My Generation (25 page)

MacArthur's habit of self-congratulation, beating its rhythmic way through these pages in a rattle of medals, decorations, flattery from underlings, and adulatory messages from chiefs of state, reaches a crescendo as the Philippines are retaken and it becomes clear that the war is going to be won. Certainly the work of no modern military leader is filled with so many utterances of admiration, love received and bestowed, and pure vanity; by comparison, the autobiography of Fleet Admiral Halsey, no mean hand himself at the immodest appraisal, seems a work of anemic self-abasement. Indeed, by the time MacArthur has reached Manila, the need to describe the charisma of his own physical presence has become so obsessive, and the narcissism is so unremitting, that the effect is somehow vaguely sexual, as if the General had begun to lure the unwilling reader into some act of collaborative onanism. He describes, for example, his first visit to the infamous Santo Tomás prison camp.

When I arrived, the pitiful, half-starved inmates broke out in excited yells. I entered the building and was immediately pressed back against the wall by thousands of emotionally charged people. In their ragged, filthy clothes, with tears streaming down their faces, they seemed to be using their last strength to fight their way close enough to grasp my hand. One man threw his arms around me, and put his head on my chest, and cried unashamedly. A once-beautiful woman in tatters laboriously lifted her son over the heads of the crowd and asked me to touch him….I was kissed. I was hugged….

It is callous and offensive enough—even more so since it was written from the vantage point of mellow reflection—that this passage has for its dominant image not that wretched suffering itself but a man confusing himself with Christ. It becomes unspeakable when it seems very likely that MacArthur was employing characteristic fantasy in order to obscure the pathetic truth. Protesting MacArthur's similar description of the “liberation” of another Manila prison camp, Bilibid, a survivor recently wrote a letter to
Life
magazine—where part of this book was first published—and claimed bluntly that the General's account was a lie. The prisoners were freed and taken elsewhere, he said, then “unaccountably” brought back to the prison, where MacArthur shortly joined them with his entourage of newspapermen. There was no grateful outburst of welcome, only “wobbly ranks of thin, terribly tired men standing in stony silence.”

MacArthur's Southwest Pacific command was one prong of a two-pronged assault on Japan, the other being Admiral Nimitz's Central Pacific force composed primarily of the Navy and Marine Corps. At the beginning of the war MacArthur bitterly opposed this division of the power, and he hated the Navy with a passion; it comes as a pleasant surprise, therefore, that he nowhere makes the claim of having won the war in the Pacific single-handedly; and the General earns points by offering praise where praise is due, paying tribute to Halsey and Kinkaid and such Air Force men as Kennedy and even Major Bong, who contributed so much to the success of his own operations. MacArthur's unselfish respect for the achievements of other military men is very Prussian. Also it cannot be denied that his own great sweep up through New Guinea and its island outriders to the Philippines was a brilliant feat of aggressive warfare.

A kind of exultant momentum seems to take hold of MacArthur as the war concludes, and it carries him through to his undoubtedly fine achievements as the absolute dictator of a conquered Japan. Free of “Washington” at last, MacArthur seems to have undergone in Tokyo a kind of benign metamorphosis. Sternly aloof, authoritarian, he was able nonetheless to display enormous understanding, tact, and even a heretofore concealed strain of magnanimity—as when he firmly resisted the yowls from America and its allies that Emperor Hirohito be tried as a war criminal. No less able a witness than Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer has paid his earnest compliments to MacArthur's job of democratization, and similarly Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union returned from Japan impressed by his reforms in such areas as constitutional rights, labor, and the enfranchisement of women. Yet both Reischauer and Baldwin think that he outwore his stay, and Baldwin has felt that with such central issues as the unionization of government workers the General sided with reaction.

Typically, MacArthur's long account of his visitation to Japan is Promethean and lacking in any flaw; it is one of the General's failings that often as soon as he has begun to win the reader over with a sort of hulking charm, he doses him by a sudden convulsion of self-righteousness. Thus, despite his magnanimous treatment of the emperor, he was ruthless in his disposal of the case of General Homma, “the Beast of Bataan,” who had reputedly engineered the Death March. In his excellent book
But Not in Shame
, John Toland has offered convincing evidence that MacArthur was simply out to get his old enemy of the Philippines and that he rigged a trial that did not faintly resemble a display of justice. Homma, aside from being a man of great personal dignity and humanity, had no inkling of the atrocities taking place at that distant edge of his command. Our hero must have known this, yet in reviewing the trial he ordered Homma peremptorily executed with a statement priggish and insufferable even for MacArthur:

The proceedings show the defendant lacked the basic firmness of character and moral fortitude essential to officers charged with the high command of military forces in the field. No nation can safely trust its martial honor to leaders who do not maintain the universal code which distinguishes between those things that are right and those things that are wrong….

