The Cost of Sentimentalizing War

The terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, supposedly launched a new kind of American war, with unfamiliar foes, unlikely alliances, and unthinkable tactics. But the language deployed to interpret this conflict was decidedly old-school, the comfort food of martial rhetoric. With the Axis of Evil, the menace of Fascism (remixed as “Islamofascism”), and the Pearl Harbor references, the Second World War hovered over what would become known as the global war on terror, infusing it with righteousness. This latest war, President George W. Bush said, would have a scope and a stature evoking the American response to that other attack on the U.S. “one Sunday in 1941.” It wouldn’t be like Desert Storm, a conflict tightly bounded in time and space; instead, it was a call to global engagement and even to national greatness. “This generation will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future,” Bush avowed.

Elizabeth D. Samet finds such familiarity endlessly familiar. “Every American exercise of military force since World War II, at least in the eyes of its architects, has inherited that war’s moral justification and been understood as its offspring: motivated by its memory, prosecuted in its shadow, inevitably measured against it,” she writes in “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A professor of English at West Point and the author of works on literature, leadership, and the military, Samet offers a cultural and literary counterpoint to the Ambrose-Brokaw-Spielberg industrial complex of Second World War remembrance, and something of a meditation on memory itself. It’s not simply that subsequent fights didn’t resemble the Second World War, she contends; it’s that the war itself does not resemble our manufactured memories of it, particularly the gushing accounts that enveloped its fiftieth anniversary. “The so-called greatness of the Greatest Generation is a fiction,” she argues, “suffused with nostalgia and with a need to return to some finest hour.” Those who forget the past may be condemned to repeat it, but those who sentimentalize the past are rewarded with best-seller status.

The mythology of the Second World War features six main elements, by Samet’s tally: that the United States joined the war in order to rid the world of tyranny and Fascism; that “all Americans were absolutely united” in their commitment to the fight; that “everyone” in the country sacrificed; that Americans got into the war reluctantly and then waged it decently; that the war was tragic but ended on a happy note; and, finally, that “everyone has always agreed” on the first five points.

The word choices here—“all,” “absolutely,” “everyone,” and “always”—do stretch the myths to the point of easy refutability, but some of the best-known popular chronicles clearly display the tendencies Samet decries. “Citizen Soldiers,” Stephen Ambrose’s 1997 book about Allied troops in Europe, presents the reticence of American G.I.s in describing their motivations as a kind of self-conscious idealism and aw-shucks humility. “They knew they were fighting for decency and democracy and they were proud of it,” Ambrose writes. “They just didn’t talk or write about it.” But, without such oral or written records, can one really divine such noble impulses? Samet dismisses Ambrose’s œuvre, including the nineteen-nineties best-sellers, “Band of Brothers” and “D-Day,” as “less historical analysis than comic-book thought bubble.” Obsessed with notions of masculinity and chivalry, Ambrose indulges in “a fantasy that American soldiers somehow preserved a boyish innocence amid the slaughter,” she writes. If anything, the boyish innocence may belong to Ambrose himself, who admits that he grew up venerating veterans of the Second World War, a youthful hero worship that, Samet notes, “tends to overwhelm the historian’s mandate.”

For a more accurate account, Samet highlights a multivolume study, “The American Soldier,” by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer and a team of collaborators. During the war, they studied the ideological motives of American troops, and concluded that, “beyond acceptance of the war as a necessity forced upon the United States by an aggressor, there was little support of attempts to give the war meaning in terms of principles and causes.” Samet finds this real-time depiction of a nonideological American soldier to be credible. In the words of the military sociologist Charles C. Moskos, who studied the motivations of soldiers in the Second World War and in Vietnam, each man fights a “very private war . . . for his own survival.” Or, as John Hersey put it in a later foreword to “Into the Valley,” his narrative of U.S. marines battling on Guadalcanal, the soldiers fought “to get the damn thing over and go home.”

