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I never went to Vietnam or even joined the military. I was somewhat of a peacenik in those days. All I've seen of "Saving Private Ryan" was the first 15 minutes. That was enough. My father left me a picture of himself with his 50cal machine gun and a wisp of smoke in the background: a reconaissance plane he shot down. TV shows like MASH and China Beach leave us with a distorted view of what war is. The women in today's military have no idea what they've signed themselves up for. Most men don't either, but I suspect the men are better able to face it, just as a matter of brain biology. But perhaps the reason we do this is to celebrate our survival and to honor the men who went and did what they were asked and either paid the price immediately or paid in small, painful installments over the rest of their lives. It's an unfortunate characteristic of the human race that there will be war. We should always do what we can to avoid it, but someday, we'll have to defend ourselves. I ask all of you who read this: Should we honor those who make that sacrifice by focusing on the valiance of their efforts or should we do all we can to destroy them by focusing only on the truly ugly, bloodthirsty events that occur in the fog of war?
My own opinion is that, no matter how horrible the battle, the warrior deserves respect.
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by Anonymous User on Wednesday July 25, @11:27AM EST (#2)
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> My own opinion is that, no matter how horrible
> the battle, the warrior deserves respect.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Scott
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by Anonymous User on Wednesday July 25, @11:42AM EST (#3)
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I'm the person who submitted this article, and I agree too. Soldiers are not at fault for any war. War happens when politicans get angry at each other, then force the citizenry to duke it out for them.
What I got from the article is that we, as a society, are losing track of how horrible war really is. We're looking back at WWII with misty-eyed nostalgia, when instead we should be feeling solemn reverence and incalculable grief for those who died, and I'm not just talking about physical death. Those who survived died emotionally.
As I wrote in my article preamble, I also feel that the military did a great disservice (and that's putting it mildly) to WWII vets by providing them with no emotional support system upon return to the U.S. These men were suffering greatly, yet their pain was ignored and even covered up by a gov't hellbent on nothing but good PR.
Many of these men, though aged, are still with us and still suffer. I remember reading that the group with the highest rate of suicide is elderly males. I wonder how many of these victims are WWII vets suffering from untreated PTSD?
Claire
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As a 23-year-old male still counting down the years until he is safely ineligible for the draft, I respond to the glamorization of WWII (and most other wars) with deep, mixed feelings. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly agree that we should do all we can to honor and appreciate the men who were called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. On the other hand, I have always been disturbed at the implication that the "manhood" they exemplified was not extraordinary but, in fact, "standard", and that any man who has not had to make that sacrifice is somehow less of a man because of it.
While my female contemporaries are thought of as "liberated" for having the luxury of not having to become housewives as their grandmothers were expected to do, my male contemporaries and myself are thought of as "slackers" for - thus far - having the freedom not to become killing machines as our grandfathers were expected to do. Apparently, we believe in our hearts that only women truly have the right to live a lifetime of uninterrupted human being-ness; for men, it is a mere luxury afforded by peaceful times, and those who have that luxury deserve to be respected less for it.
This attitude is palpable in the way older (and not so older) people talk about young "men" (they don't think we truly are "men"). I am disturbed and depressed by the seeming belief that males are not inherently equipped to fully achieve "real manhood" without going through Hell on Earth to get there.
Whenever I see an advertisement or read a column or listen to a speech waxing poetic on the sacrifices of "the greatest generation", the real message that I feel is being directed at me is that I am both spoiled and deprived to not have to do what they did, and that if ever the opportunity came along, I should not only take it but welcome it as it would make me somehow complete. The glamorization hammers into all men (including the men who have gone to war) the idea that going to war is a "good" thing, and that men should be ashamed for feeling any fear or antipathy towards it. The term "draft dodger" remains one of the ultimate four-letter words in our culture.
So, as a masculinist/masculist/men's liberationist/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call it-ist, the thing which drives me is the sincere and mortal hope that we might someday change our attitudes about men and manhood so that men might actually be thought of as being capable of achieving true manhood in its richest form without having to be drafted, dehumanized and deposited into deadly combat in order to achieve it. And that the men who've had the misfortune of this experience might finally be allowed to admit that it was what it was, and that the state of being they were forced to adhere to during those dark years was not "manhood" but something else entirely.
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"I am disturbed and depressed by the seeming belief that males are not inherently equipped to fully achieve 'real manhood' without going through Hell on Earth to get there."
I certainly sympathize, having experienced the same during the Vietnam era, when I was told over and over that I was a coward, not a real man, etc. etc., for refusing to "serve" in that insane adventure. However, I have come to realize that there is a kernel of truth here. I do believe it is true that a young male must go through some real difficulty, some life-or-death (or nearly) confrontation involving fear and/or pain to become a man.
Traditionally, all human societies have offered some form of "initiation" for young males. Unfortunately, most of them seem to involve violence of some kind, either to others (raiding, warring) or to the young man himself (circumcision or other mutilation as manhood rite, raiding and warring). Our society is particularly dumb, offering only military conscription and the brutal dehumanization of "basic training" as a manhood rite.