In 1951, recalled from his command in Korea by President Truman, MacArthur received the grandest welcome ever accorded by the American people. The General notes this fact with pride in his
Reminiscences
, though perhaps at last it is some aberrant modesty that prevents him from recording what had already been spoken and written of him: “the greatest living master of English” (this from Dr. Norman Vincent Peale), “the greatest man alive,” “the greatest man since Christ,” “the greatest man who ever lived.” To these must be added the highest encomium ever received by an American—certainly in the halls of Congress—when after MacArthur's famous speech to that body, Representative Dewey Short of Missouri, a man educated at Harvard and Oxford, said, “We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh.” (In the
Congressional Record
he later revised this statement to read: “A great hunk of God in the flesh.”) MacArthur had made a tragic blunder in Korea—failing, as he had with the Japanese in the Philippines, to prepare adequately for Chinese aggression—yet his terrifying plan to extend the war onto the Chinese mainland had been cheered on, in one of those rare militaristic spasms, by vast numbers of Americans. Why they had done so may have best been explained by the British scholar Geoffrey Barraclough:

Whatever view one may otherwise take of his actions, he took his stand on American interests. It is perhaps understandable, in the tense international situation of 1950, that Truman and his advisers found it difficult to acknowledge in the face of the world that the United States had an imperial role in Asia, shaped by long history, which it was going to defend. MacArthur made no bones about it. He cleared the air of cant.

That “Washington,” this time in the form of Harry Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, foresaw that he would “involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, with the wrong enemy, at the wrong time,” provided the margin of our salvation.

In spite of his noble protestations, MacArthur had a simple lust for war. Though he was an alien to our civilization, perhaps in the end he was really not so remote from it that it is possible for us to rest easy with his sentiments, his yearning, and with those men who share his yearning. Toward the last days of his career he claimed over and over to be a lover of peace, a man who hated more than anything the idea of war. Yet he gave a final, supposedly
extemporaneous speech at West Point. And the lines of farewell from that speech recorded on the last page of the book—for a peace-lover they seem inappropriate but they do not surprise us; we have seen those very words before—are filled with the same old nostalgia:

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished tone and tint; they have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll…the crash of guns…

[
New York Review of Books
, October 8, 1964.]

W
hy is it that the war in Vietnam has inspired tons of journalism, most of it ordinary, yet such a small amount of imaginative literature? Could this be merely the continuation of a negative trend which began during the Korean War—a conflict which also produced little that was notable in the way of fiction, drama, or poetry? For up until the past two decades the wars America engaged in proved to be the catalyst for memorable work from some of our finest writers. In the best of these works—those of Whitman and Melville, Hemingway, Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Mailer, James Jones—the writers seemed possessed by an almost Euripidean need to demonstrate the eternal tragedy and folly of warfare, its persistence as a mysterious and destructive force dwelling in the very matrix of our nature, its stupidity, its boredom and anguish, and the glorious heroism it sometimes calls forth in spite of itself. In retrospect, it may be that both the appeal and the vitality of these novels and poems—and of lesser yet beautifully crafted works like John Horne Burns's novel of World War II,
The Gallery
—had to do with a kind of residual unconscious romanticism. After all, the Civil War and the two world wars of this century, whatever their horrors and whatever the historical blunders and idiocies that propelled them into being, possessed moral aspects which could make an individual's participation in the conflict not entirely ignoble. Both Stephen Crane and Hemingway were conscious of the insanity, the brutalization
of war, but there were still a few idealistic principles embedded in the Civil War and World War I, thus lending to
The Red Badge of Courage
and
A Farewell to Arms
certain ironies and contradictions which helped give to each, finally, a romantic and tragic resonance.

It is possible, then, that the further we remove ourselves from wars in which a vestige of idealism exists or—to put it the other way around—the more we engage in waging wars that approach being totally depraved, the less likely we are to produce imaginative writing that contains many plausible outlines of humanity. It is a long leap, both historically and aesthetically, from the clear, frightened, distinctive identity of the hero of Stephen Crane to the blurred, undifferentiated, curiously one-dimensional twentieth-century victims wandering or staggering through the Vietnamese landscape of Ronald J. Glasser's
365 Days;
yet it is a tribute to Glasser's great skill as a writer that from this most morally loathsome of wars, which has in someway degraded each person who has been touched by it, he has fashioned a moving account about tremendous courage and often immeasurable suffering. It is therefore a valuable and redemptive work, providing as it does a view of the war from the vantage point of a man who has not only been there but has himself, obviously, seen and suffered much.

