Remember this little boy? A Syrian. Was he a terrorist?

Remember this little boy? A Syrian. Can we be sure he wasn’t a terrorist? https://t.co/HGQDZyWldO pic.twitter.com/At01ywBVqy

— csdickey (@csdickey) November 19, 2015

On CNNi with Hala Gorani Talking Syria, Russians, Americans and Quagmires Earlier This Week

Here's the link: http://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/10/28/exp-the-world-right-now-hala-gorani-christopher-dickey.cnn

Journalism, Free Speech and the Tools of Terror - Address to conference at Universitá degli Studi di Teramo

Synopsis:

In the Age of Facebook and the Time of Twitter, the age-old clash between free speech and security is not about editorials in the press, graffiti in the streets or speeches on street corners. It’s about the ability of violent extremists to reach a global audience with a compelling narrative that attracts recruits, volunteers, “lone wolves”—a narrative that motivates them, and activates them. Traditional government controls and censorship are virtually useless. The extremists have to be met on their own communications battleground, but if we don’t understand the extremists’ tools and their narrative there is little hope that we can neutralize their message. Even then, there are no guarantees.

Text:

For the foreseeable future one of the central preoccupations of the global press, and certainly of the American press, is going to be the communications challenge presented by the “so-called Islamic State,” or ISIS, or ISIL, or Da'esh, the acronyms we use when we don't want to dignify this group with a name that makes it sound like a national entity.

And let’s make no mistake, the danger it poses is, first and foremost, one of communications. Its military victories have mostly been against hollow armies rife with corruption or weakened by other insurgencies. Its impact on global opinion, however, is based on its creative exploitation of media and myths, some old and some new, all wrapped up in an iconography that is deeply seductive for many young people in many different parts of the world. 

I think all of us here can agree that we do not agree with almost anything that Da'esh represents, but we would be making a major mistake, as people concerned about the media, security and free speech, if we did not admit the agility and creativity of its messaging, which is much more supple and much more focused than most of the media when we are trying to tell something like the truth about the events that surround us. 

If you want to understand one key aspect of the way Da'esh gets its message across, you would do well to spend a little time playing "Call of Duty," which has gamers enraptured all over the world.

Start at 00:33

If you then look at any of the highly produced films by Da'esh showing the actual murder of Western hostages, Syrian soldiers, Egyptian and other Christians, crucifixions, stonings, people thrown from towers and, most notably, the burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot — then you, as a player of "Call of Duty," will find yourself in very familiar territory. 

In “Call of Da'esh,” if you will, real people really are dying these gruesome deaths, but the video presentation has moved all that into a more accessible and, for a certain mindset, more acceptable dimension.

While Facebook, Twitter and YouTube certainly have been revolutionary communications tools, relatively few people in the press have understood how to exploit them effectively. And if we are going to talk about freedom of speech, we need to understand that these are the venues, much more than newspapers, or even television, that really count.

Journalists, I am sorry to say, are among the least imaginative users of social media. We employ social media these days to glean information because even the richest news organizations are reluctant to deploy people to war zones. Battlefields are expensive to cover. 

But the most imaginative and effective users of social media as a tool to try to change the world are not doing what journalists do—grabbing bits of fact here and there to try to discover a truth—they are creating narratives to engage a following. And the most successful users of social media, at least in a political and potentially revolutionary sense, are those who create a narrative for a targeted audience that can be moved to action which then reinforces the narrative.

Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States this way in 2008. His campaign’s use of social media first engaged people who might only be vaguely interested in supporting him. Then it asked them to carry out specific acts, ringing specific doorbells to talk to people face to face to raise money and encourage voting. Then it asked people — young, enthusiastic people, for the most part — to record the results so Obama’s analysts and algorythms could gauge where their performance might be improved. And the narrative? The election of the first black president of the United States, a young man who said, “Yes, we can.”

I actually wrote in 2008 that these same kinds of tactics could be employed by terrorists. It's a question of tools, after all, not of ideology. At the time I was thinking of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who had first used CD-Roms and DVDs to spread their narrative, then satellite television, and who had just begun to experiment with YouTube.