For most in my generation, it was either the military or some other dangerous passage that formed our "manhood." In the early 1970s I emerged from some six years of heavy drug use and random homeless wandering to realize that I felt like I'd been through a war myself, though it was an internal war rather than the external one most others had experienced during those years. I spent the next decade in a Zen Buddhist community, trying to put it back together.
I have noted a certain lack of development in American males born in the mid-1950s and later, who have not had to face being drafted into a war - or anything of comparable difficulty. It is unfortunate that war is the only "maturation environment" for males our society has been able to come up with.
An interesting alternative can be found in Southeast Asia, where young males are traditionally expected to spend a couple of years in a Buddhist monastery, learning self-control, discipline, austerity, humility and service. It's a training in many ways as tough as the Marines (shaven heads and all), but not dehumanizing, in fact quite the opposite.
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"However, I have come to realize that there is a kernel of truth here. I do believe it is true that a young male must go through some real difficulty, some life-or-death (or nearly) confrontation involving fear and/or pain to become a man."
In some Jungian psychological circles this is called "The Fisher King Wound." A young man gets a taste of manhood before his time, is wounded by it, then spends a period of time despairing over it, trying to catch up to his manhood yet still cling to some of the boyhood he used to know.
There's an excellent (and short) book on male psychology by Robert A. Johnson simply titled "He." It delves deeply into the Fisher King story, relating the King Arthur legend directly to male psychology in a number of interesting ways. Anyone interested in Andrew's description above or the Fisher King wound in general should check out a copy. You can buy it at Amazon.com.
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A very good article, though it doesn't go deep enough.
My father was one of those WWII veterans: captain of a squadron of fighter-bombers off a carrier in the Pacific. Nearly died several times, once when the ship was sunk under him. Participated in fire-bombing raids over Japan near the end of the war. Tragically, he was good at it, though he hated it.
My mother describes our first meeting: his first child, I was born (in 1943) while my father was away killing Japs (and watching his friends killed around him); he came home on leave when I was a few months old. My mother met him in one of those crowd scenes of returning servicemen, wives and children, and handed him his new baby (me). Perhaps sensing (as babies do) his emotional state, I started to cry, and he handed me back.
I've always seen that picture as emblematic of something fundamental in American "gender relations." My mother's naive expectation (she was all of 22 years old) that my father would/could immediately generate all the expected feelings of open-heart affection toward a baby after what he'd been doing for the last several years. And her disappointment that he did not, then or later in our tortured family life, which led her to embrace the common female view that men are naturally cold, cruel and violent, and/or "have no feelings." Which I imbibed, as the saying goes, with my mother's milk, and only began to unlearn decades later.
(I think it is clear that men go to war for two reasons: (a) To collect territory, property and glory, which lead to more "success with the ladies"; or (b) to defend the territory and property they have, on which depend the well-being of their families, from men engaged in (a). One way or the other, it is all about women, women's desires and women's needs. If men are "naturally violent," it is for good reason: we have been bred to exactly that end, from long before humans existed. Females of any species seldom mate with losers. Nor is military prowess necessarily linked with maleness; the most brutally efficient military machine on the planet is entirely female: the army ants of the aptly-named Amazon.)
Thus was set the pattern of our relationship, which got a lot worse, and left me severely emotionally scarred. But not as badly scarred as he was. He died in 1974, age 56, of lung cancer, happy to finally get it over with, I believe. If I accomplish nothing more in this life, the fact that, despite having inherited a large portion of his pain, I have now outlived him (shortly I'll be 58), I see as a kind of inter-generational progress. And something, at least, I could do for him.
Perhaps more intelligent than most cannon-fodder, my father was aware all during the war that he was being lied to, though he didn't live long enough to learn much about how and why. Only after his death have I learned that that war, like nearly all wars, especially in modern times, was arranged and manipulated, for the profit of a few, to whom the rest of us really are "cannon fodder," as well as "resources" of various other kinds. It is now well-known that Roosevelt and cronies deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, so as to turn America's then-overwhelmingly "isolationist" sentiment toward war. As it is known that major corporations like Standard Oil happily sold to all sides all during the war.
I believe that many WW II veterans, like my father, suspected that something was not quite right about what they had been lured into doing. As many have noted, killing is a crime, no matter the reason, and even the most honorable soldiers must be absolved of their blood-guilt when they return to the society they were defending. When they are not entirely sure of the justness of their cause, such absolution will be difficult or impossible. When the society itself would rather forget, the results will be devastating on the soldiers, as in the case of Vietnam veterans.
In 1967 I visited my father briefly where he lived in Annapolis, Maryland, on my way to Canada to avoid taking part in the latest American military adventure, this time much more obviously in no way related to any kind of honorable defense of home and family. Though he didn't entirely agree with my youthful (and, I now feel, simplistic) anti-war views, he didn't criticize my decision. The day after I left, he went to the largest anti-war demonstration in Washington, a very untypical thing for him to do.
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