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Posted on by Dave Bonta

The space where a tree used to be

The space where a tree used to be still forks, still ramifies. It weaves a net of scissors, perfect for cutting paper chains of angels from the difficult air.

The space where a tree used to be has its separate birth, cotyledons like the horns of old-fashioned gramophones swelling with dark chords. Everyone makes the same mistake of shouting into them, as if they were ear trumpets.

The space where a tree used to be is never available for residential lots. It conceals whatever core of resistance remains after colonization – green canes hidden inside every sword.

The space where a tree used to be is marked by crossed sticks or a sawed log bearded with yellow ice. Sometimes a sapling encroaches on it. Sometimes a vole follows the tunnel left behind by one of its roots clear to its logical conclusion and hollows out a nest – a tomb chamber fit to fill with seeds & truffles.

The space where a tree used to be grows dark at noon with the wings of passenger pigeons. Its artificial eye surveys the woods from the far edge of the field, sacrificing detail for the allure of smooth illusions such as depth and duration.

The space where a tree used to be is a pillar of fire by day, a waterfall by night: listen. Its birds are worth more in the bush than in any hand. It rears its head like a gnomon against the stars.

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Cibola 56

This entry is part 55 of 119 in the series Cibola

Esteban (3)

For those who know, the road to paradise
is as short as the distance
between two breaths . . .
Who said that? He murmurs it
again in the voice of the sententious
old fart who taught him Nahuatl
& catches himself, repeats it
in Arabic, then in his mother’s Manding,
his gaze lost in the ceiling’s
contest of lights.

From somewhere in the next room
a wash of sun: by the lack of color
close to noon, he guesses.
A slow-burning log throws up
an intermittent flame–figures
of the moment stretching
grotesque tangles of arms & legs,
the ambient light turned shadow,
a sudden ground.

Dear Mother, I am beginning
to distrust these reports about
the Seven Cities. I am wearing doubt
like a vulture’s ruff of feathers
at the base of its naked red neck.
Down along the desert coastline
all the people dressed that way,
but here they are modest in cotton–
master spinners. In either case,
they treat me well. I’m
no longer so good at sleeping
directly on the ground.

He half-rises on the reed mat
to examine the form at his side,
count the even swells that make
her breasts rock gently at anchor.

What new worlds might be unfolding
beneath those eyelids? He peers
more closely, as if (despite
the obvious glow of health)
to diagnose. Watches how
her lashes flutter, pulsing:
a walker’s rhythm. By this
& the breath count he divines
a heavy load, or perhaps
a steepening path.
The number of breaths between pauses
grows steadily shorter: 49, then 42,
34, 25, 13.

Ah, what patterns–what science his far-
off step-father could’ve
teased from such an accounting!
For this is one hole in his knowledge
Esteban regrets: the art of seeing
through numbers.
He’d been too young, resented
the endless restrictions imposed
by inauspiciously numbered days
& hours. Now he wonders
if the omen-reading, the numerology
hadn’t had something to do with
the insight that the world itself
eludes enumeration?

(To be continued.)

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Air quotes

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us You know a poetry reading is going to suck when the very first words out of the first reader’s mouth are “O.K., so…”

You are confirmed in this belief when the reader proceeds to spend half of his allotted time reading from a densely theoretical introduction to his poems that he himself has written. It is full of ironically employed clichés, such as “Progress goes forward,” & “I have never read this poem the same way twice & think it would be impossible to do so.”

The main thing, you gather, is that meaning is not merely suspect but wholly fraudulent. The work in question consists entirely of one-stanza “poems” each of which may be taken as an interpretation of the one-word title, “Progress” (in which this avant-garde poet does not, of course, believe). “Meaning discovers a method,” he says. Therefore his method is anti-methodical. “Every stanza is modular,” he continues, & you shiver, remembering the German medievalist Uwe Poerksen’s analysis of contemporary linguistic malaise: The tyranny of a modular language.

He reads in a flat monotone enlivened only by the slight falls in intonation at the ends of “sentences.” Anything more, you realize, would betray enthusiasm: etymologically, the possession by a god or spirit & therefore the ultimate heresy for those who believe in the vacuity of belief.

