Chapter 2

The Good Story

Survivors scarcely spoke of their torment. They did not tell their children. They repressed their memories. Perhaps discretion seemed the safer course; certainly it seemed the more dignified. … But there was something else, something really unsayable. Survival itself was somehow shameful, unbearable. By what right, after all, had one lived ?

—Roger Cohen1

Return of the Repressed

In early November 2014, a website alerted me that someone had searched for my column “War Stories for a New Generation.” I had forgotten I ever wrote the piece, which appeared in a small magazine in 1992, but it now felt like the first shoot of what had since grown into a tree (or ­perhaps a small grove) of ongoing concern with the legacy of World War  II and the generations that told stories about it. The way in which that war had translated into America’s engagement in Vietnam and the very different legacy that the later war appeared to have left only exacerbated my original concern. In 1992, America had comparatively limited military engagements abroad and it seemed we might have the opportunity to take stock at home of both past and possible future armed undertakings.

I include parts of the 1992 column here because it measures how much has changed on both the national and the international scene in the 20-plus years since and how much needs restating:

War Stories for a New Generation

Behold, I cry out, ‘Violence!’ but I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice.

—Job 19:7

I confess I have always been suspicious of war stories. The real war story seems too easy a means of generating dramatic tension in art: why else have purveyors of books, and movies, and TV series around the globe continued to draw so persistently on World War II, for example, a conflict that officially ended almost half a century ago? And why do audiences who had no direct experience of that conflict continue so insistently to attend their productions? I distrust the peacetime war story just as much, because it seems a comfortable way, not of generating, but of avoiding dramatic tension; told in daily life rather than fiction, it provides a reasonably social means of forestalling critical thinking about a situation, rather than encouraging it.

I realized the value of both forms, though, and in a very personal way, as I was preparing recently to teach the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch’s 1985 novel, The Assault. Mulisch’s book is a real war story: it tells of one Anton Steenwijk, a 12-year-old living with his parents and older brother on the outskirts of Haarlem in early 1945. Much of the rest of Europe has already been liberated, but the Netherlands is still German-occupied. So, when a collaborator is murdered in the street outside the Steenwijk home, a combination of Nazi reprisal policy and sheer chance results in the deaths of Anton’s brother and parents as well.

The remainder of Mulisch’s novel is, as his narrator tells us, “a postscript”—35 years of apparently normal life, with Anton following much of Europe to pull himself out of the war and into prosperity. While Anton may have suppressed his memories of what happened to his family, though, he has not resolved them; and so everything, in Mulisch’s remarkably compact tale, derives from Anton’s inadvertent or unconscious attempts to deal with the past. As the book closes, the author plants a final clue that the whole tale has been a gloss on the story of the Biblical Job, the “blameless and upright man” whose faith is sorely tried by God; and there he leaves us, together with his protagonist, a little wiser about why his fellow men did what they did, but still at a loss to determine God’s motives.

As I read Anton’s story, I was puzzled to find myself suddenly remembering my family’s move, a few years after I was born in 1951, to a new development on the outskirts of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Nothing about my family’s new neighborhood suggested the kind of trial to which both Anton and Job are subjected in their respective stories. We lived in a little ranch, and our neighbors lived in little ranches, and our parents all sent us, their children, to school in a big yellow bus; I know this from our home movies. Our families had cars, and radios, and TVs, and food; they were prosperous, or on the way to being so. They were confident, or they seemed so in retrospect, and the times repaid their apparent confidence—on this latter point, the facts speak for themselves.

And yet what lingers like a voiceover to those silent 8-mm scenes are the stories, stories that I haven’t heard in years now, but that had then both the power and the foreignness to remain with me ever since. They were war stories, stories about a real war. Like the stories we read or watch on the screen, they had to do with bombing missions and drowning GIs and hard-faced SS officers and suicide in hiding and near-death in open fields—only these stories were told by real people, not characters in a book or movie, and I hadn’t gone looking for them. The scenes in which the stories came out escape me now for the most part, but a few remain—a half dozen figures seated in clear light at a mid-Sunday dinner, with the summer sky beyond the windows promising rain; a room full of overstuffed, brown-upholstered furniture, the walls lined with books, and the Minnesota winter somehow comfortingly still and frozen outside.

