Features » September 8, 2006

The Good War on Terror (cont’d)

In the film, a small company of American soldiers manages to survive the D-Day invasion, and are then led by their commander, John Miller (Tom Hanks), on a quest to find Private Ryan. Ryan’s three brothers have, unbeknownst to him, all recently died in combat, and U.S. General Command has decided to find the lone surviving Ryan boy and get him home to his grieving mother. Miller and his company, comprising a charmingly diverse assemblage of white guys, wander the French countryside still dotted with Germans, looking for the elusive private, who had parachuted ahead with the airborne.  

But the film’s real message revolves not around Ryan, but Cpl. Timothy Upham. We first meet Upham when Miller goes to fetch him from his desk where he is poring over maps and translating communiqués from French and German. Young and wispy, with hair brushing his upper lip, Upham is a translator, not a fighter: He hasn’t fired a gun since basic training and wants to take his typewriter with him. He quickly earns the unit’s ire by annoyingly chatting everyone up and quoting books and poetry.  

At one point, after engaging a German tank that manages to kill one of their own men, the American soldiers capture the lone surviving German and force him to dig his own grave before they execute him. As the German pathetically mutters nonsensical English phrases, Upham objects to Miller. “Captain, this isn’t right,” he says, “You know this. He’s a prisoner, he surrendered. He surrendered, sir.” Miller is skeptical, but ultimately swayed. He blindfolds the German and tells him to walk 1,000 paces and then turn himself in to the first American soldiers he sees. The other men grumble.

It’s not the last we see of the German. In the film’s climatic battle, as the Americans try to hold a bridge under a heavy German attack, this same former prisoner returns to shoot and kill Captain Miller. Meanwhile, during the battle, Upham is paralyzed by a fear so total that, as his Jewish comrade wrestles hand-to-hand with a menacing Nazi, he can only cower in the stairwell below, crying as the Nazi plunges a knife in the Jewish soldier’s chest.  

The message is clear. In the great struggle for the future of the free world, the intellectual cannot be trusted. His concern for the laws of war means he is weak and cowardly, and will contribute to defeat. Only the true soldier can win the war. This is the ethos of the Cult of the Soldier, which would come to entirely dominate our politics in the years to follow.

“For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press,” Zell Miller boomed during his keynote speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention. “It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest. It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag who gives that protester the freedom he abuses to burn that flag.”

The Cult of the Soldier wasn’t confined solely to the Republican Party. Just a month earlier, the Democratic National Convention had been converted into a four-day military pageant, with home movies of John Kerry as a young solider, his Swift Boat crew assembled on stage on the convention’s final night, and the nominee opening his acceptance speech with a stiff salute and the words, “John Kerry, reporting for duty.”  

It didn’t work. Whatever points Kerry scored from his military valor were negated by ceaseless attacks on his character: from the incessant charge of flip-flopping to the slander of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. More devastatingly, Kerry’s personal story didn’t fit the idealized notion of honorable, dutiful, courageous combat, because after his service he returned home to question the war’s purpose and the war crimes of his fellow soldiers.  

If he played Miller in the war’s first act, he played Upham in its second.

But even without the particulars of Kerry’s own moral journey, it was still destined to fail. Reality can’t compete with the power of these established symbols. To reinforce the Cult of the Soldier is to reinforce the same set of oppositional culture war cliches that undergird our current political discourse. You’re either with the war or you are against the troops.  

Not everyone was so naive as to miss this. Even before 9/11, historian Howard Zinn, himself a WWII bombardier, wrote in The Progressive that he refused to celebrate the Greatest Generation “because in doing so we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are miseducating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism. … Indeed, the current infatuation with World War II prepares us–innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others–for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past.”

The experience of Vietnam had largely succeeded in cleansing Americans of whatever romantic notions of military heroism they may have once held dear. For neoconservatives, our collective suspicion of war was a weak-kneed impediment to fulfilling our imperial calling, a national illness they diagnosed as “Vietnam syndrome.” Searching for a cure took up no small amount of conservative energy, but it was the centrists and liberals who produced the WWII nostalgia who ultimately provided it.  