There are very few active verbs. “Anything named is to be tilted,” he intones. “Around each of these states is a periphery of mixed states without syntax.” (A periphery around? Isn’t that redundant?) “The way things work is not a projection of syntax.” You are reminded of the child’s fantasy of disappearing by eating his own body parts, one by one – a fantasy only made possible, of course, by the invention of the flush toilet.

The second reader is more interesting because her incomprehensibility is more genuine. She walks with the help of a cane & speaks in brief, clipped phrases painfully delivered: a stroke two & a half years ago, she explains, has led to “a problem with speech production.” Thus, she says, she virtually embodies what had been said earlier that day about the gap. You divine that she is not talking about the clothing store.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us All of these poets are participants in a weekend-long conference at the adjacent university. None of them bother to introduce themselves, clearly assuming that everyone in the small audience is part of their circle. You sip a hot beverage along with the others. You find you are one of three people taking notes.

Each difficult phrase endures a difficult birth. “Small stars in the shape of proverbs,” she says. You rather like that. But was the lyricism intended, or merely the affect of a defective ear?

Her last poem is in memoriam Jacques Derrida. Ironic self-parody, or unselfconscious cliché? Son of man, you cannot tell. “It carries an epigram,” she announces, & reads the epigram, whose author you fail to note: “There is no wasteland.” Bull fucking shit, lady! you want to shout.

The poem in memory of Jacques Derrida features a one-line refrain: “I kid you not.” Audience members exchange knowing looks. “Apocalypse – or a part of the body?” wonders the “poet.” Her infirmity prevents her from making frequent quotes in the air with her fingers as the others do. Her rigidity lends her a certain iconic quality, like Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo – a comparison to which, you suspect, she wouldn’t take a shine. That she can still smile, can still read, seems frankly heroic.

And her speech impediment actually enhances her delivery, like George Burns with his frequent pauses to puff on a cigar. “The clock chimes midnight: bong, bong, bong, et cetera.” At this, the audience cracks up.

She, too, adheres strictly to her ten-minute time limit. At least these people are brief, you think, remembering open-mike readings where embarrassingly bad poets chortled their way through half their life’s work.

The third reader is actually understandable. You almost weep with gratitude. She reads selections from a lengthy midrash – as she calls it – on Adorno’s famous line, “After Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry.” Why was poetry singled out from among all the other arts, she wonders? It smacks of the way the Nazis singled out Jews, Gypsies, intellectuals, homosexuals – she runs down the list.

Her conclusion seems on-target, if somewhat obvious: for Adorno, a literary critic, “It is an act of mourning for him to cut off what was important to him,” like Abraham binding his beloved Isaac for the sacrifice. But in her lengthy questioning of Adorno’s motives, has she not placed herself in the position of an avatar of transcendent meaning, like the angel who carried God’s commands to Abraham? “Have I been taken in the role of angel? I should not write poetry,” her poem bravely concludes.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us You like this reader. Not only does she read with expression, her patter between poems is funny: “The devil sold me his soul,” she says. You chuckle along with the others. “At the crossroads?” someone shouts.

“I am a phantom, sacred and secular, beginning not to disbelieve in ghosts,” she concludes one poem. “Beginning not to disbelieve”: does that make her the reactionary of the group? Another poem ends with the line, “Therefore it is scrupulous even to listen to shadows.” But you wonder: After Paul Celan, isn’t it a little barbaric to keep playing around with fractured syntax, as if your life, too, depended on it?

The last two readers of the evening also seem likeable, though once again you are reminded of the lines from that angry outsider poem by Antonio Machado: …Pedatones al paño / que miran, callan y piensan / que saben, porque no beben / el vino de las tabernas. “Academics in offstage clothes, who watch, say nothing, and think they know, because they don’t drink wine in the ordinary bars,” in Robert Bly’s translation. They are like dogs, you think, publicly licking their own genitals without shame.

You find yourself paying close attention to the noises from the front of the store. Every time the cash register dings, it sounds like an arch commentary on the reading. But a lengthy gargle from the espresso machine makes you think that maybe they’re all in on the joke. This is not, after all, one of the ordinary bars.

But perhaps you are the one who should be ashamed. “Juxtaposition is a kind of melodrama,” says the last reader. He repeats this phrase, or variations thereof, often enough to let you know that he’s almost serious. In place of a left hand he wears a pirate’s metal hook – or rather, a pair of pinchers – & you have a hard time taking your eyes off it. When he uses it to signal quotation marks, you think: it’s perfect.

