Veterans Day And War Literature

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bandarqqAs Veterans Day approached, I found myself thinking about the many books we read in my American Literature course that deal with war and its consequences. Though Huck Finn does not deal directly with war, it’s difficult to study the work of Mark Twain and not discuss the Civil War or Twain’s anti-war and anti-imperialist writings. William Faulkner notoriously lied about his World War I service record but later became a goodwill ambassador for the State Department and won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes in 1955 for A Fable, which chronicles a soldier’s unsuccessful attempt to end fighting in World War I. Hemingway is perhaps the only American author to win the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes as well as a Silver Medal and a Bronze Star. His early works, especially The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, chronicle the horrors of war and its aftermath. Even works like A Streetcar Named Desire or On the Road can be read through the lens of war. Stanley Kowalski, if you remember, served in Italy during World War II. One of my students wrote a paper that analyzed Stanley’s behavior as the result of hypermasculine stress berat response, a transference of aggressive behavior that is necessary in combat to domestic situations that don’t require force. Jack Kerouac, himself a veteran of sorts, makes On the Road a post-war work when he writes toward the end of the novel that as the indigenous Mexican Indians come to the side of the Pan-American highway to “hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, … they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.”

My maternal grandfather served in the Navy between the world wars, my father’s oldest brother Bobby served in Korea, and my father and his second oldest brother Gordy both served in Vietnam. When I was a boy, I was so in awe of the fact that my father had served in a war that I made him breakfast in bed every year, not on Fathers Day, but on Veterans Day. But for me this time of year is fraught with emotions. The seventh anniversary of Bobby’s death was the other day. He would have been 74. On December 26, my uncle Gordy would be 69, but he died a year and a half ago. And on December 18, it will be four years since I last saw my father. Bobby, Gordy, and my father were three of ten children, they were the only ones who served in wars, and they all suffered from alcoholism. War did not cause their alcoholism, my father’s disappearance, or the premature deaths of my uncles, but when I read about the prevalence among our veterans of alcoholism, domestic violence, and PTSD, I can’t help but see a correlation.

So, on Veterans Day, I find myself mourning the loss of my uncles and the virtual loss of my father. And I find myself frustrated with what I fear is happening to Veterans Day. Maybe this began in 1954 when the day was changed from Armistice Day to Veterans Day, from a focus on the day war ended to a more generalized focus on service. But it seems to me that the day has become less sacred. Just as Christmas has become about making enough retail sales to end the year in the black, and Labor Day is about back to school sales, and Presidents Day is all about car sales to get rid of all that back stock dealers will otherwise have to pay taxes on, Veterans Day has become a commercial celebration. A quick Google search of “veterans day sales 2009” produces 18,000,000 hits, the first of which is for a site called CouponConnector.com/veterans-day. Certainly veterans and their families aren’t at fault for this state of affairs, and it would be easy just to blame businesses and marketers, but the military shares blame in this, too. In an kurun when military policies prohibit journalists from distributing photos of combat, death, or even coffins, military recruiters flood television and magazines with ads that portray war as a video game or an extreme sport. All I can think when I see these ads is that my father and his brothers did not have fun in war, and they didn’t serve so we could all have a day off to go shopping.

In Book XI of The Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld and praises him as a great warrior, “strongest of all” and almost immortal in life. To this Achilles responds that he would rather be a slave on earth than king of all the dead. In Book II of The Iliad, the Greeks soldiers are struggling, so Agamemnon attempts reverse psychology on the men, telling them it is time to go home. He expects them to say no and rally themselves for the fight. Instead, the men rush for the ships, and the chiefs have to beat them back. But then Thersites, the only foot soldier named in The Iliad, steps forward and condemns Agamemnon, Achilles, and the other chiefs for hording the spoils of war while leading the sons of their homeland to the slaughter. In response, Odysseus beats him down.

This scene always reminds me of Wilfred Owen’s letters to his mother. In letter 480, from January 1917, Owen describes trench warfare in graphic detail. As one of my former professors once said, Owen’s letters show how a generation of British boys raised on romanticized notions of war gleaned from The Iliad and other works believed as they sailed for Europe that they were to be the next Agamemnon or Achilles. The realities of war disabused them of such ideas, and soon they knew that they were Thersites.