The Art of War
On this Memorial Day we take some time to reflect on books and movies that can help us better understand the experiences of soldiers at war.
As a kid I had a certain obsession with war. I suppose this is not unusual for young boys. The interest largely revolved around WWII, no doubt related to the fact that my parents had spent their teenage years under Nazi occupation and the attendant stories stoked a young imagination. I read as many books as I could find about the battles that defined the war. I built models of the P-51s and P-38s and B-17s and the aircraft carriers that shifted the balance of power in the Pacific and the tanks that did so in the European theater. My brother and I eagerly played games based on the battles of Midway and Bastogne and would employ our model tanks in pitched warfare against each other. We had bags filled with plastic soldiers that we would line up across our bedroom floor. During the summer months we would join neighbor kids in the nearby woods for daylong games of “army” where we would point our makeshift rifles at each other and declare the other person dead and out.
I would from time to time go to the nearest recruiting headquarters and get my hands on as much paraphernalia as they would let me have and decorate my room with it. I attacked the shelves of the local library that contained war books. Around this time the series “The World at War” aired and became must-viewing in our household, and we would organize our after-church Sunday evenings around viewing all 26 episodes.
The idea of battle not only appealed to my imagination, but to my nascent ideas of courage and heroism. Robert E. Lee once expressed relief that war was so horrible or else we would grow to love it too much, in part because we could discern in war clear moral purpose, but also because it awed us with its scale and displays of raw power — satisfying the “lust of the eye.” In 7th grade I read Elie Wiesel’s Night (still on my short list of most important books I have ever read) and it deepened my conviction that the Second World War was truly a “good” war, and that good wars were the only ones America fought. Not even the specter of the Vietnam war that cast its shadow over my childhood could dissuade me.
I loved watching war movies, particularly movies about WWII. I can’t begin to count how many of these I watched in my youth. I didn’t realize that these movies told us more about the time in which they were made than they did about the war itself. I didn’t know it then, but one movie I particularly loved, Kelly’s Heroes, was a cynical and ironic look at American involvement in Vietnam that cleverly projected that cynicism back on to “the good war.” Nor did I know that The Sands of Iwo Jima was largely propaganda.
As I grew older my viewing habits became (I trust) more sophisticated. By the time Saving Private Ryan was released I realized that its “band of brothers” narrative intended to demythologize the second world war by stripping it of its larger moral overtones and geopolitical concerns, the very thing that had made stories about that war so appealing to me in my youth. Still, the movie produced its intended effect: it took all the romance and heroism out of war, replacing it with meditations on FUBAR and senseless death. Ryan stood and fought “with [and for] the only brothers I have left.” The movie left little to the imagination concerning war’s violence and tragedy, and only dimly, represented by the faded flag at the end, illuminated war’s sense of glory or moral purpose.
My thinking had already shifted long before then, largely as a result of my immersion in the literature of the first world war. As much as Wiesel’s book had convinced me that war could be good, Erich Maria Remarque’s extraordinary All Quiet on the Western Front presented me its senseless inhumanity. If WWII was “the good war,” WWI — the war to end all wars — began in my reading and imagination to replace it as the model of war, one where a civilization imploded on itself to no good end. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (one of the best books on the subject of war that I have read) and Robert Wohl’s The Generation of 1914 showed how combat soldiers could express their war experience in literary form and introduced me to the poetry of Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (the latter’s work powerfully cast into musical form in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem). Many of these young men had excitedly enlisted in an enthusiastic sense of war’s romantic adventure and subsequently suffered disillusionment on the fields of the Somme and Verdun. I found Owens’ poems especially evocative, their tone and message made more poignant by his untimely death as the war approached its conclusion. In Dolce et Decorum Est he presented us with the “ecstasy of fumbling” that accompanies putting on the gas masks that might prevent men from “guttering, choking, drowning” “as under a green sea.” And then he admonished us not to romanticize what really happened on the front lines:
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
[It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country]
In Strange Meeting Owen had a soldier meet in death the man he killed on the battlefield, only to discover their shared interests and mutual humanity; and in The Parable of The Old Man and the Young he compared the politicians of Europe to Abraham and the soldiers to Isaac; these backrow “leaders” given the opportunity to spare their son(s) and offer the ram of pride instead: “But the old man would not so, and slew his son/and half the seed of Europe, one by one.”
