A scene from Operation Earnest Will during the forgotten "tanker war" of the mid-1980s.
I like this painting. It reminds me that, of all the things you are not supposed to acknowledge about war, the fact that it sometimes can be sublimely beautiful may be the most heretical. But it's true. I could write more about this, and maybe some day I will. But probably not. If you've seen the elephant, as they used to say, there's nothing I could write that you wouldn't already know. If you have not, nothing I could write could allow you to understand.
“War is like lightning from a clear sky. To
say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has
suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its
anti-romanticism, is inadequate. Here are beauties which pierce like
swords or burn like cold iron; here is a life that will break your
heart. . . .
Anguish is,
for me, almost the prevailing note. But not, as is most
typical of our age, the anguish of abnormal or contorted souls; rather
that anguish of those who were happy before a certain darkness came up
and will be happy if they live to see it gone. But with the
anguish comes also a strange exaltation, and when we have done with it, we
return to our own life not relaxed but fortified.
Even now I
have left out almost everything — the beauty of the landscapes, the passions,
the high virtues, the remote horizons. Even if I had space I could
hardly convey them. And after all the most obvious appeal of war is
perhaps also its deepest: “There was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.” Not wholly vain — it is the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment.”
― C.S. Lewis
From the prologue to a novel I wrote:
