And when the war was over, he came home.
My grandfather was not a war hero or even a combat soldier. He was an artist, “born with a pencil in his hand,” my family liked to say. He was swept up in the tides of his time and went off to war in 1944 when he was 35 years old, married with an infant daughter (my mother) at home. When he was gone, my grandmother took his place on the assembly line at a Continental Motors factory in Muskegon, Michigan, a “real Rosie the Riveter” as we like to say in my family. In the year and a half he was in the Pacific Theatre, he served as a sign painter and the artist for a newspaper in an army surgical hospital on Biak, an island off the northern coast of what was then Dutch New Guinea—Private First Class Benjamin Quartermaine, with no aspirations but to do his duty and return home to his wife and infant daughter at the earliest convenience. And when he finally returned, he settled down to a long life as an autoworker, union shop steward, father of two, and grandfather of seven. His is the story of many American families in the 20th century, almost stereotypically so.
They all came home—the survivors, the many who were not killed in battle—and they made a new world. This may be the only real benefit of a war, that sometimes the survivors can make the world anew.
And they did.
He lived the second half of his life in the new America created after 1945, a universe which contains the entire history of rock and roll; every rocket, satellite, probe, or person to leave earth’s atmosphere; every personal computer ever made, sold, purchased, used, and tossed into a landfill; the internet in its entirety; the American suburban middle class, including every leaf blower, microwave oven, and George Foreman Grill ever sold and every Christmas tree carted in and out of the front door of a house on a cul-de-sac; fourteen presidents, every one conducted in and out of office according the U.S. Constitution except for the one who was assassinated; many millions of votes successfully cast and counted; Eighty-two consecutive seasons of Major League Baseball, and seventeen World Series victories by the Yankees; five major wars fought, not one of them as morally clear-cut as World War II; four generations; every nuclear bomb ever made and the two used to destroy two cities in Japan in the last days of the war. We live in the shadow of those two bombs still, in the Anthropocene Age, but still, we humans are better off because the fascists did not win the war.
Like many grandchildren of America’s Greatest Generation, I see the war through the lens of family. Though most of the men and women who served in that war are gone, their traces can still be found in millions of households across America, in physical, emotional, and psychic realms. Sometimes we feel them in the swelling of pride around a few remembered details from the war, a photo album brought out on special occasions, or a few souvenirs displayed under glass. A box of letters. Sometimes these traces are present in the damage done by a distant father, or similar wounds of abuse that stretch across decades but never fully heal. The memory of an uncle who was missing an eye but would never speak of the war. The scars are not always easy to see because they were absorbed by decades of daily routines, the steady momentum of “moving on” that left little room for reflection. So much was simply turned inward and left unspoken.
From the first time I lifted that box of his letters in my hands, the weight of collective memory was tangible to me. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can relate to this feeling, especially those of us who became the keepers of their stories and memories within our families—the amateur genealogists and museum keepers who watch over the family photo albums and caches of letters from the war. I am among them. We are the ones who must decide which pictures to frame and hang on the wall or post on the internet. Should we turn the letters he wrote home over to the Library of Congress? How do we preserve the trinkets he carefully shipped back from the war? Do we regard them as junk or family heirlooms? If it is the latter, how do we display them in our homes? Pass them on to our children and grandchildren?
These may seem like trivial concerns, but they touch on a protean desire to learn from our immediate ancestors the things that were not passed on to us when they were alive. There is a deep irony present in the Greatest Generation. Because of the enormity of the Depression and the War, their generational cohort appears to inhabit history more fully than other generations. If this is an illusion, it is certainly a powerful one. At the same time, as individuals, they were often reticent to share the worst of what they had endured, willing to hide their traumas, infidelities, and failings, burying their memories for the sake of their families. The gaps in our memories of them are sometimes painful to contemplate, and often it is the emotional depth that is most absent from our recollections of them. So many simply carried that part to the grave with them.
