Memorial Day 2022

Note: RE people seeing this day of remembrance and mourning as the first day of summer. This is a day to honor the men and women who died for our country while serving in the U.S. military.

The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War - Samuel Hynes

Readers of war memoirs have one question, “What was it like, the war.” Hynes points out that images and expectations of war are cultivated in our imagination and to our benefit we can change our understanding of war by bringing war in our imagination (“war in the head”) closer to the reality of war as human experience. Reading first-hand accounts of war, we can be vicariously involved in other people’s war experience.

Therefore, Hynes’ object was to scrutinize the expectations and experiences ​​that civilian soldiers took into the two destructive wars in continental Europe, the Vietnam War, and POW camps run by the Germans. Hynes excludes the memoirs of commanders and high ranks, because they did not participate first-hand on the battlefield and so are unable to describe of their own knowledge and experience what was happening.

The author also covers memoirs by sufferers who went through the massacres of the Holocaust and the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some extended quotations are upsetting. I had to put the book down for days at time, to recover.

Hynes was a Marine pilot during WWII so he testifies that many American young men in the Thirties read the WWI memoirs of Sassoon and Graves. They knew the horror of industrialized war, but readily signed up after Pearl Harbor because they matter-of-factly figured that if the country was good enough to live in, it was good enough to fight for. They also felt on an instinctual level that Hitlerism was evil, just as we ordinary people now feel the presence of barbaric evil, when we look at images of the malicious destruction of life and property in Ukraine.

Hynes also points out that many WWII American soldiers were wary high-sounding concepts like “valor” and soldiers in Vietnam warned new guys about not acting like John Wayne in a movie. Hynes says for civilian soldiers, going to war was a stage of their lives, though certainly for some it was the high point of their lives, the one time they were involved in something really huge and important. Hynes acknowledges that for some young males going to war was the ultimate adventure.

This balanced book is worth reading, though some passages are disturbing .

Accounts mentioned this book; click on the title to read the review:

·         Toward the Flame: A Memoir of World War I – Hervey Allen

·         Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe - W. Stanley Moss

·         The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

·         A Passionate Prodigality - Guy Chapman

·         With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa - Eugene B. Sledge

·         All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

·         The Road Past Mandalay: A Personal Narrative - John Masters

·         Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves