Soldiers — celebrated with soaring hosannas that foster myths once war is over — have been treated by their commanders for much of history as what in now known as “cannon fodder.” Military personnel, during most of the world’s great wars were issued no IDs, so identification of the dead, was chancy. Identification tags, weren’t issued until sometime in 1914.
Several days ago in The New York Times, Alex Rosenberg, professor and Philosophy Department chairman at Duke University, posed a sharply argued defense of “the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge” – superior to other theoretical endeavors, say, literary theory and most certainly myth. While his paean to rationality is provocative and instructive — and valuable at this moment in history — its exclusivity prompts an immediate common-knowledge refutation: The dramatically apparent reality that we are not rational animals — as a brief and candid survey by any person of his/her past shows. National and world history clearly illustrates this — including current political events in the United States and Mexico.
And great myths — the great human heritage of cultural tradition — Plato, Confucius, Buddha, Goethe and many others — speaks “to the eternal values that have to do with the centering of our lives and the underlying ethos of our culture” one historian has noted. Even as we deny them, myths appeal to us, populate our lives. The wisest of such myths constitute the glue that helps hold societies together. Yet others — some of which die after a moment of misconceived inspiration — wound cultures mesmerized by them. Those that have proved most cohering are stories that enlarge us. And enthusiasm for the vast and enlarging benefits of science needn’t exclude giving space to the utility of mythology, which can instruct individuals about their own lives. “It’s a great, exciting, life-nourishing subject that has to do with the stages of life, initiation rituals from childhood to adult responsibilities, from the unmarried state to marriage. These are mythological rites.”But when myths are misconceived they become destructive, gnaw away at the best of national life, the best accomplishments of any true national hero.
George Washington is greatly admired even though the mythology that has gown up about him reveals defects. “He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician,” it has been said more than once; not a gifted orator; not an intellectual. He showed indecision and mistaken judgments at critical moments. Lacking much education, he relied on experience as a tutor. It was Washington who gave the Revolutionary army of farmers and storekeepers determination at desperate moments. As he awaited help from a parsimonious congress and from negotiations with France for aid, he wrote officers — and congress — calling for “perseverance” “patience and perseverance,” for “perseverance and courage.” He had the luck of being unafraid in battle. Benjamin Franklin’s wise, if desperate, negotiations in Paris finally brought French soldiers to aid the colonies, its fleet to block British reinforcements, enabling the 1781 American victory at Yorktown.
And, very much like some Revolutionary engagements — and those of Abraham Lincoln’s civil war — the dead often simply disappeared — during battles, hasty retreats, surrenders, hurried victories. There was no way of identifying most bodies left behind. If someone were killed in action and the body not recovered quickly, there could be no chance of identifying the remains. Rapid decomposition was an obvious problem; equally as bad was the practice of looting the dead for any valuables — weapons, personal items, clothing — not only by victors, but by local civilian populations. Soldiers had no strong incentive to keep detailed records of enemy dead, and bodies were frequently hastily buried in shallow, often mass, graves, the locations of which were often obliterated. Such remains might not be found for years, if ever.
Such were the circumstances during and after the September 12-13, 1847, battle between U.S. and Mexican troops on Chapultepec Hill, the entryway to Mexico City. As U.S. troops rushed up the hill, Mexico’s army commander, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, in the process of losing some 1,800 men, began retreating, leaving Mexico’s capital unprotected. Sporadic fighting took place the next morning. But by midday, U.S. troops entered Mexico City. Behind both armies left a battlefield scattered with the dead and dying.
Battlefields equal confusion, even after combat. Consider Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863, three months after a battle in which General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army was defeated. As Abraham Lincoln prepared to give his famous address, the dead were still being buried.
In Mexico City September 14, 1847, U.S. troops were busy occupying and maintaining order in the capital. Burial of the dead was postponed, and predatory animals, buzzards took an immediate toll — along with local leperos and the poor who scavenged the battlefield for whatever they could use or sell. When burial of the decomposing bodies was undertaken it was carried out quickly: This meant often shallow trenches into which as many bodies as possible were thrown. Identification, if any, was accidental. A body already stripped of its uniform, hard-used by insects, birds and animals offers no easy ID to unhappy burial squads. When a U.S. commission was sent to Chapultepec Hill in 1850, the site had been changed by weather, continued political upheaval and use. The commission tried to find as many bodies as possible. The bodies of Mexican forces are said to have been in separate graves. Mexican Army Colonel Manuel J. Solis was ordered in 1947 to find the bodies of the six Niños Heroes (child heroes) reportedly killed in the battle of Chapultepec Hill 100 years before. Solis entertained what some experts called a naive concept: that commission workers burying bodies of U.S. service men identified the remains of six unheard-of cadets, who died in different locations, and carefully buried them together. Solis came up with six skeletons he said were buried together.
A number of Mexican historians have questioned this, before and after the 1980s investigation and report by Mexican historian and magazine editor, Armando Ayala Anguiano. He published a 1983 report shedding doubt on Solis’ findings. Ayala wrote that Solis had no contemporary documentation, used no scientific investigation. Alaya wrote, with irony, that Solis’s six skeletons were probably those of U.S. soldiers missed by the commission. It is these remains that since 1952 have resided in the enormous monument honoring the child heroes in Chapultepec Park. He wrote, “In a certain moment ... all countries need myths. But the time also comes when these myths, no longer useful, become a harmful burden. Perhaps now the painful moment has come for us to do away with the myth of the Niños Heroes.”
No one has produced effective evidence contradicting Ayala’s report.