From 2009 to 2011, we saw the power of narrative combined with social media and satellite to create popular uprisings in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and much of the rest of the deeply frustrated Arab world. But their narrative was a short one—to gather, to protest, to try to bring down the government—with no real strategy for what might come after. I remember when I was in Tahrir Square in Egypt people talking about “crowd sourcing” the leadership of the revolution. Well, we know that doesn’t work. Militant groups with long histories of discipline and organization move into the vacuum and, more often than not, frustrate entirely the hopes of the free-thinking crowd on Facebook and Twitter.

In fact, coming full circle, we have to understand that the people who truly mastered the new media are those associated with the Al Qaeda spin-off that we’ve been calling Da’esh, because it understood its audiences—there are several; it knew how to develop narratives that they would feel compelling; and it has the leadership to continue an organized drive to create a new state in the Middle East that has goals far outside the region.

I want to focus here on the Da’esh narrative that has proved so seductive to young people in the West, because that is the one that Western governments have found so surprising.

In fact, today’s terrorists have certain common characteristics. I think of them as testosterone, narrative, and theater, or, if you will, TNT.

Testosterone because they are predominantly young men, often frustrated in their work lives and sex lives, who want an outlet for their energies. (This is true of many recruits in conventional armies. But one of the things Da’esh adds to the mix is the promise of wives and even slave girls.)

Narrative, which we keep coming back to, is absolutely central. Almost all terrorist recruits over the years, whether in the IRA, the Sendero Luminoso or Black September, have been convinced they were fighting to defend an oppressed people. They were not necessarily oppressed themselves, but they identified with those who were, and they see themselves in noble, even chivalric terms, like knights in shining armor coming to the rescue, which gives them the ability to justify, as knights often did, absolutely horrific acts. It is no accident that Al Qaeda’s core book of ideology by Ayman al Zawahiri bears the title Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. Young men and women are inspired to answer their call of duty.

Theater? This is another area where social media have become so important. The recruits of modern terrorist organizations want to project themselves and their actions on the world stage, even if they are not going to be around on this earth to see the result. Social media have made this effect incalculably easier to achieve. And this is hardly limited to Islamic extremists. We just saw in a rural college in Oregon a horrendous mass murder by a young man who clearly thought he could write his name in history with the blood of his classmates. A few months earlier, another young man tried to do the same thing in Charleston, South Carolina, which is my home away from home in the United States.

As the Internet and social media have lowered the monetary costs of global communications, they also have lowered the threshold for violence that can command the world’s attention.

Fifteen years ago, Bin Laden and his men spent a lot of time watching disaster movies like “Independence Day,” and they plotted their attacks to imitate that sort of iconography. Without huge spectaculars, they knew they could never command the kind of headlines and television time that they and their suicide troops wanted.

Ten years ago, when Abu Musab al Zarqawi was decapitating his enemies in Iraq, he had to depend on satellite news networks to show clips of the grotesque videotapes that preached about his sense of justice and were intended to horrify his enemies.

Terrorists of those earlier generations had to depend on others, even on the "mainstream media," to get their message out. But no longer.

Today, Da’esh has so many more tools at its disposal to sicken its enemies and glorify its knights in blood-spattered balaclavas, and not only the soft social media like Facebook and Twitter, but the hard core violent excitement of shared video games.

It isn’t so much that Da’esh produces its own version of “Grand Theft Auto,” although it has done that, it is the way it uses the imagery and iconography of video games to put its message across, blurring intentionally and cruelly the lines between the Xbox and the execution grounds of Raqqa.

Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.

Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.

Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.

Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.

Screen shot from trailer of Call of Duty: Black Ops II

You may have noticed I have barely mentioned religion.

When we talk about Al Qaeda and Da’esh, there is often a lot of discussion about what the Qur’an says or does not say. And there is a lot of tweeting from this Surah or that one. But, of course, the Qur’an can say or not say just about anything these organizations want.

Do the Qur’an and the hadith warn against the worship of idols? Yes. So let’s destroy Nimrud and Palmyra. But have those same lines been interpreted by scholars for many centuries to warn against the portrayal of the human form? Absolutely. You can see the result in mosques all over the world. There are no representations of human beings.

Earlier radical movements, like the Ikhwan in Arabia, not only fought and died to keep television out of the Saudi kingdom in the 1960s for that reason, earlier on they smashed every mirror they could find in Jeddah and Mecca when they conquered those cities.

But Da’esh has no problem with the human form because it is so vital to its new media narrative—it won’t motivate many young men or women with calligraphy and arabesques—and Da’esh is a very practical organization.

There once was a notion that the people, on social media by the millions, or the billions, would offer correctives to the inhuman propaganda of monsters like the killers of Da’esh. But that simply is not the case—unless the people have a narrative that is more compelling. And they do not.

Neither do governments. Take a look at the deeply embarrassing efforts of the U.S. State Department’s @ThinkAgainTurnAway Twitter feed. That makes the point better than I can.

So, here’s my question for you—and it is not a rhetorical one:

Is there a narrative that we liberal-thinkers can use to counter the TNT that Da’esh offers its recruits? Maybe that is not exactly our duty, but it is something we have to think about in the name of humanity and, yes, whenver we talk about journalism, free speech and the tools of terror. 


END

A note on the horrific flooding in our old Columbia, South Carolina, neighborhood

So much is gone with the wind and the floods that ravaged the Carolinas. In Columbia, SC, the dam that created Lake Katharine broke, devastating the homes downstream. (See Ben Hoover's stunning coverage at https://www.facebook.com/bl.hoover.3?pnref=story ). My family lived on Lake Katharine for almost 30 years and these are some snapshot memories cerca 1970-74, including James Dickey with Robert Lowell, Robert Redford, and grandson James B.T. Dickey on the dock behind our house at 4620 Lelia's Court (which was torn down after we sold it in 1998). I am sure Bronnie and Kevin, Janet Lee Burnet, who took the great photo with Lowell, James Mann, Michael Allin (who taught me to water ski on that lake), Ward Briggs, Gordon Van Ness III, and others have more pictures they could share as well to help us remember our time on Lake Katharine, and I hope Shani Shani Raine Gilchrist has great success helping to organize relief efforts for people who live below the broken dam. To that end there will be a reading by South Carolina authors, including Marjory Wentworth, on Oct. 10 in Charleston.

 

Coming Up - My South Carolina Tour for 'Our Man in Charleston'

SOUTH CAROLINA

Thursday, September 17th Charleston, SC - 12:00pm Blue Bicycle Luncheon Talk, Q&A, Signing Hall’s Chophouse

2:00pm Preservation Society of Charleston, Stock Signing Book & Gift Shop

6:00pm Barnes & Noble, Talk, Q&A, Signing 1812 Rittenberg Blvd 

Friday, September 18th Pawleys Island, SC 

11:00am – Discussion Moveable Feast Luncheon, Pawleys Plantation, book signing after.

2:00pm – 3:00pm Litchfield Books – Signing Only 

Saturday, September 19th Little River, SC 

11:00am – Discussion Moveable Feast Luncheon, 12:00pm - The Parson’s Table 

Recent Speaking and Writing about Refugees and Migrants in Europe

My appearances on CNN talking about migrants and refugees in Europe:

 http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/09/04/exp-dickey-syrian-refugees.cnn

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/04/outrage-isn-t-enough-to-end-syrian-refugee-crisis.html

article

Cheap Outrage Won't Save Refugee Kids

Sep 2, 2015 2:43 PM EDT
Much more could be done to end the horror stories in the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and along the... MORE

article

Fact: Immigrants Make Cities Safer

Aug 6, 2015 9:00 AM EDT
Politicians would rather talk about horrifying anecdotes and conventional wisdom than look at the... MORE

article

Migrants' Desperate Chunnel Blitz

Jul 29, 2015 9:05 PM EDT
The danger of making their journeys, and possibility of death, doesn't deter the thousands of... MORE

Recent Writings About the American Civil War Past and Present

• article

  

  Ken Burns' 'Civil War' After Dylann Roof

  Sep 6, 2015 12:01 AM EDT
  The PBS documentary turns 25 this year, just as the Charleston murders and the Confederate flag... MORE
  

article

Cuba's Star-Spangled Slavery

Aug 15, 2015 12:13 AM EDT
The Stars and Stripes, not the Confederate flag, once represented the sordid system of human... MORE

video

A British Spy in the Civil War South

Jul 27, 2015 11:45 AM EDT
Dickey describes his research into the story of British spy Robert Bunch, who watched the... MORE

article

Confederates in the Blood

Jul 21, 2015 1:00 AM EDT
My new book looks at the raw truths of Southern history, but my family has been living that... MORE

article

Confederate Madness Then and Now

Jul 14, 2015 1:10 AM EDT
A British consul witnessed the cynical process that plunged the United States into civil war in the... MORE

My Video Take on Trump, the Bully in the Pulpit @anderson360

What to make of @realDonaldTrump on #ForeignPolicy? He's a 'bully' using 'reality tv' strategy says @csdickey http://t.co/MUyBRnnqzA

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) September 10, 2015

Barnstorming for "Our Man" - and Poetry!

