Uncle Nick in Burma, ca 1944 ©UrbisMedia
When the fifteen hours of Ken Burns documentary of World War II is over later this week we can return to the endless Bush Iraq War that is already longer than the war that eliminated Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. The contrasts go well beyond the differences between the almost quaint citizen soldiers in their cloth shirts and tin-pot helmets and the Robo-cop, all volunteer military we have in Iraq. “Body armor?” my uncle, who fought from North Africa to Anzio, might have said, “What the hell is body armor?” The Whermacht couldn’t kill my uncle, but disease did, way too early when he got back. These days over a thousand of his fellow veterans of WWII die every day. They have been called “the greatest generation,” but I think my uncle Marco would have laughed at that; he was too close to the three smells he said he remembered from the war—“cordite, puke and shit.” The Japanese in Burma couldn’t kill his bother, my uncle Nick, either. They are, to me, great men, but I never heard either portray himself, or their gerneration, as “heroic.”
There are still enough WWII vets around, however, to pull together an audience for George Bush—the man whose idea of combat is a push and shove in a bar in Texas—to create the illusion that his war is somehow in the spirit and purpose of their war. They dutifully applaud, wearing their veteran regalia; but there are a lot of their fellow soldiers who don’t and won’t show up for Bush’s staged shows. Maybe they are too old and too addled to make the necessary distinctions between a Roosevelt and a Bush, between a Hitler and a Hussein, between a war that was about preserving democracy and one where “democracy” is just a subterfuge to get to the oil. This August Bush told the national convention of the American Legion: “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . .The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops. . . . I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.” They applauded lustily. They just don’t get it. Sorry, but these guys are not the greatest part of the “the greatest generation.”
One of the worst things a society can do is to believe its own public relations. I believe that there are great ideas and even great deeds, but not great generations or civilizations. Human behavior is just to complex and varied for such summation. There is too much irony. The Burns documentary gets at both in subtle ways. It explores the segregated division of Nisei Japanese, composed of many volunteers whose families were still in the camps we had thrown them into after Pearl Harbor. They were one of the most decorated divisions in American military history, like the Tuskegee Airman, who could keep every bomber they escorted from being shot down, but couldn’t drink from the same fountain as whites when they got home. There is a vignette of a wounded black soldier on a hospital ship off Pelilu, who is refused a haircut by a white Navy barber. There is another about an American soldier who is digging out the gold teeth of a wounded with a bayonet, but still alive, Japanese soldier (recounted by another American soldier who had to put the Japanese soldier out of his misery). Not any great stuff in these deeds. Of course, there was much heroism and many great deeds, the stuff of legend. But legends are the stuff, unfortunately, of public relations.
Bush uses those legends, and uses those old guys in their caps festooned with pins and vests with medals, as props, the way GoArmy.com and the Marines use them to recruit a generation that is more left behind and disadvantaged, or just looking for something more exciting to do than flip burgers or stock shelves at Wal Mart. There were some thrill-seekers in The War, too, but many more who had more mundane or noble motivations. There were also the propaganda films, like Why We Fight . They all didn’t know what the hell they were getting into, or how bad it could be. They didn’t know a good military tactic from a stupid one, they didn’t know that they were often regarded as expendable, that the frame of reference for their war was far closer to “The Great War,” where waves of men were shoved out of trenches into ceaseless machine gun fire and more men would die in a single engagement than all of Iraq thus far. They often didn’t know of the screw-ups and sheer carelessness of their generals until they read them after the war. [1] We lost more American’s in one day on one Pacific Island than we have lost in the entire Bush Iraq War. But I wonder if we would get today’s American soldiers to assault a beach like Tarawa or Iwo Jima, Omaha Beach on D-Day, they way they did in the 1940s. If the American public had to see it in the same day’s news, rather than an edited cinema newsreel weeks or months afterward, would they put up as long with a stupid, senseless war like Bush’s war. But at the end of The War we were rightly convinced that we were in the right and had done the right thing. Nothing here is meant to gainsay that.
Each time Bush puts himself up in front of his standard greatest generation veteran [2]background I am further reminded that it is another public relations piece for American exceptionalism that is, paradoxically, the most compelling indicator tha twe were are anything but exceptional. We did win The War, and then returned to our racism, became greedy, complacent, materialistic, and arrogant. The so-called greatest generation was complicit in this, complicit in helping someone like Bush and Cheney come to power, and complicit in their abuse of it. There are many conclusions and lessons that can be drawn from such world-changing events as The War, and the Burns documentary could only treat some of them, as well as it did. But it is a fair conclusion to say that our great effort and its victory also resulted in the loss of our national innocence, so to speak. We won, we prevailed, and we became “the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever known,” in fact as well as by our own estimation of ourselves. But we have not used our might judiciously.
In films schools there are still courses that are called “doc and prop,” noting that the closeness between reportage and propaganda are sometimes uncomfortably proximate. To Burns’s credit he tries to take the view of The War from the inductive, from the people who experienced it in their homes and in the factories, and on the battlefields; not many of the generals and most of the politicians. But, it is plain to see and hear from those who were “in it” that that they never could quite see “the forest,” the molar aspects of The War, because they were “the trees.” There were too close to it to see it full, their heads down welding, riveting, or trying to keep from being a casualty.
So, in some sense, The War does not merit its definite article; it is many different wars, for Black and Whites and Japanese-Americans, and those on the home front. I recall when I was traveling in the old USSR some years ago coming upon several war memorials. They all were memorials to what the Russians called simply, “The 1941-1945 War.” I recall being in an Atomic Bomb museum in Nagasaki where the diorama on the history of what they call the “Pacific War” does not mention Pearl Harbor. At the War Museum in Saigon, all the exhibits proclaim their “victory” over America. We should not think that because we can make a documentary of The War, that it is exclusively, “our” war.
For a lot of Americans, like me, the Iraq war is not “our” war—it’s Bush’s war and we need to proclaim at every PR event that this deceitful, cruel bastard stages with a backdrop of people who have actually been to war, but sadly, were just “one of the trees,” and ought to know better, that they should not make it their war, too.
Like the old veteran of The War, for whom their war has become the model of international relations and the appropriate method of its resolution, we have not progressed historically. They see the new world through old lenses. Sure, it has been said that those who do not heed history are condemned to repeat it. But those who just repeat history are just condemned by it. For George Bush to use The War to justify his war, does just that, and it is an insult to the memory of my uncles. [3]
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 10.4.2007)
[1] Douglas Macarthur does not come off well at all in this documentary, closer to the self-promoting, arrogant, and self-regarding commander who was better at being his own public relations agent than a tactician. A lot of footage is given over to the Bataan Death march and its aftermath.
[2] There usually also is a good share of Vietnam Vets in these audiences, made up of the guys who fought, while their president boozed it up in Alabama.
[3] Just in case you might have missed it. At the end of The War, Burns dedicated the documentary to all those who fought and died in that “necessary” war.