The “Good War” in American Memory
John Bodnar. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 320 pp. Intro. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $40.
Reviewed by James Carey
This book is a meditation on how Americans, individually and institutionally, have chosen to remember World War II. In comparison with more morally ambiguous wars, World II is generally understood to have been a “good” war, indeed the good war. The United States was thrust into war when Japan attacked without warning and Germany declared war without provocation. The German and Japanese regimes were anti-democratic, aggressively imperialist, and racially chauvinistic. Their armed forces treated the peoples they conquered harshly, often with unspeakable brutality. During World War II, the American people had little difficulty envisioning their cause as just. Since then we have had little difficulty remembering it as just.
Bodnar thinks, however, that our memory is selective. He wishes to make sure that the price paid for victory is not, as he puts it repeatedly, “erased.” In chapter after chapter he presents vivid reminders of the horrific human cost of the war. Any American who is unaware of this cost, and thinks of World War II exclusively in terms of victory achieved and celebrated, would do well to read this book.
The author does not limit himself to reminding us of the dead and their grieving families. He clearly wants to do something more. Exactly what he wants to do is not clear. At times he implies that the cost of victory was too high. At other times he implies that it was not, given the nature and aims of the enemy we were fighting. Bodnar avoids making an unambiguous case for either of these contradictory perspectives by adopting a mode of presentation that is impressionistic rather than expository. He offers a series of undeniably moving vignettes, but he rarely advances arguments.
Bodnar thinks that World War II was fought largely for an ideal of liberal humanitarianism, for human rights and human improvement, not only abroad but even in America itself. He recognizes, however, that this ideal was not embraced by many Americans. In his opinion, Americans are not as noble as they think they are. The war against the Japanese was fought out of a desire for retribution. Self-defense—an expression that, like many others in his text, he unaccountably places in quotation marks—apparently had little to do with it. Bodnar does not give sufficient emphasis to the fact that the Japanese attacked not only Pearl Harbor but, shortly afterward, Wake Island and the Philippines as well, in an attempt to annihilate the American presence in the Pacific. Bodnar is less critical of the way the war was conducted in Europe. As he sees it, American troops in the Pacific were driven not only by an ostensibly mindless desire for revenge, but by racism as well.
Bodnar does recognize that “[t]he contest had . . . been a hard fought triumph over evil political regimes.” In particular, “the defeat of the Nazi regime was a story of good defeating evil.” Bodnar admires World War II films that stress “the futility of resorting to mass violence to solve political and social problems.” He does not, however, show how anything other than war could have defeated the Nazi regime. Bodnar rejects “assumptions that war [is] the best way to resolve disputes.” But not even Adolf Hitler made so stupid an assumption, preferring to achieve his ends through diplomacy when possible. War is resorted to only when leaders are convinced, rightly or wrongly, that disputes cannot satisfactorily be resolved in any other way.
It troubles Bodnar that public monuments commemorating America’s role in World War II are “more about virtue and strength than violence and death,” that they focus “more on victory than on . . . carnage.” The Marine Corps War Memorial “presented images of national victory and valor,” but “concealed . . . the reality of the carnage.” One gets the impression that Bodnar would have preferred a depiction of the mangled bodies of dead Marines. He does not question whether those who died on Iwo Jima would have preferred to be remembered that way rather than as they are commemorated on the Marine Corps War Memorial. Even regarding the beautiful and profoundly moving image of the grieving parents of a slain Soldier in one memorial, Bodnar senses something not quite appropriate: “the dead . . . are now erased” and represented “only by the [American] flag” that the mother is depicted as holding. Bodnar speaks of citizens as not being “prepared to accept the war as simply just or necessary, because they remained haunted by the pain it brought them for the rest of their lives.” But this pain, which should never be underestimated, hardly implies that the war was either unjust or unnecessary, much less that no war could be just and necessary.
Bodnar seems not to understand what war is. “Men soon realize that their fates are no longer in their hands and that they are merely being offered up for sacrifice.” But troops are never merely offered up for sacrifice, and it is a slander of commanders who bear the terrible onus of actually conducting military operations, rather than just meditating on them, to imply such a thing. Bodnar disapproves of the officer who is “ready at a moment’s notice to sacrifice the well being of his men to achieve a strategic objective.” But in every war the well-being of Soldiers is subordinated to strategic objectives. That’s what war is and why it is awful even when it is just and necessary.
Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide: What Each Side Must Know about the Other—and about Itself
Bruce Fleming. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2010. 296 pp. Notes. Index. $27.50.
Reviewed by Peter D. Feaver
In 1997 Thomas E. Ricks, then a reporter for the Wall St. Journal, wrote Making the Corps (Scribner), a book about his experience shadowing a group of Marines from the recruiting process through boot camp. The book told how the military broke down individual civilians and created Marines. Ricks followed individual recruits back to their home communities and recorded their disdain for the civilian life they had left behind. The book was wildly successful and cemented Ricks’ reputation as a thoughtful observer of military life.
