighter in the world bar none. He's the UFC's current light heavyweight champion. In his 10-year career, he has lost only three fights and has gone on to avenge two of them. The third, his 2003 loss to Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, is set for a rematch on May 26.
"The plan is to knock him out in the first round," Liddell says in a voice devoid of bravado. Unlike some fighters, he does not boast. He wears his professional record with a shrug. His talent is a gift from birth, or God. "I've been fighting people since way back," he says with a smile. "At parties. In clubs. I always say I never started a fight. But looking back, I made it real hard for you to get out of one."
Even before he got paid to kick and punch, Liddell liked brawls. Not backing down was a means to an end. "Fighting was a competition for me," he says, "something I happened to be really good at." Liddell is 37 years old. He is 6'2", 220 pounds. He has a round, boyish face, with piercing eyes and a sharply defined, Val Kilmer mouth. He's not small, but he doesn't block the sun like many athletes. His body is one of supreme use; every muscle serves a purpose. And generally that purpose is to put other men in a world of pain. "I'm not conflicted about it," he says. "I don't mean to hurt ya. I just want to prove I do it better."
What Liddell means is that he isn't psychotic. He describes himself as "mellow, laid-back." He doesn't derive pleasure from inflicting pain, and the fact that you enjoy watching him do it says a hell of a lot more about you than him. "Chuck looks like an ax murderer," says UFC president Dana White. "But he's the nicest guy in the world."
Even so, being an ultimate fighter has very little to do with being nice. It's about being an incomparable athlete. You must excel at boxing, martial arts and wrestling. You must possess depths of fortitude and a willingness to stand alone. And you must be accountable for yourself in a way that few sports require. Liddell knows this, having played virtually every other sport with the exception of tennis.
Chuck Liddell is the biggest draw the UFC's got. In 1998, while he was working as a bartender and a kickboxing instructor, a friend of a friend asked him if he wanted to try a mixed martial arts (MMA) fight. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Liddell agreed. And he won. Not long after, the UFC came calling. Now Liddell has transcended the sport to become a cultural icon (witness his recent cameo on "Entourage"). He is The Guy for most guys, a real-life hero in a world of spoiled, whiny poseurs. Arnold, without the script.
"Chuck is a bona fide superstar," White says. "Even in other countries, everybody knows him. When I go to New York with him, he gets mobbed. People scream from their cars." Liddell's signature, and most popular, move in the octagon is a wide, swinging punch that bends and curves, Plastic Man-style, ending with his fist on the side of an unsuspecting head. His reach is long; his power, jaw-shattering. The whole movement is balletic, grace honed to violence, quick and definitive, propelled by intention. The intention: not to win, but to defeat.
"His greatest strength is his uncanny ability to knock out from any angle," says John Hackleman, owner of fighter breeding ground The Pit, who's known Liddell for 16 years. "A lot of fighters are great until they get hit. Chuck doesn't quit. The harder you hit him, the harder he'll fight." Or, as another fighter says as he passes the octagon and spots Liddell: "Looks who's here! Clan of the Cave Bear! Guns of f---ing Navarone!"
A short list of MMA fouls, as approved by the Nevada State Athletic Commission:
Butting with the head.
Eye-gouging of any kind.
Biting.
Fishhooking.
Groin attacks of any kind.
Putting a finger into any orifice.
Grabbing the trachea.
Grabbing the clavicle.
Spitting at an opponent.
Timidity.
Charlene Liddell was vehemently antiviolence, even while her son was getting pummeled daily in school. "We lived in assisted housing in Santa Barbara," Chuck recalls. "There were two white kids in my class, and I was one of them."
Eventually, a teacher told Mrs. Liddell, a single parent, that her son was going to get hit every day unless he hit back. And so it was that little Chuck got a lesson in hand-to-hand combat from his maternal grandfather. At age 12, he began martial arts training "to stay busy." A natural athlete, he gravitated toward team sports in high school -- track, baseball, football, wrestling -- and excelled in them all, playing middle linebacker and starting all four years in wrestling at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. "I went as far as I could with football," he says with little regret. "Wrestling, too. But I'm better at fighting. I used to say it sucks that the one thing I'm really good at I can't make money on."
Then along came the UFC. The sport had a rocky start, beginning as it did in 1993 as a way to find the world's best fighter in informal competitions under the imprudent tagline "There are no rules!" Anyone with balls was welcome. Most guys padded their martial arts résumés and entered the cage only to wail like banshees. Boots were worn. Hair was yanked out by the fistful.
Liddell had to learn to fight at an early age.Footage of said fights made its way to Washington, inspiring no less a tough guy than John McCain to call it "human cockfighting." Bans followed, TV programming was nixed and the sport would have been forever relegated to backyards and basements were it not for a handful of investors who saw the wisdom of legitimacy.
One of them was White, a boxing promoter who became part of a group that purchased the UFC for $2 million in 2001. The no-holds-barred approach was abandoned, replaced with regulating bodies and Olympic-style rules. Thanks to aggressive marketing, UFC fights now average around 2.3 million viewers on Spike TV and sell out arenas worldwide. HBO is close to signing a broadcast deal, and "SportsCenter" airs postfight highlight clips. This year, more young men tuned into the league's UFC 70 event than the MTV Video Music Awards.
Still, many in the old guard of sports are resistant to mixed martial arts, citing what they feel is an inherent barbarism. Some sportscasters liken UFC matches to bar fights, while others refuse to acknowledge the league exists. This, one could argue, is more about elitism and old-school snobbery -- the same type of condescension once directed at NASCAR -- than a valid argument against the sport. Football, a pursuit known to eat its young, causes far more career-ending injuries than MMA. "I got hurt so much more in football and wrestling," Liddell says.
Some of MMA's biggest detractors are from the boxing world. Boxing, after all, stands to lose the most from MMA's rise. Floyd Mayweather Jr., boxing's biggest mouth, recently claimed, "Boxing is an art, UFC is a fad," and that if Liddell stepped into a boxing ring, "he'd get punished." This, of course, pisses off Liddell. "Everybody messes with us," he says. "What makes boxing a sport but not us? We have to do more and know more than boxers. I'd drop a boxer so fast." He's probably right. Boxing is about five or so basic punches; MMA adds wrestling and martial arts. Unless a boxer landed an early knockout punch, he'd find himself pinned and looking for the nearest exit.
At the moment, Liddell is eating lunch at the Pink Taco, in the Hard Rock. His legs are folded under his chair, bobbing like sewing needles. On his wrist, a diamond-studded watch catches the light. "One of my sponsors gave me this," he says, shaking his arm. "It's not something I would ever buy for myself. It was really nice of them, but … " He shrugs, then returns to his chips and iced tea.
Across the table, Hackleman shovels in some guacamole and reminisces about the old days, back when the two men would spar just for fun. "You're the same now as you were when you were sleeping on my couch," Hackleman says. "Before a fight, Chuck is always goofing around. That's why I named him the Iceman. He doesn't get nervous." He doesn't pray, either. Not before a fight anyway. "Why would I?", he says.
Liddell is a confident man. He is a man who has been tested and has survived, and that knowledge fills him with a lightness of being unfamiliar to men who don't dare come up against anything, let alone themselves. All elite athletes possess this poise, this buoyancy -- but none more so than the fighter. It is one thing to excel, to be fast, to be flexible, to be strong, to endure. It is quite another to do all of that while being hit in the face. "A lot of big guys make a reputation for themselves as hard," Liddell says. "Then I'll see them in the ring and they can't fight their way out of a paper bag. They're picking on guys they can beat. That's not being tough. That's being an a--hole."
As Liddell stands up to leave, the Pink Taco manager approaches, hand extended. "Lunch is on us, Chuck," he says, beaming. Liddell thanks him and attempts to move toward the door, but his two-second pause has allowed a crowd to form. Men in their 20s and 30s encircle him, most snapping away with their camera phones. "Would you sign my hat?" one asks, thrusting it at Liddell. The fighter obliges, staying mum when another fan quips, "Don't make me fight you for a picture." After every autograph, Liddell says, "Thank you."
Ten minutes later, he finally breaks free and walks purposefully toward the elevators. He misses the open door and is again surrounded. It will take him 20 minutes to get to his suite on the top floor, where upon arriving he will immediately rush to the balcony and take a long, deep breath of fresh air.
Tito Ortiz was no match for Liddell here."I like to people watch," he says, nodding toward the pool teeming with girls in bikinis and heels. Liddell turns around and walks to the couch, limping slightly. When the limp is mentioned, he rolls his eyes. "People have been asking about that," he says with irritation. "I don't have a limp."
He shuffles along, visibly favoring one leg. He catches his reflection in the mirror. "I think it's from my toe," he concedes, lifting his right foot out of his flip-flop to reveal a slice under his big toe deep enough to lose change in. "Could be that, I guess." He can't recall how he got the cut, and he's not one for complaining, about anything, with one obvious exception: He doesn't much like unremitting grandstander Tito Ortiz, his former training partner turned rival.
In 2002, Liddell was primed to fight Ortiz for the UFC title, but Ortiz demurred, claiming schedule conflicts. That didn't sit well with fans or Liddell, and Ortiz was impelled to face him in April 2004. Liddell won with a second-round knockout, and he beat Ortiz again last December, despite a torn MCL and a popped tendon in his left hand.
"I'll admit," Liddell says, lowering his voice slightly, "he is one guy I enjoy hitting -- I enjoy it a lot."
A short list of people scarier than Chuck Liddell:
Mike Tyson.
Michael Jackson.
Ryan Seacrest.
Ann Coulter.
Dick Cheney.
Oprah.
Backstage at the WEC fights, Liddell is coaching Erik Apple, a 29-year-old fighter with matinee idol looks. The two men circle each other on a warmup mat, with Liddell occasionally tapping Apple on the skull when he leaves himself vulnerable. Apple furrows his brow and nods at Liddell's every word. They wrestle a little, Liddell again showing Apple his weak spots, a mixed blessing so close to fight time. They finish with a hug.
The UFC is a handsy bunch. Hugging is big, as are shoulder squeezes and hair tousles. There is an easy intimacy among men who grapple for a living, a fluid physicality, as if every moment outside the ring is an opportunity to apologize for what happens inside it. When you've ripped a man's ear to the lobe, a postmatch embrace goes a long way.
With cameos on shows like "Entourage," Liddell's profile is only going to get bigger.
"Don't you hate waiting?" Apple asks Liddell, his bare feet tapping wildly. "It's the worst," Liddell says with a smile. Well, maybe not the worst. Losing is the worst. "When you lose a fight, you damage your manhood," says Hackleman, a former boxer and fighter. "You can't blame the team. You failed. Period."
Given the chore that awaits them, the fighters backstage are oddly relaxed. A few psych themselves up, but most clown around, tease each other or offer support to the fighters on deck. They wrestle and stretch. Others watch the closed-circuit TV. There's something very natural about the whole scene, comforting even, like this is what men are meant to be doing -- grappling for dominance and laughing over beers when it's all done.
"Men want to fight," Hackleman says. "What we do is innate. The two basic biological responses are fight or flight. It's not play basketball or flight." While Hackleman sees fighting as an undistilled version of every sport, Liddell is more sanguine. "Fighting is what it is," he says. "I've never felt out of control. I'm the last guy to punch a wall. If I'm really upset, I may go for a jog or something."
There is, of course, some darkness. For Liddell it springs from his father, a man so ill-equipped to parent that he locked his toddler son in a room for hours at a time, leaving Chuck's 3-year-old sister to look after him, Liddell says. "She fed me onions once. I was crying because I was hungry. Dad didn't care. Then he left for good."
Liddell has two children: Trista, age 9, and Cade, age 8. Both live with their respective mothers but remain very close to their father, as do the women, neither of whom Liddell felt compelled to marry. He takes his parenting seriously, but Liddell wants it known that his absentee father is not the reason he fights. It's not about compensation, emotional or otherwise. "A lot of guys get in street fights to prove something," Liddell says. "But I never did. I have nothing to prove, but I never give up. You give me enough time, I'll win."
He laughs. Has he ever been in therapy? "For what?" He is quiet for a moment.
