Advice from a Patriot

“But they should have kept at home, we should then never have gone after them to kill them in their own country.” [1]  American Revolutionary war soldier Joseph Plumb Martin on dead Hessian invaders killed at the Battle of White Plains fought October 28, 1776.

Enlisting when he was 15 years old in 1776 with the Connecticut regulars, Joseph Plumb Martin served seven years during the American Revolutionary War.  Martin wrote his memoirs, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier, in 1830.[2]

In 1776, Martin fought in the battle of White Plains in New York.  Two years later he was stationed in the same area and visited the graves of some of the fallen:

“…I, with some of my comrades who were in the battle of the White plains in the year ‘76, one day took a ramble on the ground where we were then engaged with the British and took a survey of the place.” [3]

While looking at the graves, Martin’s conscience bothered him, and he felt regret for the Hessians killed, whom he viewed as just as human as his dead American friends:

“We saw a number of the graves of those who fell in that battle; some of the bodies had been so slightly buried that the dogs or hogs, or both, had dug them out of the ground.  The sculls and other bones, and hair were scattered about the place.  Here were Hessian sculls as thick as a bomb shell;—poor fellows! they were left unburied in a  foreign land;—they had, perhaps, as near and dear friends to lament their sad destiny as the Americans who lay buried near them.” [4]

Today the tables are turned: American soldiers are not fighting invaders on American soil to gain their liberty, instead Americans slaughter civilians in foreign lands to “keep us safe.”[5]  American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, while not in red coats, nor buried in shallow graves in a foreign land, are the invaders, and many decent Americans are dying in far off lands, as did the Hessians Martin fought over two hundred years ago.

Today the tables are turned: our representatives do not boldly proclaim their actions to the world with a Declaration of Independence, instead the US government hides behind a cloak of secrecy, jailing those who would dare tell the world what the US government does in foreign lands.  On July 5th, 2010, the US military jailed Army Specialist  Bradley Manning  in Kuwait on charges that he leaked a classified video showing a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists, and seriously wounded children.

Joseph Plumb Martin, an American Patriot, has good advice for all Americans when he considers the Hessians buried at White Plains:

“But, the reader will say, they were forced to come and be killed here; forced by their rulers who have absolute power of life and death over their subjects.  Well then, reader, bless a kind Providence that has made such a distinction between your condition and theirs.  And be careful too that you do not allow yourself ever to be brought to such an abject, servile and debased condition.” [6]

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[1] Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier, Signet Classic, 2001, pp 116.

[2] Martin’s memoirs were originally published anonymously as A narrative of some of the adventures, dangers, and sufferings of a Revolutionary soldier, interspersed with anecdotes of incidents that occurred within his own observation.

[3] Martin, p. 116.

[4] Martin, p. 116.

[5] “Wikileaks Soldier Reveals Orders for "360 Rotational Fire" Against Civilians in Iraq,” By Ralph Lopez, June 17, 2010, (Accessed at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Wikileaks-Soldier-Reveals-by-Ralph-Lopez-100616-298.html on July 6, 2010).

[6] Martin, pp. 116-117.