Arriving on the heels of serious reflection about civil-military relations occasioned by President Bill Clinton’s disastrous early forays in national security and military personnel policy, Ricks raised all sorts of concerns about military attitudes that boiled down to one big question: was the military becoming alienated from the civilian society it was meant to serve?
Bruce Fleming’s latest book, Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide, aspires to have the same kind of impact as Ricks’ bestseller. It contains some of the same raw materials. Fleming is a civilian professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy. From his vantage point, he has watched thousands of young men and women transition from civilian life to a military career. His book is full of anecdotes relating civil-military clashes he witnessed or participated in. Like Ricks, Fleming aims to tell outsiders what he has seen and tries to demystify what may seem foreign about military life.
The book’s subtitle promises to tell the military what it must know of civilians, but there is not much of it in the text. Instead, Fleming’s overwhelming emphasis is on identifying the military’s shortcomings and thus, perhaps inadvertently, reinforcing stereotypes and prejudices that anti-military civilians might hold. For civilians who hold a gauzy image of the military—perhaps the image of a recruiting ad during a sporting event—this book presents a useful alternative perspective. For civilians who already understand that the military has flaws but consider the institution on balance to be fairly effective (as human institutions go), the book will probably seem a bit tendentious.
Fleming’s book can also be surprising. It is strikingly derogatory about military culture, values, and customs. After 150 pages of this, it then turns to the issues of gender, racial, and sexual orientation diversity, and the reader expects to encounter another set of critiques of a Neanderthal military resisting progress. Instead, Fleming suddenly develops a different critique, this time complaining about a civilian cultural implant: political correctness. The unexpected defense of the military is disorienting until Fleming relates a painfully personal anecdote, when he was accused of creating a “hostile atmosphere” for female cadets because he spoke frankly about sexual issues in class. His account settles the score nicely—the low-level administrative figure who served as his tormentor comes off as petty and stupid—but the reader is left wondering whether other parts of the book also involve settling scores and whether Fleming’s targets might have a different, but equally valid, perspective on events.
The book has the feel of a meandering undergraduate humanities seminar and reads much like an unabridged version of instructor notes-plus-transcript of class discussions. The usual pedagogical tropes are deployed: references to classical literature; tough questions that expose the shallowness of the students; and the self-congratulatory “speak truth to power” posturing of a professor who bravely bites the hand that feeds him.
To be sure, this tone is also the source of some of the book’s strengths: it covers the gamut of issues and weaves together literature, film, pop culture, and the bracing (almost shocking) frankness that is the hallmark of military conversations when the civilian world is thought not to be listening.
Alas, it also provides the volume’s deficiencies. Like the discussion in a college seminar, it contains countless unsupported assertions and generalizations (the more dodgy the claim, the more emphatically it is pronounced); tends to be innocent of the vast scholarship on the topics discussed while quoting liberally from Fleming’s own prior publications; and would benefit from a trimming by a ruthless editor.
While Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide does address broader themes, not until the final chapter does Fleming’s real target come into focus: the service-academy system, especially the Naval Academy itself. He argues that the academies cost too much and produce an inferior product. His thesis, in a nutshell: “. . . the Naval Academy corrupts honorable young men and women.” He stops just short of recommending abolishing the academies altogether and instead recommends that they be refashioned to look more like an idealized form of civilian universities.
The final chapter would work fairly well as a stand-alone article, or as a book in miniature (not all that miniature, since the chapter runs to more than 50 pages). It has all of the strengths and weaknesses of the larger book; people persuaded by its thesis need not read the rest of the book and people who are not persuaded won’t find the rest convincing, either.
Perhaps Fleming’s book will achieve the same success that Ricks’ did. It arrives just as the gap issue is returning to center stage. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen has identified as one of his top priorities the need to forge a culture of military professionalism that is not alienated from civilian society. For a decade the military has been telling itself that it went off to war while civilian society went off to the mall, and Fleming captures well the sense of alienation and disorientation that such myth-telling can produce. Even if it turns out that the statistics do not support all the claims he is making, I believe his charges will resonate.
The debate this books stirs up could be constructive. If so, Fleming will have made a useful contribution to the long-standing national conversation about how to reconcile civilian and military cultures.
A More Perfect Military: How the Constitution Can Make Our Military Stronger
Diane H. Mazur. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 240 pp. Intro. Notes. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant David A. Melson, U.S. Navy
A More Perfect Military asks an important and provocative question: Can the national dialogue about who serves in the U.S. military be improved? Law Professor Diane H. Mazur argues that a legal structure established after the formation of the modern all-volunteer military has stifled discussions about this question and civilian control of the military in general. This structure, Mazur concludes, creates a military out of touch with American society and lacking “constitutional values.”
