Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Quotes

“Other men may thrill to the sight of Old Glory rippling in the breeze, but for me the library was a better symbol of what I had taken up arms to defend.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Humans have no monopoly on grief. Dolphins carry their dead on their backs for days. Giraffes refuse to eat. Elephants cry. Whit carried the dead on his back for years. For life. I’ll carry him on my flightless wings always.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“I died when I was little more than two years old, on June 13, 1919, there in the Signal Corps lofts at Camp Vail, New Jersey. One week after Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which would eventually recognize the right of women to vote. Pigeons do not vote, but as a female being I felt a degree of investment in the fortunes of other females.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“I knew I could count on President Wilson to refrain from pious claptrap. “Human beings,” he said, millet crunching in his beak, “seem powerfully invested in the notion that suffering improves or ennobles the sufferer. This is, of course, childish nonsense.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“By showing me to the injured men, the army told them, This fluffy, cooing thing with its wooden leg is what the public will know of the ravages of war. Your task is to remain unseen. By showing me to the public, the army told them, War is a game, and its costs are light enough to be borne by even this little bird. The burgeoning American empire demanded sacrifices; my job was to help make them acceptable, even entertaining. In that limited and perverted sense, I continued to function as a messenger pigeon.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“By showing me to the injured men, the army told them, This fluffy, cooing thing with its wooden leg is what the public will know of the ravages of war. Your task is to remain unseen. By showing me to the public, the army told them, War is a game, and its costs are light enough to be borne by even this little bird. The burgeoning American empire demanded sacrifices; my job was to help make them acceptable, even entertaining.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“We soldiers learned vigilance until our technique was flawless and thoughtless; we learned it or we died. But then what? Once we’d ingrained it so deeply as to make it automatic—stay alert, sleep light, trust nothing—we couldn’t unlearn it when the danger had passed.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“No one who’d actually been in the Pocket would believe the explanation, but that didn’t matter. We were symbols now, no longer in control of our own stories.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“It was a good lie, whoever had come up with it. Blaming the Germans wasn’t an option—too many incriminating duds still littered our funkholes—but since the French 75-millimeter gun was also the main field weapon of the American artillery, guilt could be plausibly shifted in that direction.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Honors ennoble those on whom they’re bestowed, but they also ease the guilt of those whose commands made them necessary in the first place. A medal is a mirror, reflecting a glory that we force ourselves to believe in.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“The French children carried Baby Mine and me in our basket through the candlelit street to the church. While I was as mystified as ever by human religion and its tendency to answer simple questions with long, strange stories, that night I felt almost blessed.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“I’ve learned that everything that thinks and feels,” she said, “grows by subtraction. Detachment brings perspective. Wisdom comes from letting go. It’s true for humans, too, but most of them seem to struggle with it.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Among the men, only Whit kept his face clean-shaven; how he did it in the absence of privacy and clean water, I’ll never know. I also knew that our major kept up a strong front during the day, his cheer unflagging, but wept uncontrollably while asleep in his funkhole.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“But not a day has slipped by these past hundred years that I haven’t recollected my final flight. And now, on the eve of their centenary, here in the darkened museum—Sergeant Stubby asleep beside me, climate-controlled air sighing around us—those events replay behind these glass eyes that I can never close.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“The second encirclement would be a disaster, and it would win me commendation and international fame. It would leave my brain full—as it is now, here on the Toloa’s deck—of visions of pleading faces and ruined bodies, of phantom agonies that scour the parts of my consciousness where I once held hope for the future, like the pains that plague a maimed man where a limb’s been cut away.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“I stood looking at the men—more my men now than ever before. Their lives, if they escaped with them, would be divided forever into Before the War, the War, and After, and between those divisions would stretch psychic no-man’s-lands as desolate as any in France.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Munson was a member of the unit to which Corporal Gault assigned me after I flew my tenth mission back home to Rampont, a unit that would soon be known throughout the world as part of the Lost Battalion. That summer it was still simply the 1st Battalion of the 308th Regiment of the United States Army’s 77th Infantry Division, under the command of newly minted Major Charles White Whittlesey.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“I immediately understood that all our training—the rehearsal of thoughts and actions, the merging of individual identities into a coordinated and interdependent force—was done in anticipation of this very moment, to stanch the fundamental impulse to flee from such terror. We smelled that death—perhaps the death of civilization—and we kept moving toward it, thereby becoming something more and less than human.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“After the woods our good cheer was quelled by the faint first whiff of a real battlefield, a gagging combination of shit and gunpowder, gas and blood, decaying flesh and muddy rot.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“While our fellow pigeons did not regard bonds between hens as unnatural, the humans who kept us certainly seemed to—and in any case such a pairing could serve no human purpose, as it would yield no champion racers, no progeny at all. While I preferred to think of us as the humans’ partners and collaborators—and we were; I wasn’t wrong—we were also their property and their tools. What did I expect?”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Unlike some species—crows, cowbirds, cuckoos—pigeons are not vengeful. But some part of me was eager to take to the air on behalf of these slaughtered birds, if not to avenge their deaths then to fly for the side that hadn’t committed such an atrocity.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Whenever they occupied Belgian or French territory, the Germans would order all pigeons in the region destroyed.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“I had a spot on one of the open lower decks, jammed with men, but my height granted me a view of the Statue of Liberty receding in the golden light, a sentimental sight that nevertheless provoked my sentiments. How many crimes, I wonder now—how many blunders worse than crimes—get committed in her name?”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Later, on the battlefield, I would come to see soldiers befriend the field mice and wrens who ventured into the trenches seeking morsels of food. Even the smallest creature—a spider on her web—could give a man the mercy of taking his mind off the violence raging at all hours, reminding him that the earth still retained some forms of order even within the catastrophe. Attunement with another creature feels magical, a brief stay against dread. It’s true for humans, and it’s true for us pigeons.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“My youthful excursions into socialism had fostered sympathy for the workers of the world but had given precious little guidance when it came to encountering them in person.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Throughout the war I looked back on that evening at the Harvard Club with great fondness, recalling it as the moment when I found my footing among the officers and struck up some of my truest friendships. But then the Pocket tainted my nostalgia, as it tainted everything else.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“I ceased to find the prospect of becoming a manful-man repugnant. When manifested in football and fraternity pranks, this roughhousing seemed stupid and shallow, but now that it was for ideals that I could admire, I saw the appeal.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“The intricacies of contracts and the evolving stringency of the rules governing banks absorbed and grounded me, even as my entanglements with men—queer men, as Felix taught me to say—gave my body and heart the occasional flight.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“I compensated for my athletic deficiency with an upright bearing and an impeccable style of dress that earned me the nickname “the Count”—one bestowed with affection, as I was good-humored about my own foibles.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Laconic” and “sarcastic,” as the men in my regiment would later invariably describe me. Classic New England.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey