No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America - Softcover

Samet, Elizabeth D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250074932 ISBN 13: 9781250074935

Publisher: Picador, 2015

Synopsis

As the post-9/11 wars wind down, a literature professor at West Point explores what it means for soldiers, and our country, to be caught between war and peace.

In her critically acclaimed, award-winning book Soldier's Heart, Elizabeth D. Samet grappled with the experience of teaching literature at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Now, with No Man's Land, Samet contends that we are entering a new moment: a no man's land between war and peace. Major military deployments are winding down, but soldiers are wrestling with the aftermath of war and the trials of returning home while also facing the prospect of low-intensity conflicts for years to come. Drawing on a range of experiences-from a visit to a ward of wounded combat veterans to correspondence with former cadets, from a conference on Edith Wharton and wartime experience to teaching literature and film to future officers-Samet illuminates an ambiguous passage through no man's land that has left deep but difficult-to-read traces on our national psyche, our culture, our politics, and, most especially, an entire generation of military professionals.

In No Man's Land, Elizabeth D. Samet offers a moving, urgent examination of what it means to negotiate the tensions between war and peace, between "over there" and "over here"-between life on the front and life at home. She takes the reader on a vivid tour of this new landscape, marked as much by the scars of war as by the ordinary upheavals of homecoming, to capture the essence of our current historical moment.

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times; and Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898. Her essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and Bloomberg View. Samet won the 2012 Hiett Prize in the Humanities and was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the research and writing of a book about mythologies of the war veteran in Hollywood cinema. She is a professor of English at West Point.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

Coming Home

 

FIRST SERVICEMAN: What gives?

SECOND SERVICEMAN: Oh, my folks had a barbeque last night. Turned out to be a homecoming.

FIRST SERVICEMAN: I had one of those things. It turned out to be murder.

SECOND SERVICEMAN: Half of them were afraid if they said something they’d upset me, and the other half were afraid if I said something I’d upset them.

FIRST SERVICEMAN: Look, my friend, let’s face it, nobody’s going to listen to us. Why don’t we take off an hour someday? You tell me about what you did, I’ll tell you about what I did.

SECOND SERVICEMAN: You got it.

—Till the End of Time (RKO, 1946), directed by Edward Dmytryk

DEEP IN THE CANYON OF HEROES

Has coming home from a war—even a “good war”—ever been easy? Certainly not for Homer’s mistrustful Odysseus, who returns in disguise to Ithaca to slaughter the suitors who have commandeered his house and whose loyal yet equally wary wife subsequently refuses to believe he is her husband, and not some impostor, until he accurately describes the bed they long ago shared. Nor for the Chinese soldier whose lament is recorded in a Han dynasty folk song: Having gone to war at fifteen, he comes home at eighty to find everything unrecognizable. A stranger tells him he will find his old house out by the burial mounds, overgrown with trees. Birds roost in the rafters, and forest animals scurry through what used to be the dog’s door. The old soldier cooks his dinner from the grain and sunflowers growing wild in the yard, but once the meal is ready, he realizes there’s no one left to serve it to him, no one with whom to share it. The soldier’s homecoming is as freighted with ambivalent myths as is war itself: two different parties, each with carefully crafted stories that depend on the other’s absence, suddenly collide in a no man’s land that, if partly of their own making, is primarily the inevitable residue of making war.

It’s easy to imagine that there’s safety in numbers, that mass mobilization makes repatriation a whole lot more routine. This is not necessarily the case. After World War II, the generals and the admirals (Eisenhower, Wainwright, Nimitz, Halsey) had ticker-tape parades through New York City’s Canyon of Heroes. Most of the rest of the conflict’s more than fifteen million veterans just sort of drifted home. When, on the night before being demobilized at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, in January 1946, my dad was finally able to call home for the first time in a few years, his own father didn’t recognize his voice: “This doesn’t sound like Teddy.” My dad took the train home to Boston the following day. A few days later, realizing that he had nothing to wear but his uniform, he went down to a shop in Kenmore Square to try on a suit. He didn’t even recognize the guy in civilian clothes he caught sight of in the mirror.

Despite similar episodes of uncertainty and strangeness, my father’s transition ended up being a reasonably smooth one. Probably the biggest factor in it was the World War II Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—the GI Bill—which sent him to college, something he otherwise could not have afforded. The naturalness with which he resumed civilian life was by no means a universal experience, but our fierce nostalgia for those good old, “greatest” days tends to obscure the postwar period’s complexities in a mist of patriotic confetti. As the historian Kathleen Frydl argues in The GI Bill, the substance and legacy of the bill itself, especially the ambivalence with which it and its veteran beneficiaries were initially regarded by a range of constituencies, have been distorted by politics and the passage of time. We are justly outraged today, for example, by news of for-profit colleges preying on veterans in order to tap into the benefits they are receiving from the modern GI Bill, but Frydl reminds us that this particular swindle was born in the late 1940s, when there were so many more potential victims to exploit. One of the fantasies contributing to the present era’s confused and overwrought civil-military relationship is that every World War II service member was warmly appreciated by a grateful nation and that every veteran felt a reciprocal gratitude. It takes a contemporary observation such as this one made by the poet Wallace Stevens in a 1945 letter to recall that even that war, all encompassing as it was, could still feel somewhat abstract to a civilian at home:

