|
Warrior Stories
On memoirs, autobiographies, historical fictions, official biographies,
and romans à clef, Part Three
This month I had intended to write about generational tales of we who had grown up in the sixties and seventies and our rebellion against racism, imperialism, and the Vietnam War and the Central American Wars. After reviewing O’Brien’s book last month, I realized I was putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps I should write about warriors’ descriptions that spoke of the idiocy of war of rather than such domestic accounts seen from America.
Ulysses Grant wrote about the War with Mexico in his Autobiography: “The war [with Mexico was] one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation… I consider the annexation of Texas… without the assent of Mexico, [compromised] the national character, involving us certainly in war with Mexico...The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
Stephen Crane, a noncombatant, wrote a complex novel of cowardice, desertion, and courage in his 1895 Red Badge of Courage. Perhaps thinking of Thomas Paine Crane tells the tale of an antihero who seeks and succeeds in redeeming his honor in The Red Badge of Courage.
Ten years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice. . . I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it…Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene…” Hemingway’s later war book For Whom the Bell Tolls was John McCain’s favorite book.
Twenty years after the Treaty of Versailles, Dalton Trumbo wrote Johnny Got His Gun. The hero hideously wounded in WW I, unable to speak or communicate. He needs to say things and he learns Morse Code. He proceeds to excoriate the war. Those who tend him, understand him, and walk away, refusing to hear his ‘cri de couer.’
Milton Wolff, the last Commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, wrote a novel about the Spanish Civil War. Instead of lauding heroism and courage, the novel focuses on the execution of a volunteer who goes AWOL. An interesting choice for a hero of that good war.
Soldiers find meaning in war. Mailer was not the first to try to craft the Great American Novel in The Naked and the Dead. One such was Bob Baldock, founder of Black Oak Books, who wrote an “autobiographical novel” titled Wild Green Oranges. A college kid, he dropped out of school and hitchhiked to Florida and fought in the Cuban Revolution in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra.
And then Vietnam. Some suffered like the characters in The Things They Carried. Others, like Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July, and Geronimo Pratt, Last Man Standing, were wounded and found meaning in struggling against the war machine. Brian Wilson, a Vietnam Veteran lost both legs trying to stop a train carrying arms to be deployed in the US Contra Wars in Central America. Wilson relays his story in Blood on the Tracks.
For a more extended review see George Packer’s 4-7-14 New Yorker article “Home Fires: How soldiers write their wars.” This includes the “forever wars,” the Afghan and Iraqi wars. And now, of course, we have another iteration of Iran.
"Home Fires: How Soldiers Write Their Wars"
| 
