Those Who Have Borne the Battle (3 page)

At the same time, I was deeply committed to the rights of the gay and lesbian community. For a time, this forced me to juggle supporting principles in tension with one another. The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 2010 was a significant step forward. It has opened some closed doors for gay and lesbian Americans, and it will open some closed doors for the military on many other campuses. It is important that people now freely pass both ways through these open doors.

In 2009 I stepped down from the Dartmouth presidency after serving for eleven years. My plans were a bit uncertain, but I knew that I wanted to continue working with veterans. I was concerned that so much of the obvious public support for veterans was transitory, if not superficial. The wounded particularly faced a lot of problems, and it was not clear that most Americans understood these issues—and it surely was not clear that I understood them. But I wanted to try to understand better.

In the spring of 2009 Chancellor Robert Birgenau invited me to give the Jefferson Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in the next academic year. I was honored to accept, and when the nominating committee indicated that they hoped I would talk about my work with veterans, I agreed. I told them I was a historian and that rather than simply describing my recent experiences, I wanted to discuss the history of the way in which Americans have viewed and cared for those who have fought our wars.

In preparing for the Jefferson Lecture, I read widely on war and veterans. Much of this was new territory for me as a political historian—and one who had not had his hand in history for a few years. I could only touch upon some of the things I wanted to share in the Jefferson Lecture. That presentation as well as the preparation for the remarks I delivered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington on Veterans Day, 2009, and a lecture at Yonsei University in Seoul on Veterans Day, 2010, regarding American veterans of the Korean War, became intellectual building blocks for this book.
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Early on, I recognized that there was a need for a book that summarized critically how Americans historically have mobilized for war and how they have treated those who fought.

It became clear to me as I was working on the Jefferson Lecture that the historical American attitude toward veterans has not been constant, nor has it been an independent variable, unrelated to other things. Views of veterans have been shaped by public views of the military and of the wars in which the troops were engaged, as well as perceptions of the way they were conducting them. I sought to understand these things, as temporal, subjective, and imprecise as they are. Americans do not view “veterans” separately from their missions—witness in the late twentieth century the different contemporary public views of World War II veterans and Vietnam War veterans.

Most Americans have never served in combat. They have no conception of the reality of war. As I have tried to understand this experience through reading and conversations, I acknowledge my own very real limits. One Korean War veteran, who had served as a prisoner of war and had escaped from the massacre of a group of prisoners, said that when he
tried to talk about his experience, people would say, “Oh yeah. I know. I read about that.” He observed, “You can read about it all you want, but you're not going to understand how it was.”
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The majority of those Americans who are “war veterans” are really “wartime veterans” and never experienced combat either. This has been increasingly true over the past one hundred years, as the logistical and support needs of combat forces have become even greater. I have not tried to distinguish here between wartime service and combat duty. Wartime service members not on the front often suffer from some of the same apprehension and concern as their combat buddies. Many of them could find themselves under fire, and in all cases they have served during wartime. One Iraq veteran told me that serving in a combat zone created “a pervasive sense of horror.” My narrative focus here is largely on those who have engaged in combat, even as the various veterans programs have not distinguished between combat and noncombat veterans.

In addressing these issues, in this book I focus primarily on the army because it has the greatest need to raise forces for wars. The army symbolizes so well the process, the problems, and the successes of mobilizing forces in our democracy. It represents the range and complexity of wars. The legendary “citizen soldiers” are synonymous with the American Army, even though today's soldiers are often long-serving and most identify themselves as professionals, rather than civilians on temporary duty.

The American armed forces have also proved to be a place where some of the great tensions of our country, those regarding inclusiveness and equity, have played out. Whether immigrant groups in the nineteenth century, African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women, or, now, gay and lesbian Americans in the past half century, there has been an ironic tension between those who have wished to serve their country and the barriers they have faced in doing so. The military institutionally has been as responsive to these groups as have most institutions in our society, often more so; the military culture has not always proved as receptive.

Up until the Cold War, Americans historically tended not to support a significant investment in the military except in times of war. This allowed most citizens to ignore the military most of the time. It also necessitated
rapid and significant mobilization in times of emergency. This book describes how we have mobilized for our wars, how we think about the service of those who are called upon, and how we treat them after their service has ended, as we attempt to return to status quo ante bellum. Those who have served in combat find it difficult to imagine returning to that state.

Wars are by and large transitory things, occasional distractions perhaps, for those who are not fighting them and whose loved ones are not fighting. The less realistic the broader society's image is of combat, the easier it is for society to put the reality of war behind. What is missing, then, is a clear understanding of what society has imposed upon some of its young citizens, what their countrymen have asked of them. Those who served will not put it behind.

War is about national strategy and national defense and patriotic pride and geopolitical calculations. And it is about misunderstandings and miscalculations, stupidity and malice, and sometimes about the consequences of accidents. War is about strategic agendas and epic battles that define nations and shape history. War is about courage and heroism, but it is also about pain and suffering and sorrow and tragedy. But combat, the process of actually fighting a war in the dirt and the mud, in airplanes, or upon ships at sea, is about those who finally are sent out to implement these national strategies—and they have more immediate concerns than the national goals or considerations.