All during the war there have been very few visible signs of it here in Hartford. Occasionally, on the street, one would see a long string of young men on the way to the draft board, but that was all. We were intent on the war, yet it was far away. At first, when someone that we had known was lost, there was an extraordinary shock; later, this became something in the ordinary course of events, terrifying but inevitable.

Three years earlier, in an account of a bond rally featuring the actress Dorothy Lamour in Bangor, Maine, E. B. White noted a similar indifference to those long strings of young men: “Dorothy … drove off through the cheering crowd in the blood-red car, up Exchange Street, where that morning I had seen a motley little contingent of inductees shuffling off, almost unnoticed, to the blood-red war.” Today, the comparatively small number of those serving makes the average citizen’s relationship to war even more attenuated.

Coincidentally, the Bangor International Airport, a frequent stopover for military flights, is now home to a nonprofit organization called the Maine Troop Greeters, whose mission “is to express the Nation’s gratitude and appreciation to the troops, for those going overseas for a safe return and for those returning for a joyful homecoming and to make their … stay in Bangor as comfortable and pleasant as possible.” An army major told me that one of the greeters is known as “the hug lady” and that every soldier who has passed through Bangor knows her. Even the hardest and most jaded can’t help but smile on seeing the hug lady, this officer explained: maybe it feels a bit silly and awkward to be embraced by this grandmotherly stranger, he reflected, yet no one seems immune to the effect of a hug and a homemade cookie. How grateful, I wonder, is the nation on behalf of which the Maine Troop Greeters claim to speak? In what ways should it be expressing its gratitude? Is gratitude even the proper sentiment?

THE SEA OF VARIABILITY

The soldier’s readjustment has always been a difficult art. “It’ll take time, I guess,” an uneasy veteran tells his father in the 1946 film Till the End of Time. “Sure. You didn’t make yourself a soldier overnight,” the father responds. “You can’t make yourself a civilian again overnight.” I’ve recently been struck by the number of films that depict World War II servicemen coming home to empty houses or, even more troubling, to houses full of strangers. Hollywood could be a sublime wartime propaganda machine; nevertheless, it refused to mute the ambiguities of the veteran’s homecoming. Physical and psychological obstacles to readjustment crop up in various films of the period, most notably William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, released the same year as Till the End of Time. Their scenarios expose all of the uneasiness on both sides that accompanied the influx of nearly sixteen million ex-service members (or ex-heroes, as they are sometimes rather bitterly referred to on the screen) into civilian society. The simple fact that there were so many veterans—the comparatively small totals of the 4.7 million veterans of the World War I American Expeditionary Force and the 8.7 million who served in Vietnam still exceed the approximately 2.5 million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—made their readjustment a pervasive societal feature rather than, as it is today, a somewhat unusual spectacle.

In Pride of the Marines (1945) a blinded veteran played by John Garfield sits awkwardly in the living room of the house in which he used to live repeating variations on a refrain as true as it is false: “Things pretty much the same, huh?” Garfield’s mantra—a mantra he wants desperately to believe—makes me think anew about a visit I made a few years ago to Walter Reed, before the facility moved to Bethesda as part of Base Realignment and Closure. I was in Washington for a series of meetings at the Pentagon, where I had never been, with various people I had never met, but the hospital was the one item on the agenda that intimidated me. If you can’t sing or tell jokes or sign baseballs or heal wounds, can you ever be something other than a war tourist on a military hospital ward? Shawn, the officer responsible for coordinating my trip, assured me that we would see only those patients who had signed up to receive visitors. Shawn and I had met only the day before, but because of the way he had arranged everything over the weeks of e-mails and telephone calls preceding my visit, I already trusted him implicitly: I would go to Walter Reed.

We met three patients that day: two soldiers and a marine. One soldier’s mother sat in a chair, her face the exact and exacting mirror of a son’s bewilderment and pain, more difficult to look at than the injured figure lying on the bed. The marine was a lieutenant, a stranger to me yet in some ways not so different from the many lieutenants I know. He was so happy and eager to please when we walked into the room, wheeled his chair over to us with such alacrity, that I was disarmed. It felt almost as if he had been expecting us, like a figure from a Greek myth, a host doomed perpetually to await the uninvited guests who alight on his doorstep. The lieutenant had lost his leg, and he periodically returned to the hospital for weeks and months at a time for a series of operations. The same nurse, John, had been assigned to him on each occasion, and it was clear that this relationship sustained the marine. John helped him to remember things he no longer could. “John’s my guy,” he said after the nurse gave him a particular word for which he had been searching. Staring at what was left of his leg, the lieutenant told me that John had also given a name to the place in which he found himself. He called it “a sea of variability.”

