THE OTHER SIDE SHOOTS TOO | 2006-06-20
To show you how OLD some of the blather The Greatest Generation puts out is, let me give you an example from a COMIC BOOK I read at about age ten.
Even before MAD Magazine came out, there were funny books that were intended to be comical.
In this one, the hero was asked by his girl, after another heroic episode, "But weren't you frightened?"
He repeated the line all of us by age ten had heard a thousand times from the World War Two Generation a hundred times before:
"My dear, every man who goes into combat is afraid. No matter how brave he may be, it is natural for him to face fear and to overcome it."
This was such an old line he then added a comic twist:
"So you ask me if I was afraid?"
"No, I wasn't a bit scared. I'm a Hero."
It was hilarious. Which shows you how sick a kid can be at the age of ten from the bragging he hears. We were so sick of the endlessly repeated line by then that it was a real kick to hear somebody say what the WWII Generation had hinted the five years before:
"No, I weren't skeert."
I was watching Geraldo Reviera on a live broadcast from Iraq. In the middle of his crawling around, an Iraqi fired a long-range bullet straight at him.
The look on his face was a particular kind of blank look.
The funny thing is that I had shot a BB gun a couple of weeks before to scare off a squirrel, and the look on ITS face was much the same: kind of a paralysis with blank eyes.
Decades before I had gone thousands of miles to pretend to be a combat mercenary for intelligence purposes.
In combat a lot of shooting takes place. Some people will hold the gun over their heads and empty the clip. Some lie side by side and direct their fire. There are specialists in directing the fire pattern.
Naturally, you would kind of imagine that someone who came thousands of miles to get shot at would not be surprised if someone shot at him. I have no doubt that this was the case with every member of The Greatest Generation. But for me, and apparently for Rivera, there is a difference between the general hail of fire and explosives and shrapnel and the very rare case when someone actually fires straight at YOU.
Rivera continued his broadcast. When it happened to me the first time, I probably had that same look on my face and then continued what I was doing.
Heroic, right?
As soon as the shooting ended, I went into a total case of the shakes. I couldn't control my limbs. I wonder if Rivera did the same thing once the broadcast was over?
I always see the funny side of things.
My reaction was not altogether logical. I had come many, many lines to participate in combat. But my whole body went into convulsions when somebody shot at ME.
Hey, Whitaker, what in the hell did you EXPECT? If you get into combat, somebody is going to shoot at you.
It kind of goes with the territory, you know?
So I wasn't skeert.