Comments on: Sgt. Richard Kirkland For All Of Us

By: Andrea

Andrea — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:04:56 +0000

A lot of my feelings on it come from my own military experience, including during Operation Iraqi Freedom when I did, indeed, kill people. If you read _On Killing_ by Dave Grossman, you learn a lot about the ways in which the military has gone out of its way to make it very easy for soldiers to kill other people. The training and military enculturation is pretty necessary because as it turns out it's quite difficult to bring yourself to kill other human beings.

Granted that Sgt Kirkland was functioning in a very different military world and I'm seeing his actions through the lens of my own training and experience but what still strikes me is that he transcended the military enculturation to dehumanize the enemy and offered aid. He even rose above a soldier's practical assessment: Union soldiers he aided on that field might very well come back to kill him and his comrades.

Hm. Laying it all out like that, I now begin to wonder if Sgt Kirkland wasn't, more than anything else, just a failure in the Confederacy's military training.

By: toby

toby — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:19:43 +0000

Tim, Northern Ireland has followed a similar process to Namibia. There is great loss and melancholy under the surface as people have had to confront the murderers of their families being released and even getting elected to office. There have been cases of victims and their aggressors meeting publicly, sometimes in the glare of TV lights, to reconcile. It is easy to be cynical about these meetings, but at least one is usually well intentioned.

The general sentiment seems to be “No one wants to go back to the Troubles” and each side has gained just about enough to keep them quiescent. I remember a very learned professor saying back in the 1970s “The problem in Northern Ireland is that there is no solution”. But there was, or maybe there was no solution then … some things just had to be worked through, unfortunately mostly by those who willed the violence to continue.

I wonder was this the sentiment in the USA after 1876: the North had preserved the Union, the South had won a victory for States Rights (1876) – there was enough for everyone to feel they could move on …. except the blacks who were sacrificed to make the “reconciliation”.

Something similar happened after the Boer War in South Africa. The British had gone to war ostensibly (as one of their war aims) to improve the lot of the blacks. However, having won they war, they gradually abridged the rights of blacks, even in paces like the Cape, in order to draw the former independent Boers into the Union of South Africa.

By: Will Hickox

Will Hickox — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:20:48 +0000

Few people will want to hear this kind of thing, and you, Kevin, probably already know it, but I've recently read an article (not by a historian, but referencing many primary sources) which questions the validity of the whole Kirkland story. Apparently the earliest reference occurs in a letter to a newspaper written by Gen. Kershaw in the 1880s, and Kershaw doesn't mention it anywhere else. The article's author wondered why nobody at the time wrote about Kirkland's act, which would have been witnessed by thousands of men on the relatively small battlefield of Marye's Heights. There are also apparently some pretty obvious literary devices in the Kershaw account.

By: Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:52:40 +0000

I agree with you, Peter. That's not to say that we can't find significant meaning in Kirkland's actions. Again, I think our obsession with the Kirkland is more a reflection of our need to celebrate the war rather than an interest in coming to terms with its brutality. I think Andrea gets at the core of our collective memory re: this story when she distinguishes between the soldier who fought and killed and the human being who reached out to his enemy. I disagree with this distinction. The challenge is in understanding how we can both kill and provide succor to the enemy.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:31:53 +0000

I'm not convinced that Kirkland transcended being a soldier. Part of being a soldier means killing, but as 19th century Americans understood it, being a soldier also entailed human conduct towards noncombatants. Not to diminish the risk of Kirkland's actions, but what he did would seem to fit within what he understood “soldier” to mean.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:12:22 +0000

I think one of the more gripping things about Kirkland does not disregard that he was a soldier and therefore killed; it is that he rose above that for a transcendant time. Before that, he fought and killed and after that, he doubtless fought and killed again. But for a few hours he was a human being again instead of a soldier.

By: Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 19:35:29 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Tim. You said: “I, for one, do not find it as difficult to imagine that someone who had killed and would kill again might himself needing to reaffirm his humanity.” That sentence perfectly captures what I am trying to get at. We interpret Kirkland as engaging in a selfless act that functions in a bubble that is divorced from the rest of the battle/war as well as his own personal experience of having contributed to all the bloodletting.

By: Tim Abbott

Tim Abbott — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:41:55 +0000

Great post, Kevin. National reconciliation is a confounding thing, alright. During my years in Namibia, just after its independence from South Africa and again several years later, I watched both that new nation and South Africa grapple with how to acknowledge the past while moving forward. This happened at all levels of society: in South Africa's case with a novel experiment in a process of Truth and Reconciliation, while in Namibia with a “live and let live” approach to nation building. I met people who were still living in the same village with those who had brutalized and oppressed them, including with black Namibians who had served with the South African “anti terrorist” paramilitary police force Koevoet, and I could not understand how those they oppressed managed to set their grievances aside and coexist. One woman in particular who had lost her husband in a firefight between insurgents and the army in which he had been a noncombatant that broke out in there village, and who had herself been crippled during torture, told me simply and directly that she doesn't forget these things but has to go forward.

Some history is lost and distorted in that process, but lives continue. The challenge for historians generations after this process has become myth instead of direct experience is not merely to debunk but to look at someone like Kirkland both on his own terms and in terms of the symbolic need that drives how his story became mythologized. I, for one, do not find it as difficult to imagine that someone who had killed and would kill again might himself needing to reaffirm his humanity. The truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa has heard from many such people. Killer angels, indeed…