War. What is it good for?

If you are or were a Seinfeld fan, you might remember the scene where Elaine asks whether Tolstoy’s War and Peace would have been as highly acclaimed as it was had it been published under its real title, War, What is it Good For?

That clip came to mind again this morning as I read my friend Dan’s thoughtful piece on D-Day remembrance and the millions of events that were also part of WWII (and every other war in human history) that don’t make it into the history books or get their own remembrance days. I know many of you also subscribe to his newsletter and will have seen it.

The Real War Will Never Get Into the Books

His piece struck a chord with me because I have been thinking about war and warriors quite a bit lately in my own research on the vikings. A couple weeks ago Dan — who is much more of a military and warfare historian than I am — generously let me pick his brain about the topic, and so we talked about our thoughts on what it means to be a warrior both then and now, as well as what the experience of war has historically done to people.

I reminded him that I’d heard him say in one of his podcasts long ago (I can’t even recall which one anymore) that we humans think our default condition is peace with war periodically breaking out, but when you look at the entire scope of human history, it becomes obvious that war is much more the norm with peace periodically breaking out. That gave me pause because as a historian I can’t disagree with him. Especially as someone who intensely studies a violent and brutal time rife with warriors and war like the Middle Ages.

Why is this so? I know that is a mother of all questions because war is a complex subject, as evidenced by Dan’s post reminding us of the myriad unseen ways it is experienced. But I also can’t help but think there’s probably a bit of Occam’s Razor involved because the handful of reasons for war — usually things like territorial interests, resource interests, or power interests — is generally a pretty short list. As are the outcomes, both intended and unintended: death, destruction, despair, and dislocation. It seems where warfare is concerned, humans run a simple script that is akin to “lather, rinse, repeat.”

The other thing is it doesn’t really seem to matter what side you are on. What war leaves in its wake is experienced by both sides. It brings to mind a young former U.S. Marine named Paul who took one of my history courses 15 years ago. I was teaching about modern Europe, so inevitably World War I came up. Even though I am a medievalist historian, I have always been intrigued by WWI history. The utter senselessness of it cannot be overstated. The first industrial war, the largest death toll in human history up to that point, decimation of an entire generation or more of young men, families left empty and grieving, parts of Europe destroyed, and literally almost nothing the “winners” had to show for four years of hell. And then a “peace” treaty that created anything but. When I talked about my feelings about it with my students, Paul asked if I had read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I had not.

Paul gave me a copy, which I still have and cherish to this day. It is a first-person account of a WWI soldier and all that you might imagine their experience would entail, both during and after the war. I remember sobbing at the end, but what struck me the most was that the author writes it in such a way that you do not know until fairly late in the book which side the soldier is on. It simply does not matter. Both sides experienced the same horror and downstream pain.

And that downstream pain — that stuff that rarely makes it into the history books that Dan mentions in his post — I saw firsthand in my grandfather, Army Sergeant Clement A. Barnes. He was only 21 when Pearl Harbor happened. Like many, he enlisted and spent time in the Pacific theater. By that time he was already married to my grandmother and had a son, my father. There are stories my father has told me about grandpa killing at least two people in pretty close hand-to-hand combat. And I’m sure there are countless stories that grandpa left untold. He served until the war ended, with the official end coming on September 2, 1945, his 25th birthday.

Grandpa Clem

In the aftermath, the WWII generation became known for having sucked it up and got on with things with a quiet sort of dignity. But what happened to many like my grandfather was anything but dignified. He was damaged at a time when no one really understood what that meant. Sure, even back in WWI people referred to “shell shock,” but not many knew what to do about it. Oftentimes the answer was to stuff it down deep and just try to forget. But that could be hard to do. My father, as a boy, remembers being awakened by my grandpa’s screaming due to his nightmares. He actually tried to talk about the war, but some in his family didn’t like it. My great-grandmother, his mother-in-law, used to scold him and tell him to stop talking about the war, that nobody wanted to hear about it.

My grandpa was half Irish; his mom was born in Dublin, and that side of the family embodied that “tough as nails” spirit that Irish people are known for. Also like the Irish he came from, grandpa could be sentimental and teary-eyed, he was a bullshitter, and he was a drinker. And he sometimes lashed out at my grandmother in ways that can only be described as verbal abuse. His gruff exterior, foul mouth, chain smoking, and alcohol were the ways he coped with the war.

I grew up witnessing this. As a kid, I was intrigued by him but certainly also afraid of him. He died of a heart attack at 77, the same year that the WWII movie Saving Private Ryan came out. It took me many years to watch that movie because all the reports, even from veterans at the time, was that it was the first movie to realistically portray the war and what soldiers went through. Once I’d seen it, however, I wished my grandfather was still alive so that I could talk to him about it. I’m not sure he would have wanted to, but there’s part of me that thinks he would have appreciated the fact that someone cared enough to ask. It helped me to understand him in just the tiniest of ways and made so much of what I’d witnessed as a child finally make sense. It also made me sad for his life that could have been so much more, not only for him but for all of us. The effects of downstream pain.

I still have all the letters that grandpa wrote to my grandma during the war. They don’t betray any of the horror, just the mundane day-to-day details of a person doing his job, inquiries about his kids, and usually always punctuated at the end with graphic details about just how much he missed his intimate relationship with my grandmother. That last part makes them admittedly a bit embarrassing for a granddaughter to read, but then I have to remember they were kids in their early 20s, in love, and one of them was fighting a war.

In Dan’s post, he mentions the WWII veteran Paul Fussell. Coincidentally, in that very same history class where I taught the World Wars, I used to show a documentary from the late-1990s that Paul is featured in. It always struck me the rawness of his honesty about the war, exactly at the same time when journalist Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation had come out and we were all in awe of these seemingly bulletproof super human heroes.

Fussell notes that in the letters soldiers wrote to their loved ones back home, they often concealed just how horrifying things were. He says,

What they were doing was assuring their people that they were okay, not in any danger — usually an intense lie. That we were going to win the war very soon and please send another pair of dry socks and things like that. But nobody ever told the truth; ‘you know I’m sick to death of this, I think I’m going to have a breakdown, I think I’m going to go mad.’ You didn’t say that kind of thing because it would have bothered the recipient.

I often wondered if that’s how my grandfather felt but left out of his letters to home.

Fussell goes on to say what it felt like to get the news of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death just a few months before the end of the war when Fussell was still actively in theater, getting ready for a potential ground invasion of Japan. The U.S. was gripped with shock and grief, but his comments about it, seemingly cold and callous, betray the reality of what war was doing to millions of soldiers:

Of course I was very sorry when he died, but I didn’t burst into tears. It didn’t bother me as much as it bothered some people who didn’t exist in an atmosphere of death as I did. For me, the war was about death, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people important and unimportant were being killed all the time. He was just another casualty to me.

Those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, as well as my grandfather’s experience, are exactly the “awful individual incidents” that mostly go unrecognized in war that Dan talks about. As he correctly points out, “Only those involved in the actual blood and gore see it for what it really is. And then live with those scars and memories forever after among the rest of us who couldn't possibly understand what they've been through.” So much sacrifice unacknowledged. That is the nature of war.

So, Dan is right. We should remember and commend those who fought in events like D-Day, and the real war will never get into the history books. But I’m still left wondering why do we even need war at all? Seriously, what is it good for?