I think many of us know by now that the official narratives of the war do not necessarily align with the actual experiences of men and women who went to war eighty years ago. America has had time to digest the war, to fully consider it, from a distance. The conflict has been thoroughly analyzed, its less savory aspects aired, even the ones that are embarrassing to the victors. So many stories have been brought to the surface. And over time, some of the ideological barriers that determined what could be said about the war have fallen away. Consequently, many of us now resist the temptation to turn every soldier from that war into a statue, bronzed, bedecked with glory, and thanked in perpetuity for his or her service. We know better now. Many of us prefer a less triumphal, more human accounting of their lives and experiences.
An honest accounting of the war must move beyond platitudes. I discovered this as a young man reading novels written by World War II veterans such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and James Jones. I learned from them that some of the officers were egregiously incompetent and led their men into unnecessary slaughter. Towards the end of the conflict, many soldiers were boys and old men. Some men wounded themselves rather than fight or broke down in the midst of battle. Men died in combat, but they also died in bar fights and accidents and friendly fire incidents. Enemy prisoners were sometimes executed after they surrendered. Some American soldiers took trophies from dead bodies, especially teeth with gold fillings. Others, as I learned in my own research, boiled the heads of dead Japanese soldiers and sent the skulls back to their families in the states. The skulls and bones of dead soldiers were used to adorn the entrances to tents. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German civilians died in cities that were firebombed from the air, and two Japanese cities were incinerated by nuclear bombs. And many soldiers returned to their families as broken men, silent, suffering, stewing with anger and resentment and the horrors known only to soldiers who have survived combat.
But for those of us whose fathers and grandfathers and great uncles served in that war, it almost does not matter what they did. Time, like a buffeting wind, has stripped away the veneer of moral judgment. The Boomers grappled intimately with the after-effects of the war in their households, in the untreated PTSD and trauma of their fathers and other male relatives. And after they died, deep, unresolved questions remain: Was he really the twenty-year-old kid in a Marine uniform in the photograph that is proudly framed and displayed in the entryway to our house? Was he simply dad or grandad and leave it at that? Or was he the guy who came home in ‘45 plagued by nightmares, always ducking out of conversations about the war, the guy who drank a lot and was always simmering with something obviously awful but never spoken aloud? If there is artifice in our collective memories of the war, it comes from our inability to resolve these fragments. This may be why so many people simply defer to the picture hanging in the front hall because it is the easiest story to tell.
The grandchildren of the Greatest Generation face a different challenge. So much was withheld from us, so much is invisible as we now look backwards and try to reconstruct these Depression-era, War-era lives. What would we give for just a half hour of their time, to ask the questions that were never asked or answered while they were alive? How do we make these dead men come back to life again? What dark magic can we summon to reconcile the fragments of them that remain?
My grandfather is long dead. I am 60 years old; he died of a stroke in 1979 when he was 70 years old and I was just fourteen. Our lives overlapped rather briefly in the 1970s at a time when, as a retiree, he was eager to share his stories of the War and the Great Depression with a boy who was equally eager to hear them. I was at the age of maximum receptivity, a nascent writer with a hunger for narratives, a “sponge” mopping up every detail. I took it all in. For the luckiest among us, the relationships we have with grandparents create links in the chain of family history, and through them, we are able to stand astride history. I was lucky in this regard.
To be a link in this kind of chain is to connect the past with the future. You are not simply a museum curator, you are also a historian, a cultural critic, and potentially, a sage. I was the one in my family who was most interested to know what my dead grandfather has to teach me about the present moment. A lot has happened to my country in the nearly eighty years since he left his wife and daughter to travel to a war zone on the other side of the world. He participated in a fulcrum event, a before-and-after break in the stream of history that produced the world into which I was born. In fact, I have lived my entire life inside of the bubble of security and economic prosperity created by the Allied victories in World War, but I have also lived long enough to witness the postwar period begin to falter and die. The War in Vietnam, the counterculture in all of its delights and excesses, Watergate, Reaganomics, the Great Recession, 9/11 and the forever wars, the Trump presidencies, Charlottesville, the COVID crisis. Each of these events has put a crack in the once-reliable facade of post-war certainties about what America is, and is not.