"I went to anger management once," he says. "At Cal Poly I kicked a stuck door, and it flew off the hinges. The counselor said, 'Come back when you have real problems.'"
Does he look like a chess player? There's more to this man than fighting.A short list of largely unknown facts about Chuck Liddell:
He was in the chess club.
He has never broken his nose.
He was an A student in high school.
He has a degree in accounting.
He has a Chihuahua named Bean.
He has seen "Fight Club."
It was "fine."
He has also seen "The Sound of Music."
He loved it. So much so that he went to see the musical -- a couple of times.
Chuck Liddell is not afraid of dying. "I am afraid of not being able to fight," he says. He'd miss it, the physicality, the touchstone to truth, the constant and real measure of his own ability. If nothing else, fighting offers men a wellspring of knowledge. For better or worse, when you can take a punch, you know who you are.
Liddell knows precisely who he is. And because he knows, he can dance with abandon, paint his toenails pink ("because I can") and enjoy the occasional musical without shame. He's a man awash in serenity. Only the potential for injury unnerves him, if he allows himself to dwell on it, which he doesn't.
"I can't see myself in a wheelchair," he says, cringing. "People feeling sorry for you would get old real quick."
He envisions a different future, a shinier one. "I'm interested in Hollywood," he says. "I'm trying to do Punisher II. I may get to play the villain's crazy brother. I'll probably start acting classes."
He knows it sounds cliché, but he makes no apologies. "I'm 37," he says. "I hope to fight quite a few more years, but you never know." He pauses, takes a long, deep breath and smiles. "Then again, Randy Couture is still the heavyweight champion at 43," Liddell says happily.
"And I knocked him out twice."
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
Post Tenebras Lux (After Darkness, Light)...R.I.P. Darrell Griffin, Jr. (U.S. Army)
It's very rare that a MSM (mainstream media) outlet tells a good story or allows the entire truth to be told without agenda-based spin. This U.S. News and World Report story about the life of Army Staff Sgt. Darrell Ray Griffin Jr., and his death by a sniper's bullet, in Iraq. Though lengthy, it shows very well how complicated, horrific, and yet hopeful and uplifting the situation in Iraq can be. War is much like love in that it's never neat, and it's usually messy, but if you persevere to the end, you can win a greater victory than anyone could ever imagine and live in a reality that once was only a dream. Staff Sgt. Griffin gave his life for the dream that was the people of Iraq living in peace and freedom...all I can do for this hero is pray for his family and add my own Latin tidbit, in pace requiescat (rest in peace). You've earned it soldier, may God comfort your family and welcome you into his loving arms.
E-Mails Reveal a Fallen Soldier's Story
By Alex Kingsbury
"Four days before his death, Army Staff Sgt. Darrell Ray Griffin Jr., an infantry squad leader in Baghdad, sent an E-mail to his wife, Diana. "Spartan women of Greece used to tell their husbands, before they went into battle, to come back with their shields or laying on them, dying honorably in battle. But if they did not return with their shield, this showed that they ran away from the battle. Cowardice was not a Spartan virtue ... Tell me that you love me the same by me coming back with my shield or on it."
A few days later, Diana replied. "Are you ok??? I haven't heard from you since Sunday and it is now Wednesday ... I know you said you were going on a dangerous mission ... I get so nervous when I don't hear from you ... phone call or e-mail ... I just hope and pray your ok honey ... "
It was an E-mail Griffin would never read.
As the Baghdad security plan draws thousands more troops into densely populated parts of the Iraqi capital, the danger from roadside bombs and small-arms fire grows exponentially. The city has now surpassed Anbar province as the deadliest region for U.S. troops. Since the war began, more than 3,370 American soldiers and marines have been killed and more than 25,000 wounded in Iraq, and, in terms of American casualties, the past six months have been the costliest of the war. American commanders say they expect casualties to increase in the next three months.
One of those casualties was Darrell Griffin, felled by a sniper's bullet on March 21, 2007, while patrolling in Sadr City. He was fatally shot while standing in the hatch of a Stryker armored vehicle. I interviewed him on March 3, 10 days before his 36th birthday, at a forward operating base near the town of Iskandariyah, 35 miles south of the city where he was killed. The desert sun was bright, and he wore a pair of dark glasses, which covered his eyes but couldn't conceal a spasmodic muscle tic in his face. He was quite self-conscious about the tic, he confessed, but shrugged it off. "That's what happens after two combat tours in Iraq." We talked about a recent battle and about his collection of digital photographs chronicling his two tours in Iraq. He'd seen things, he said, that he could never tell his wife or family on the phone.
We had met the day before, inside a dusty green tent on the base. It was about 10 o'clock on a Friday evening, and the men of Charger Company's 3rd platoon, 2-3 Stryker Brigade, were preparing for a mission to nab a local suspected troublemaker who was holed up in a farmhouse outside of town. Griffin was a big guy, even without the bulky body armor, helmet, and "dangle"—what soldiers call the bits of gear that they clip, strap, or otherwise buckle to their uniforms. He had half a dozen rifle magazines strapped across his chest, two radios, a medical pack, a flashlight, a digital camera, and a variety of other pouches and pockets swollen with kit.
His rifle stock had a sticker of a white skull, and on his helmet written in black Magic Marker was the phrase "Malleus Dei," the Latin phrase meaning God's hammer. During his first tour with a different infantry unit, it was John Calvin's motto "Post Tenebras Lux"—after darkness, light. As he fiddled with all his equipment, he talked about the upcoming mission—how it was likely to be routine, how much things in Iraq had changed since his first deployment, and how the folks back home simply couldn't understand the chaos and carnage that soldiers see on a daily basis.
Embedded with Griffin's unit from the last days of February into early March, I met many of the soldiers in Charger Company. Griffin was a veteran in the unit and more than willing to chat about all he had seen. We mostly talked about a fight near the city of Najaf just a few weeks earlier. Assigned to recover the wreckage of a downed Apache helicopter and the remains of the two pilots, the 2-3 stumbled across what the Army called a Shiite doomsday cult known as the Heaven's Army, which had amassed hundreds of fighters and hundreds of civilians in a compound on the outskirts of town. The 2-3 dug in and called in airstrikes against the buildings, a bombardment that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
The men spoke often about Najaf because memories of the engagement were still disturbingly fresh in their minds. Hundreds had been killed or maimed, including women and children. The 2-3 didn't lose a man. "Not even a sprained ankle," said Lt. Col. Barry Huggins, the American commander of ground forces at the scene. But several men were still having nightmares—a 19-year-old medic had dreams of treating a child with a missing limb. "And I have lots of photographs of what happened," Griffin offered that evening. "You should sit down and have a look at them." So we sat on his cot, and he began narrating.
There were hundreds of pictures, documenting his two tours with the Army's new Stryker brigades—crack units equipped with the newest vehicles and assigned to some of the toughest missions. We made it through only a few dozen pictures of the battle of Najaf and its bloody aftermath before it was time to go out on the raid, but we agreed to pick up it up again the next day.
The raid was unremarkable. Griffin and his unit failed to nab their target, and the platoon—with a reporter and photographer in tow—spent a few hours chasing five men who had fled the scene across open farm fields. Crunching through those fields, Griffin and I began talking about philosophy and politics and famous thinkers. He hadn't been to college, but he read widely and spoke with a remarkable clarity and urgency about what he had seen. The next afternoon, Griffin again opened his laptop. "I'd like you to copy these pictures and make sure that people see them," he told me. So I plugged my iPod into his computer and began downloading several gigabytes' worth of folders with titles like "SECOND DEPLOYMENT," "ELECTIONS," "TAL AFAR DEATH PICS," and "CLOSE CALLS."
"Would you like to see a picture of the first guy I had to kill?" he asked. It was taken at 12:33 p.m. on April 21, 2005, according to the time stamp. The young man lies dead, covered in blood and dressed in a blue sweater and white jacket.
Then there were pictures of the clash in Najaf in late January, with panoramic shots of the rows of weapons that were seized and the rows of corpses. "I'd never seen anything like it," Griffin said. "The destruction was almost biblical." He wrote about that battle, too.
My squad and I along with my platoon leader 1LT Weber established a strongpoint at the first corner that we approached. I noticed a mutilated child thrown against a wall from random bomb blasts and as I was setting my machine gunner for security, a man was trying to get out of the village with a dead baby in his arms, holding her as if she was still alive along with his wife who could barely walk because her face had been torn open by the bombing. As this all happened at the same time, a man brought a young 10-12 year old boy to me in his arms and it was obvious that the child was barely breathing but still alive. He tried to hand this child to me but I did not want to take my eyes off of all the villagers who were now approaching my position in droves. The man knew that this boy would die so he placed the boy next to a man whose legs had been blown off lying across from me and in the arms of a dead man this boy finally died. I witnessed so much carnage on this particular day that words and descriptions of the horror would become trivial in attempting to paint a picture of what I saw ...
I achieved my 8th confirmed kill in this village when I opened a door to what I thought was just another small room and upon entering, saw human bodies strewn on the floor, wall to wall, that had been placed there because the room had obviously been established as a casualty collection point. One man lying close to the door had been pleading for me to help him and kept pointing to his injured leg. I did not want to commit to entering the room because I had a blind spot to my front left and did not want to be engaged by any survivors; the room was strewn with massive amounts of AK-47's, magazines, grenades and other assortments of weaponry. I motioned for the man to crawl out and he would not or could not comply. He then looked dead into my eyes and suddenly began to smile at me while he reached for his AK-47. I lifted my rifle and fired 8 rounds into his forehead from about 3 feet killing him instantly ...
There was so much sensory overload as to the horrific that I was forced to make my squad work in cycles stacking bodies so that they would not have any mental breakdowns. Our local [Iraqi] interpreter "Ricki" even vomited from seeing this macabre spectacle. I knew that as U.S. forces in Iraq, we were definitely now in an even more unpredictable and unstable environment than I had thought prior to this.
After the battle, they found stores of food and ammunition, 11 mortar launchers, and an antiaircraft gun inside the compound. There were so many enemy weapons that the Army filled three pickup trucks with captured guns. More than 200 people surrendered in the morning, and more than 250 were reported killed. "We shifted from secure helicopter, defense, to hasty attack, to clear the trench, to humanitarian mission," says Colonel Huggins.
I asked Griffin if he'd like to talk about the Najaf battle and all his pictures in a video interview. We borrowed some plastic chairs from an Internet cafe on the base, found an abandoned tent that was far away from the noise of the helicopter landing pad, and talked for 26 minutes.
He didn't say much about why he had joined the Army—for all the reasons printed on the recruiting posters, he offered. He'd been a rebellious kid, the kind that his junior high school assistant principal was happy to see move to high school so he could stop sticking him in detention. Griffin ran away from home several times, too, once waiting a month to call his father, telling him he was living in the attic of a martial arts studio. He met his wife while he was jogging in Pasadena, Calif. ("I know it sounds corny," he told her, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, "but you look really beautiful.") They were married in 1994. Looking for excitement, he became a paramedic in the not-so-nice parts of Los Angeles, where he was shot at for the first time. But it was in the military that he found a new purpose and direction; he joined the National Guard in 1999 and, finding that too slow, went on active duty in July 2001.
In his first Iraq tour, Griffin spent time in Mosul and Tal Afar. He earned his chops kicking down doors and chasing bad guys, adventures that he documented in a journal on his laptop. He even won a Bronze Star with V for valor for saving the lives of three American and two Iraqi soldiers after an ied attack in Tal Afar.
When I got to the top of the vehicle, I saw Sgt. Gordon's right leg hanging on by skin only ... As we were still taking heavy small-arms fire Doc and I were pulling out our First Sergeant, whose legs had both been broken by the powerful blast. As soon as we handed him down we began to treat Sgt. Gordon by applying a tourniquet to his nearly severed leg and then handed him down. When I climbed down from the vehicle to assess PFC Rosenthal, I noticed that his face had been severely burned, so I thought, but it was merely the soot from the blast. As soon as I knelt down to cut his pants off to assess his wounds, asphalt began chipping all around us due to the small-arms [fire] getting closer ... Once at the front of the vehicle, we began taking heavy fire from a mosque off to our east and there was just nowhere else to take cover. Luckily, our Commander's vehicle approached the wreckage and we immediately loaded all the casualties and they were brought back to [Forward Operating Base] Sykes.