If in the first scene the accents on the soundtrack were solidly Midwestern, in the latter they harked back to the Jewish communities of central Europe. And again, the soundtrack assures me the stories came out in accents from around the globe, from all over Europe, America, and Asia. The tellers were adults, parents, and grandparents, or sometimes just friends of the family. Everyone had lots of friends, from all over, all united by … by what? Their roots, their language, their education, even the places they now lived? In retrospect, it seems obvious the common denominator here was the war, or the fact the war was over.

As often as not, there was humor in the stories these familiar people told about their bond, headshaking as often as horror. Looking back now, I wonder where the rage went, the fear, the disgust, the resistance. Was it simply something to be forgotten, suppressed, gradually worked off as Anton Steenwijk does through his career as an anesthesiologist, through his two marriages, two children, four houses in the city, the country, the southland? We know about the people who couldn’t cope with the war after the fact. But what about the ones who did—was telling those stories enough to restrain reality, keep it at arm’s length, disarm it? Or had they already discovered the truth about the other war stories—that they could, if not wipe away the past, then at least apply it constructively? And is that why they gradually stopped telling the real war stories and, in their prosperity, shifted to something to all appearances more benign?

One cannot justify the ways of God to man, as Job and his friends, as Anton Steenwijk and his friends, discover. But the problems my parents and their friends faced coming out of World War II did not, do not lie far beyond our ken. The son of one of Job’s friends, Elihu, argues that a man’s deeds benefit God, but they certainly affect his fellow men—and that is something we have been able to talk about, of course, because the wars keep happening. …

[D]uring a conversation in New York after the English translation of The Assault appeared in 1985, I asked Mulisch who else was writing interesting fiction in Holland today. I recall him smiling and saying that the best writers today were the ones who were writing after the War. Perhaps, the smile was for the fact that writers are always writing after the War; perhaps, it was for the fact that he, born well before the war and a senior figure on the Dutch scene, has contributed so much. Either way, his example makes clear that complaint in Job’s tradition will not be enough, if only because we who come after have previously aspired to more. Criticism and irony will not be enough, either, though they mark a new beginning at a time when as a nation and a generation—despite the rhetoric—we haven’t achieved the unity, or unity of purpose, that finally makes war stories unnecessary. That is what the real war stories were about, back in the beginning, for those of us who were lucky enough to hear them. At the very least, remembering them as we tell our stories from daily life will add the necessary perspective, the necessary note of urgency. Because the urgency remains, the wars continue—can we afford not to say that?2

Bringing It Home

Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning 1998 film about D-Day and the fighting that followed is probably the best incarnation of my rather cryptic reference, in the 1992 essay, to a “­peacetime war story,” and its differences from Mulisch’s book explain my skepticism. Spielberg makes his intentions clear with the opening scenes: the Stars and Stripes rippling in the breeze and then a tracking shot of an aging gentleman trudging ahead of what are clearly his wife, children, and grandchildren, prosperous and handsome and very American. The location: Colleville-sur-Mer, the cemetery and memorial to American soldiers who died on the beaches of Normandy and in other battles in Europe during World War II. The goal: Private First Class James Francis Ryan returns to honor the memory of Captain John H. Miller, 2nd Ranger Battalion, who died (we later learn) saving Private Ryan and is interred in the cemetery.3

I had made the same pilgrimage with my wife and sons four years earlier, during the 50th anniversary celebration of D-Day, June 6, 1944, without the baggage, fictional or real, of having experienced it. Yet I had my own deeply felt associations: my mother’s stories of living through the closing years of the war on her grandmother’s farm in Normandy had made the conflict real—the SS officers billeted with her family, the German soldier who commandeered a lamb she was leading to pasture, the German officer who ordered the lamb returned, the villagers’ night-time excursions to bury Allied flyers who had been shot down in and around the village of Marcilly-sur-Eure; then, after the liberation wild Jeep rides across the Norman countryside and Marlene Dietrich singing for the GIs at the Olympia concert hall on the Champs Elysées.