It is a grand irony that Spielberg claimed repeatedly that his entire motivation behind making Saving Private Ryan was to deconstruct the simplified version of WWII that Americans had come to accept. “All wars,” he said in a typical interview, are “chambers of horrors.” And that’s certainly true of the film’s opening and of the gruesome descriptions in Ambrose’s books and Brokaw’s recounting. But what emerges from these works is a picture of war as a chamber of physical horrors–torn limbs, exposed viscera, muck, blood. Absent completely are the moral horrors of combat, the horror of taking a life, of feeling the killer within. There’s a good deal of evidence that suggests the most traumatic experience of war isn’t being the target of violence, but rather the agent. A 1994 study of post-traumatic stress in veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam found that “responsibility for killing another human being is the single most pervasive, traumatic experience of war.”

So when, as Spielberg and Brokaw both point out, WWII veterans refuse to say they are heroes, it may not be due to any generational humility, but rather because, in their view, they really aren’t heroes. Taking another human life may sometimes be necessary, but it is rarely, if ever, heroic.

In fact, the more recent Greatest Generation texts by and large display far less moral nuance than the classic World War II literature produced by the men who fought in it. In Catch-22, to name just one example, there is no glory or moral clarity, only surreal, horrific absurdity. At one point, as Yossarian is about to embark on a bombing run, he asks his comrades, “Do you guys realize, we are going to bomb a city that has no military targets, no railroads, no industries, only people?”  

The WWII that emerges from accounts of the late ’90s is one scrubbed clean of its moral complexity. There is no mention of American big business financing the build-up of the Nazi war machine, no America First campaign determined not to shed American blood for European Jews, no firebombing of civilians in Dresden. The war was difficult, yes, and bloody, but pure and just: a battle, not to put too fine a point on it, between good and evil.  

In the hands of the men who would come to dominate American military policy in the Bush administration, this Manichean framework was a useful template to apply indiscriminately to any and all of the military confrontations they had long sought. To the neocons and some breakaway lefties, al-Qaeda members are “Islamofascists,” 21st century heirs to the murderous ideologies of Nazism, fascism and totalitarianism. It is always Munich 1938, every dictator is a “tyrant,” and anyone opposed to a state of perpetual war is guilty of “appeasement.”

“In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war,” Bush said in a March 17, 2003, address that would herald the beginning of the bombing of Iraq. “In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.”  

Making WWII the touchstone for martial combat allowed the militarists we politely call “neoconservatives” to imbue all wars with the same moral purpose. The Greatest Generation nostalgia succeeded in helping to subtly shift the burden of proof, such that wars were presumed innocent and righteous, as opposed to the far more sane position that war is guilty until proven innocent.  

If there’s a single guiding ethos for the Bush’s administration’s foreign policy, it is this: that contrary to the age-old insight about the “fog of war,” war brings moral clarity even as it clouds the senses. In the first days of the escalating missile and rocket strikes between Israel and Hezbollah, Dan Bartlett, a White House aide, explained that “[The president] mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived.”

Through the crucible of battle, evil and good announce themselves. In the absence of violence, they remain hidden.  

The perils of unity

The people who produced the books and movies that would come to define WWII nostalgia were by no means reactionaries. Spielberg is famously liberal, Brokaw widely rumored to be a Democrat, and Ambrose an establishment centrist who in 1995 penned an op-ed calling for Colin Powell to run for president.

So whatever the nationalistic and militaristic effects of the symbolic vocabulary they built, war and patriotism weren’t the primary aims. No, what seems to motivate the soft-focus reflections on the ’40s is the unparalleled experience of unity that the Good War created. “The one time the nation got together was World War II,” says Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) in The Greatest Generation. “We stood as one. We spoke as one. We clenched our fists as one.”  

By appealing to an era of broad national consensus, Brokaw, Spielberg and Ambrose tapped a popular urge to rise above the social striations and fissures of post-’60s upheavals. After 30 years of culture war, they were calling for a truce. And as the initial reaction to 9/11 showed, Americans were ready for one.  

On the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, with the country still just three months removed from the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush invoked, as he would many times in the years that followed, the unwavering unity America had displayed during World War II. “During four years of war,” he said, “no one doubted the rightness of our cause; no one wavered in the quest of victory.”  

A state in which “no one doubts the rightness” of its cause is a state in which politics has ceased to exist. In retrospect, that is what the nation sought in the waning days of the 20th century. Crowding into theatres to watch Saving Private Ryan, curling up to read The Greatest Generation, Americans were longing for something greater, more noble and less petty than mere politics. But mere politics turns out to be the only bulwark we have against the collective madness that war engenders. When politics dies, when it is suffocated underneath the warm blanket of patriotic consensus, the conscience of the republic dies along with it.