His war experiences fueled his obsessive reading. "Philosophy has kept me grounded in conjunction with the things that I have seen in my life that have changed me drastically," he told me. His family and friends joke that they'd ask Griffin to send them reading lists before seeing him just so that they could keep up with his conversations. "He would come into the store and regularly drop a few hundred dollars on books," says Michael Smythe, the manager of Griffin's favorite bookstore, who spoke at his funeral.
While the books were helping him think, events on the ground were changing him. "I can't wait to see you guys," he wrote home to his father in April 2005. "I will not be right for sometime when all this is over. I have done some things that will haunt me for a long time to come and pray that G-d will forgive me for having done them. Let's just say that the enemy can start to appear in the very people that you are here to 'help.'"
Many of the soldiers in Iraq carry cameras. One in the 2-3 went into battle with a Canon slr strapped in a pouchlike holster on his thigh. Griffin went through three digital cameras during his two tours, once running through a hail of enemy bullets to fetch one he'd dropped in the sand. "I hope, in the long run, that those pictures will help this generation to deal with whatever will have to be dealt with in the aftermath of this thing," says Huggins, reflecting on the thousands of personal pictures that his soldiers have taken. "They will certainly never forget the things that they have done here."
When Griffin was home in Fort Lewis, Wash., between his first and second deployments, Diana would sometimes find her husband with head lowered, crying. "He had a slightly harder heart when he came back," she said. "He wanted to appear unchanged by what he had seen. All I could do was keep telling him that it was ok either way."
Griffin was first deployed with a Stryker unit from the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division. On Jan. 3, 2005, in Tal Afar, his unit was called from its base in an old castle to head into the city to deal with the body of an Iraqi policeman's son, who had been beheaded.
We took some Iraqi cops to the scene and did in fact see a headless body with the head carefully stacked on top of the chest with the body lying flat on the ground. The police officers (3) went up to the body to identify it while security was maintained for them by us. Before they got within 8 ft. of the body, the body exploded and killed one while injuring severely the others ... We took the torso back to the castle where we have been for awhile and had to unzip the body bag so that other family members could identify the lower half by the shoes he was wearing.
Later in the day, the Iraqi police, who were family members of the destroyed body, began to drink heavily and one of them (Ali) started shooting randomly into the crowded traffic circle below the castle. We watched as he killed a 17 yr. old girl, a 7 yr. old girl and a 28 yr. old male. We could not intervene as this was happening for very complex reasons. This has been one of the most horrific days of my entire 34 yrs. of living on this earth ... I am stupefied and stand in tragic awe in the face of this carnage, what could I possibly say? Where was God today?
He often wrote about God in his E-mails home. He'd been a part-time pastor at a California Baptist church once, giving sermons on Wednesday nights. He'd knocked on the door of a church shortly after he met his wife in 1992. "I'd like to be saved," he'd said. In January, he asked his wife to send him a copy of the Koran, because he wanted to read about the Muslim faith. But in early March of this year, he told me that he'd stopped attending church. "I started studying philosophy and became an atheist," he said. "I'm still trying to contemplate God, but it is kind of hard here." Ten days later, on his birthday, he called home. "He was remarkably calm," recalled his father. "The things he has seen in war and the fact that he read so deeply in philosophical and theological issues led him to be often conflicted internally about God. He said that he reconciled his conflicts and that he was ready anytime God called him. Not the statement of an atheist."
Whatever his personal convictions, the memories of Najaf and other missions in early March were becoming a heavy piece of dangle. While embedded on March 5, I followed Charger Company on another raid that Griffin recounted in his journal. The platoon entered the home of a family whose only crime was having names similar to those of wanted insurgents.
I noticed the mother attempting to breast feed her little baby and yet the baby continued to cry. [The interpreter] who is a certified and well educated doctor of internal medicine educated in Iraq, told me that the mother, because she was very frightened by our presence, was not able to breast feed her baby because the glands in the breast close up due to sympathetic responses to fear and stressful situations. I then tried to reassure the mother by allowing her to leave the room and attain some privacy so that she could relax and feed her child. I felt something that had been brooding under the attained callousness of my heart for some time.
My heart finally broke for the Iraqi people. I wanted to just sit down and cry while saying I'm so, so sorry for what we had done. I had the acute sense that we had failed these people. It was at this time, and after an entire year of being deployed and well into the next deployment that I realized something. We burst into homes, frighten the hell out of families, and destroy their homes looking for an elusive enemy. We do this out of fear of the unseen and attempt to compensate for our inability to capture insurgents by swatting mosquitoes with a sledge-hammer in glass houses.
It was weeks later and back in the states that I realized that Griffin was the only soldier I had interviewed at any length with the video camera. Taking the camera along was just an experiment with multimedia reporting, after all. In the end, Griffin was only briefly mentioned in a story about the Stryker unit raids that appeared in the magazine. "Every night is something different," he's quoted as saying, while sitting in the back of his eight-wheel Stryker vehicle. "The uncertainty is one of the hardest things to deal with."
On March 23, I received an E-mail from Capt. Steve Phillips, the commander of Charger Company. Diana Griffin, he wrote, had bought out three stores' worth of magazines when her husband's quote appeared in print. "She called my wife several times to brag about how her husband was in the news," Phillips wrote. "I don't know if you remember him, but he was with [the] platoon the night you chased around for the 5 individuals that were fleeing us. Darrell was shot and killed two days ago when we were returning from our new area of operations within Sadr City."
Snipers are an infantryman's worst nightmare—an unseen enemy who can kill with ease. Even worse, insurgents these days have taken to videotaping kills, videos that are sometimes broadcast on Iraqi satellite television. "We have been the deepest conventional force in Sadr City in the past 2 years I believe," Phillips wrote. "It is tense and it is a tough mission." Griffin was the first soldier from his unit killed during this combat deployment.
There was an E-mail message from Diana Griffin in my in box as well. "I was wondering if you have anything more of his interview [whether] you taped him or wrote it down that I may have, and also any pictures." I sent copies of the interview and the pictures to his family, and agreed to say few words at the funeral.
The bullet that ended his life also deprived him of an open-casket funeral. The ceremony was held at a large church in Porter Ranch, Calif., not far from his final resting place, the National Cemetery in downtown Los Angeles, in front of about 150 mourners. The local television station was there; so were members of the Patriot Guard Riders, a group of former servicemen who voluntarily escort military funerals to protect families from religious zealots who protest such things. Indeed, as the funeral procession made its way along the freeway from the church to the cemetery, a Toyota pickup swerved toward the hearse, beeping its horn with the driver's hand extending his arm with his thumb down.
The often distant branches of Griffin's family came together for the first time in years. His father sat modestly dressed next to Diana, who wore black. There were other family members there, too, some buttoned down, others with tattoos and long hair. And Darrell's sister, who, like her brother, excels in martial arts.
His remains lie under a sliver of white marble in the veterans' cemetery. Despite requests from his family members, the Army erased Griffin's laptop hard drive before returning it to them. It's done for security, officials said, but it also erases pictures and writings. Deletions are done by the military on a case-by-case basis, "but a lot of people buy recovery software and get some of the files back," an Army official offered. The Department of Defense also recently issued new regulations that, in practice, may severely limit soldiers' E-mailing and blogging. "[I] believe that readers should know the situation as it really is over here without any partisan interpretation of the facts," Griffin once blogged to a MySpace group. "Perception must not be reality; reality must stand on its own merits good or bad."
Darrell Griffin Sr., an accountant who also runs several business ventures, is compiling his son's writings into a book and hopes to travel to Iraq to see where his son died. "My emotions have [been] on a roller coaster going from extreme anger, to sadness, to helplessness, to acceptance to confusion and then all over again," he wrote me five days after his son's death. And the elder Griffin has been pressed by many of his friends and colleagues in Southern California to join the ranks of the antiwar movement and use the story of his son's death to help end the war. "They just don't seem to understand or accept that my son loved the Army—that the Army saved him in many ways—and that the thing he hated the most was politics getting in the way of finding real solutions for the Iraqis."
This month, his son-in-law's National Guard unit was activated for deployment to Iraq. In the coming months, he expects his grandson, a Marine medic, to go there as well. "There should be a limit on how much of this a family is asked to bear," he says.
Diana Griffin is moving from Fort Lewis, Wash., to be closer to her family in Southern California. And she remembers the chaplain coming to the door. "The President of the United States ... " he began. That's where her memory of the event stops. By her bedside, she still keeps a book on the 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard that her husband hadn't finished reading. She didn't speak at the microphone to the assembled mourners at the funeral, but after the echoes of the graveside 21-gun salute faded into the din of the nearby freeway, she said this: "Today, Darrell has come home on his shield."
E-Mails Reveal a Fallen Soldier's Story
By Alex Kingsbury
"Four days before his death, Army Staff Sgt. Darrell Ray Griffin Jr., an infantry squad leader in Baghdad, sent an E-mail to his wife, Diana. "Spartan women of Greece used to tell their husbands, before they went into battle, to come back with their shields or laying on them, dying honorably in battle. But if they did not return with their shield, this showed that they ran away from the battle. Cowardice was not a Spartan virtue ... Tell me that you love me the same by me coming back with my shield or on it."
A few days later, Diana replied. "Are you ok??? I haven't heard from you since Sunday and it is now Wednesday ... I know you said you were going on a dangerous mission ... I get so nervous when I don't hear from you ... phone call or e-mail ... I just hope and pray your ok honey ... "
It was an E-mail Griffin would never read.
As the Baghdad security plan draws thousands more troops into densely populated parts of the Iraqi capital, the danger from roadside bombs and small-arms fire grows exponentially. The city has now surpassed Anbar province as the deadliest region for U.S. troops. Since the war began, more than 3,370 American soldiers and marines have been killed and more than 25,000 wounded in Iraq, and, in terms of American casualties, the past six months have been the costliest of the war. American commanders say they expect casualties to increase in the next three months.
One of those casualties was Darrell Griffin, felled by a sniper's bullet on March 21, 2007, while patrolling in Sadr City. He was fatally shot while standing in the hatch of a Stryker armored vehicle. I interviewed him on March 3, 10 days before his 36th birthday, at a forward operating base near the town of Iskandariyah, 35 miles south of the city where he was killed. The desert sun was bright, and he wore a pair of dark glasses, which covered his eyes but couldn't conceal a spasmodic muscle tic in his face. He was quite self-conscious about the tic, he confessed, but shrugged it off. "That's what happens after two combat tours in Iraq." We talked about a recent battle and about his collection of digital photographs chronicling his two tours in Iraq. He'd seen things, he said, that he could never tell his wife or family on the phone.
We had met the day before, inside a dusty green tent on the base. It was about 10 o'clock on a Friday evening, and the men of Charger Company's 3rd platoon, 2-3 Stryker Brigade, were preparing for a mission to nab a local suspected troublemaker who was holed up in a farmhouse outside of town. Griffin was a big guy, even without the bulky body armor, helmet, and "dangle"—what soldiers call the bits of gear that they clip, strap, or otherwise buckle to their uniforms. He had half a dozen rifle magazines strapped across his chest, two radios, a medical pack, a flashlight, a digital camera, and a variety of other pouches and pockets swollen with kit.
His rifle stock had a sticker of a white skull, and on his helmet written in black Magic Marker was the phrase "Malleus Dei," the Latin phrase meaning God's hammer. During his first tour with a different infantry unit, it was John Calvin's motto "Post Tenebras Lux"—after darkness, light. As he fiddled with all his equipment, he talked about the upcoming mission—how it was likely to be routine, how much things in Iraq had changed since his first deployment, and how the folks back home simply couldn't understand the chaos and carnage that soldiers see on a daily basis.
