“We search for a redemptive ending to every tragedy,” Elizabeth D. Samet writes.Illustration by Gérard DuBois
The
terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, supposedly launched a new kind
of American war, with unfamiliar foes, unlikely alliances, and
unthinkable tactics. But the language deployed to interpret this
conflict was decidedly old-school, the comfort food of martial rhetoric.
With the Axis of Evil, the menace of Fascism (remixed as
“Islamofascism”), and the Pearl Harbor references, the Second World War
hovered over what would become known as the global war on terror,
infusing it with righteousness. This latest war, President
George W. Bush said, would have a scope and a stature evoking the
American response to that other attack on the U.S. “one Sunday in 1941.”
It wouldn’t be like Desert Storm, a conflict tightly bounded in time
and space; instead, it was a call to global engagement and even to
national greatness. “This generation will lift the dark threat of
violence from our people and our future,” Bush avowed.
Elizabeth D. Samet
finds such familiarity endlessly familiar. “Every American exercise of
military force since World War II, at least in the eyes of its
architects, has inherited that war’s moral justification and been
understood as its offspring: motivated by its memory, prosecuted in its
shadow, inevitably measured against it,” she writes in “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness”
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A professor of English at West Point and
the author of works on literature, leadership, and the military, Samet
offers a cultural and literary counterpoint to the
Ambrose-Brokaw-Spielberg industrial complex of Second World War
remembrance, and something of a meditation on memory itself. It’s not
simply that subsequent fights didn’t resemble the Second World War, she
contends; it’s that the war itself does not resemble our manufactured
memories of it, particularly the gushing accounts that enveloped its
fiftieth anniversary. “The so-called greatness of the Greatest
Generation is a fiction,” she argues, “suffused with nostalgia and with a
need to return to some finest hour.” Those who forget the past may be
condemned to repeat it, but those who sentimentalize the past are
rewarded with best-seller status.
The mythology of
the Second World War features six main elements, by Samet’s tally: that
the United States joined the war in order to rid the world of tyranny
and Fascism; that “all Americans were absolutely united” in their
commitment to the fight; that “everyone” in the country sacrificed; that
Americans got into the war reluctantly and then waged it decently; that
the war was tragic but ended on a happy note; and, finally, that
“everyone has always agreed” on the first five points.
The
word choices here—“all,” “absolutely,” “everyone,” and “always”—do
stretch the myths to the point of easy refutability, but some of the
best-known popular chronicles clearly display the tendencies Samet
decries. “Citizen Soldiers,”
Stephen Ambrose’s 1997 book about Allied troops in Europe, presents the
reticence of American G.I.s in describing their motivations as a kind
of self-conscious idealism and aw-shucks humility. “They knew they were
fighting for decency and democracy and they were proud of it,” Ambrose
writes. “They just didn’t talk or write about it.” But, without such
oral or written records, can one really divine such noble impulses?
Samet dismisses Ambrose’s œuvre, including the nineteen-nineties
best-sellers, “Band of Brothers” and “D-Day,”
as “less historical analysis than comic-book thought bubble.” Obsessed
with notions of masculinity and chivalry, Ambrose indulges in “a fantasy
that American soldiers somehow preserved a boyish innocence amid the
slaughter,” she writes. If anything, the boyish innocence may belong to
Ambrose himself, who admits that he grew up venerating veterans of the
Second World War, a youthful hero worship that, Samet notes, “tends to
overwhelm the historian’s mandate.”
For a more accurate account, Samet highlights a multivolume study, “The American Soldier,”
by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer and a team of collaborators. During
the war, they studied the ideological motives of American troops, and
concluded that, “beyond acceptance of the war as a necessity forced upon
the United States by an aggressor, there was little support of attempts
to give the war meaning in terms of principles and causes.” Samet finds
this real-time depiction of a nonideological American soldier to be
credible. In the words of the military sociologist Charles C. Moskos,
who studied the motivations of soldiers in the Second World War and in
Vietnam, each man fights a “very private war . . . for his own
survival.” Or, as John Hersey put it in a later foreword to “Into the
Valley,” his narrative of U.S. marines battling on Guadalcanal, the
soldiers fought “to get the damn thing over and go home.”
Samet argues that Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie “Saving Private Ryan,”
from 1998, is “wholly unrepresentative” of Second World War attitudes
toward the individual soldier. She contrasts the 1949 film “Twelve
O’Clock High,” in which a brigadier general (played by Gregory Peck)
insists that his men place collective loyalties above personal ones.
After one pilot breaks formation, during a sortie over Nazi Europe, in
order to assist a fellow-aviator at risk of being shot down, Peck lashes
out, “You violated group integrity. . . . The one thing which is never
expendable is your obligation to this group. . . . That has to be your
loyalty—your only reason for being.” By focussing on the fate of a
single survivor, Samet writes, Spielberg’s film “effectively transforms
the conflict from one characterized by mass mobilization and modern
industrial warfare to something more old-fashioned, recalling the
heroism of ancient epics,” in which individual glories and tragedies
take narrative precedence over the wider war.
Samet is particularly harsh on Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation,”
also from 1998, with its “explicitly messianic agenda” of showing us a
cohort so packed with honor and honesty and self-sacrifice that it was,
as the newsman writes, “birthmarked for greatness.” In a section titled
“Shame,” Brokaw acknowledges the racism that was so “pervasive in
practice and in policy” in this greatest of eras, but he responds with
uplifting sketches of members of racial minorities who manage to
overcome it. (“It is my country, right or wrong,” one of them concludes.
“None of us can ever contribute enough.”) Samet dissents, stressing,
for instance, that the conflict in the Pacific, “begun in revenge and
complicated by bitter racism” against the Japanese, has been
overshadowed by the less morally troubling sagas of European liberation.
“Unity
must always prevail,” Samet writes of the war myths. “Public opinion
must turn overnight after Pearl Harbor, while the various regional,
racial, and political divisions that roiled the country must be
immediately put aside as Americans rally toward a shared cause.” A more
complicated reality emerges in Studs Terkel’s 1984 “ ‘The Good War’ ”
(the title includes quotation marks because the notion of a good war
seemed “so incongruous,” Terkel explained), an oral history that amasses
the recollections of wartime merchant marines, admirals, U.S.O.
entertainers, G.I.s, and nurses. Their views on the war span “the
sentimental and the disillusioned, the jingoistic and the thoughtfully
patriotic, the nostalgic and the dismissive,” Samet writes.
To investigate cultural attitudes toward G.I.s in the aftermath of the war, she considers such novels as John Horne Burns’s “The Gallery” (1947), in which American soldiers in Italy engage in black-market transactions with locals; and such movies as “Suddenly”
(1954), in which Frank Sinatra portrays a veteran turned contract
killer who hopes that his war record will win him sympathy. (“I’m no
traitor, Sheriff. I won a Silver Star.”) In other noir films of the era,
returning G.I.s are loners disillusioned not just with the war and the
years taken from them but also with what their country seemed to have
become in their absence: hard, greedy, indifferent. Samet even scours
military handbooks, including a 1945 one, memorably titled “112 Gripes
About the French,” which admonished American G.I.s that they “didn’t
come to Europe to save the French,” or “to do anyone any favors,” so
they should stop stomping through the Continent as though expecting
everyone’s gratitude. Not exactly “Band of Brothers,” is it?
There
is a before-and-after quality to the Second World War in American
political writing. The adjective “postwar” still clings to this one
conflict, as if no American soldiers had wielded weapons in battle
since. But if memories of one conflict shape attitudes toward the next,
Samet writes, then the Good War legend has served “as prologue to
three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones.” There’s plenty of
support for this quandary. In “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam”
(1988), Neil Sheehan identified the “disease of victory,” wherein U.S.
leaders, particularly in the military ranks, succumbed to postwar
complacency and overconfidence. Samet recalls the reflections of Rear
Admiral Gene La Rocque, a Second World War veteran who retired during
Vietnam, and who told Terkel that “the twisted memory” of the Good War
“encourages the men of my generation to be willing, almost eager, to use
military force anywhere in the world.”
Memories
of the Good War also helped shape the views of military life held by
the men who fought in Vietnam. Samet takes up Philip Caputo’s Vietnam
memoir, “A Rumor of War,”
showing how the author’s notions of war and service were influenced by
youthful fantasies of the Second World War. “Like thousands of boys,”
she writes, “he imagined himself performing heroic feats in the style of
John Wayne.” Caputo, a decorated Marine Corps infantry lieutenant,
described the looming threat of “moral and emotional numbness” during
his service, and how war transforms callousness into savagery. In his
memoir, earnestness mingles with bitterness: “In the patriotic fervor of
the Kennedy years, we had asked, ‘What can we do for our country?’ and
our country answered, ‘Kill VC.’ ”
The war in
Vietnam, Samet suggests, still functions as a counterweight to the
legacy of Good War mythology in America’s national-security discussions.