Upcoming events - Please come if you're in the neighborhood - or even if you're not!

GEORGIA

September 2, 7:15 - Georgia Center for the Book - Talking about my father's last poems in "Death and the Day's Light"

September 3, 7:15 - Georgia Center for the Book - Talking about growing up in the South, and writing "Our Man in Charleston"

CONNECTICUT

September 8, 7:00 -   RJ Julia Booksellers, Talk, Q&A, Signing, Madison, CT 06443

SOUTH CAROLINA

Thursday, September 17th Charleston, SC - 12:00pm Blue Bicycle Luncheon Talk, Q&A, Signing Hall’s Chophouse

2:00pm Preservation Society of Charleston, Stock Signing Book & Gift Shop

6:00pm Barnes & Noble, Talk, Q&A, Signing 1812 Rittenberg Blvd 

Friday, September 18th Pawleys Island, SC 

11:00am – Discussion Moveable Feast Luncheon, Pawleys Plantation, book signing after.

2:00pm – 3:00pm Litchfield Books – Signing Only 

Saturday, September 19th Little River, SC 

11:00am – Discussion Moveable Feast Luncheon, 12:00pm - The Parson’s Table 

My new book, "Our Man in Charleston," is officially published today

So at last it's out. Your local bookstore should have Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

prominently displayed. (And if not, tell them they should!) It's all over Amazon, with a fantastic price for the moment of $14.01 for the beautifully produced hardcover edition, plus a Kindle edition, and an Audible audio version read elegantly and appropriately by a Briton, Antony Ferguson. 

The hardcover book also is available at Barnes and Noble, in the stores and online.

Over the past week I have written two essays for The Daily Beast that put "Our Man" in the context of recent events and my own background as a Southerner. The first, "Confederate Madness Then and Now," many of you have seen already. The second was just published this morning:

Confederates in the Blood

My new book looks at the raw truths of Southern history, but my family has been living that complicated heritage for generations.

Today, I will be talking about the book and about the Confederate legacy on NPR's "Here and Now," which airs at noon on Boston's WBUR and in many other parts for the country as well. Tomorrow I will be on the BBC.

I am happy and, yes, more than a little proud to say the early reviews and comments have ranged from good to great, and next week the New York Times Book Review will list "Our Man" as an "Editor's Choice."

"Our Man in Charleston is a joy to discover. It is a perfect book about an imperfect spy."
—Joan Didion

"Thoroughly researched and deftly crafted. [Our Man in Charleston will] introduce people to a man who should be better known, one who cannily fought the good fight at a fateful moment in history."
—Wall Street Journal

"One heck of a good read."
—The Charlotte Observer

"[Bunch is] a brilliant find…Dickey, the foreign editor of The Daily Beast and a former longtime Newsweek correspondent, uses his research well: in a story like this one, point of view is everything, and Bunch's is razor sharp."
—American Scholar
"Dickey has written a book that is as much suspense and spy adventure as it is a history book... A story as compelling as this one does not come around very often. With so much already written about the Civil War, and more coming every year, originality is a rare thing these days. The story of Robert Bunch is that and more."
—The Carolina Chronicles

"A fascinating tale of compromise, political maneuvering, and espionage."
—Publishers Weekly
"Dickey's comprehension of the mindset of the area, coupled with the enlightening missives from Bunch, provides a rich background to understanding the time period….A great book explaining the workings of what Dickey calls an erratic, cobbled-together coalition of ferociously independent states. It should be in the library of any student of diplomacy, as well as Civil War buffs." 
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"A fine examination of a superbly skilled diplomat."
—Booklist 

"Britain's consul in Charleston before and during the first two years of the Civil War was outwardly pro-Southern and earned notoriety in the North. But in secret correspondence with the British Foreign Office he made clear his hostility to slavery and the Confederacy. His dispatches helped prevent British recognition of the Confederacy. Christopher Dickey has skillfully unraveled the threads of this story in an engrossing account of diplomatic derring-do." 
—James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom

"Did Robert Bunch, Her Majesty's consul in Charleston, keep Britain out of the Confederacy's war? Drawing on Bunch's clandestine correspondence, Christopher Dickey makes a compelling case that this dazzlingly duplicitous, ardent anti-slaver played a key role. A fascinating, little-known shard of vital Civil War history, brought glitteringly alive with all the verve and panache of a master story teller."
 —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March
"In his extraordinary new history Our Man in Charleston, Christopher Dickey has written a book you can't put down. This is a well-researched history with the immense power and sheer element of surprise we find in the finest spy novels. It's like reading a book by Graham Greene, written while he was staying at the house of John le Carré, discussing the fate of nations over drinks. With Charleston consul Robert Bunch, Dickey has introduced a new great man in the great war that haunts America still. I adored this book."
—Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini and South of Broad

"Our Man in Charleston is a superlative and entertaining  history of the grey area where diplomacy ends and spy craft begins. British Consul Robert Bunch played a secret role in the anti-slavery fight in Charleston, which would remain secret to this day were it not for Christopher Dickey's extraordinary detective skills."
—Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire and Georgiana

"Wonderfully written and researched, Our Man in Charleston is the best espionage book I've read. I couldn't put it down."
 —Robert Baer, former CIA case officer and author of See No Evil

"Robert Bunch is an unlikely spy, but his bravery and moral sensibility make him an intriguing hero for Christopher Dickey's Civil War history. Dickey knows his stuff, from spying to the slave trade, and he's a master at telling a fast-paced, gripping yarn." 
—Evan Thomas, author of John Paul Jones and The Very Best Men
"Christopher Dickey has accomplished the near-impossible—exhuming a forgotten but irresistible character from the dustbin of Civil War history, and bringing him back to life with painstaking research and bravura literary flair. This irresistible book opens new windows onto the complicated worlds of wartime diplomacy, intelligence-gathering and outright intrigue, and the result is fresh history and page-turning excitement." 
—Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln and the Power of the Press and winner of the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize

"A long-needed study of Robert Bunch, British consul in Charleston—a secret agent for the Crown in the Civil War era who outwardly praised the city and its people while privately loathing both, and who discouraged diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy by keeping his superiors abreast of its determination to continue importing slaves. Elegantly written, well researched, an engrossing story."
—Howard Jones, author of Blue and Grey Diplomacy

My essay on Confederate Madness Then and Now, with a taste of "Our Man In Charleston"

As most of you know, my latest book, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South, will be published next week. It may already be in the stores in many parts of the United States, and it's also available on Kindle. 

This essay, published today on The Daily Beast, puts the story of the book in the context of today's debates about the Confederacy and its symbols. It has gotten quite a lot of attention in the few hours since it was published.

Confederate Madness Then and Now
A British consul witnessed the cynical process that plunged the United States into civil war in the...MORE

Talking "Our Man in Charleston" (and ISIS and Iran!) with Alex Witt on MSNBC

http://www.msnbc.com/alex-witt/watch/us-seeks-confirmation-of-isis-leader-s-death-483063363631

I appeared on "Weekends with Alex Witt" Sunday to talk about "Our Man in Charleston," but also a bit about ISIS in Afghanistan and the Iran talks in Vienna—from Paris. 

You might say we were all over the map...

When Saud al Faisal was a young man ...

I have always loved this photograph of Saud al Faisal bin Abdelaziz published in The House of Saud, by David Holden and Richard Johns. It was taken at the United Nations in 1976, I believe, not long after Saud's father King Faisal was murdered and his uncle, King Khalid, appointed him foreign minister. The Western suit, the Princeton education, the worldly ways of the young man — a different time, a different world. As Bruce Riedel writes in The Daily Beast today, Saud will be sorely missed.

Our Man in Charleston has a "masterful" grasp of "skullduggery and human contradiction." - Departures Magazine

There’s a great write-up of Our Man in Charleston in the newest Departures Magazine, which calls the book "masterful." The review is not yet available online, but here’s my favorite part: 

“A veteran correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast and the author of several novels, Dickey has a journalist’s nose for the scoop and a thriller writer’s sense of pacing. His debt to Graham Greene is clear not just from the book’s title but also from his grasp of skullduggery and human contradiction.”