In June 1994, my sons were seven and three years old, respectively. They were both enamored of the machinery of armed conflict, particularly World War II. They had developed the interest despite (or perhaps because of) their parents’ initial, politically correct, gender-neutral inclination to keep weapons out of childish hands. The video-game industry provided them abundant means of overriding us, but our resistance to arming them had also driven the older of the two to serious military history: Nathaniel prepared for the trip by reading Cornelius Ryan’s massive chronicle of D-Day, The Longest Day, and that literary accomplishment seemed to us to justify letting them take the lead in determining what we visited. When we arrived on site at an 18th-century farmhouse B&B a few kilometers short of Omaha beach, we turned over the guidebooks to Nathaniel and the video camera to Ben and chauffeured them around for the next six days. Sandra was less than entranced—“If you’ve seen one bunker, you’ve seen them all”—but the two boys embodied the data-sponge essence of being young and male and eagerly absorbed it all.

So why resist Spielberg’s enshrinement of this signal moment in American history? For starters, does James Francis Ryan (played in the flashbacks by Matt Damon and at the beginning and end of the film by Harrison Young) return to Normandy because of the flag so amply displayed in the opening frames or because, as we discover by the end of the film, he has come to do penance for his role in Miller’s (played by Tom Hanks) death? The realism of the scenes that immediately follow, in a flashback that theoretically reaches us through veteran Ryan’s now-­clouding gray eyes, also contribute to the feeling of unreality: on the beach and in scene after scene throughout the film, Spielberg goes to great lengths to capture the raw truth of armed combat, complete with dismembered corpses, blood by the gallon, good guys gunned down in the most painful circumstances, and bad guys rewarded for being bad. We are treated to the full panoply of ethical choices under armed stress and helped to draw sad lessons from them about fundamental flaws in human nature. In other words, Spielberg embraces the violence of war more than his veteran’s distress.

As the film ends, we return to the waving flag and our aging veteran, but we know now that he weeps not for Capt. Miller or even for the other GIs who sacrificed their lives to bring him, the lone survivor among four brothers who have fought in the war, out of combat and home to his mother. No, he weeps for himself because, as he begs his wife to reassure him, he wants to know he has been “a good man.” Whatever his post-war virtues, one could plausibly argue that Saving Private Ryan offers a signal example of bad leadership. Hanks’ school-teacher-turned-warrior has a hard time staying focused on the mission to save Ryan. Several of his men die in unrelated and avoidable engagements, and when he listens to a subordinate who cites the Geneva Convention and saves a captive German, the German resurfaces with disciplined single-mindedness to kill two more members of the squad. When the reduced team finally finds Private Ryan, the latter simply refuses to obey orders and Miller accepts this insubordination as a declaration of principle. In so doing, he effectively turns the rescue into a suicide mission, a fate his men have anticipated from the start.

One might read the film as an endorsement of the U.S. armed services’ ethos, clearly articulated by the end of the 20th century, that every man put at risk in combat is worth heroic and costly efforts to recover alive; the post-World War II record is full of such anecdotes, from Vietnam to Kosovo to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the Normandy invasion and other battles during World War II also clearly recognized, and at times prioritized, a top-down, utilitarian assessment of the value of the individual soldier rather than a human-rights-driven conviction of his claim to life, regardless of circumstances. Even if the portrait of the military bureaucracy’s high-minded commitment to save Private Ryan is historically accurate, it feels sentimental, especially when measured against the mayhem Spielberg so enthusiastically portrays. The director had had ample practice with the latter: the “special features” for the DVD edition of Saving Private Ryan4 includes footage from war movies Spielberg shot as a teen. The fascination is the same, albeit on a budget that significantly limited the scope of the young director’s special effects.