President George H. W. Bush, in expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in
1991, believed that he had also exorcised the demons of that bad war.
“By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” he exulted
in a White House speech. This past summer, amid worries that Kabul 2021
would resemble Saigon 1975, President Biden
declared, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people
being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States.” (He was
technically correct; the landing pad used to evacuate Embassy personnel a
few weeks later was next door.)
Yet the enduring
power of Vietnam in the American imagination may have a paradoxical
effect: its badness bolstered a sense of the Second World War’s
goodness. Decades after George H. W. Bush was shot down in the Pacific
by Japanese forces and rescued by an American submarine, the old bomber
pilot justified Desert Storm in explicitly Second World War terms. His
collection of correspondence, “All the Best, George Bush,” includes
various letters from 1990 and 1991—to King Hussein of Jordan, to
Cardinal Law of Massachusetts, to his children—invoking the enemies and
the stakes of the Second World War in arguing for action against Saddam
Hussein. For the record, Kuwait was Poland, Saddam was Hitler, and Bush
would not be Chamberlain.
The
U.S. exit from Afghanistan and the coinciding twentieth anniversary of
Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks have precipitated a spate of memory-mongering
over the global war on terror. Samet identifies several verdicts already
in contention: that it was a “tragic coda to the American Century,” a
two-decade transition from end-of-history swagger to end-of-empire
fatalism; a “valiant crusade” undone, as ever, by insufficient political
will to carry on; or a regrettable misstep by a country that really
should know better. She is particularly skeptical of the notion that
liberating Afghan women was a vital part of the original U.S. mission.
“How easily consequence is becoming justification,” she scoffs. “How
flattering it will be one day to reimagine it as an original objective.”
The search “for a kind of honor amid the ruins” shapes the literature
of Iraq and Afghanistan, Samet writes, a tendency that she also finds in
works that revisit Vietnam, such as Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War,”
in which Robert McNamara, L.B.J.’s Secretary of Defense, says, “We all
make mistakes.” It’s not much as regrets go, though it tops the
Rumsfeldian “Stuff happens” response to the looting that took place in
Baghdad in 2003.
“We search for a redemptive
ending to every tragedy,” Samet writes. “We find no solace in the
inconclusive.” The writings we have so far from the post-9/11 era do
not, in truth, appear to be particularly redemptive or sentimental; they
are, in the main, pitiless. We’ve been offered a painful roster of
bureaucratic stasis and missed warnings, while the narratives of how the
United States waged the war reveal a nation that betrayed its values in
a conflict allegedly waged in their defense. The centerpieces of the
fight against terrorism were the unnecessary war in Iraq and the failed
one in Afghanistan, with little vindication to be found in either. These
initial interpretations reflect a refusal to let the defining conflict
of this early twenty-first century fade into the safety of nostalgia, or
be twisted too soon, or too long, by remembrance.
If
the cumulative frustrations of Vietnam and the post-9/11 wars produced a
nation more reluctant to go abroad in search of monsters to slay, would
that mean that the Good War myth was finally losing its authority?
Samet is doubtful. She fears that the Second World War will go the way
of the American Civil War, “an epic past that we can no longer
retrieve,” national remembrances of which have amounted to a “theme
park” of mendacity and nostalgia only partially redressed by the recent
push to dismantle Confederate statuary. It may be only a matter of time,
she thinks, before “we transform utterly those who fought it into
symbols of an erstwhile greatness bought by blood.”
Samet
could take heart from the current renderings of our 9/11 wars, yet she
remains vigilant. “In a climate in which the pressures to sentimentalize
are so strong and victory and defeat are so difficult to measure,” she
writes, “it seems a moral imperative to discover another way to read and
write about a war.” Her retrospective on the Good War is another such
way, and a worthwhile one. Time can indeed sand down the jagged edges of
a war, and sentiment can reshape it into something unrecognizable.
Still, sentiment always distorts, whether it comes late or early, and
time enables every new generation to rethink and redefine a conflict
with a more dispassionate and informed gaze—as this book itself
proves. ♦