While the book effectively describes the problem—the difficulty in having free and open discussions of the military’s place in American society—it is unlikely to persuade readers who do not already agree with its conclusions. Essential to the book are assumptions that the U.S. Constitution addresses the composition of the American military and that the deference given to the all-volunteer military in setting personnel policies is inappropriate. Other views either are not addressed or are summarily dismissed. There is no discussion of broader social views of the military, its economic role, or who joins and why. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their effects on the military receive only passing comments, despite their being the most prolonged conflicts in U.S. history. Most troubling, however, is the discussion of the role of the U.S. Constitution.
Focusing on several U.S. Supreme Court decisions issued in the late 1970s and 1980s, Mazur argues that the Supreme Court, and in particular the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, created a legal doctrine legitimizing the separation of the U.S. military and society. This separation, she argues, resulted in a military that embraced partisan politics and a social agenda at odds with “constitutional values.” However, the constitutional origins of these values are never clearly defined. Where A More Perfect Military explains the values that the military should embody—an apolitical, diverse representation of the American public and responsive to changing social trends—it relies on the work of social scientists or other commentators. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with the approach, it confuses observations of what the military should be with what relevant laws and regulations actually require of the military.
The ideal military presented in Mazur’s book, the one that embodies “constitutional values,” includes more college-bound young Americans who would be attracted to the military by public-service opportunities. Mazur argues that the military does not attract these Americans because it has institutionalized political and social conservatism, as well as religious fundamentalism. This, she argues, is the direct result of the Supreme Court’s insulation of the military from social criticism. Isolation from U.S. society in general creates a military, at least as presented here, that seeks out Americans with similar values and creates a self-reinforcing gap between civilian and military personnel—unless the recruiting system were to be reformed.
The idea that the U.S. military might improve recruitment by changing the structure of enlistments or how it compensates service members is intriguing. The AmeriCorps’ “Teach for America” program is presented as a public-service model that the military could adopt. Elsewhere it is observed that a draft military would be a more “constitutionally sound” alternative to the all-volunteer force. Unfortunately, A More Perfect Military presents these issues without considering the origin of that force in the 1970s or the effects of popular views of military service. These faults detract from what might have been a useful proposal.
A More Perfect Military makes a valid point by concluding the U.S. government should examine who serves in the military and their motivations for doing so. It also provides sound observations about the shortcomings of several recent military policy debates. However, its arguments that the current composition of the military violates the U.S. Constitution and that it is solely the result of political maneuvering are not convincing.
Mazur’s arguments would have been enhanced by an examination of the broader social trends that influence military recruitment. Militaries are the product of the societies that create them; to argue that ours is different or the product of ideologically motivated jurists is hard to believe. A More Perfect Military should be recognized for encouraging thought about the military’s relationship with society, but it does not provide credible answers to the questions it raises.
The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers
Nancy Sherman. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010. 338 pp. Prologue. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $27.95.
Reviewed by Robert J. Ursano
War is a disaster distinct from all others—natural or manmade—and is always terrifying, vastly destructive, and costly in terms of human lives and resources. There are now more than 25 wars being fought around the globe, and we are engaged in the longest war in our nation’s history.
Dr. Nancy Sherman, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and former professor of ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy, brings both a human and a philosopher’s sensibility to the subject of war and the experience of those who fight. Through references and individual stories she brings that understanding and context to us at home. Her observations teach enduring lessons, often heard yet frequently forgotten.
She asks, Why does war engage us as well as terrify? What holds a Soldier’s mind and spirit together during combat? Why do we fight? How does one become a “Soldier,” and how does one return home? The words of scholars and those of service members inform many of the answers she delivers.
All wars are, in fact, “untold,” because they span immense time and space and personal experience. In the big picture we know that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are not just two, but a series of varying engagements, comprising for most combatants long periods of alternating boredom and fear, anger and sadness, aggression and just doing what one is trained to do. No single year in these conflicts has been the same as another.
As Sherman points out, shame can be one of the burdens a Soldier carries home from the war, along with feelings of isolation, particularly if he or she feels detached from others who share their experience. Service members do their duty, bring focus and training to their deeds, and accomplish what others think impossible. For many, war may be the defining moment of their lives.
Each war tends to bring to the fore new technologies and weapons and induces particular injuries and traumas. In Iraq and Afghanistan, improvised explosive devices are the signature weapon just as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury are the signature wounds. And this does not even touch on the effects these stressors have on the families of wounded warriors—known as “injured families.”
Sherman gathers all of these pieces in the pages of The Untold War to inform and express the complexity of war as a human, internal experience.