Sitting in the car after the visit, Shawn asked me whether we had made the right decision. “I didn’t say anything before, because you had a job to do,” he added, and then he told me his story. In Kuwait he had been in a tent into which a fellow soldier had thrown a grenade. The blast from the grenade sent fragments all around him, even through the family photographs he had hung up by his bunk. Shawn and the soldiers near him were wounded; the air force officer who had been next to him later died from his injuries. “I had to deal with the fact that everything wasn’t the same, that it never would be, and that that’s okay.” This is the “heavy reckoning” of which Shakespeare wrote: the chaos of “all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle”—the unassimilable, ungovernable aftermath of war. For Shawn, accepting irrevocable change as a consequence of war was the necessary prelude to learning how to adjust to the sea of variability and to achieving some kind of new equilibrium in such an elastic state.

Violence works deep transformations in even the most self-aware soldier. Combat ages a veteran prematurely: sometimes the evidence is physical, while often it manifests itself in less tangible ways, in a certain gravity and presence, perhaps. After a year and a half fighting in Mexico under what he called the “Tropicle Sun,” Ulysses S. Grant looked around to find too many of his friends wounded or dead. “At this rate,” he wrote to his future wife, Julia Dent, “I will soon be old.” “So you see,” he observed later in the same letter, “it is not so easy to get out of the wars as it is to get into them.” Navigating the volatile world of war, the soldier finds a powerful fantasy in the idea that somewhere else time stands still. Rich with narrative and dramatic potential, this fantasy has provided fodder for countless books and films. Of course things don’t stay quite the same at home.

The 1946 Paramount noir The Blue Dahlia offers an especially painful version of the veteran’s welcome home. Johnny Morrison, a navy lieutenant commander played by Alan Ladd, returns to Los Angeles from flying Liberators in the South Pacific knowing that his young son has died in his absence. He finds his wife, Helen (Doris Dowling), not grieving but hosting a party in her swanky bungalow. After being greeted at the door by a drunken woman who announces to the crowd with some amazement, “Helen’s got a husband,” Johnny has to break up an embrace between his wife and another man. “You’ve got the wrong lipstick on, Mister,” Morrison tells the man (Howard Da Silva) before socking him in the jaw. It is only when Johnny sarcastically asks Helen whether he ought to apologize for his behavior that the real venom emerges: “Apologize, darling, but you don’t have to. You’re a hero. A hero can get away with anything.” And when he subsequently tries to wrest a drink away from her, Helen snarls, “Take your paws off me. Maybe you’ve learned to like hurting people.”

Helen’s attack typifies one of the suspicions frequently voiced in these films: that the veteran has grown accustomed to violence and may even enjoy it. Sterling war records often provoke ambiguity in postwar cinema: routinely investigated by law enforcement officials and others, they are subsequently invoked as evidence of good character, competence, or trustworthiness even as they raise concerns that the erstwhile serviceman has developed a habitual reliance on violence to solve his problems. By proving a veteran’s ability to kill, a service record sometimes makes him a likely suspect in violent crimes at home. Drifting through Anytown, U.S.A., in search of work or a new start, the mysterious veteran easily becomes a prime suspect in crimes otherwise attributable to uncomfortably familiar (and frequently upstanding) members of the community.

In the case of The Blue Dahlia, Helen’s unfounded resentment leads her to project onto Johnny an attitude that might be called the presumption of heroes: namely, that everything at home will be just as they left it—maybe even better than they left it—no matter how much they dread otherwise and no matter how much war might have changed them in the interim. The New Yorker correspondent A. J. Liebling reveals the defensive urgency of this desire in his discussion of “a favorite army fantasy: what civilian life will be like after the war.” He provides an example of the game as played by some airmen in North Africa who were being moved to a new field in 1943:

Somebody said, “I hear they’re going to start us here and let us hack our way through to South Africa.”

Somebody else began a descant on a favorite army fantasy: what civilian life will be like after the war. “I bet if my wife gives me a piece of steak,” he said, “I’ll say to her, ‘What the hell is this? Give me stew.’”

Another one said, “I bet she’ll be surprised when you jump into bed with all your clothes on.”

The delicacy of their speculations diminished from there on.

The humor here is based on a profound conviction that war permanently alters the combatant. In the face of that radical change, home-front stability becomes an essential part of the fiction that sustains a soldier amid the disintegration of war and helps to allay what is in some, but not all, instances an unwarranted anxiety about the impermanence of relationships left behind. This aspect of homecoming finds one of its earliest incarnations in Homer’s Odyssey

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1250074932
• ISBN 13: 9781250074935
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240