Embedded with Griffin's unit from the last days of February into early March, I met many of the soldiers in Charger Company. Griffin was a veteran in the unit and more than willing to chat about all he had seen. We mostly talked about a fight near the city of Najaf just a few weeks earlier. Assigned to recover the wreckage of a downed Apache helicopter and the remains of the two pilots, the 2-3 stumbled across what the Army called a Shiite doomsday cult known as the Heaven's Army, which had amassed hundreds of fighters and hundreds of civilians in a compound on the outskirts of town. The 2-3 dug in and called in airstrikes against the buildings, a bombardment that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
The men spoke often about Najaf because memories of the engagement were still disturbingly fresh in their minds. Hundreds had been killed or maimed, including women and children. The 2-3 didn't lose a man. "Not even a sprained ankle," said Lt. Col. Barry Huggins, the American commander of ground forces at the scene. But several men were still having nightmares—a 19-year-old medic had dreams of treating a child with a missing limb. "And I have lots of photographs of what happened," Griffin offered that evening. "You should sit down and have a look at them." So we sat on his cot, and he began narrating.
There were hundreds of pictures, documenting his two tours with the Army's new Stryker brigades—crack units equipped with the newest vehicles and assigned to some of the toughest missions. We made it through only a few dozen pictures of the battle of Najaf and its bloody aftermath before it was time to go out on the raid, but we agreed to pick up it up again the next day.
The raid was unremarkable. Griffin and his unit failed to nab their target, and the platoon—with a reporter and photographer in tow—spent a few hours chasing five men who had fled the scene across open farm fields. Crunching through those fields, Griffin and I began talking about philosophy and politics and famous thinkers. He hadn't been to college, but he read widely and spoke with a remarkable clarity and urgency about what he had seen. The next afternoon, Griffin again opened his laptop. "I'd like you to copy these pictures and make sure that people see them," he told me. So I plugged my iPod into his computer and began downloading several gigabytes' worth of folders with titles like "SECOND DEPLOYMENT," "ELECTIONS," "TAL AFAR DEATH PICS," and "CLOSE CALLS."
"Would you like to see a picture of the first guy I had to kill?" he asked. It was taken at 12:33 p.m. on April 21, 2005, according to the time stamp. The young man lies dead, covered in blood and dressed in a blue sweater and white jacket.
Then there were pictures of the clash in Najaf in late January, with panoramic shots of the rows of weapons that were seized and the rows of corpses. "I'd never seen anything like it," Griffin said. "The destruction was almost biblical." He wrote about that battle, too.
My squad and I along with my platoon leader 1LT Weber established a strongpoint at the first corner that we approached. I noticed a mutilated child thrown against a wall from random bomb blasts and as I was setting my machine gunner for security, a man was trying to get out of the village with a dead baby in his arms, holding her as if she was still alive along with his wife who could barely walk because her face had been torn open by the bombing. As this all happened at the same time, a man brought a young 10-12 year old boy to me in his arms and it was obvious that the child was barely breathing but still alive. He tried to hand this child to me but I did not want to take my eyes off of all the villagers who were now approaching my position in droves. The man knew that this boy would die so he placed the boy next to a man whose legs had been blown off lying across from me and in the arms of a dead man this boy finally died. I witnessed so much carnage on this particular day that words and descriptions of the horror would become trivial in attempting to paint a picture of what I saw ...
I achieved my 8th confirmed kill in this village when I opened a door to what I thought was just another small room and upon entering, saw human bodies strewn on the floor, wall to wall, that had been placed there because the room had obviously been established as a casualty collection point. One man lying close to the door had been pleading for me to help him and kept pointing to his injured leg. I did not want to commit to entering the room because I had a blind spot to my front left and did not want to be engaged by any survivors; the room was strewn with massive amounts of AK-47's, magazines, grenades and other assortments of weaponry. I motioned for the man to crawl out and he would not or could not comply. He then looked dead into my eyes and suddenly began to smile at me while he reached for his AK-47. I lifted my rifle and fired 8 rounds into his forehead from about 3 feet killing him instantly ...
There was so much sensory overload as to the horrific that I was forced to make my squad work in cycles stacking bodies so that they would not have any mental breakdowns. Our local [Iraqi] interpreter "Ricki" even vomited from seeing this macabre spectacle. I knew that as U.S. forces in Iraq, we were definitely now in an even more unpredictable and unstable environment than I had thought prior to this.
After the battle, they found stores of food and ammunition, 11 mortar launchers, and an antiaircraft gun inside the compound. There were so many enemy weapons that the Army filled three pickup trucks with captured guns. More than 200 people surrendered in the morning, and more than 250 were reported killed. "We shifted from secure helicopter, defense, to hasty attack, to clear the trench, to humanitarian mission," says Colonel Huggins.
I asked Griffin if he'd like to talk about the Najaf battle and all his pictures in a video interview. We borrowed some plastic chairs from an Internet cafe on the base, found an abandoned tent that was far away from the noise of the helicopter landing pad, and talked for 26 minutes.
He didn't say much about why he had joined the Army—for all the reasons printed on the recruiting posters, he offered. He'd been a rebellious kid, the kind that his junior high school assistant principal was happy to see move to high school so he could stop sticking him in detention. Griffin ran away from home several times, too, once waiting a month to call his father, telling him he was living in the attic of a martial arts studio. He met his wife while he was jogging in Pasadena, Calif. ("I know it sounds corny," he told her, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, "but you look really beautiful.") They were married in 1994. Looking for excitement, he became a paramedic in the not-so-nice parts of Los Angeles, where he was shot at for the first time. But it was in the military that he found a new purpose and direction; he joined the National Guard in 1999 and, finding that too slow, went on active duty in July 2001.
In his first Iraq tour, Griffin spent time in Mosul and Tal Afar. He earned his chops kicking down doors and chasing bad guys, adventures that he documented in a journal on his laptop. He even won a Bronze Star with V for valor for saving the lives of three American and two Iraqi soldiers after an ied attack in Tal Afar.
When I got to the top of the vehicle, I saw Sgt. Gordon's right leg hanging on by skin only ... As we were still taking heavy small-arms fire Doc and I were pulling out our First Sergeant, whose legs had both been broken by the powerful blast. As soon as we handed him down we began to treat Sgt. Gordon by applying a tourniquet to his nearly severed leg and then handed him down. When I climbed down from the vehicle to assess PFC Rosenthal, I noticed that his face had been severely burned, so I thought, but it was merely the soot from the blast. As soon as I knelt down to cut his pants off to assess his wounds, asphalt began chipping all around us due to the small-arms [fire] getting closer ... Once at the front of the vehicle, we began taking heavy fire from a mosque off to our east and there was just nowhere else to take cover. Luckily, our Commander's vehicle approached the wreckage and we immediately loaded all the casualties and they were brought back to [Forward Operating Base] Sykes.
His war experiences fueled his obsessive reading. "Philosophy has kept me grounded in conjunction with the things that I have seen in my life that have changed me drastically," he told me. His family and friends joke that they'd ask Griffin to send them reading lists before seeing him just so that they could keep up with his conversations. "He would come into the store and regularly drop a few hundred dollars on books," says Michael Smythe, the manager of Griffin's favorite bookstore, who spoke at his funeral.
While the books were helping him think, events on the ground were changing him. "I can't wait to see you guys," he wrote home to his father in April 2005. "I will not be right for sometime when all this is over. I have done some things that will haunt me for a long time to come and pray that G-d will forgive me for having done them. Let's just say that the enemy can start to appear in the very people that you are here to 'help.'"
Many of the soldiers in Iraq carry cameras. One in the 2-3 went into battle with a Canon slr strapped in a pouchlike holster on his thigh. Griffin went through three digital cameras during his two tours, once running through a hail of enemy bullets to fetch one he'd dropped in the sand. "I hope, in the long run, that those pictures will help this generation to deal with whatever will have to be dealt with in the aftermath of this thing," says Huggins, reflecting on the thousands of personal pictures that his soldiers have taken. "They will certainly never forget the things that they have done here."
When Griffin was home in Fort Lewis, Wash., between his first and second deployments, Diana would sometimes find her husband with head lowered, crying. "He had a slightly harder heart when he came back," she said. "He wanted to appear unchanged by what he had seen. All I could do was keep telling him that it was ok either way."
Griffin was first deployed with a Stryker unit from the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division. On Jan. 3, 2005, in Tal Afar, his unit was called from its base in an old castle to head into the city to deal with the body of an Iraqi policeman's son, who had been beheaded.
We took some Iraqi cops to the scene and did in fact see a headless body with the head carefully stacked on top of the chest with the body lying flat on the ground. The police officers (3) went up to the body to identify it while security was maintained for them by us. Before they got within 8 ft. of the body, the body exploded and killed one while injuring severely the others ... We took the torso back to the castle where we have been for awhile and had to unzip the body bag so that other family members could identify the lower half by the shoes he was wearing.
Later in the day, the Iraqi police, who were family members of the destroyed body, began to drink heavily and one of them (Ali) started shooting randomly into the crowded traffic circle below the castle. We watched as he killed a 17 yr. old girl, a 7 yr. old girl and a 28 yr. old male. We could not intervene as this was happening for very complex reasons. This has been one of the most horrific days of my entire 34 yrs. of living on this earth ... I am stupefied and stand in tragic awe in the face of this carnage, what could I possibly say? Where was God today?
He often wrote about God in his E-mails home. He'd been a part-time pastor at a California Baptist church once, giving sermons on Wednesday nights. He'd knocked on the door of a church shortly after he met his wife in 1992. "I'd like to be saved," he'd said. In January, he asked his wife to send him a copy of the Koran, because he wanted to read about the Muslim faith. But in early March of this year, he told me that he'd stopped attending church. "I started studying philosophy and became an atheist," he said. "I'm still trying to contemplate God, but it is kind of hard here." Ten days later, on his birthday, he called home. "He was remarkably calm," recalled his father. "The things he has seen in war and the fact that he read so deeply in philosophical and theological issues led him to be often conflicted internally about God. He said that he reconciled his conflicts and that he was ready anytime God called him. Not the statement of an atheist."
Whatever his personal convictions, the memories of Najaf and other missions in early March were becoming a heavy piece of dangle. While embedded on March 5, I followed Charger Company on another raid that Griffin recounted in his journal. The platoon entered the home of a family whose only crime was having names similar to those of wanted insurgents.
I noticed the mother attempting to breast feed her little baby and yet the baby continued to cry. [The interpreter] who is a certified and well educated doctor of internal medicine educated in Iraq, told me that the mother, because she was very frightened by our presence, was not able to breast feed her baby because the glands in the breast close up due to sympathetic responses to fear and stressful situations. I then tried to reassure the mother by allowing her to leave the room and attain some privacy so that she could relax and feed her child. I felt something that had been brooding under the attained callousness of my heart for some time.
My heart finally broke for the Iraqi people. I wanted to just sit down and cry while saying I'm so, so sorry for what we had done. I had the acute sense that we had failed these people. It was at this time, and after an entire year of being deployed and well into the next deployment that I realized something. We burst into homes, frighten the hell out of families, and destroy their homes looking for an elusive enemy. We do this out of fear of the unseen and attempt to compensate for our inability to capture insurgents by swatting mosquitoes with a sledge-hammer in glass houses.
It was weeks later and back in the states that I realized that Griffin was the only soldier I had interviewed at any length with the video camera. Taking the camera along was just an experiment with multimedia reporting, after all. In the end, Griffin was only briefly mentioned in a story about the Stryker unit raids that appeared in the magazine. "Every night is something different," he's quoted as saying, while sitting in the back of his eight-wheel Stryker vehicle. "The uncertainty is one of the hardest things to deal with."
On March 23, I received an E-mail from Capt. Steve Phillips, the commander of Charger Company. Diana Griffin, he wrote, had bought out three stores' worth of magazines when her husband's quote appeared in print. "She called my wife several times to brag about how her husband was in the news," Phillips wrote. "I don't know if you remember him, but he was with [the] platoon the night you chased around for the 5 individuals that were fleeing us. Darrell was shot and killed two days ago when we were returning from our new area of operations within Sadr City."