The consensus that governed America when my grandfather was alive has dissolved too, leaving America divided and at war with itself. Like many Americans, I have been looking backward to the Greatest Generation to try to understand these fractious, frightening times. America’s response to the COVID crisis, for instance, has left me wondering what happened to the country that once gathered its will and resources to fight and win World War II? Why couldn’t we perform the same miracle with COVID? Forty years ago, the Senate and the House of Representatives were filled with men who had served in World War II. Every president who served during my childhood—Johnson, Nixon, and Ford—was a veteran of that war. Is it possible that this generation of American politicians was better able to find consensus because they had served their country during an existential crisis?
Writing this book, I have learned that it is easy to romanticize the generation that survived the Great Depression and fought in World War II. Our society has been doing it for decades in books, movies, and memorials. I have felt the pull towards glorification of this generation for most of my life, but I am periodically reminded to think more clearly about my grandparents’ experiences. In a recent discussion with a therapist friend of mine about our grandparents, I said “they were just made of tougher stuff.” She laughed and replied “they were literally made of different stuff. They ate different food, they breathed different air, they drank different water, they had different technologies, they worked differently, their family structures were different, their values were different.”
She is right, of course. There is no way to bottle the essence of a generation and carry it over to the present because they were the product of a particular time and place. They fully embodied their moment in history. So much triumphal discourse on World War II rests on the false premise that collectively held character traits made the Greatest Generation special. In a memorable scene from the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony Soprano asks his therapist, “whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong silent type? That was a real American.” The scene works because so many Americans are nostalgic for a cultural model of masculine resilience and toughness that they believe has disappeared.
This supposed resilience and ability to endure hardship without complaint is at best an oversimplification. What is undeniably true is this: millions of American men left their homes and families, boarding trains and ships to travel to the other side of the world and fight in a horrific war. They mostly did so without complaint, with a grim determination that, as my grandfather used to say, “we had a job to do,” but whatever force drove them overseas was much bigger than Gary Cooper and some generalized stereotype of the good old days when men were tougher and less open about their feelings.
If it wasn’t Gary Cooper, what was it?
If I have learned anything about the Greatest Generation, it is this: Circumstances made them. They were not special, nor was there an elusive and now-extinct sense of collective identity or a set of experiences that unified them, though they set aside their differences long enough to become one for a few short years. They endured, and many returned home determined to make their sacrifices mean something. For many, it was a personal quest to start a family. For others with wider horizons, it was a commitment to community or national service or politics. For some, black Americans especially, it was the insistence that their sacrifices must come with concomitant reform and racial justice. The country very quickly began to reformulate itself around the collective momentum of these desires. We have been living in that country ever since.
How does one describe the energy that sometimes bursts out from the end of a war, like seedlings sprouting in the days after a forest fire? I am a writer and a scholar of literature, not a historian, so I will reach for a book, a great one, Homer’s Odyssey. This is the story of a general who tries to make it home from the Trojan war and is thwarted at every turn, until finally, after twenty years, he successfully returns to Ithaca and is reunited with his wife, Penelope. In the penultimate chapter of this epic, he shares with Penelope what the sage Tiresias has instructed him to do upon his return.
He told me to go among many cities of men, taking my well-shaped oar in my hands and bearing it, until I come where there are men living who know nothing of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt, who never have known ships whose cheeks are painted purple, who never have known well-shaped oars, which act for ships as wings do. And then he told me a very clear proof. I will not conceal it. When, as I walk, some other wayfarer happens to meet me, and says I carry a winnow fan on my bright shoulder, then I must plant my well-shaped oar in the ground, and render ceremonious sacrifice to the lord Poseidon, one ram and one bull, and a mounter of sows, a boar pig, and make my way home again, and render holy hecatombs to the immortal gods who hold the wide heaven, all of them in order. Death will come to me from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end me in the ebbing time of a sleek old age. My people about me will prosper. All this he told me would be accomplished.
