What About the Arrow-maker?

An old Indian tale helped me understand D-Day

I’ve written about writing a story dealing with D-Day. It began as something kind of silly, a bit of erotica. How can a soldier have a bit of nookie in the middle of a battle, I wondered. What might flow from that?

I’ve been writing that damn story for a year now. I got bogged down in the research. So many hard to grasp things about soldiers and battle and their equipment and what the hell they were trying to do.

I got pulled down one rabbit hole after another, trying to understand some detail and turning to a book or a website to grasp it, and then finding that I needed to know something else and had to look up a technical term, or download a map of Omaha Beach, and just getting sucked into this enormous time-sink.

One thing puzzled me.

In book after book, the historian would describe events on one part of the invasion beach and note that at exactly the same time on exactly the same bit of sand, another group would be doing something similar, and yet afterwards the survivors being interviewed would each profess complete ignorance of the activities of those who must have only been a few metres away.

WTF?

It made no sense to me. These people were clever, brave, resourceful — hell, they survived, didn’t they? — and yet ignorant of the activities of others close by. If you were threading a Bangalore torpedo — and it was a struggle for me to work that one out, let me tell you! — through the barbed wire, then surely you’d notice if someone else was doing the same thing right beside you?

You’d work together, do a better job, have a greater chance of survival in teamwork. That’s what being a soldier is all about, yeah?

But they didn’t. Writer after writer described similar situations. These guys must have all had their heads up their bums, I finally decided.

The story of the arrow-maker

There’s an Indian tale about an arrow-maker. It’s part of my tradition, and it teaches a valuable lesson.

In a bit of serendipity, when I went looking for a website so that I could copy the tale, I found that there were two quite different stories with the same title, each part of an Indian tradition. Two different traditions; one in South Asia, one in North America. Anyway, here goes my version:

A long time ago in a land far far away, a traveler came to a village. It was full of life and bustle and people going about their business. The traveler heard a commotion in the distance and looked to see a noisy, colourful wedding procession making its way down the street, all music and chanting, elephants and extravagant costumes, laughter and flowers.

He stood back from the street to let the procession go by, and noticed that he was beside the stall of an arrow-maker, who was working on making an arrowhead. So intent was the craftsman at his work that he did not bother to look up when an elephant gave a mighty trumpet right beside him. Everybody clapped their hands over their ears and laughed at the noise, but the arrowmaker did not move.

After the procession had passed, the traveler asked the arrow-maker, who had finished his arrowhead and was taking up a fresh one, why he had not flinched at the elephant.

“Was there an elephant?” the man responded. “I did not notice. I was making the point of the arrowhead, and that takes all my attention, because it must be perfect.”

Each at the finest point of focus

Mystery solved. If you are totally focused on some fine detail, you might not notice something else that is unimportant to your job. You do the work with every grain of your attention, get it done right, and then look up, “What’s next?”

And of course there must have been noise and distractions on Omaha Beach. Poke your head up and it will get shot off. Do the work, get through the wire, get moving off the sand, don’t worry about anything else but the job right there at the tip of your nose.

I should listen to the old stories more often. All the books and webpages with pictures and diagrams about landing craft or battalions or Bangalore bloody torpedoes, and a key point was in an ancient philosophical story.

Britni

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