Snipers are an infantryman's worst nightmare—an unseen enemy who can kill with ease. Even worse, insurgents these days have taken to videotaping kills, videos that are sometimes broadcast on Iraqi satellite television. "We have been the deepest conventional force in Sadr City in the past 2 years I believe," Phillips wrote. "It is tense and it is a tough mission." Griffin was the first soldier from his unit killed during this combat deployment.
There was an E-mail message from Diana Griffin in my in box as well. "I was wondering if you have anything more of his interview [whether] you taped him or wrote it down that I may have, and also any pictures." I sent copies of the interview and the pictures to his family, and agreed to say few words at the funeral.
The bullet that ended his life also deprived him of an open-casket funeral. The ceremony was held at a large church in Porter Ranch, Calif., not far from his final resting place, the National Cemetery in downtown Los Angeles, in front of about 150 mourners. The local television station was there; so were members of the Patriot Guard Riders, a group of former servicemen who voluntarily escort military funerals to protect families from religious zealots who protest such things. Indeed, as the funeral procession made its way along the freeway from the church to the cemetery, a Toyota pickup swerved toward the hearse, beeping its horn with the driver's hand extending his arm with his thumb down.
The often distant branches of Griffin's family came together for the first time in years. His father sat modestly dressed next to Diana, who wore black. There were other family members there, too, some buttoned down, others with tattoos and long hair. And Darrell's sister, who, like her brother, excels in martial arts.
His remains lie under a sliver of white marble in the veterans' cemetery. Despite requests from his family members, the Army erased Griffin's laptop hard drive before returning it to them. It's done for security, officials said, but it also erases pictures and writings. Deletions are done by the military on a case-by-case basis, "but a lot of people buy recovery software and get some of the files back," an Army official offered. The Department of Defense also recently issued new regulations that, in practice, may severely limit soldiers' E-mailing and blogging. "[I] believe that readers should know the situation as it really is over here without any partisan interpretation of the facts," Griffin once blogged to a MySpace group. "Perception must not be reality; reality must stand on its own merits good or bad."
Darrell Griffin Sr., an accountant who also runs several business ventures, is compiling his son's writings into a book and hopes to travel to Iraq to see where his son died. "My emotions have [been] on a roller coaster going from extreme anger, to sadness, to helplessness, to acceptance to confusion and then all over again," he wrote me five days after his son's death. And the elder Griffin has been pressed by many of his friends and colleagues in Southern California to join the ranks of the antiwar movement and use the story of his son's death to help end the war. "They just don't seem to understand or accept that my son loved the Army—that the Army saved him in many ways—and that the thing he hated the most was politics getting in the way of finding real solutions for the Iraqis."
This month, his son-in-law's National Guard unit was activated for deployment to Iraq. In the coming months, he expects his grandson, a Marine medic, to go there as well. "There should be a limit on how much of this a family is asked to bear," he says.
Diana Griffin is moving from Fort Lewis, Wash., to be closer to her family in Southern California. And she remembers the chaplain coming to the door. "The President of the United States ... " he began. That's where her memory of the event stops. By her bedside, she still keeps a book on the 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard that her husband hadn't finished reading. She didn't speak at the microphone to the assembled mourners at the funeral, but after the echoes of the graveside 21-gun salute faded into the din of the nearby freeway, she said this: "Today, Darrell has come home on his shield."
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Why "Elizabethtown" is a Vastly Underrated Movie
This is just a fantastic piece of writing by Mrs. DuToit. She uses a movie ("Elizabethtown", starring Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom) to reflect on the commonality of our journeys as we make our way through the world, the people who help us along the way, the highs and lows we experience with the passage of time, the sometimes tough slog of discovering who we are, and how we become truly alive when we keep pushing through the hard times to make room for the things that make life worth living. I know a movie is just a movie, but still, the thinking and comparisons she displays here are quite good. It's a bit long, but reading the whole thing is definitely worth it.
"I started to answer the question in comments about why I thought "Elizabethtown" was a great film. I highlighted the text and started over again and again. What film can do, what it is supposed to do, when all the planets are aligned, when all the crafts are working in concert, is to move you. The vast majority of films made are stories, similar to stage plays. They don’t really use the medium (or even understand it). Television, despite the flicker tube, is an auditory medium. You listen more than you watch. It’s the nature of the relationship we have with the box.
Film is different.
When you go to a film, it is important to sit in the right spot. Well, it matters if it is the right kind of film. You need to sit in the middle of the aisle, close enough so that your peripheral vision touches the edges of the screen. You watch it as a horse with blinders, blind to the fact that you’re in a theater and that there is something else around you. If you sit too close you miss the edges. If you sit too far away, you miss the experience.
Allow the film to encompass you.
Most films go from A to B to C (ho hum, boring). They tell a story about something or someone. They stay in reality, even in fantasy or sci fi genres; meaning, that the images and plot are direct. There isn’t more to it. A film such as Silkwood, while a brutal story about people who experienced great drama, isn’t an art film. It isn’t trying to be. It’s just telling a story. Sometimes, as with that film, the filmmaker will do a few things that make it better than most, but it is still just a story film.
That isn’t what Elizabethtown was. It wasn’t a story film. The obvious story was irrelevant to the underlying story, and what it was trying to do.
I think that is why it would fall flat for many. They missed that it wasn’t trying to do what other films do. Its story was an allegory. All the images and characters were allegorical. It required a suspension of reality… a requirement to look deeper at what it was trying to do.
Before I get into the allegory of this film, I want to touch on another important point about art films: Great filmmakers often pay homage to other great films in their work. They design shots that are copies of other great works. They create scenes and characters in deference to other great ones. And if you don’t know film history, if you don’t know all the great films, then you won’t recognize those moments when they occur.
"Elizabethtown" was full of them.
The other thing that great art films do is revisit a common theme. As with all art forms, there are classic subjects that the great artists revisit—presenting to the world their interpretation of that theme. Painters, for example, have tackled the ascension, Bathsheba, the Virgin Mary, or Christ’s crucifixion. But other themes, not in the top 40s, have also been repeated again and again. Shakespeare brought new life to the Greek Plays. And sculptors have tried desperately to come close to the magnificence of the perfect man, as Michelangelo did with his David.
Michelangelo didn’t get it right only technically. When we look at his David we see more than flesh, bones, or muscle structure. We see the essence of the perfect man, a little bit narcissistic, but powerful, and beautiful. There is a sexual energy to the stone, and there is movement. We not only see the physical characteristics of David, we see into David’s soul.
I doubt that any other artist will be able to do it again, or even come close to that perfection. So new artists have to do it differently, which is why surrealism and impressionism came about. If you can’t get to the essence through realism, try surrealism.
And that was "Elizabethtown". A surrealistic look at who we are.
When Beethoven wrote more and more symphonies, other composers began committing suicide. Others gave up composing.
Those composers realized that Beethoven had done it. The it that artists are always trying to achieve… the rare offering of absolute perfection. No one can describe what that perfection is ahead of time, but when you see it or hear it, you know it. Only when someone has achieved it do you realize what it is, and in seeing it, you know it to be it. When you see it or hear it there is a sense of “ahhhh, yes, that is it.” And you are forever changed by the experience.
That is what the true artist attempts to do. To have that “ahh” achievement. When someone else accomplishes it so perfectly it is pointless to continue that same pursuit. It has been done. It is time to move on to some other subject because that, whatever that is, has been done, or you have to try it a different way--with a new and different approach. Da Vinci captured the essence of woman in the Mona Lisa. It has been done. Winged Victory captures the essence of spirit. That has been done. Venus de Milo captures the essence of femininity. That has been done.
Just as philosophers are in a constant search for the ultimate truth, the thought or ideal that will explain all and unfold the mysteries of the universe as if you’ve found the combination to the lock, artists are after that same truth, but in the form of art. It isn’t common in the ordinary sense. So when we refer to things as common themes, we don’t mean it in the sense of the great masses, or in the sense of ordinary. Common denotes frequent. There are frequent themes that artists attempt to interpret, to give their spin and take on it, and to understand them.
We revisit these themes to understand the way that others have approached them, just as a philosopher studies the works of other philosophies. They are looking for the hole, the secret, or where the philosopher got it wrong. Always, we are looking for an explanation. We read, look, or listen and copy so that we might understand them, and in doing so, understand ourselves. These are intangible, complicated things, or we would have long ago unlocked their secrets and come to understand them.
Artists copy.
That is the first thing you have to know about art. It is all about copying. Copying what came before. There is an important lesson in that, far beyond the study of art from the perspective of light, shade, and perspective. We don’t want to start over. We want to start from a higher plain, from the foundation left behind for us. It is the same reason we study our history, so we know where we have been, so we don’t have to do it all again, but might go beyond where we’ve been, to something greater and closer to perfect. But you can’t get there if you start from scratch. You have to begin where it stopped and you have to copy that last one so you know where you are. You have to start where we left off.
So where did we leave off? Something about allegories…
The opening scene of "Elizabethtown" was a flight, a journey. The first clue of the allegory/subject matter of the film was in those opening shots. We saw the reflection, but from where we’d come from, not where we were going. Ah! A film about reflection… of looking back. Orpheus!
What was the moral of the Orpheus story? Looking back is dangerous. You can’t go back. It will turn you to stone. You can’t live in the past. You can only look to the future. Future is life. The past is death. Being stuck in the past is the end of life, ie, turning to stone. You must go on.
It was a film of journeys. Dozens of them. Some people were able to make the trips, others were unable to leave or move at all. Some were stuck where they were, in a kind of purgatory. Some had escaped. Some never would.
The Orlando Bloom character ascended and then descended into Hell (the symbolism of the corporate world in which he’d spent the last 8 years of his life). Alec Baldwin was the symbol of the devil (fitting, being Alec Baldwin). He was consummate evil. He had wooed the man from his father, and then when he was through with him, he cast him out. And the man was empty. He was discouraged. All that he had done and sacrificed was for naught.
The story twisted to allow us to go back, but not to the lead character’s past, to his father’s past. It was a journey of discovering who he was, and his roots. But nothing about those scenes were to be taken literally. They were all about being in the belly of his family, and that was the symbolism of "Elizabethtown". There was something wholesome about the place—like a great big glass of cold milk and cookies. There was warmth in the people, although they were surreal and peculiar. But even with that, all of the characters (however bizarre and goofy) were the essence of warmth, of caring, and of family.
The half-smirk of the Bloom character told all of that, of how he was living the moment, but in a constant state of disguised laughter at the simplicity of the place and the lunacy of the people, complexity in simplicity. Their rawness of emotion and goofiness kept him surprised and off guard. They come up with silly solutions for ridiculous problems, all the while Bloom was trying to cope, but only going through the motions. It is the way that someone floats through life when they are in a state of great shock. Everything becomes surreal and you’re moving around in the world as if walking through a bowl of Jello.
He had an appointment with death...the death he had decided to welcome after his fall from grace.
But she was there. His spirit guide. His savior. His flight attendant. He was going to be alone in this journey; although she would guide him and direct him, and there would be crowds around him… it was a journey he had to take on his own.
Then she gave him a map. A map and a plan that would allow him to choose a path, but before he could choose a path of his own, he had to follow the one she had given him. He might not have made the discoveries she laid out for him to find. It might not have worked. But he went with it. He followed it exactly, doing what she had instructed him to do.
The ascension.
The film turns to a series of montages at this point and becomes entirely something else. Quick cuts, short scenes, each one a jewel. We had learned just enough about the character and his sins and passions to know who he was, and how he came to be where he was. And he knew who he was. Now it was time to figure out what he could be, what was possible, and if he would keep his appointment with death or choose another road.
The quest begins. The search for truth, for forgiveness...a journey of discovery and redemption.
In all the other significant trips he took in the film, his method of travel was flight (in an airplane or a helicopter). This time he was grounded. His body was grounded to the earth, but it was time for his soul, his essence to take flight… setting aside one’s worldly goods…
He ascended into the glory of America. He left his father’s bosom and past and went on a journey in search of himself, in the raw beauty and liberty of America. He floated, soared, and relished in the bounty and vastness of it, in the strangeness and peculiarity of it. He stopped to smell the roses. He stopped to dance. He drove to cry. He carried on to remember, but to let go. He saw beauty. He saw ugliness. He heard America talking, because (for the first time) he listened with an open heart and a rawness of spirit. He had nothing to lose. He rose from the ashes of failure and despair, of guilt and longing—of the impostors of fortune. He was in search of something and he found his father’s grace and soul, and in doing so, found out who he was. He made peace with the past and released it—was released from the Hell he had made for himself. He found the present, and had nothing but the future to revel in. In getting there, there was room in his heart for her.