My Father as Grandfather with "Tucky" Dickey in 1973.

James Dickey and his grandson Tucky about 1973.

For more of these see "Our Scrapbook."

OBAMA'S OTHER NOBEL: THE IRVING SMOLENS PEACE PRIZE

This is Jean-Marc Illouz's lovely tribute to the D-Day veteran Irving Smolens who bent Obama's ear about war and peace one year ago this week. Jean-Marc posted it on Facebook and has kindly allowed me to republish it here.

By Jean-Marc ILLOUZ

I have recurringly thought of Irving Smolens since that day.

His was a name I had never heard of in nearly 40 years as a French war correspondent from Vietnam to the Middle East.

Among the last survivors of Utah Beach, he was Private Irving

Smolens Enlisted 1943, 4th Inf.Div. 29th Field Artillery - Army Serial # 31353382.

Almost a name on a stone till that day in June 2014 during D-Day 70th anniversary commemorations at the American Cemetery in Normandy.

The old soldier insisted on approaching his Commander in Chief to deliver a short valetudinary message:
"Thank you Mr President for keeping us out of war" [re:The Daily Beast's Christopher Dickey original story below]

An echo from a soldier's soldier, I often quoted later when confronted to various Obama critics. Most were "drugstore soldiers" hailing from the Hill and howling for blood, Tea Party cartoon characters or foreign critics unaware of the extent of Congressional power in US Foreign Policy.

Others abroad were the very same that not so long ago would denounce US imperialism and now posited that Uncle Sam's magic firepower could -boom!-cure centuries old divides in their own societies.

To be sure Obama only chose to extensively resort to drones here and more sparingly to air power elsewhere. Not the John Wayne- Bush Jr kinda stuff.

Smart alecks claim "he blew it when the time was ripe to scuttle Syrian dictator Assad and wipe out his Air Force"?

Ripe? To skydive the country into some machismo state of war with Russia over Syria...and Ukraine? A US Vital interest?

Today's challenges are with Russia and China first. Not Dracula and garlic. Containing and crushing the so called Islamic State is a long term business. It will also require their cooperation. And Jihadi terror AND idéology will not be defeated "live from the Pentagon" alone.

Vision at the White House will take really deciding who's the more effective Muslim ally - Iran included - the US needs to lick ISIS in the region. And -before it engulfs Palestine - using some tough love with the Israeli right.

The President clearly understands this. And also that it's not as easy as bombing some video targets in Wadi-Dum.

So far Saudi money and Israeli influence have largely dictated or impeded US policy including this administration's. But perhaps what will remain as this two terms President's greatest merit, will be to have resisted America's natural inclination to wrap Manifest Destiny in testosterone, shoot first and think later, spill blood and billions in non vital, well lobbied "patriotic "wars from Vietnam to Iraq.

At the outset of his presidency,Obama was - as we all remember - rather embarrassed to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

As of today he has brought neither peace nor victories. Rescuing the US economy and not Ramboing around may not be Iwo Jima's stuff but survivor Irving Smolens words of thanks still ring to me as the greatest National Award a resilient President Obama could ever dream of.

ps: Irving Smolens passed away on April 11th 2015, at 90 in Melrose, Mass.RIP.

He had actively opposed both the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/…/what-the-d-day-veteran-told-…

Hilarious and Still Too True: SNL's 2007 "Petraeus Hearing" w/ Hillary Clinton, McCain, and Obama

A new Amazon.com page for my father, James Dickey

I am happy to report that the Amazon.com James Dickey page is shaping up nicely. Both "The Complete Poems" and "Death, and the Day's Light" are now displayed prominently.

The biography is an abbreviated version of one on the site of The Poetry Foundation and emphasizes the poetry over the novels. There is a blog feed and a Twitter feed, and there will be several photographs, changed frequently.

Suggestions welcome, but in the meantime please spread the word on Twitter, FB, etc.!

Also, interesting to note the Amazon page already is number two when you search James Dickey on Google (without quotes), right after the Wikipedia entry. (For some reason when the name is in quotes it's not coming up on the first page of the search. Go figure.)