Beyond the realism of the combat scenes, though, Spielberg has an ideological point to make. Elsewhere in the special features, he quotes President Eisenhower recollecting his time as Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force that staged the landing: for Eisenhower, “an aroused democracy” made the difference in winning the war. “­Freedom,” Spielberg concludes, “does not come free.”5 The feature “Into the Breach” includes commentary to the same effect by the late, award-­winning historian Stephen Ambrose (Band of Brothers, D-Day). Ambrose built a substantial career and a historical approach out of collecting the stories soldiers told about fighting the war, and Saving Private Ryan joins Band of Brothers and the various spin-offs it generated (Spielberg co-­produced the TV series) in capturing the story of the common man at war.

If only by virtue of the wealth of material this approach reveals, it makes democratic impulses the measure of the conflict, expressing a philosophy of history that reaches well beyond discussions of World War II. In this view, the course of major events is not about the exploits of great men but about the many ordinary men who did the fighting and dying. That philosophy finds concrete expression in the careful shaping, for example, of the National World War II Museum (originally the National D-Day museum) in New Orleans, which is devoted to illustrating the stories common soldiers told about their experience. One could also argue that it expresses the managerial philosophy of Andrew Higgins, the founder of New Orleans-based Higgins Industries. Higgins’ firm produced the landing craft, the so-called Higgins Boats, that allowed Eisenhower to put troops ashore in large numbers on D-Day. Here, patriotism and commerce are unabashedly intertwined.

Still, did World War II usher in a new, populist approach to warfare? Did “the aroused democracy” determine what we should fight for and how, or did it simply do the fighting? The disjunction between Spielberg’s patriotic homage to national values and the men who lived them and the moments the film actually celebrates—albeit as cautionary tales—­suggests we did not turn a corner at mid-century in our concept of war, even with Eisenhower’s uplifting assessment. The piety is Spielberg’s, not his characters’, and that falsifies the story.

In the name of ideology, moreover, Spielberg opens himself and his film to correction regarding the historical record. Contradictory empirical evidence also generates “stories,” and these, in turn, significantly complicate Spielberg’s version of the Ambrosian enterprise. In 2012, Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States, a documentary series, aired on the American TV cable channel Showtime. Stone is best known for films that dramatically reinterpret moments in modern American history (Platoon, Wall Street, JFK), and, like these, Stone’s Untold History has found abundant detractors because of its casual use of historical fact. That said, Stone presents numbers that have been available and acknowledged for decades on casualties on the eastern front. The Soviet Union lost millions of soldiers and civilians in the war. For Stone, D-Day and all that followed on the western front, while heroic, came late and only after the Russians had both sustained and inflicted monstrous losses, the latter a key factor in the German defeat. Moreover, one could argue that the Russians, too, waged a people’s war, but it was hardly the work of a democratic nation.6

Then, in 2013, Mary Louise Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, released What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France.7 As the title suggests, U.S. strategists planning the invasion motivated their personnel through patriotic appeals but also quite deliberately planted the notion that once France had been secured, a very good time awaited the liberating army. Roberts’ account of what ensued is based on public records and runs counter to all of the myths about “the good war” and the soldiers who fought it. Those of us who visited France in the 1950s, 1960s, and later will remember the persistence of anti-Americanism in various quarters. In retrospect, that hostility may have stemmed less from French guilt over the weak resistance they offered their Nazi occupiers and more from their sentiment that the liberation had simply delivered them from the frying pan of totalitarian repression into the fire of unbridled New World lust.

The point is not which story is true—all three versions of the American involvement in World War II were and are based on solid evidence—but that a good story, one that might inspire inspired leadership, must capture the full context for the conflict and do so with that intent. That is why, as I discovered recently, Mulisch’s novel The Assault has become standard reading in Dutch secondary schools. The stories that last, the good stories, combine a sense of the individual, the organization, and the system in which we operate. The stories that last, the good stories, find their way to a complexity that recognizes those relationships and then subsumes them in a version of the truth that allows easy access and quick apprehension, but then says, “And now what?” With that question, the reader, listener, or teller him- or herself realizes that the lesson is always a work in progress, the challenge never goes away, and the stories we tell work only if they keep us a little off balance, a little on edge, persistently hungry for an evolving truth. That is the challenge of virtuous decision making, on and off the battlefield.