People in combat become consumed with tactical problems and personal needs. In the final accounting, combat becomes intensely personal. Within the framework of an immediate tactical military objective, within a military unit with clear hierarchy and crisp differentiation of authority and of responsibility, combat is about simply staying alive, about protecting and aiding those in your unit, and about deadly confrontations with those who share with you the impulse for their own self-preservation. A study of those who fought in America's wars confirms the constant “overriding desire to survive,” regardless of the purpose of war or nature of combat.
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Most human beings learn as infants to remember two constant things: to look out for themselves, avoiding any threatening risks, and not to
harm another human being—and the latter is emphasized under threat of law as well as moral code and religious teachings. When young men are mobilized for war, those who train them have to impose a sense of discipline and focus that enables those in combat to subordinate these fundamental principles when the situation demands. When they are demobilized, they are told to return to their first rules, to forget that which they have just learned, and to wipe from their memory contrary experiences. In each instance, this is impossible. The former, training for war, is sufficiently successful to engage in winning battles. The latter, unlearning and forgetting what they have just experienced, may not be possible for those who encounter the horror of war.

Most veterans attribute their ability to engage in combat to simple fear as well as pride—no one wants to let others down or appear to be wanting in the necessary courage to engage. It is essential to suppress reason, at least civilian reason. Karl Marlantes served in Vietnam as a much-decorated marine officer who received two Purple Hearts and a Navy Cross. In his novel
Matterhorn
he wrote of yet another order to take yet another hill from the North Vietnamese Army: “It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't even know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about.” The main protagonist, Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, admitted that he “couldn't figure out why they didn't just quit.” In a statement of resolution, or resignation, or simple inertia, that has echoed from combat since the Trojan War, Mellas already knew the response, his and his men's, to the question about quitting: “Yet they wouldn't.”
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Combat veterans then return home. They must suppress their combat experiences in order to return successfully to civil society. But even if they are successfully suppressed, they cannot be forgotten. Each of these tasks of learning and unlearning comes at some cost, and the cost is an intensely personal one that is not borne by society.

In the course of writing this book, I have been dependent upon the scholarship of scores of outstanding historians and other scholars, and I have learned much from the memoirs and memories of some truly remarkable men and women. This book summarizes and synthesizes, but it is also interpretive. I will share some of my views on the matters under
discussion. I also have a bias: I want to tell the story of those who left their civilian lives and homes to fight wars, their understanding of their tasks, and the public understanding of the purposes for which they fought and the ways they have engaged in their pursuit. I want to tell the stories of the veterans. I sympathize with them. I wish to describe how American society historically has thought about, remembered, and cared for those who have sacrificed in America's wars.

America's combat veterans have been called up from their civilian lives to do what were sometimes remarkable and sometimes distasteful, and always dangerous, things. They have served and too often been forgotten, except as abstractions or as historical stick figures. Their families and neighbors know them, of course, as real persons—even as they seldom truly know what it was these real persons just experienced. Since 1973, in the era of the all-volunteer army, when the military is an even smaller percentage and less representative part of our population, firsthand experience with the armed forces is even more rare. Fewer families and fewer neighborhoods know anyone who has served in the current wars.

Finally, I have focused exclusively on Americans and their wars. War is not a game of solitaire, or for that matter a game of any sort. All American wars have involved opposing nations, regimes, or groups. The fact that I am not assessing the impact upon these enemies, even while acknowledging that with US firepower and success, it has usually been more traumatic for many of them than for the Americans, does not mean I am indifferent to the consequences of war for all parties. I am not. This discussion is confined by subject to my interest in understanding Americans and their wars. Wars are remarkably cruel things, and all participants on all sides deserve to have their stories told. This is but a step toward telling one of these stories.

 

 

This book is mainly centered on World War II and the years and wars that have followed. This is the history that frames our current experiences and expectations. But this history has some deep roots and antecedents. These are an essential part of the story. The American Revolution shaped some of the basic institutions and values that we continue to acknowledge.
The Civil War affirmed the nation, while it also introduced Americans to the horror of modern, sustained, industrial warfare.

From the beginning of the Republic, Americans debated the role of the military and the ways in which the country would mobilize for war. The first debate was in most regards easy to conclude. In this new nation there was early consensus that the military would be subordinate to the elected civilian leadership. In many ways this complicated the second part of the problem: how does civilian leadership ensure that they have a military prepared for war?

Based upon the precedent of the militia of England and in parts of Europe, and deeply rooted in some 150 years of the colonial militia experience, Americans have celebrated the “citizen soldier” as the custodian of the nation, from Bunker Hill in Charlestown to Pointe du Hoc in Normandy. Nonetheless, it was clear from the outset that war could not simply be left to amateurs. If this was clear, it was also largely unspoken. So Americans developed a small standing military and evolved a means to mobilize and train larger military forces to engage in wars. If always more complicated than the legend, the model largely worked through the first half of the twentieth century.

As the United States grew, a smaller percentage of the population served in wars—with the major exception of World War II. If wartime sacrifice has never been shared by all, certainly in the years since World War II even a smaller fraction of the population has served. And “sacrifice” has become an empty slogan for most Americans. One of the results of this has been that American culture increasingly defined those who served as “heroic,” a term derived from the act of service rather than any specific circumstance or performance during that service.