'Great' Gen an' Their 'Good' War

'Great' Gen an' Their 'Good' War
By Jason Stout

"Don't believe that crap, kid, that they talk about the war. Don't you believe it. You're either scared shit or bored shit -- that's war."

A man named Marty Ring told me that, about 36 years ago. Marty was a combat veteran who'd lived through D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge -- a big, funny, deep-eyed, edgy New Yorker, he looked a little like Zero Mostel. After the war he did some scriptwriting in the early days of live TV until he was blacklisted for being a "red" -- which in his case meant that he wasn't afraid to criticize the government of the United States. He had fought and been willing to die for his country and for humanity, but that didn't matter during the McCarthy era; all that mattered was that he had exercised his liberty as a free human being, and that this exercise of liberty wasn't approved of in official circles. So at about the age of 40 he was working two jobs to make ends meet, paying a price he would not have had to pay if his generation had taken the Constitution seriously.

We worked at adjacent desks as typists in a Manhattan office. He never made a sob story of what had happened to him, at least not to me, and in that context I often think of something else Marty said one day when the headlines were especially terrible: "Not enough tears, kid -- there's not enough tears for all the hurting in this world. Don't start crying. You'll never stop."

Marty and I lost touch 30 years ago, and if he's still alive he's got to be 80-ish now, but I've never forgotten his gruff wisdom, and lately I've been thinking about him a lot. For now the Great American Myth Machine is busy selling an image of something his generation never was and, for the most part, never pretended to be: in Tom Brokaw's now-famous phrase, "the greatest generation."

It started with Steven Spielberg's 1998 film Saving Private Ryan -- a very great film for its first 20 minutes or so, and a pretty good melodrama for the remainder of its footage. During Ryan's gruesomely accurate portrayal of the D-Day landing, watching what those men went through I found myself saying to them, aloud (but softly), "Thank you, thank you, thank you," over and over. It felt almost like praying. Like all soldiers in all wars, the bad wars as well as the "good" wars -- and like all soldiers on all sides of all wars, the bad side as well as the good side -- here were common people, most of them very young, from all strata and ways of life, thrust into an unspeakable hell, surviving or dying more by chance than by individual effort, and somehow getting the job done; or, in the case of the Germans that same day, not getting the job done; men dependent, in those moments, upon a mix of their own courage, their country's resources, their commander's decisions, and what used to be called "the fortunes of war." Given the issues of the Second World War, I feel a deep gratitude and obligation to the Allied soldiers who fought it -- but not an obligation to buy a lie. We don't honor those veterans when we pretend that one generation of soldiers is much different from or greater than another; nor do we honor them when we forget that any war, even their "good" war, is anything but the culmination of a massive amount of mistakes, mistakes by all sides, mistakes cascading into one Great Mistake that makes unavoidable the horrid sacrifice of untold numbers of souls.

For Nazi Germany did not arise and flourish in a vacuum. In 1914, another war began, the First World War, in which no side was any worse or better than the other; in fact, their systems of government and commerce were so much alike that to this day no one's made sense of why such slaughter took place -- or why, at the end of that war, for nothing but pure spite (and profit), the Allies intentionally created a situation of chaotic brutal poverty in Germany. Out of that chaos rose Nazism. Those Germans who enthusiastically accepted Hitler are absolutely responsible for the results of their choice; but that does not lessen the responsibility of the Allies -- France and England primarily, with the United States happy to tag along -- who created the conditions that made Nazism possible. But to this day our culpability is not a part of America's historical memory.

And there is another, perhaps even deeper, aspect of the Great Mistake that became the Second World War and is a primary ingredient for all wars. In Henry Miller's Remember to Remember (1947), Miller quotes from a novel by his friend Alfred Perles called The Renegade, published in 1943. The novel's narrator is reciting to a woman some banal views about the war that is raging all around them, but she cuts him off. This is what she tells him: "You have not yet begun living your own life, and it is important to live one's own life ... It may sound cruel, and I daresay it is not altogether your own fault, but the fact remains that you are personally responsible for the war to the extent that you have not lived your own life: the sum total of innumerable pasts like yours has to bear the responsibility for the catastrophe. It is no use pleading that you never hated anybody, that you had always kept clear of any direct activities that led up to the unavoidability of the war. That is not enough. Your great fault, which you share with the vast majority of men, was to lead a wrong life."

A wrong life. That is, a life not truly one's own: an imitative life, a life that goes along, a life that accepts a generalized definition (which no one is accountable for) of what life should be, instead of discovering and sacrificing for a life that is an expression of your own soul. When one person fails to live his or her own true life, it is a personal tragedy; when millions fail to do it, they become merely a mass, a tectonic plate of population that eventually cracks against another tectonic plate of population to create the earthquake that is war: the culmination of a massive amount of personal mistakes, a massive number of unlived lives, that are then stripped to their essences by the result of all their unlivedness -- a result we call "war." And when this unlivedness finally manifests as war, no one can stand against it, all are swept up by it, for as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "War is a contagion."

The "good" war was not good; it was, like any war, the result of a massive unlivedness, a shared deadness, that had to result in organized mass murder (war) to manifest its deadness and shock the world back into some sort of life.

Which is why that war was referred to by its survivors, almost as soon as it was over, as "the best years of our lives." A horrible irony. People were swept out of their unlived-yet-alive lives into something that seemed greater than themselves, though it was only the culmination of all their choices. And, swept so violently from the humdrumness they'd succumbed to, they felt finally alive -- for a little while.

But the "greatest generation" came back from their war to create what? The suburbs. The corporate world. The McCarthy era. The TV commercial (the broadcast of millions of lies a day that has become our environment). The nuclear arms race. The abdication of the Constitution (which invests only Congress with the power to declare war) that allowed mere presidents to commit the country to new wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq. The economic colonization of Latin America that's condemned millions to gross poverty. It's not a pretty legacy. The "greatest generation" emerged from their war far more frightened, far more desirous of false security, and far easier to manipulate than when they went into battle. Most of them lapsed right back into their unlivedness. They sold their heritage of liberty to any huckster who could offer an illusion of safety -- and so created a land where no one feels safe. And no one feels safe because so many people are still living an unlivedness -- which means that we will fight another big war one day, perhaps soon, to expiate our sense of helplessness. (That's what the Bush-Cheney administration is all about, baby.)

The year of Saving Private Ryan, 1998, also gave us Terrence Malick's far greater film The Thin Red Line. Few saw it, and fewer speak of it now, because Malick didn't succumb to melodrama and he had no illusions of "greatest" anything. What Spielberg showed for 20 minutes Malick showed for nearly three hours, but in much greater psychological detail. He portrayed a lot of terrified human beings who have no idea what's going on, caught in a life-and-death situation out of their control, terrified, with no choice left but to be true to themselves or not -- and most of them don't even know the choice is there, and don't want to know. They're not avenging Pearl Harbor. They're not protecting liberty. They're caught up in a catastrophe for which they take little or no responsibility, and they're scared shit. Like soldiers in all wars. And most of them want nothing but to take refuge again in a state of unlivedness that is not war but is not really peace either. And there still aren't enough tears for all the hurting in this world. end story

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