Samet argues that Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie “Saving Private Ryan,” from 1998, is “wholly unrepresentative” of Second World War attitudes toward the individual soldier. She contrasts the 1949 film “Twelve O’Clock High,” in which a brigadier general (played by Gregory Peck) insists that his men place collective loyalties above personal ones. After one pilot breaks formation, during a sortie over Nazi Europe, in order to assist a fellow-aviator at risk of being shot down, Peck lashes out, “You violated group integrity. . . . The one thing which is never expendable is your obligation to this group. . . . That has to be your loyalty—your only reason for being.” By focussing on the fate of a single survivor, Samet writes, Spielberg’s film “effectively transforms the conflict from one characterized by mass mobilization and modern industrial warfare to something more old-fashioned, recalling the heroism of ancient epics,” in which individual glories and tragedies take narrative precedence over the wider war.

Samet is particularly harsh on Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation,” also from 1998, with its “explicitly messianic agenda” of showing us a cohort so packed with honor and honesty and self-sacrifice that it was, as the newsman writes, “birthmarked for greatness.” In a section titled “Shame,” Brokaw acknowledges the racism that was so “pervasive in practice and in policy” in this greatest of eras, but he responds with uplifting sketches of members of racial minorities who manage to overcome it. (“It is my country, right or wrong,” one of them concludes. “None of us can ever contribute enough.”) Samet dissents, stressing, for instance, that the conflict in the Pacific, “begun in revenge and complicated by bitter racism” against the Japanese, has been overshadowed by the less morally troubling sagas of European liberation.

“Unity must always prevail,” Samet writes of the war myths. “Public opinion must turn overnight after Pearl Harbor, while the various regional, racial, and political divisions that roiled the country must be immediately put aside as Americans rally toward a shared cause.” A more complicated reality emerges in Studs Terkel’s 1984 “ ‘The Good War’ ” (the title includes quotation marks because the notion of a good war seemed “so incongruous,” Terkel explained), an oral history that amasses the recollections of wartime merchant marines, admirals, U.S.O. entertainers, G.I.s, and nurses. Their views on the war span “the sentimental and the disillusioned, the jingoistic and the thoughtfully patriotic, the nostalgic and the dismissive,” Samet writes.

To investigate cultural attitudes toward G.I.s in the aftermath of the war, she considers such novels as John Horne Burns’s “The Gallery” (1947), in which American soldiers in Italy engage in black-market transactions with locals; and such movies as “Suddenly” (1954), in which Frank Sinatra portrays a veteran turned contract killer who hopes that his war record will win him sympathy. (“I’m no traitor, Sheriff. I won a Silver Star.”) In other noir films of the era, returning G.I.s are loners disillusioned not just with the war and the years taken from them but also with what their country seemed to have become in their absence: hard, greedy, indifferent. Samet even scours military handbooks, including a 1945 one, memorably titled “112 Gripes About the French,” which admonished American G.I.s that they “didn’t come to Europe to save the French,” or “to do anyone any favors,” so they should stop stomping through the Continent as though expecting everyone’s gratitude. Not exactly “Band of Brothers,” is it?

There is a before-and-after quality to the Second World War in American political writing. The adjective “postwar” still clings to this one conflict, as if no American soldiers had wielded weapons in battle since. But if memories of one conflict shape attitudes toward the next, Samet writes, then the Good War legend has served “as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones.” There’s plenty of support for this quandary. In “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam” (1988), Neil Sheehan identified the “disease of victory,” wherein U.S. leaders, particularly in the military ranks, succumbed to postwar complacency and overconfidence. Samet recalls the reflections of Rear Admiral Gene La Rocque, a Second World War veteran who retired during Vietnam, and who told Terkel that “the twisted memory” of the Good War “encourages the men of my generation to be willing, almost eager, to use military force anywhere in the world.”