For the last number of years I have had the honor and privilege of teaching officers in the University of Louisville’s “Strategic Broadening Seminar for the US Army.” This thoughtful and compelling program, run by the University’s McConnell Center, encourages officers to engage in serious philosophical and historical reflection as a way of strengthening their approach to leadership. Every year I discuss with them Jonathan Shay’s incredible book Achilles in Vietnam, as good a book on combat trauma as it is as an interpretation of The Iliad. Simone Weil, in her brilliant reading of The Iliad, identified force as the poem’s main character, the all-consuming power that turns everything it touches, even those who fancy themselves as possessing it, into things. She saw The Iliad as essentially an anti-war poem; whatever virtues we think we see in men at war disguise war’s essential dehumanization. She also noted how the poem elliptically demonstrates love’s operations underneath the machinations of force, giving us the chance to rediscover our humanity in the depths of war’s violence.
The Greeks shrewdly coupled Ares, the god of war, with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In his seminal study of men in battle, The Warriors, J. Glenn Gray reflects broadly on this fact, making explicit the connection that is mostly implicit in Weil’s essay. While Gray focuses more on romantic love, Shay sees war as crudely reducing such love to the sexual act. But Shay has a great deal to say about the love between comrades and how the violent destruction of the beloved leaves a soldier adrift in a universe without any moral order or purpose. At its extreme, the bereft soldier, having entered an anomic state, will go “berserk,” indifferent to life and limb.
After watching Saving Private Ryan I took a multi-decade break from watching any movie or TV show war-related. I recognized its horrors and and believed that, in any case, the costs rarely justified the rewards. When meeting with the officers, I always begin by confessing to them I have never been in the military nor seen combat duty, so I couldn't speak with any authority to their experiences. Our conversations, stripped of bellicose bravado and “thank you for your service” platitudes, demonstrate remarkable sensitivity, thoughtfulness, candor, and serious reflection on the part of the officers. They bring to Shay’s book experience that teases out many of his meanings that would have otherwise remained hidden to me, while his book could help them make sense of their own combat experiences. The book also makes us realize that the deepest and most real experiences of men in battle aren’t altered by technology: loss and violence remain at war’s core. But neither does technology completely prevent soldiers from performing acts of valor. The drapery of civilization torn down, their war experiences allow the bright light of truth to illuminate their condition and ours. How do we justify the things we do, particularly when such things might otherwise seem morally suspect? Maybe most importantly, by getting to know the officers I am able to see the lives of soldiers more multi-dimensionally and to appreciate them as persons in their own right.
For those of us not on the front lines we do well to remember that our nods to service shouldn’t clear our consciences or blind us to the enduring horrors of war. We get to feel good about ourselves without having to deal with war’s trauma and continued undoing of personality — a central theme of Shay’s book. Our rote expressions of gratitude shield us from the sheer brutality of the enterprise. But neither do we allow ourselves to appreciate fully the sense of duty and obligation, as well as acts of love and courage, that men and women in battle can express, or allow such expression to shape our own lives. Part of Shay’s argument in both Achilles in Vietnam and his subsequent Odysseus in America is that we do a poor job reintegrating soldiers back into civilian life because we don’t allow their stories and experiences to inform our own. We keep them forever at arm’s length because we don’t want to know the full truth of what kinds of creatures we are and what we are capable of — both for better and for worse.
I was reminded of this when, having lifted my moratorium, I recently (on my son’s recommendation) watched both Masters of the Air and Band of Brothers. These series, like Saving Private Ryan, take the narrower narrative approach, until the discovery of concentration camps broadens the combatants’ perspective on war’s purpose, but not fully. Within the contracted structure we see, in Masters of the Air, bombers going on missions of suspect strategic advantage flying into walls of flak and sitting defenseless against the German fighters buzzing around them. We’re not sure if we are witnessing courage or foolishness. In Band of Brothers, many of the soldiers find within themselves qualities of commitment to duty and self-sacrifice to others they may never fully recapture again in civilian life. War won’t leave them untouched, but will it leave them transformed, and if so, how? Shay argues that the combat soldiers find themselves unable to reintegrate into civilian life, not only because of things undone but more importantly an inability to come to grips with the things they had done, introducing a split within the self that resists being made whole. This destruction of personality, Shay demonstrates, is the real price of war.
The battlefields belong to the dead buried on them in graves either marked or no, but for the living the sacrifices of personality endure. It is well that we remember the dead, but at least equally important that we remember the living and commit ourselves to making their stories part of ours. This means allowing the fullness of their stories, not a slimmed-down shined-up and falsified version, to inform us. According to USO statistics, combat soldiers since 9/11 are four times more likely to die by their own hand than they are by an enemy’s. On average, one veteran commits suicide every hour in this country. Addressing the causes of these preventable deaths, including resisting the use of military force except where absolutely necessary, may be our most important focus on Memorial Day.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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