Champion the Enemy’s Need
by Kim Stafford

Ask about your enemy's wounds and scars.
Seek his hidden cause of trouble.
Feed your enemy's children.
Learn their word for home.

Repair their well.
Learn their sorrow's history.
Trace their lineage of the good.
Ask them for a song.

Make tea. Break bread.

Kim Stafford, “Champion the Enemy’s Need” from Wild Honey, Tough Salt. Copyright © 2019 by Kim Stafford. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Red Hen Press, www.redhen.org. (buy now)

The first Computed Tomography scan was performed on a patient on this date in 1971. It's also known as a CT scan or sometimes a CAT scan, for Computed Axial Tomography. A CT scan produces images of cross-sections or "slices" of the human body. It makes it possible for doctors to examine the soft tissues of the body, which are difficult to see with traditional X-rays. In 1971, the scanner took about five minutes to capture a single slice, and it took a couple of hours to produce a single image from the raw data. Today's scanners can capture multiple slices and return images, all in under a second.

The first diagnostic scan was performed at Atkinson Morley's Hospital in London, and the first patient was a woman who was suspected of having a tumor in her frontal lobe. The scan — quite blurry by today's standards — revealed what appeared to be a mass. When surgeons opened up the woman's skull, one of them remarked that it looked exactly like the picture. The CT scan had proved its usefulness.

Partial credit for the development of the CT scanner is due the Beatles, according to British radiologist Ben Timmis. That's because the band's recording label, EMI, heavily funded the research of the CT's inventor, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield. Because the Beatles sold so many records and made so much money for EMI, Hounsfield was able to devote four years of full-time work to the development of a commercial CT machine, which was called the EMI-Scanner.

The first-ever World Series game was played on this date in 1903. The Pittsburgh Pirates were playing versus the Boston Americans. Pittsburgh won the first game with a score of seven to three, but in the end, Boston won four games in a row to take the contest five games to three. Because it was an informal and voluntary arrangement between the two clubs, there were no plans to repeat it, and so there was no World Series in 1904. But by 1905, the World Series became formally established by both leagues and became an annual — and compulsory — event.

Today is the birthday of social historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin (books by this author), born in Atlanta, Georgia (1914). He wasn't a historian by training; he studied law at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. He didn't write about major battles and political events, but about social and intellectual history, and the daily experiences of ordinary people. His personal and professional hero was Edward Gibbon, another amateur historian who had published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century. Boorstin was quite proud of his own lack of formal education in history, because he wasn't constricted by rules. His only qualification, he said, was his love of the subject.

When he was appointed Librarian of Congress in 1975, several senators asked him to give up his writing. He refused, but assured them that he wouldn't write "on the job." So he wrote in the evenings, and on weekends, and got up every morning at 4:30 and wrote until he went to the library at 9 a.m. One of his first acts as Librarian of Congress was to demand that the library's imposing bronze doors be left standing wide open. "They said it would create a draft," he recalled later, "and I replied, 'Great — that's just what we need.'"

It’s the birthday of William Timothy O’Brien (books by this author), better known as Tim O’Brien, born in Austin, Minnesota (1946). When he was seven, the family moved to the “turkey capital of the world” — Worthington, Minnesota. O’Brien grew up there, on the shores of Lake Okabena, and part of his book The Things They Carried (1990) was set there.

O’Brien studied political science at Macalester College in St. Paul; he got good grades, was elected student body president, and graduated in 1968. The summer he graduated, he was served with a draft notice for the Vietnam War. He was against the war, and had participated in protests. Before he had to report, he spent some time in northern Minnesota, near the Canadian border, and he thought about dodging the draft. “My conscience kept telling me not to go,” he later wrote, “but my whole upbringing told me I had to.”

He served in the 23rd Infantry Division. Before he arrived in Vietnam, a platoon from the same division had carried out the My Lai massacre, but O’Brien and his fellow soldiers didn’t find out until later. He said: “I arrived in Vietnam roughly a year after the massacre happened. And I was assigned just by serendipity to a unit battalion that had the Pinkville area, the My Lai area. And so a good portion of my tour, I was walking through these villages where this horrible atrocity occurred prior to my arrival to Vietnam. And part of our fear [...] had to do with the hostility that you could read on the faces of the people there, even among the little children.”

When he returned home, he went to graduate school at Harvard, and was one of few vets there at that time. He left Harvard for an internship at The Washington Post, and while there, he wrote several articles about the war, which he later collected and published as a memoir in 1973. That book was called If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. His next book, Northern Lights (1975), was a novel about two brothers, one of whom went to Vietnam while the other did not.

O’Brien’s most famous book, a collection of linked short stories about the war, is The Things They Carried (1990). The stories blur the line between fiction and memoir; they feature a character named “Tim O’Brien” — but O’Brien the author insists it’s a work of fiction. He wrote: “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” The Things They Carried was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

From The Things They Carried (1990):

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®