“Juxtaposition is a kind of melodrama.” Juxtaposition is almost the whole of my art as a writer, you mutter to yourself.

Afterwards, sitting at the bar in the local brewery, your desire for a pint of porter is entirely sincere – or should we say post-ironic? Here’s where spending the last hour and fifteen minutes listening to “poetry” pays off. Beer & French fries have never tasted better than they do at this moment.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 55

This entry is part 54 of 119 in the series Cibola

Reader (8)

The possibility of entities and occurrences being regarded as basically similar is
very intriguing to the western mind in view of the Aristotelian tradition of
opposing these notions. . . . Both . . . can be characterized in terms of distance
and boundedness . . . [It’s possible] that some events are regarded by [Tohono
O’odham] as having will . . . In the analysis of Papago nominal number, having
will was shown to be the distinguishing attribute of animate entities.
MADELEINE MATHIOT
“Papago Semantics”

My heart turns giddy
I wander in a daze
hai-ya my heart
an unbearable feeling
running toward this toward that
an unbearable feeling
ANON. PIMA (AKIMEL O’ODHAM) ANT SONG
(adapted from the translation by Lloyd Paul and Donald Bahr of a 31-song
sequence assembled and sung by Andy Stepp and Clair Seota)

The hero is only welcome on troubled days.
MALINKE PROVERB

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Queen of the rats

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Rat has at least two god-parents that the dictionary is willing to discuss, both verbs in Latin: radere and rodere. Radere means to scratch, to scrape, to shave – whence erase. Rodere – whence rodent – means to gnaw.

But wait – you say – that’s not a rat in the picture! It’s not even a placental mammal. But the opossum does remind us about convergent evolution (hairless tails, a preference for garbage). Some words I’ll be mentioning later in this essay – errata, Erato, erotic – have no evolutionary relationship with rat, although I will be arguing for a kind of convergence in meaning.

Latin cognates aside, the English rat comes straight from the Anglo-Saxons – or more likely the Norse, whence the Norway rat. One pictures a raiding party of these rí¦ts swarming ashore under cover of darkness, heading straight for the nearest granary. After weeks at sea, men and rats alike must’ve been grateful to leave their fetid ships. And indeed, the Vikings’ powerful stench often gave them away. In frequently raided parts of the British Isles and what are now the Low Countries, if the winds were right, peasants working in the fields would catch a sudden whiff of body odor mixed with stale urine, rotten-meat-and-moldy-bread breath and general funk, and knew they had a couple minutes to flee. Those whose noses failed the test were killed or carried off. Thus, over several centuries, a process of unnatural selection resulted in local populations with noses almost as keen as bloodhounds.

Okay, I just made that up. (For anyone who isn’t adept at smelling a rat, outright fabrication begins with “And indeed.”) In fact, the opposite was more nearly true: the Vikings could probably smell their human prey a mile off. The Church taught that frequent ablutions were a heathenish practice adored by devotees of Freya and followers of Mohammed. And contemporary accounts indicate that the un-Christianized Norsemen and women were generally cleaner than their more southerly neighbors; every large farm had a heated bath-house, and hands and faces were washed on a daily basis.

So much for stereotypes! In fact, rats and pigs are also very clean animals if given half a chance. They have to be. Both animals have extremely sensitive olfactory organs; life with humans would probably be very nearly intolerable for them, were it not for the abundant rewards. And how much of what we discard lands on the midden heap solely because of our inadequate sniffers, preventing us from perceiving a whole universe of subtle variations in odor and hence in taste?