Memories of the Good War also helped shape the views of military life held by the men who fought in Vietnam. Samet takes up Philip Caputo’s Vietnam memoir, “A Rumor of War,” showing how the author’s notions of war and service were influenced by youthful fantasies of the Second World War. “Like thousands of boys,” she writes, “he imagined himself performing heroic feats in the style of John Wayne.” Caputo, a decorated Marine Corps infantry lieutenant, described the looming threat of “moral and emotional numbness” during his service, and how war transforms callousness into savagery. In his memoir, earnestness mingles with bitterness: “In the patriotic fervor of the Kennedy years, we had asked, ‘What can we do for our country?’ and our country answered, ‘Kill VC.’ ”

The war in Vietnam, Samet suggests, still functions as a counterweight to the legacy of Good War mythology in America’s national-security discussions. President George H. W. Bush, in expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, believed that he had also exorcised the demons of that bad war. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” he exulted in a White House speech. This past summer, amid worries that Kabul 2021 would resemble Saigon 1975, President Biden declared, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States.” (He was technically correct; the landing pad used to evacuate Embassy personnel a few weeks later was next door.)

Yet the enduring power of Vietnam in the American imagination may have a paradoxical effect: its badness bolstered a sense of the Second World War’s goodness. Decades after George H. W. Bush was shot down in the Pacific by Japanese forces and rescued by an American submarine, the old bomber pilot justified Desert Storm in explicitly Second World War terms. His collection of correspondence, “All the Best, George Bush,” includes various letters from 1990 and 1991—to King Hussein of Jordan, to Cardinal Law of Massachusetts, to his children—invoking the enemies and the stakes of the Second World War in arguing for action against Saddam Hussein. For the record, Kuwait was Poland, Saddam was Hitler, and Bush would not be Chamberlain.

The U.S. exit from Afghanistan and the coinciding twentieth anniversary of Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks have precipitated a spate of memory-mongering over the global war on terror. Samet identifies several verdicts already in contention: that it was a “tragic coda to the American Century,” a two-decade transition from end-of-history swagger to end-of-empire fatalism; a “valiant crusade” undone, as ever, by insufficient political will to carry on; or a regrettable misstep by a country that really should know better. She is particularly skeptical of the notion that liberating Afghan women was a vital part of the original U.S. mission. “How easily consequence is becoming justification,” she scoffs. “How flattering it will be one day to reimagine it as an original objective.” The search “for a kind of honor amid the ruins” shapes the literature of Iraq and Afghanistan, Samet writes, a tendency that she also finds in works that revisit Vietnam, such as Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War,” in which Robert McNamara, L.B.J.’s Secretary of Defense, says, “We all make mistakes.” It’s not much as regrets go, though it tops the Rumsfeldian “Stuff happens” response to the looting that took place in Baghdad in 2003.

“We search for a redemptive ending to every tragedy,” Samet writes. “We find no solace in the inconclusive.” The writings we have so far from the post-9/11 era do not, in truth, appear to be particularly redemptive or sentimental; they are, in the main, pitiless. We’ve been offered a painful roster of bureaucratic stasis and missed warnings, while the narratives of how the United States waged the war reveal a nation that betrayed its values in a conflict allegedly waged in their defense. The centerpieces of the fight against terrorism were the unnecessary war in Iraq and the failed one in Afghanistan, with little vindication to be found in either. These initial interpretations reflect a refusal to let the defining conflict of this early twenty-first century fade into the safety of nostalgia, or be twisted too soon, or too long, by remembrance.

If the cumulative frustrations of Vietnam and the post-9/11 wars produced a nation more reluctant to go abroad in search of monsters to slay, would that mean that the Good War myth was finally losing its authority? Samet is doubtful. She fears that the Second World War will go the way of the American Civil War, “an epic past that we can no longer retrieve,” national remembrances of which have amounted to a “theme park” of mendacity and nostalgia only partially redressed by the recent push to dismantle Confederate statuary. It may be only a matter of time, she thinks, before “we transform utterly those who fought it into symbols of an erstwhile greatness bought by blood.”

Samet could take heart from the current renderings of our 9/11 wars, yet she remains vigilant. “In a climate in which the pressures to sentimentalize are so strong and victory and defeat are so difficult to measure,” she writes, “it seems a moral imperative to discover another way to read and write about a war.” Her retrospective on the Good War is another such way, and a worthwhile one. Time can indeed sand down the jagged edges of a war, and sentiment can reshape it into something unrecognizable. Still, sentiment always distorts, whether it comes late or early, and time enables every new generation to rethink and redefine a conflict with a more dispassionate and informed gaze—as this book itself proves. ♦