This beautiful passage can be interpreted many ways. When I was younger, I thought it was an allegory for psychological healing, analogous to the therapeutic journey many veterans make when they return home from war—and I still think it can be.
But after I finished writing this book, I began to think of the winnowing oar in another way. The oar can also be interpreted as an analogy for the function of both individual and collective memory. If we carry the oar long enough, it will be mistaken for something else entirely, in Odysseus’s case, as a tool for winnowing wheat as it is harvested.
It is tempting to put the oar in a museum, hang it on the wall behind protective glass with a plaque explaining what it is and why it was important, but still, its significance will evolve with time. The Heraclitean imperative is always acting upon us. Change is inevitable.
And we will inevitably participate in this change. In his master work of symbolic anthropology, Inventing Culture, Roy Wagner depicts culture as a dialectic between invention and convention. We inherit symbols and ideals and constantly reinvent their meaning. We are all caught up in this flux.
Perhaps Homer is saying that new life can only begin after we stop carrying the oar.
The postwar world is organizing itself into something new, but the new order has not yet revealed itself. The spirit of fascism has been revived and the specter of world war is again stalking the earth. Climate change, environmental catastrophes, and species extinction are accelerating. What will the memory of the “Good War” mean in this new world? Now that most of the Greatest Generation has died, America is trying to summon a collective memory of the war that will endure into the future. What did it mean? What is our obligation to the men and women who participated in it? How do we memorialize them? What do we make of the war itself? Are we duty bound to uphold all of the institutions and norms they bequeathed to us? If not, how do we choose what to keep and what to discard? What can we finally say now that they are gone? What lessons should we keep and carve in stone for posterity, the things we should never forget?
My desire to write this book began with a story about an American soldier who wore severed human ears attached to his belt. By confronting this story directly and proving that it could have been true, I was forced to bury my romantic notions about that war, and war in general. I was also forced to broaden my conception of the war’s meaning for non-Americans. Not everyone enjoyed an unprecedented period of prosperity after the war. Eastern Europeans were plunged into a new era of darkness when the Iron Curtain fell. Russia contended with the loss of 20 million of its citizens, with perhaps another 20 million killed during the Stalinist terror of the 1940s and 1950s. The New Guineans remember the war as the event that birthed their nation. For the Japanese families who travel to Biak in search of some connection to their ancestors who were abandoned to die horribly there, the war is a severance with the past that must be healed somehow.
I think often of the bodies of Japanese soldiers left to rot in caves on Biak and the brutality of some of these same soldiers against the natives of this island, of the starving Japanese soldiers who chanted “Charlie Chaplin” in solidarity with American soldiers from the tree line behind the movie theatre of an army hospital, and my grandfather’s daily ritual of writing letters home from that place, many of which began “My Darling Honey, Baby, and Mom,” letters with his artwork drawn in the margins. I think of the American surgeons and nurses working on Biak who saved many hundreds of lives, and of the single bomb that was dropped on the hospital from a Japanese fighter bomber on March 22, 1945, killing 40 people. I think of scared, starving men hunted in the mountains of a faraway island, butchered and left to rot. I think of the cycles of vengeance and the legacy of trauma that all wars leave in their wake.
I originally thought to end this book with a note of gratitude to my grandfather and all of the men and women who served in that war, but I feel something different now. I’ve carried the oar further than I ever thought possible and buried it finally. Now I am filled with an overwhelming awareness of our commonality, that thread of recognition that runs through all humans, the part of us that abhors all wars and craves a world in which we are safe from state violence. In the end, this is the stronger impulse in me. Call it a shared desire for peace. Call it a prayer.
Kommentare