Here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/James-Dickey/e/B000AQ073Y

D-Day - A column I wrote 11 years ago about Ernie Pyle and George W. Bush

The first time I visited the Normandy beaches, almost 20 years ago, I went with my father-in-law, who'd landed there on D-Day. We walked on the wide sand and through the green, wind-blown fields, and he looked a little lost, as many veterans do when they wander those cross-covered cliffs.


You could see him gazing out to sea, but searching inside himself for the buddies who'd died, and for that young man who used to be him. Since then, we've visited other sites where he fought and his friends perished. The experience is always heartbreaking, not only because of the sad fact that death is, but because of the terrible scale of it in these places—a spectacle of killing which, thank God, we haven't seen in my generation's many wars. At least, not yet.


The chronicler of G.I. Joe's World War II was Ernie Pyle. When he was killed by a machine-gunner on the little Japanese island of Ie Shima in April 1945, after so many years reporting on the fighting, he had a draft column in his pocket that describes as eloquently as anything I've ever read the weight of the carnage on those who survived it. He was thinking back on Normandy:


"Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks," Pyle wrote. "But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.


"Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.


"Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.


"Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.


"These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.


"We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference. . . ."



He well and truly hated war because he saw what it was from so close.


Pyle, the son of a tenant farmer, mixed easily in the enormous conscript army mustered by the United States to take on what was, truly, an Axis of Evil. He knew what his country was fighting for, and his columns never doubted the rightness of the cause, even though he admitted he lost sight of it sometimes in the middle of all the killing. The way Pyle wrote about the common soldiers' lives, sharing their pains and frustrations and horrors as well as their good humor and common sense and uncommon valor, made him probably the most widely read and best-loved correspondent of his time. But he well and truly hated war because he saw what it was from so close.


Pyle understood that even the highest ideals get worn down by endless fighting. "I had come to despise and be revolted by war clear out of any logical proportion," he wrote in 1943, when he began a brief trip back to the States. "I couldn't find the Four Freedoms among the dead men. Personal weariness became a forest that shut off my view of events about me. I was no longer seeing the little things that you at home want to know about the soldiers."


When George W. Bush makes his D-Day anniversary visit to the Normandy beaches on Sunday, we're going to hear a lot of well-honed speeches trying to compare the righteous combat forced on us in World War II with the war of choice we've entered into in Iraq. But only speechmakers from coddled, comfortable backgrounds who've never heard a shot fired in anger, much less seen "dead men by mass production," would dare use the blood of those who died at Normandy 60 years ago to try to cleanse their conscience of those dying in Iraq today.


The United States entered World War II, as it had entered World War I, to defeat a proven aggressor and bring the war to an end. The Bush administration actually won its righteous war, in Afghanistan after the aggression of September 11, 2001. But that victory came too quickly, it seems, for our leaders to get much satisfaction from it. So they sent our kids to Iraq. And what is the goal there today, now that the reasons we were given at first have proved to be grand delusions? To spread democracy? To extirpate the very idea of terrorism? To work the will of God? Sixty years ago, those who thought they could teach the world how to live the only right way, which was their way, and launched unprovoked wars claiming this was the only thing could do to defend their values--those were the people we called the enemy.

But let's be clear about the soldiers. Our soldiers. Those men and women in Iraq today are, indeed, just as heroic as those at Normandy. They have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, but that's not their fault. They are fighting and dying and trying to build something good as soldiers, despite the most foolhardy civilian leadership in the modern history of the United States. Like any G.I. Joe in World War II, they're making the best of a bad situation.


In his day, Ernie Pyle's columns read like the letters every soldier wanted to send. But today's soldiers, at least the ones who write to Shadowland (shadowland@newsweek.com), do a pretty good job of telling the story themselves.


Last week, for instance, I got a long letter from Lt. Col. Richard Allinger in Baghdad. ... 


"The American soldier in Iraq is a fine human being," he writes. "Young men and women, a zillion miles from home, watching their friends die day after day, being mortared..., eating lousy food, baking in the unbelievable heat. Young men and women who are attending too many memorials and last roll calls. These young men and women suffer these indignities routinely and go out each day to help rebuild a school, build a water line, repair a bridge, fix the substations, install air conditioners in orphanages, the list goes on and on. These young men and women are heroes, not prison guards gone wild. They are the bravest most incredible people I have ever had the pleasure to know."


To which I say, Amen.


The full column is available on Newsweek.com.