And he was redeemed, restored, and made whole again. This Orpheus didn’t look back and was able to steal Eurydice back to earth. This Romeo awoke before Juliet took her life.
It is a theme as old as art itself. The ultimate theme, you might say. A fable told since man first expressed thought, told in a thousand parables—a journey of seeking one’s fortune, an awakening of spirit, and of discovering what fortune means.
Magic!
Two road diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
"I started to answer the question in comments about why I thought "Elizabethtown" was a great film. I highlighted the text and started over again and again. What film can do, what it is supposed to do, when all the planets are aligned, when all the crafts are working in concert, is to move you. The vast majority of films made are stories, similar to stage plays. They don’t really use the medium (or even understand it). Television, despite the flicker tube, is an auditory medium. You listen more than you watch. It’s the nature of the relationship we have with the box.
Film is different.
When you go to a film, it is important to sit in the right spot. Well, it matters if it is the right kind of film. You need to sit in the middle of the aisle, close enough so that your peripheral vision touches the edges of the screen. You watch it as a horse with blinders, blind to the fact that you’re in a theater and that there is something else around you. If you sit too close you miss the edges. If you sit too far away, you miss the experience.
Allow the film to encompass you.
Most films go from A to B to C (ho hum, boring). They tell a story about something or someone. They stay in reality, even in fantasy or sci fi genres; meaning, that the images and plot are direct. There isn’t more to it. A film such as Silkwood, while a brutal story about people who experienced great drama, isn’t an art film. It isn’t trying to be. It’s just telling a story. Sometimes, as with that film, the filmmaker will do a few things that make it better than most, but it is still just a story film.
That isn’t what Elizabethtown was. It wasn’t a story film. The obvious story was irrelevant to the underlying story, and what it was trying to do.
I think that is why it would fall flat for many. They missed that it wasn’t trying to do what other films do. Its story was an allegory. All the images and characters were allegorical. It required a suspension of reality… a requirement to look deeper at what it was trying to do.
Before I get into the allegory of this film, I want to touch on another important point about art films: Great filmmakers often pay homage to other great films in their work. They design shots that are copies of other great works. They create scenes and characters in deference to other great ones. And if you don’t know film history, if you don’t know all the great films, then you won’t recognize those moments when they occur.
"Elizabethtown" was full of them.
The other thing that great art films do is revisit a common theme. As with all art forms, there are classic subjects that the great artists revisit—presenting to the world their interpretation of that theme. Painters, for example, have tackled the ascension, Bathsheba, the Virgin Mary, or Christ’s crucifixion. But other themes, not in the top 40s, have also been repeated again and again. Shakespeare brought new life to the Greek Plays. And sculptors have tried desperately to come close to the magnificence of the perfect man, as Michelangelo did with his David.
Michelangelo didn’t get it right only technically. When we look at his David we see more than flesh, bones, or muscle structure. We see the essence of the perfect man, a little bit narcissistic, but powerful, and beautiful. There is a sexual energy to the stone, and there is movement. We not only see the physical characteristics of David, we see into David’s soul.
I doubt that any other artist will be able to do it again, or even come close to that perfection. So new artists have to do it differently, which is why surrealism and impressionism came about. If you can’t get to the essence through realism, try surrealism.
And that was "Elizabethtown". A surrealistic look at who we are.
When Beethoven wrote more and more symphonies, other composers began committing suicide. Others gave up composing.
Those composers realized that Beethoven had done it. The it that artists are always trying to achieve… the rare offering of absolute perfection. No one can describe what that perfection is ahead of time, but when you see it or hear it, you know it. Only when someone has achieved it do you realize what it is, and in seeing it, you know it to be it. When you see it or hear it there is a sense of “ahhhh, yes, that is it.” And you are forever changed by the experience.
That is what the true artist attempts to do. To have that “ahh” achievement. When someone else accomplishes it so perfectly it is pointless to continue that same pursuit. It has been done. It is time to move on to some other subject because that, whatever that is, has been done, or you have to try it a different way--with a new and different approach. Da Vinci captured the essence of woman in the Mona Lisa. It has been done. Winged Victory captures the essence of spirit. That has been done. Venus de Milo captures the essence of femininity. That has been done.
Just as philosophers are in a constant search for the ultimate truth, the thought or ideal that will explain all and unfold the mysteries of the universe as if you’ve found the combination to the lock, artists are after that same truth, but in the form of art. It isn’t common in the ordinary sense. So when we refer to things as common themes, we don’t mean it in the sense of the great masses, or in the sense of ordinary. Common denotes frequent. There are frequent themes that artists attempt to interpret, to give their spin and take on it, and to understand them.
We revisit these themes to understand the way that others have approached them, just as a philosopher studies the works of other philosophies. They are looking for the hole, the secret, or where the philosopher got it wrong. Always, we are looking for an explanation. We read, look, or listen and copy so that we might understand them, and in doing so, understand ourselves. These are intangible, complicated things, or we would have long ago unlocked their secrets and come to understand them.
Artists copy.
That is the first thing you have to know about art. It is all about copying. Copying what came before. There is an important lesson in that, far beyond the study of art from the perspective of light, shade, and perspective. We don’t want to start over. We want to start from a higher plain, from the foundation left behind for us. It is the same reason we study our history, so we know where we have been, so we don’t have to do it all again, but might go beyond where we’ve been, to something greater and closer to perfect. But you can’t get there if you start from scratch. You have to begin where it stopped and you have to copy that last one so you know where you are. You have to start where we left off.
So where did we leave off? Something about allegories…
The opening scene of "Elizabethtown" was a flight, a journey. The first clue of the allegory/subject matter of the film was in those opening shots. We saw the reflection, but from where we’d come from, not where we were going. Ah! A film about reflection… of looking back. Orpheus!
What was the moral of the Orpheus story? Looking back is dangerous. You can’t go back. It will turn you to stone. You can’t live in the past. You can only look to the future. Future is life. The past is death. Being stuck in the past is the end of life, ie, turning to stone. You must go on.
It was a film of journeys. Dozens of them. Some people were able to make the trips, others were unable to leave or move at all. Some were stuck where they were, in a kind of purgatory. Some had escaped. Some never would.
The Orlando Bloom character ascended and then descended into Hell (the symbolism of the corporate world in which he’d spent the last 8 years of his life). Alec Baldwin was the symbol of the devil (fitting, being Alec Baldwin). He was consummate evil. He had wooed the man from his father, and then when he was through with him, he cast him out. And the man was empty. He was discouraged. All that he had done and sacrificed was for naught.
The story twisted to allow us to go back, but not to the lead character’s past, to his father’s past. It was a journey of discovering who he was, and his roots. But nothing about those scenes were to be taken literally. They were all about being in the belly of his family, and that was the symbolism of "Elizabethtown". There was something wholesome about the place—like a great big glass of cold milk and cookies. There was warmth in the people, although they were surreal and peculiar. But even with that, all of the characters (however bizarre and goofy) were the essence of warmth, of caring, and of family.
The half-smirk of the Bloom character told all of that, of how he was living the moment, but in a constant state of disguised laughter at the simplicity of the place and the lunacy of the people, complexity in simplicity. Their rawness of emotion and goofiness kept him surprised and off guard. They come up with silly solutions for ridiculous problems, all the while Bloom was trying to cope, but only going through the motions. It is the way that someone floats through life when they are in a state of great shock. Everything becomes surreal and you’re moving around in the world as if walking through a bowl of Jello.
He had an appointment with death...the death he had decided to welcome after his fall from grace.
But she was there. His spirit guide. His savior. His flight attendant. He was going to be alone in this journey; although she would guide him and direct him, and there would be crowds around him… it was a journey he had to take on his own.
Then she gave him a map. A map and a plan that would allow him to choose a path, but before he could choose a path of his own, he had to follow the one she had given him. He might not have made the discoveries she laid out for him to find. It might not have worked. But he went with it. He followed it exactly, doing what she had instructed him to do.
The ascension.
The film turns to a series of montages at this point and becomes entirely something else. Quick cuts, short scenes, each one a jewel. We had learned just enough about the character and his sins and passions to know who he was, and how he came to be where he was. And he knew who he was. Now it was time to figure out what he could be, what was possible, and if he would keep his appointment with death or choose another road.
The quest begins. The search for truth, for forgiveness...a journey of discovery and redemption.
In all the other significant trips he took in the film, his method of travel was flight (in an airplane or a helicopter). This time he was grounded. His body was grounded to the earth, but it was time for his soul, his essence to take flight… setting aside one’s worldly goods…
He ascended into the glory of America. He left his father’s bosom and past and went on a journey in search of himself, in the raw beauty and liberty of America. He floated, soared, and relished in the bounty and vastness of it, in the strangeness and peculiarity of it. He stopped to smell the roses. He stopped to dance. He drove to cry. He carried on to remember, but to let go. He saw beauty. He saw ugliness. He heard America talking, because (for the first time) he listened with an open heart and a rawness of spirit. He had nothing to lose. He rose from the ashes of failure and despair, of guilt and longing—of the impostors of fortune. He was in search of something and he found his father’s grace and soul, and in doing so, found out who he was. He made peace with the past and released it—was released from the Hell he had made for himself. He found the present, and had nothing but the future to revel in. In getting there, there was room in his heart for her.
And he was redeemed, restored, and made whole again. This Orpheus didn’t look back and was able to steal Eurydice back to earth. This Romeo awoke before Juliet took her life.
It is a theme as old as art itself. The ultimate theme, you might say. A fable told since man first expressed thought, told in a thousand parables—a journey of seeking one’s fortune, an awakening of spirit, and of discovering what fortune means.
Magic!
Two road diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Why Sports and Sportsmanship Matters
I've been an athlete myself as long as I can remember, and I played competitive sports all the way through my junior year of undergraduate school. I learned quite a few lessons that have served me well throughout my life on things like teamwork, playing by the rules, integrity, and so on. Kim DuToit lays it out very well in this post, which I've excerpted below. I am hopeful that if my future children do get into sports that they take away as many good things from it as I did, and hopefully even more.
"Why was sport so important?
The answer is quite simple: to engender the concept of sportsmanship, and manners. While all competitions were fierce, they were always played in a spirit of the utmost cordiality—and if another school’s team did not display good sportsmanship and manners, they were not included in the following year’s fixtures.
We were taught, at all levels, that to win by cheating was not winning at all—and if someone was discovered to have won by cheating, at anything, the consequences were dire: banning from the sport, or (in extreme cases), expulsion from the school altogether. ...
Here was the essence of what we were taught: every game has its rules, and one plays within them. But if there’s an ambiguity, one should always err on the side of the honorable decision. Had I not been given out, and stayed in, I might have scored enough runs to have given our team victory. But at what price? Was it worth compromising one’s integrity for the sake of a meaningless game?
The lesson stuck with me, and has always been one of my steadfast, guiding principles. Outside sport, of course, this is called conscience, and I am appalled by the number of people who either ignore that small voice, or who never had one to begin with. The former are immoral, the latter amoral, and I try to have as little to do with either group as I possibly can. ...
When one plays by those rules of fairness and sportsmanship, of course, the expressions “technically legal”, “not provable” and the like are completely irrelevant. Where some people make the mistake, I think, is that they believe that somehow the principles of fair play and sportsmanship only apply to sport. They don’t. ...
I’ve tried to play the Game of Life with the utmost degree of sportsmanship, and where I’ve failed, not only have I known it, but my conscience is going to trouble me for the rest of my days because of it."
"Why was sport so important?
The answer is quite simple: to engender the concept of sportsmanship, and manners. While all competitions were fierce, they were always played in a spirit of the utmost cordiality—and if another school’s team did not display good sportsmanship and manners, they were not included in the following year’s fixtures.
We were taught, at all levels, that to win by cheating was not winning at all—and if someone was discovered to have won by cheating, at anything, the consequences were dire: banning from the sport, or (in extreme cases), expulsion from the school altogether. ...
Here was the essence of what we were taught: every game has its rules, and one plays within them. But if there’s an ambiguity, one should always err on the side of the honorable decision. Had I not been given out, and stayed in, I might have scored enough runs to have given our team victory. But at what price? Was it worth compromising one’s integrity for the sake of a meaningless game?
The lesson stuck with me, and has always been one of my steadfast, guiding principles. Outside sport, of course, this is called conscience, and I am appalled by the number of people who either ignore that small voice, or who never had one to begin with. The former are immoral, the latter amoral, and I try to have as little to do with either group as I possibly can. ...
When one plays by those rules of fairness and sportsmanship, of course, the expressions “technically legal”, “not provable” and the like are completely irrelevant. Where some people make the mistake, I think, is that they believe that somehow the principles of fair play and sportsmanship only apply to sport. They don’t. ...
I’ve tried to play the Game of Life with the utmost degree of sportsmanship, and where I’ve failed, not only have I known it, but my conscience is going to trouble me for the rest of my days because of it."
Friday, May 11, 2007
God Save the Whistleblowers and the United States of America
Thank God for the brave citizen who called in the report that led to the arrest of six Muslims (three of whom were here illegally by the way) that were planning to attack Fort Dix and, to quote one of the now defendants, "kill as many soldiers as possible". It is a sad sign of how P.C. and hypersensitive our country has become that "John Doe" legislation, such as that described here by columnist Frank Gaffney. This legislation, which has already been passed as an amendment to a pending bill, is sponsored by about 2/3 of Congress at present.
It's important to get this passed so that people like the hero in New Jersey who reported the Fort Dix plot will do so without fear of being sued in civil court for "discrimination" and God knows what else. Think it can't happen? Just ask the passengers who reported the six "imams" in a Minnesota airport for similarly suspicious behavior...in exchange for perhaps preventing a terror attack, they are now defendants in a federal lawsuit filed by the imams. The imams can stick their frivolous, publicity driven lawsuit where the sun don't shine, and the same goes for CAIR or any other terrorist-enabling Muslim front group in the U.S. that tries similar shenanigans with the man who reported the would-be Fort Dix attackers to the authorities. I agree with Mr. Gaffney and a chorus of others that this is legislation that should be a priority, and it should be passed as soon as possible.
"On the Amtrak train to New York a few minutes ago, the conductor announced, “If you see anything suspicious, please report it to the authorities immediately.” If Islamist-front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its friends in Congress have their way, however, this sensible, prudential announcement will have to be amended: “Be advised: If you do make such a report, you may be sued.”
Could it really come to this? It could, if the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives gets away with an effort to deep-six legislation approved last month with the support of 109 of their caucus’ members.
According to a Republican memo circulated before the vote, that legislation is designed to ensure that “any person that voluntarily reports suspicious activity -- anything that could be a threat to transportation security” will be granted immunity from civil liability for the disclosure.” It “authorizes courts to award attorneys' fees to defendants with immunity” and would apply retroactively to activities that took place on or after November 20, 2006.
That date is significant, of course, since it was the day when six Arizona-based Muslim clerics were removed in Minneapolis from an aircraft operated by US Air. The deplaning occurred after fellow passengers did what my conductor urged those on his train to do: They reported suspicious behavior.
The six Islamist clerics – now universally known as the Flying Imams – reportedly engaged in behavior that seemed designed to trigger alarms. Such behavior is said to have included: praying ostentatiously before boarding the plane, changing seats to sit in pairs in unassigned seats (by some accounts in a pattern reminiscent of some terrorists’ modus operandi), making loud statements in Arabic that appear to have included derogatory comments about America and requesting unneeded seat-belt-extenders – which can, in a pinch, be used as weapons.
Following understandable expressions of concern by as-yet-unidentified fellow passengers, the crew consulted with airline and local and federal police. The decision was taken to remove the imams. In a lawsuit filed in March by CAIR on behalf of the imams, these “well-respected, religious leaders…felt degraded, humiliated and dejected as they were led before airport patrons and passengers who looked at them as if they were criminals.” In addition to suing US Air, CAIR is going after unspecified “John Does” – namely, yet-to-be-served passengers, flight attendants and airport personnel the Islamist organization contends acted “with an intent to discriminate.”
Some perceive in the imams’ behavior – and CAIR’s effort to capitalize on the response it fortunately and predictably precipitated – an intention to use our civil liberties to diminish America’s preparedness and capacity for dealing with domestic threats. At the very least, this caper plays into the hands of CAIR as it promotes another piece of legislation, the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) of 2005 whose original co-sponsors were two prominent leftists in Congress, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).
Now, “racial profiling” – like the “intent to discriminate” – are in many cases highly subjective calls. And claims of such wrongdoing are especially suspect coming from the likes of CAIR. After all, as the invaluable Center for Vigilant Freedom makes clear, this organization (which was established by a Hamas front group known as the Islamic Association for Palestine) is feverishly seeking to demonstrate that Muslims in America are being victimized.
In fact, in a speech to the Muslim ADAMS Center on April 27, 2007 and transcribed by Vigilant Freedom (http://www.vigilantfreedom.org/910blog/2007/04/30/audio-from-cairs-meeting-on-6-imams-at-adams-center/), CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, declared: “There were 196 cases reported by the Justice Department for Muslims in civil rights cases. There were over 1008 cases reported by the Jewish faith. We need to do a much better job not only in recognizing our civil rights but also in reporting it to the government. [It] is very critical and very important….We really feel our community is more targeted. 54% – this is one of CAIR’s surveys – 54% of all Muslims surveyed said they had been subject to discrimination. 54%, which if you put numbers down, we’re talking about tens of thousands of cases, not dozens, as is reported in the Justice Department’s annual report.”
In other words, it serves CAIR’s purposes to portray Muslims as victims. Imams who behave suspiciously are victims. And other Muslims who fail to report their victimhood are undermining the efforts CAIR and its ilk are making to secure not just equal treatment under the law but special rights (e.g., designated prayer rooms, cleansing facilities, Muslim-only hours for school gyms, etc.) In the process, they are inuring this democracy to the encroachment of a religious code known as shari’a law and the parallel society the Islamists seek to establish here, as elsewhere, enroute to the creation of Islamic states.
It is against this backdrop that Congress must enact legislation to protect “John Does” and, thereby, to protect us all. It is unacceptable that the Democratic leadership is seeking to prevent such an outcome through parliamentary sleight-of-hand – by keeping the public in the dark about the make-up and timing of the conference committee that will hammer out differences between the House-passed legislation, which includes such protection, and the Senate bill that does not.
Every effort should be made to encourage our countrymen to report suspicious activities – which may prove to be the difference between life and death for large numbers of us. And every effort at odds with that duty must be exposed to the harshest scrutiny and most vigorous opposition."
It's important to get this passed so that people like the hero in New Jersey who reported the Fort Dix plot will do so without fear of being sued in civil court for "discrimination" and God knows what else. Think it can't happen? Just ask the passengers who reported the six "imams" in a Minnesota airport for similarly suspicious behavior...in exchange for perhaps preventing a terror attack, they are now defendants in a federal lawsuit filed by the imams. The imams can stick their frivolous, publicity driven lawsuit where the sun don't shine, and the same goes for CAIR or any other terrorist-enabling Muslim front group in the U.S. that tries similar shenanigans with the man who reported the would-be Fort Dix attackers to the authorities. I agree with Mr. Gaffney and a chorus of others that this is legislation that should be a priority, and it should be passed as soon as possible.
"On the Amtrak train to New York a few minutes ago, the conductor announced, “If you see anything suspicious, please report it to the authorities immediately.” If Islamist-front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its friends in Congress have their way, however, this sensible, prudential announcement will have to be amended: “Be advised: If you do make such a report, you may be sued.”
Could it really come to this? It could, if the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives gets away with an effort to deep-six legislation approved last month with the support of 109 of their caucus’ members.
According to a Republican memo circulated before the vote, that legislation is designed to ensure that “any person that voluntarily reports suspicious activity -- anything that could be a threat to transportation security” will be granted immunity from civil liability for the disclosure.” It “authorizes courts to award attorneys' fees to defendants with immunity” and would apply retroactively to activities that took place on or after November 20, 2006.
That date is significant, of course, since it was the day when six Arizona-based Muslim clerics were removed in Minneapolis from an aircraft operated by US Air. The deplaning occurred after fellow passengers did what my conductor urged those on his train to do: They reported suspicious behavior.
The six Islamist clerics – now universally known as the Flying Imams – reportedly engaged in behavior that seemed designed to trigger alarms. Such behavior is said to have included: praying ostentatiously before boarding the plane, changing seats to sit in pairs in unassigned seats (by some accounts in a pattern reminiscent of some terrorists’ modus operandi), making loud statements in Arabic that appear to have included derogatory comments about America and requesting unneeded seat-belt-extenders – which can, in a pinch, be used as weapons.
Following understandable expressions of concern by as-yet-unidentified fellow passengers, the crew consulted with airline and local and federal police. The decision was taken to remove the imams. In a lawsuit filed in March by CAIR on behalf of the imams, these “well-respected, religious leaders…felt degraded, humiliated and dejected as they were led before airport patrons and passengers who looked at them as if they were criminals.” In addition to suing US Air, CAIR is going after unspecified “John Does” – namely, yet-to-be-served passengers, flight attendants and airport personnel the Islamist organization contends acted “with an intent to discriminate.”
Some perceive in the imams’ behavior – and CAIR’s effort to capitalize on the response it fortunately and predictably precipitated – an intention to use our civil liberties to diminish America’s preparedness and capacity for dealing with domestic threats. At the very least, this caper plays into the hands of CAIR as it promotes another piece of legislation, the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) of 2005 whose original co-sponsors were two prominent leftists in Congress, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).
Now, “racial profiling” – like the “intent to discriminate” – are in many cases highly subjective calls. And claims of such wrongdoing are especially suspect coming from the likes of CAIR. After all, as the invaluable Center for Vigilant Freedom makes clear, this organization (which was established by a Hamas front group known as the Islamic Association for Palestine) is feverishly seeking to demonstrate that Muslims in America are being victimized.
In fact, in a speech to the Muslim ADAMS Center on April 27, 2007 and transcribed by Vigilant Freedom (http://www.vigilantfreedom.org/910blog/2007/04/30/audio-from-cairs-meeting-on-6-imams-at-adams-center/), CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, declared: “There were 196 cases reported by the Justice Department for Muslims in civil rights cases. There were over 1008 cases reported by the Jewish faith. We need to do a much better job not only in recognizing our civil rights but also in reporting it to the government. [It] is very critical and very important….We really feel our community is more targeted. 54% – this is one of CAIR’s surveys – 54% of all Muslims surveyed said they had been subject to discrimination. 54%, which if you put numbers down, we’re talking about tens of thousands of cases, not dozens, as is reported in the Justice Department’s annual report.”
In other words, it serves CAIR’s purposes to portray Muslims as victims. Imams who behave suspiciously are victims. And other Muslims who fail to report their victimhood are undermining the efforts CAIR and its ilk are making to secure not just equal treatment under the law but special rights (e.g., designated prayer rooms, cleansing facilities, Muslim-only hours for school gyms, etc.) In the process, they are inuring this democracy to the encroachment of a religious code known as shari’a law and the parallel society the Islamists seek to establish here, as elsewhere, enroute to the creation of Islamic states.
It is against this backdrop that Congress must enact legislation to protect “John Does” and, thereby, to protect us all. It is unacceptable that the Democratic leadership is seeking to prevent such an outcome through parliamentary sleight-of-hand – by keeping the public in the dark about the make-up and timing of the conference committee that will hammer out differences between the House-passed legislation, which includes such protection, and the Senate bill that does not.
Every effort should be made to encourage our countrymen to report suspicious activities – which may prove to be the difference between life and death for large numbers of us. And every effort at odds with that duty must be exposed to the harshest scrutiny and most vigorous opposition."
