COLUMN: Remembering Silence

From Mark Tonsetic's "Java Daze," Fall '94 A scattering of students file past the reviewing stand with the shiny exuberance of liberated youth. They will soon leap to join the band of soldiers that will end all wars. They carry with them the liberties that are theirs by birth, and the principles that are theirs by education. Marshal Joffre, who has seen war devour his nation, feels himself swept by the enthusiasm and ideals of the crowd of 20,000 that has come to hear him speak. The band strikes up an unexpected round of the "Marseillaise," and the marshal lets a tear fall for his past, this present, and their future. May, 1919. The crowd seems a still shell of what it was, or what it might have been: all around rings the silence of not only noise, but belief. Faith and thought have been left engraved on the walls of the Quad: Alexander Balfour. Earle Schuyler Barker. Leslie Carter Bemis. Knox Boude Birney. William Bispham Black. Edward Benjamin Goward. Henry Howard Houston II. John Lawrence Layton. Howard Clifton McCall. Clark Brockway Nichol. Frederic B. Prichett. Hilary Baker Rex. Harold St. George Taylor. Emanuel R. Wilson. Van Horne D. Wolfe. On the walls they forever remain the "Sons of Pennsylvania." December 9, 1941. The University of Pennsylvania's Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps, organized the previous year, assembles for its annual Mess Night Banquet. It is normally a riotous affair, full of grog, legend, and that special camaraderie that belongs to the sea. Today it is somber, and the midshipmen eat in muffled silence. The fleet at Pearl Harbor has suffered virtual annihilation, and reports from the West Coast are still scattered. The admiral that addresses them speaks of war, and wonders who will return for homecoming. His generation knows that no distance can break the bonds of principle learned here -- all another admiral can remark the following year is, "Tell these men that I am proud of them. Tell them just that. I am damn proud of them." April, 1945. The Class of 1945 sets its Ivy Day stone in the back of Houston Hall. It is inscribed with an empty helmet and the Latin epitaph, "Vivere militare est." The class is the first since 1865 for whom college has witnessed uninterrupted war. The ceremony is marked with the requisite speeches and songs, but what sounds loudest is the silence. The silence of three-year graduates still fighting in the Pacific; of roommates who traded their textbooks for an enlistment contract; of classmates vanished in places their fathers used to ramble on about in memory. The displacement has been such that nothing save an empty helmet can be engraved. Still, a sense persists that the Class of 1945 has brought about a new world. Life is a battle, but it is one for which the principles of the United States and Ben Franklin's University have fought and won. November, TKTKTKTKTKTK 1952. The task of determining the exact price paid by the University in the last war is deemed too herculean for the best archivists. Philanthropist Walter Annenberg offers to construct a silent memorial as an alternative tribute, slightly northwest of Franklin Field. Half a world away an indeterminate number of University graduates fight across the 38th Parallel. November, 1964. The ideals of 1917 resurface. This time though, they have split like battling twins on College Green. Red-faced exuberance is now scarlet anger in the faces of marchers as they prepare to lead a sit-in at College Hall and erect a peace symbol outside the library. The ideals of Ben Franklin will lead others to brave the Mekong Delta and the hell that ensues there. The University is consumed in near-chaos, and the delta consumes Thomas Judd Ellis, along with scores of untold others. The war ends not with a bang but a whimper, and falls silent everywhere but memory. November 11, 1994. Nine days from now, the University will conduct a moment of silence for its children -- students, faculty, and staff -- who took what they learned here among us and invested it in a dangerous world with the force of their lives. The Class of 1995 is fundamentally different from those of 1917, 1945, 1952, and 1964. Yet whatever the state of our world and the role of our armed forces in it, we cannot ignore the sacrifices we inherit by virtue of our membership in the Penn community. Veterans' Day reminds us that we take here, we take and fight for in the wide world. At the War Memorial nine days from now, we remember that if education and ideals survive no further than a job interview, they remain a mishmash of trivia and platitudes. They are even more so, should we ignore the history of our forefathers at Penn, and the history of their silence. The class of 1995's history of silence remains to be written. At 11 a.m. on November 11, at the University of Pennsylvania War Memorial, let us remember. Mark Tonsetic is a senior International Relations and Economics major from Winter Springs, Florida. Java Daze appears alternate Wednesdays.