Because of their acute senses of taste and smell, rats have “an extraordinarily well-developed first line of defense against toxins,” say rat biologists. One must also remember, however, that the highly developed noses of other animals evolved less for food than for sex. Anne’s Rat Page, a wonderfully informative and entertaining website on rat behavior and biology (whence also the preceding quote) says that rats have “between 500 and 1,000 types of olfactory receptors, coded for by between 500 and 1,000 genes! That is a staggering number of genes, about 1% of the rat’s DNA.” In addition, says Anne,

Rats have a second way to detect odors, called the vomeronasal organ, or VNO. The VNO in mammals is situated in a pouch off the nasal cavity. In rats, the VNO is located in a cigar-shaped passage in the floor of the nasal cavity, right next to the septum, with a narrow opening just inside the nostril. This dead-end position means that air can’t flow into it, like the olfactory epithelium of the nose. When rats sniff and lick, molecules from the environment stick to the moist nose and dissolve, and are then transported to the VNO suspended in mucus. The VNO dilates and constricts to pump the odor-bearing liquid inside rapidly. [References omitted]

I like the idea of odors essential for communication between individuals of the same species having a separate destination – a pipeline straight to the hypothalamus. In humans, the communicative role of mucous tends to be restricted to French kissing – a far cry from the versatility of rat snot.

With nasal and vomeronasal organs working in tandem, rats can detect chemical signals:

in all sorts of secretions, such as urine, feces, and secretions from the skin glands. They are picked up by sniffing or licking an individual, or through odors that have been deposited on the ground or volatilized into the air.

One of the most familiar methods of chemical communication in rats is urine marking. Sexually mature males are the most prolific urine markers, though sexually mature females may show some urine marking as well, especially on the night before they come into heat. Urine marking is therefore considered an advertisement of one’s presence and a sex attractant — adult males advertise and females choose their mate from among the advertisers. Female urine marking may be an advertisement of sexual receptivity.

Chemical secretions contain an enormous amount of information. Through odors contained in secretions such as urine, rodents can determine all the following about the animal who produced the odor:

– sex
– reproductive status: if the urine is from a female, rats can determine whether she is receptive to mating, pregnant, or lactating.
– sexual maturity (juvenile vs. sexually mature adult)
– familiar vs. unfamiliar animals (differentiate strangers from members of one’s own colony)
– social status (dominant from subordinate individuals)
– individual recognition
– stress level

So, urine contains all sorts of highly personal information! [References omitted]

But doesn’t this invalidate my claims about ratty cleanliness? Isn’t pissing all over the place kind of a filthy habit? Not really. Urine consists mainly of urea, uric acid, and salt; only a few species of bacteria normally inhabit it. If left to stand, however, those bacteria go to work converting urea to ammonia – a potent chemical often used to disinfect toilets! Confused? Me too.

But human urine (and thus presumably also rodent urine) can emit a number of highly variable odors, notes Lilian Mundt. For example, diabetes can be detected by the presence of fruity ketones. A maple syrup-like odor, caused by certain amino acids, is a telltale sign of Maple Syrup Urine Disease. And a condition known as phenylketonuria produces an odor described as “mousy” – not “ratty,” mind you. The smell, taste and color of urine are valuable diagnostic tools sadly neglected by most modern doctors. Would tasting a patient’s urine ever have become such a widespread practice if it carried the dangers of, say, coprophagy? A respectable school of yoga even advocates the regular consumption of urine for therapy and enlightenment.

Amaroli is the ancient tantric and yogic technique which incorporates the use of urine for fulfilling vajroli kriya. Amaroli comes from the root word amara which means “immortal, undying, imperishable”. Amaroli was therefore a technique designed to bring about immortality. It was used in conjunction with tantric kundalini kriyas in an attempt to purify the body so that consciousness could expand to its original and cosmic state.

One suspects that some of the health claims advanced for piss-drinking might in fact be due to the strict dietary regimen necessary to make the stuff potable.

Diet for the most intense forms of the internal technique (that is three or more glasses per day), should be low in protein and salt. Refined, processed and synthetic foods should be avoided, for example, white sugar, refined flour, tinned food, and so on. Spicy food may make the urine pungent and difficult to drink. Some proponents recommend that milk consumption be stopped too. Intake of alcohol and tobacco should be reduced to the barest minimum, or preferably avoided totally if possible.

The Amaroli novice may experience a few side-effects, such as “loose stools, skin eruptions such as pimples and boils, vomiting, fever of unexplained origin, cough, general weakness and debility.” But not to worry – this too shall pass.

