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War and Illusions
I'm still reading about World War Two.
This weekend, in addition to writing all the material I described in the previous entry, and beating my head against the interactive project, I read Paul Fussell's Wartime. John Keegan's The Second World War is my main book, my play-by-play; Wartime is the color commentary. I've been reading the Keegan book slowly, in fits and starts; after several weeks I have just gotten as far as the Normandy invasion. I devoured Wartime in the course of a single afternoon.
Wartime is the story of the war from someone who was there, even though Fussell never once mentions his own war experiences directly. It's a cynical book which permits neither itself nor the reader any illusions. It's clear that Fussell felt that some of his audience would find it painful to read, with its details and shocking revelations. Yet I didn't. It didn't even give me bad dreams that night (and I finished it right before going to sleep).
Thereby lies my point, but it'll take me a while to get to it.
One of the main principles in Wartime - in fact the theme of the entire book - is that the American nation did not and still does not know the true story of World War Two. As Fussell tells it, genuine information on war conditions was closely guarded, for both morale and propaganda reasons, and the size of operations often ensured that even generals and commanders didn't have an accurate picture of what was happening in the field. The infantry knew - the ones at the front, anyway - but they weren't about to tell the truth in their letters home, and most of them wouldn't talk about it when they came back. If they came back.
Fussell paints a picture of a war where the soldier was shockingly young, untrained, sometimes literally scared shitless, and extremely likely to die. The unworkable policy on field replacements (not corrected until Vietnam) meant that infantrymen knew there was no relief - they were stuck on the lines until the war ended or they were killed. Most were killed. Many went crazy. They deserted, they panicked, they shot each other, downed their own planes ... Fussell's idea of the war (and I have no reason to dispute it) is that of a comedy of errors, where blunders which cost thousands of lives are made daily through naivete, ego, or just plain stupidity, where the Allies only won because of their ability to outproduce the Axis, literally throwing warm bodies, guns, tanks, and planes at the enemy until the day was done.
Most importantly, Fussell believes that the ensuing fifty-year silence about the war has damaged us as a nation. He writes that
As experience, thus, the suffering was wasted. The same tricks of publicity and advertising [used to conceal the truth of World War Two] might have succeeded in sweetening the actualities of Vietnam if television and a vigorous uncensored moral journalism hadn't been brought to bear. America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.
James Loewen felt this paragraph was so important that he quoted it in Lies Across America. In fact, it was that quotation and recommendation that led me to buy Wartime in the first place.
The thing is, having read it and thought about it, I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion.
By whatever happy accident, the realities of Vietnam were exposed to the country, and I believe that changed the national attitudes. Not just about war; about trust. Trust of the government. Trust of the military/industrial complex. Trust in the wisdom of being the world's policeman. Trust that the Communists were always wrong. All of these things eroded rapidly, at least in those under a certain age. Fussell writes from the perspective of a man who will be seventy-six years old this year. At the risk of sounding scornful, his cultural experiences do not coincide with mine.
I was born in 1968, which makes me one of the first of the post-Vietnam babies. Oh, yes, I know how long the non-war lasted, but that hardly made an impression on my young brain. I don't remember seeing horrific images on my television screen or hearing about anything even vaguely related. For all intents and purposes, I was not aware of Vietnam in any direct way. But I felt its aftershocks.
Fussell, bless him, writes of World War Two atrocities and violence, and has the good grace to be honestly shocked by them, even all these years later. I wish I had the ability to be so shocked. To me war always has implied these things - the symbols are inextricably linked in my head. To me war means people getting skin rot from spending so many days hip deep in fetid mud and water; it means bodies blown into pieces so small that nothing can be found to identify; it means dragging your fallen buddy behind you and having his arm and sleeve come off into your hand; it means heads of captured prisoners displayed on stakes, POWs and civilians killed without remorse by both sides, napalm, firebombing. It means attrition and death and decay. It means not being able to trust "your" side any more than the enemy; it means being left by your commanders to die, or being as likely to fall to friendly fire as the other kind.
I never attributed anything graceful or noble to war in the first place. Not once. Not even as a child, not as far as I can remember.
When I wrote, a while back, that I couldn't see a cause worth dying in combat for, the Other Mary Anne wrote me a one-sentence email in reply. It said (I paraphrase):
That's why they draft eighteen-year-olds and not thirty-one-year olds.
But, you know, I felt the same way when I was eighteen.
I think that Fussell feels the way about World War Two because he had innocence to lose. I do not. At least, not when it comes to war.
I oppose combat for a very simple reason: I assume that, if I go to war, I am going to die. I do not believe that most World War Two American soldiers had that assumption, certainly not at the beginning and maybe not even later. That was their fault; they were victims of their own propaganda at the time. So it strikes me as a little unfair for Fussell to lay his bitterness at the feet of the world of today.
But what if we really haven't learned anything?
As I say, I was one of the first post-Vietnam babies. Its shadow hung over me. But what about the teenagers of today, the ones who are growing up without knowing real war of any kind? Do they still have the healthy cynicism we need them to have?
Or are they the thugs of Three Kings, in the desert to whoop it up and see something exciting and maybe even get to kill something? Fighting without any sort of moral awareness? Or are they a naive band of cherubs, assuming that nothing bad will ever happen to them just because they live a charmed life in the world's only superpower?
Either conclusion bothers me. I imagine they would bother Fussell too. I don't disagree with him on the fundamental need for the blood to be exposed. I'm just not sure that revelations of World War Two can, or would have, made that much difference.
Would an earlier revelation of the World War Two horrors have prevented us from fighting for a bad cause in Kuwait? Of course not - Kuwait was a war by and for moneyed interests.
Would they have prevented us from getting stuck in the mire of Vietnam? No - Vietnam had too much politics, too many egos in the soup, to avoid.
Would they have prevented the messy lesson the world learned in Bosnia/Serbia, that you can't prevent a war when a country is determined to tear itself apart from within? I doubt it.
In short, I am not sure that harsh truths are enough; I no longer believe that they alone convey the lessons we badly need to learn.
And I'm not entirely certain that Fussell would disagree with me.
© Columbine
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