Thursday, May 10, 2007
A Parliament of Clocks
This story, written by Chicago Boyz (hat tip: Instapundit and Kim DuToit), is as good an illustration of the dangers of socialism, especially as it relates to the tyranny of the majority if left unchecked. People rail on and on about the evil Re-thuglican GOP hold on pwer of the last 12 years, but the reality is that, other than tax cuts, two outstanding Supreme Court justices being confirmed, and two wars that needed to be fought, not nearly enough was accomplished in that time.
And now that the Dem Cong are back in power, they are trying desperately to ensure eternal one party super-majority rule through massive illegal alien amnesty and reinstating the "fairness doctrine" (among other things). The difference between the Dems and the GOP is the same as the difference between Florida and Tennessee's college football teams...both of the former are ruthless in competition, astute in sensing weakness, and has the fortitude to step on the neck of their enemies and crush them when they are down, while neither of the latter possess any of those things. It's like the old saying goes, "The meek may inherit the earth, but it won't be long before the strong take it away from them." God help us all if the Dem Cong succeed, just ask the undesirables in prior socialist states what happens when the state's hold on power becomes virtually unbreakable...oh wait, you can't because they're dead, over 100 million and counting. Read the whole thing, and afford the scary prospect of an eternal Dem Cong future its proper respect...do everything within your power to stomp the life out of it.
"I think an old parable explains why the professional subcultures of articulate intellectuals, such as academics in the humanities, artists and journalists, all experience such enormous pressures to conform to the same viewpoint.
In the parable, a king wants to buy some clocks and travels to the Bavarian village were the ten best clockmakers in the world keep their shops all along one street.
As he enters the street all the clocks in all the shops strike 1 o’clock in one massive group chime. The king marvels at the great accuracy of the clockmakers of the village, but a few moments later he hears another group chime. After investigating he finds that all the clocks in 9 of the 10 shops show the same time but that all the clocks in the 10th shop show a different time by several minutes. Puzzled, the king calls all the clockmakers together and ask why the clocks in the 10th shop do not chime at the same time as all the clocks in all the other shops.
The owner of the odd shop out immediately steps forward and says that due to his unusual skill and innovation his clocks keep more accurate time than the clocks of the other shops. The other shop owners protest loudly. The king is at a loss. The town lacks a master town clock or sundial, so he has no means of determining which clocks keep the best time. Confused, he decides not to buy any clocks and leaves town. Angered, the owners of the 9 agreeing shops burn down the shop of the odd man out to prevent such confusion from arising again. Now when someone comes to town, all the clocks will chime at the same instant. Customers will not become confused and everyone will sell more clocks.
The clockmakers destroy the nonconforming clockmaker among them because they know that as a practical matter we judge the accuracy of clocks by consensus. Absolute time does not exist. Essentially, a parliament of clocks votes on the correct time. (Even scientifically, this is true.) By fiat, we say that the clocks that deviate from the consensus time are inaccurate, but logically that need not be so. Different technologies or different levels of care in setting, winding or servicing the clocks could lead to the minority clocks being more accurate. However, if all the clocks agree, then no lay person will have grounds for suspecting that the majority clocks don’t keep accurate time.
As a practical matter, articulate intellectuals face the same problem. They deal in areas in which no means exist for easily or quickly falsifying and testing their ideas. Like the king with the clocks, lay people looking at their work from the outside cannot evaluate the accuracy of their work. No means exist to make an objective measurement that would determine the accuracy of a particular literary criticism. Historians agree that certain events occurred at certain places and times and then argue furiously over the events’ import and consequences. Journalists do the same thing. Various theories in many academic fields knock around for decades before simply fading away, apparently because people grow bored with them.
In order to maintain their power and position within society, articulate intellectuals must convince the larger population that they really do have a superior understanding of the issues they study. The do so using a parliament of clocks. By enforcing rigorous conformist standards on their members, they seek to create the illusion of accuracy by making it appear that all people knowledgeable in a particular field all reach the same conclusion. If all the supposed experts in a particular field all tell the same story the lay people are much less likely to guess that none of the experts know what they are talking about.
You can see this effect quite clearly in the herd mentality of journalists. Researchers have shown that journalist rapidly converge upon the same perspective on even very complex stories. Why? Well, how does an ordinary consumer of news media judge whether a particular news story is accurate? Simple, they check with another news source. What if the different sources disagree? What grounds does the consumer have for determining which source is correct? The consumer might conclude that none of the sources are making an accurate report and they may stop consuming news media. The media prevents this from happening by converging on the same story. If every source that the consumer can reasonably check tells the same story, then the consumer won’t have grounds for doubting any of the sources. (Notice that news outlets brag that they get stories before the competition, not that they provide superior information to the competition.) Back in the ’70s when a tiny handful of media outlets dominated, trust in the media ran very high. Only with the coming of cable and the Internet did trust in the media begin to seriously erode when consumers began to see that not all news sources held the same perspective. Like the king, they began to wonder just which shops really sold the accurate clocks.
The desperate attempt to substitute consensus for accuracy shows up in the articulate intellectuals’ perspective on everything from artistic critique to climatology. When people really cannot prove what they believe, they must resort to peer pressure to keep people from questioning them. Yet history, both recent and ancient, shows that elite consensus fails far more often than it succeeds. Without some means of objective falsification such as experimentation, functional technology, military victory or business success, the consensus of any group merely serves the social needs of the group and not the decision making needs of the broader society.
Contemporary leftism is the politics of the articulate intellectual and it is clear that leftists care more about creating the appearance of their own infallibility than in telling the time."
And now that the Dem Cong are back in power, they are trying desperately to ensure eternal one party super-majority rule through massive illegal alien amnesty and reinstating the "fairness doctrine" (among other things). The difference between the Dems and the GOP is the same as the difference between Florida and Tennessee's college football teams...both of the former are ruthless in competition, astute in sensing weakness, and has the fortitude to step on the neck of their enemies and crush them when they are down, while neither of the latter possess any of those things. It's like the old saying goes, "The meek may inherit the earth, but it won't be long before the strong take it away from them." God help us all if the Dem Cong succeed, just ask the undesirables in prior socialist states what happens when the state's hold on power becomes virtually unbreakable...oh wait, you can't because they're dead, over 100 million and counting. Read the whole thing, and afford the scary prospect of an eternal Dem Cong future its proper respect...do everything within your power to stomp the life out of it.
"I think an old parable explains why the professional subcultures of articulate intellectuals, such as academics in the humanities, artists and journalists, all experience such enormous pressures to conform to the same viewpoint.
In the parable, a king wants to buy some clocks and travels to the Bavarian village were the ten best clockmakers in the world keep their shops all along one street.
As he enters the street all the clocks in all the shops strike 1 o’clock in one massive group chime. The king marvels at the great accuracy of the clockmakers of the village, but a few moments later he hears another group chime. After investigating he finds that all the clocks in 9 of the 10 shops show the same time but that all the clocks in the 10th shop show a different time by several minutes. Puzzled, the king calls all the clockmakers together and ask why the clocks in the 10th shop do not chime at the same time as all the clocks in all the other shops.
The owner of the odd shop out immediately steps forward and says that due to his unusual skill and innovation his clocks keep more accurate time than the clocks of the other shops. The other shop owners protest loudly. The king is at a loss. The town lacks a master town clock or sundial, so he has no means of determining which clocks keep the best time. Confused, he decides not to buy any clocks and leaves town. Angered, the owners of the 9 agreeing shops burn down the shop of the odd man out to prevent such confusion from arising again. Now when someone comes to town, all the clocks will chime at the same instant. Customers will not become confused and everyone will sell more clocks.
The clockmakers destroy the nonconforming clockmaker among them because they know that as a practical matter we judge the accuracy of clocks by consensus. Absolute time does not exist. Essentially, a parliament of clocks votes on the correct time. (Even scientifically, this is true.) By fiat, we say that the clocks that deviate from the consensus time are inaccurate, but logically that need not be so. Different technologies or different levels of care in setting, winding or servicing the clocks could lead to the minority clocks being more accurate. However, if all the clocks agree, then no lay person will have grounds for suspecting that the majority clocks don’t keep accurate time.
As a practical matter, articulate intellectuals face the same problem. They deal in areas in which no means exist for easily or quickly falsifying and testing their ideas. Like the king with the clocks, lay people looking at their work from the outside cannot evaluate the accuracy of their work. No means exist to make an objective measurement that would determine the accuracy of a particular literary criticism. Historians agree that certain events occurred at certain places and times and then argue furiously over the events’ import and consequences. Journalists do the same thing. Various theories in many academic fields knock around for decades before simply fading away, apparently because people grow bored with them.
In order to maintain their power and position within society, articulate intellectuals must convince the larger population that they really do have a superior understanding of the issues they study. The do so using a parliament of clocks. By enforcing rigorous conformist standards on their members, they seek to create the illusion of accuracy by making it appear that all people knowledgeable in a particular field all reach the same conclusion. If all the supposed experts in a particular field all tell the same story the lay people are much less likely to guess that none of the experts know what they are talking about.
You can see this effect quite clearly in the herd mentality of journalists. Researchers have shown that journalist rapidly converge upon the same perspective on even very complex stories. Why? Well, how does an ordinary consumer of news media judge whether a particular news story is accurate? Simple, they check with another news source. What if the different sources disagree? What grounds does the consumer have for determining which source is correct? The consumer might conclude that none of the sources are making an accurate report and they may stop consuming news media. The media prevents this from happening by converging on the same story. If every source that the consumer can reasonably check tells the same story, then the consumer won’t have grounds for doubting any of the sources. (Notice that news outlets brag that they get stories before the competition, not that they provide superior information to the competition.) Back in the ’70s when a tiny handful of media outlets dominated, trust in the media ran very high. Only with the coming of cable and the Internet did trust in the media begin to seriously erode when consumers began to see that not all news sources held the same perspective. Like the king, they began to wonder just which shops really sold the accurate clocks.
The desperate attempt to substitute consensus for accuracy shows up in the articulate intellectuals’ perspective on everything from artistic critique to climatology. When people really cannot prove what they believe, they must resort to peer pressure to keep people from questioning them. Yet history, both recent and ancient, shows that elite consensus fails far more often than it succeeds. Without some means of objective falsification such as experimentation, functional technology, military victory or business success, the consensus of any group merely serves the social needs of the group and not the decision making needs of the broader society.
Contemporary leftism is the politics of the articulate intellectual and it is clear that leftists care more about creating the appearance of their own infallibility than in telling the time."
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Perspectives
Here is a story that demonstrates just how important perspectives can be:
"A former drug addict who had just beaten his addiction stood up and told his support group that he was clean and sober, and that he had beaten his addiction. Much to the group's surprise, he then told them that he was terribly sad and began to cry. One of the members asked the group facilitator how this could be, how someone who had come out of such a dark place in his life could be so sad. The facilitator looked back at the member and said, "Isn't it obvious?" His best friend just died."
I have been thinking a lot about this story over the last few days as it relates to my own life and to my walk with the Lord. Every single moment and event in life has the potential to be this way, for us to snatch sadness and defeat from the jaws of victory and happiness. It needn't be this way. Fortunately, each new moment, especially those spent leaning on and walking with the Lord, provides a new opportunity for fresh perspective. Perspective is a lot like a car radio...if you don't like what you are currently hearing, you need only to change the channel.
"A former drug addict who had just beaten his addiction stood up and told his support group that he was clean and sober, and that he had beaten his addiction. Much to the group's surprise, he then told them that he was terribly sad and began to cry. One of the members asked the group facilitator how this could be, how someone who had come out of such a dark place in his life could be so sad. The facilitator looked back at the member and said, "Isn't it obvious?" His best friend just died."
I have been thinking a lot about this story over the last few days as it relates to my own life and to my walk with the Lord. Every single moment and event in life has the potential to be this way, for us to snatch sadness and defeat from the jaws of victory and happiness. It needn't be this way. Fortunately, each new moment, especially those spent leaning on and walking with the Lord, provides a new opportunity for fresh perspective. Perspective is a lot like a car radio...if you don't like what you are currently hearing, you need only to change the channel.
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