[T]here is no need to panic and take drugs for any of the above mentioned processes. They usually occur because the body systems are now [sic] strong enough for the elimination processes to handle the deeply ingrained toxins and poisons. These other methods (eg. healing crises) are then employed by the body to dispose of the excess, and as a result, strange and perhaps as yet un-experienced manifestation [sic] may occur. If this happens the best way to handle the situation is to reduce the intake of urine or to stop completely and rest the body. Complete rest and fasting may also help, or a fruit diet can be instigated, depending on the manifestations that occur. Please do not run to your doctor and start taking medications to suppress the healing crisis’s [sic]. Let them unfold naturally and according to their own sequences….

Vomiting may occur when the urine is especially bad tasting and smelling as in fevers, jaundice and other illnesses. The urine of such dis-“eases” may seem totally unpalatable, yet if the patient has steeled his mind to drink it, then copious supplies of water will help to dilute the urine and make it easier to drink. If you can hold down the first flow, then the second should be more dilute and better tasting, and so on, until clear pleasant tasting urine finally comes.

Vomiting is good in that it cleans the stomach just as kunjal kriya does, [sic] Therefore, it should not cause any undue worry. After vomiting, the nausea is usually relieved and you feel better. If vomiting persists and dry retching occurs, you should seek professional help.

Sic.

I realize it’s not unusual to find web pages – and especially blogs – with copious discharges of errata. And errata in and of themselves are of great interest to me; they suggest not only rat but Erato, the muse of lyric poetry. Indeed, much of what the lyric poet does may be characterized as the deliberate misconstruing of signs and symbols. How better to add pungency than by throwing up a smoke screen?

Textual errata were also among the phenomena cited by the contemporary philosopher Alphonso Lingis as constituting what he calls “the murmur of the world.” The very lack of purity of sensory phenomena is what gives them texture, density, sex appeal. That was in a book called The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, which I don’t have at hand and thus may be misrepresenting slightly. But in his book The Imperative (Indiana University Press, 1998), which I do own, Lingis advances a phenomenology of perception that seems as applicable to the experience of a rat as of a human. Although rats, as highly social mammals, possess a very human-like form of intelligence, I’m sure they would tend to agree with Lingis that it is “not only our thought [that] is governed by an imperative, as Kant had maintained; our sensual, sensory, and emotional life is continually regulated by imperatives that come from the world around us.”

The erotic is especially prone to errata, it seems. For a variety of organisms, visual as well as olfactory cues relating to courtship involve “seductive display and ritual, artifice, masquerade, and finery” – not to mention subterfuge and fabrication. “Erotic beauty adds to the body the excesses of feline, avian, and coral-reef ornamentation.”

The vivid olfactory (and tactile/auditory) universe of the rat might account for its relative lack of such visual excesses. In humans, the abundant modifications of culture make up for our otherwise hairless-rat appearance. All this is natural as well as cultural. The real error lies, I think, with those yogis and other fanatics who yearn for excessive purity. To be pure is to aspire to completely homogenous, closed systems: no waste products, no ingestion of foreign substances. If sex must be practiced, it should be endogamous and strictly for procreation. The excessive fear of contamination and pollution that drives the quest for religious and racial purity also thoroughly infects modern medicine. The cult of the antiseptic leads ultimately to more disease, not less, via the rapid evolution of more virulent germs. Simple sanitation should suffice; we should obey the imperatives of our olfactory nerves and hypothalamus when they tell us that chlorine bleach and ammonia smell terrible.

Erato, queen of the hairless rats, derives much of her power from sublimation. In eros, Lingis observes, bodies exceed themselves. Lovers’ language is sheer babble.

Glands stiffen and harden, becoming bones and rods. The eyes cloud and become wet and spongy, hair is turning into webs and gleam. Then everything collapses, melts, gelatinizes, runs. Every voluptuous embrace is necrophilic, sinking into a body decomposing and cadaverous, already soaking the sheets and oneself with released inner fluids teeming with nameless and chaotic tinglings, spasms, fluids, microorganisms. The flames of voluptuous pleasure ignite them as they careen and flare apart, in clothing and the wood of the furniture collecting swampy stains, in the air whose minute spheres of water vapor teem with microorganisms, in the soil decomposing into unnameable organisms.

For this zone of decomposition of the world of work and reason, this zone of blood and semen and vaginal secretions, of elemental discharges and corpses, this zone too of proliferating, uncontrollable, nameless fetal life, which disgusts and horrifies us but also summons us, is the zone of the sacred.

There’s something to gnaw on for a while.
__________

Anne’s essays on the rat’s sensory world or ümvelt are worth reading for the way they challenge anthropocentric prejudices. Not only does the rat have two separate senses of smell; its ultrasensitive whiskers apparently blend touch and hearing. Additional essays of particular interest include The rat’s tail, Why rats can’t vomit, and Why are a rat’s testicles so big?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 54

This entry is part 53 of 119 in the series Cibola

Shiwanna (2) (conclusion)

The holy warriors of Shiwanna
descend to the slaughter, sparing only
a single pair of children.
They smash the fences, free
the herds of deer & mountain sheep
who need no prompting to escape
back into the wild.

Such a one-sided victory is dangerous.
As long as the Ashiwi live at the Middle Place
they must look after this tribe of ghosts.
They feed & clothe them, sing
their songs word-for-word
& dance their dances. The two
survivors carry their name forward
as a thirteenth clan.

Everywhere a warrior falls
the Earth Mother in gratitude
sprouts a miniature pueblo,
a rainhouse made from sand. Ants
of whatever color will fill
the priestly offices. In the end
very little gets resolved in the way
one might expect. The dream
follows dream-logic, & the roles
with all the romance belong
to the others. But with each reenactment
something vital is restored.
Freed from their wardens
the animals return to the wild, yes,
but the ones with claws & canines
are already there–& there—
& here . . .
__________

a miniature pueblo, a rainhouse: In the stylized art of Pueblo Indians, rain clouds always have a rectilinear and stepped appearance. It struck me as I was studying the literature on the Zuni and their neighbors, for whom so much public religiosity seems focused on bringing rain, that their very architecture represented an attempt to attract the favor of the rain gods through mimesis. The collecting of scalps (in a communal scalp house, in the case of the Zuni) was also connected with rain-bringing magic, as indicated by a quote in the last Reader section. The top of the head was homologized with cloud-covered peaks. Thus, cloud, mountain, pueblo and head were analogous nodes in a dense allusive web. Ants and ant-mounds were seen as microcosms of the human world.

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The legacy of March 10

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I spent most of the morning on a re-write of the current section of Cibola, which concerns a heavily mythologized but still probably historical act of genocide against a near neighbor. It turns out to be an appropriate date for such reflections. From the Japan Focus newsletter:

Sixty years ago today, on March 10 1945, the US abandoned the last rules of warfare against civilians when 334 B-29’s dropped close to half a million incendiary bombs on sleeping Tokyo.

The aim was to cause maximum carnage in an overcrowded city of flimsy wooden buildings; an estimated 100,000 people were ‘scorched, boiled and baked to death,’ in the words of the attack’s architect, General Curtis LeMay. It was then the single largest mass killing of World War II, dwarfing even the destruction of the German city of Dresden on Feb. 13, 1945.

B-29 pilot Chester Marshall flew above the destruction, but not far enough: “At 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning,” he later told Australian broadcaster ABC. “I couldn’t eat anything for two or three days. You know it was nauseating, really. We just said ‘What is that I smell?’ And it’s a kind of a sweet smell, and somebody said, ‘Well that’s flesh burning, had to be.'”

Even the city’s rivers were no escape from the firestorm: the jellied petroleum that filled the bombs, a prototype of the napalm that laid waste to much of Vietnam two decades later, stuck to everything and turned water into fire. “Canals boiled, metal melted, and buildings and human beings burst spontaneously into flames,” wrote John Dower in War Without Mercy. People who dived into rivers and canals for relief were boiled to death in the intense heat….

Robert McNamara, a former statistician who helped plan the Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki raids, went on to become US Defense Secretary (1960-68) during the war against Vietnam, where he authorized carpet bombing of vast swathes of the country with incendiaries and Agent Orange. In last year’s documentary The Fog of War, McNamara ponders the morality of victor’s justice, saying: “Was there a rule then to say that you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death one hundred thousand civilians in a single night?”

The legacy of the March 10 raid though is what it bequeathed to the rest of the century: the trumping of political and moral arguments against mass civilian slaughter by military technicians and rationalists. As historian Mark Selden wrote: “Elimination of the distinction between combatant and non-combatant would shape all subsequent wars from Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War and the ethnic conflicts of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, to mention but a few.” It’s a legacy we still live with.