Death and Pleasure, War and Pain

Life is so varied. We are docked in St Maarten as I write this, enjoying our penultimate day on the Celebrity Summit. It has been just the vacation I expected: very low key, with little activity and lots of good food, leavened by making new friends, a charming Maryland couple whose company we have enjoyed thoroughly.

We flew to this ship though on the day of the Connecticut massacre. You surely know more than I do about that horrible situation, as I studiously avoid watching or reading any news whenever I am on a ship. The dichotomy of joining a luxury cruise on the day families were mourning their lost children is not lost on me. Life is sad and varied.

The cruise has been delightful; we did not get off the ship in Barbados; we got off separately for no more than 30 minutes in St Lucia; Ransom stayed onboard in Antigua as I explored the port for perhaps an hour and today we will likely stray no further than the pier-side shops, even though we love this island, especially the French side. Cruising for us is not about traveling to different places; it’s about enjoying the pampered life aboard. Life is pleasurable and easy.

My reading material for this voyage has been E. B. Sledge’s justifiably famous account of World War II, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. Ever since I watched The War on PBS, Ken Burns’s riveting documentary, I have wanted to read Sledge’s well-respected book. It’s a gripping tale, full of eyewitness low-level detail that only an infantryman would know. He doesn’t talk much about the war in its overarching goals or campaigns, but rather about the day-to-day life of the grunts who bore the burden of combat. It’s an eye-opener, to be sure. Life is misery.

Sledge makes the point several times that only those who went through combat can understand what it was like. He quotes World War I officer and poet Siegfried Sassoon:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Near the end of the Okinawa campaign Sledge writes:

Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past. So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.

Death in Connecticut. Sunsets in the Caribbean. Death in the Pacific. Life is strange and sad, pleasurable and easy. Life is varied.