Glasser is a physician, a former Army major who found himself assigned in 1968 to the U.S. Army hospital at Zama, in Japan. It was here that he first encountered the evacuated wounded from Vietnam, “the blind 17-year-olds stumbling down the hallway, the shattered high-school football player being wheeled to physical therapy.” Trained as a pediatrician, Glasser relates how he began to feel a special empathy for these blown-apart, uncomplaining, sometimes hideously mangled casualties of war. “I soon realized,” he writes, “that the troopers they were pulling off those med evac choppers were only children themselves….At first, when it was all new, I was glad I didn't know them; I was relieved they were your children, not mine. After a while, I changed.” In the act of changing, in the process of becoming involved with these boys, Glasser listened to many stories about the horrors of combat in Vietnam. They were grim stories mostly, touched with the cold hand of mortality and having to do with slow or sudden death and unspeakable wounds, yet some of the tales were wildly improbable and overlaid by the graveyard hilarity that inevitably accompanies any chronicle of warfare.

Recounted in a dry, dispassionate, superbly controlled, and ironic voice, these anecdotes mingle at random with Glasser's own vividly observed, firsthand
sketches of hospital life in Japan. The effect is disorganized, laconic, rather unsettlingly fragmentary, until one realizes that such a disjointed technique is perfectly suited to the outlines of the lunatic war itself: its greedy purposelessness, its manic and self-devouring intensity, its unending tableaux of helicopters crashing on missions to nowhere, futile patrols ending in bloody slaughter, instantaneous death in some remote mess area miles behind the action. Glasser's yeoman soldiers, aided by modern technology, are as miserably up to their necks in war as were those of Shakespeare. They trip over mines and are reduced to vegetables; after a night of grisly hand-to-hand murder they are enraged when the cook runs out of cornflakes; they nervously conspire to kill their swinish senior officers, and then chicken out. These awful vignettes are rendered with splendid understatement. It is a banal and senseless war, lacking either heroes or a chorus. Perhaps only an ear exquisitely attuned to the banal and senseless, like Glasser's, could do justice to such a nightmare: certainly many of these pages of callow, dyspeptic dialogue—uttered out of young souls quite trampled down with despair and fatigue—are as authentic and as moving a transcription of the soldier's true voice as any written in recent memory.

But if the war has been a war made up of victims and has been denied its true heroes, it has nonetheless had its moments of great sacrifice and courage in the face of incredible suffering. It is through Glasser's calm, unsentimental revelation of such moments that we are able to shake off some of the horror with which these pages are so often steeped and to see
365 Days
as the cleansing and redemptive document it is. Nearly all of Glasser's stories of combat, although admittedly secondhand (as was
The Red Badge of Courage
), are remarkable miniature portraits of men at war. It is in the hospital episodes, however, where the force of Glasser's professional concern melts with the compassion and sensibility of a gifted storyteller, that we are given scenes of wrenching power. In the last story in the book, Major Edwards, a doctor in the hospital burn unit, is faced with the hopeless task of saving a young soldier cruelly burned across 80 percent of his body. The tale is simple, the situation uncomplicated: a dedicated physician, through no other motive than that resulting from the mighty urge to hold back death, trying against all odds to salvage someone who himself is suffering, without complaint, ecstasies of pain. Two human beings, then, locked in the immemorial struggle against inexplicable fate. This is a familiar story and one that could have been both clinical and cloying, but Glasser's hand is so sure, his eye so
clear, that the moment of the boy's imminent death and his last cry to the doctor—“I don't want to go home alone”—seem to rise to form a kind of unbearable epiphany to the inhuman waste and folly of war.

It is this quality, reverent at its best, enormously touching in its concern for the simple worth and decency of life, that gives
365 Days
its great distinction and may cause it—one hopes—to become one of those rare chronicles we can use to help alleviate the killing pain of this war, and its festering disgrace. For it shows that in the midst of their most brutish activity there is a nobility in men that war itself cannot extinguish. As Glasser says, in one of the most poignant of his passages, about the “medics”:

In a world of suffering and death, Vietnam is like a Walt Disney True-Life Adventure, where the young are suddenly left alone to take care of the young….A tour of Nam is 12 months; it is like a law of nature. The medics, though, stay on line only seven months. It is not due to the good will of the Army, but to their discovery that seven months is about all these kids can take. After that, they start getting freaky, cutting down on their own water and food so they can carry more medical supplies; stealing plasma bottles and walking around on patrol with five or six pounds of glass in their rucksacks; writing parents and friends so they can buy their own endotracheal tubes; or quite simply refusing to leave their units when their time in Nam is over.

And so it goes, and the gooks know it. They will drop the point, trying not to kill him but to wound him, to get him screaming so they can get the medic too. He'll come. They know he will.

[
Washington Monthly
, March 1972.]

There was a rather grotesque aftermath to
365 Days
. In 1981, long after its publication, the book became a
cause célèbre
in the state of Maine, where it went on trial for the obscenity of its language. Glasser and his book were acquitted, but the case remains a remarkable example of the perennial confusion in the United States over the difference between the relatively benign obscenity of certain words and the total obscenity of war.—W.S. (1982)