American life and fiction in the twenty-first century

(Tomdispatch.com) – I’m an avid reader of American novels, and I’ve noticed some strange things in recent years. The country was in a perpetual “state of war,” and you wouldn’t know it from generally published novels, except for a handful of veterans’ novels. Americans have been living in the shadow of war for at least a decade, yet there is little evidence of this beyond the popular novels of the Tom Clancy series (We Always Win in the End).

As for myself—I’m a novelist—I find that no matter what I choose to write about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about a Vietnam veteran coming home, and my second novel is filled with a vague sense of what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have done to us. However, I have never experienced or been close to war, and war has no attraction for me. So why is it always lurking there? Lately, I’ve been thinking nonstop about why this is the case, and I may have ended up with a very one-sided answer, summed up very modestly in a rather un-American word: class.

Joining the War in the South Bronx

I come from – to use an old-fashioned phrase – a working class Immigrant families. The second oldest of four siblings, not including the foster children in my mother’s care, I grew up in the basement of a building in the South Bronx of post-World War II New York City. In my community, war—or at least the military—was the norm. Young men (actually boys) often don’t get through life without serving in some military capacity. Soldiers and veterans are everywhere. Except for us, none of them are “soldiers” or “veterans” to me. They were just Ernie, Charlie, Danny, Tommy, Jamal, Vito, Frank. In our urban jungle – multiracial, diverse, low-income – here’s the thing, you never think to question it, in almost every apartment on every floor, there’s a young man who was, will be Joined the military, or was joining the military at the time, and often fought in wars given the conflicts of the era.

Many boys I know joined the Marines before being drafted for the same reasons men and women volunteer today. (Keep in mind, there was still a draft force, not the all-volunteer force of 2013.) However cliché they sound today, they reflected a reality I know well. Then, as now, the military promised a potentially meaningful future rather than the often depressing adult future we grew up with.

Yet, as now, too many boys return home with little or nothing to show for the chaos they experienced. As now, they often returned with inner confusion and loss, and many searched in vain for relief.

When I was seven, the Korean War began. I was 18 years old when our first armed advisers arrived in Vietnam. When this disaster finally came to an end, the calm ended, broken by a series of “skirmishes” from Grenada to Panama to Somalia to Bosnia, followed by the first Gulf War and, of course, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

I have dated, worked with, or been related to people who were involved in some of these wars and conflicts. In fact, one of my earliest memories – I was probably three years old at the time – is of my 19-year-old sister anxiously waiting for her military fiancé to come home from World War II. When he finally arrived after demobilization, there was no sign that the war had taken its toll on him. However, like many “Greatest Generation” veterans, he would not and could not talk about his experience, and remained inaccessible to most things in the years after. His military cap was my first military souvenir.

When I was eight or nine, my brother was drafted into the Army to fight in the Korean War, and I still remember worrying about his health. I wrote him childish letters almost every day. He was assigned to Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky, and was given a pair of lace-up boots and told he would undergo paratrooper training. He could never shake off the anxiety this mission gave him. After being discharged from the hospital, he lost so much weight and suffered from severe mononucleosis that he needed to carry a gun with him when he returned home, which he kept close at hand for the rest of his life.

My first “serious” boyfriend was a sailor on a U.S. warship warrington. I was 15 years old. Not surprisingly, he went out more often than he came home. He was out drinking.

I was 18 when my second boyfriend was drafted into the Army. John F. Kennedy was president, and the Vietnam War was just a blip on the American horizon. He didn’t serve overseas, but afterwards he had no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life. So it went.

Today, I no longer live in the South Bronx, and I have no doubt that the men and women who volunteer there are similar in mindset to those of my youth, but unfortunately, they carry with them similar issues to those suffered by previous generations of soldiers. The problem is back home for them. Suffice it to say, no matter what war they fought in, veterans have experienced the edge of death, and nothing in civilian life is or can be quite as intense.

refuse war

Training soldiers to hate, maim, and kill their enemies is the essence of the military, but in the middle of the Vietnam War—by which time I had moved beyond my neighborhood and my world—there was something that challenged this training— —The belief system that kills people begins to break down in a way that we have never seen before in our history. This mentality was suddenly destroyed and many young people refused to fight, while others who had fought in the war, some from communities like mine, came home feeling like murderers.

It was with those boys and many others in mind that I joined the student anti-war movement during those years, although I was often the only one from any group who was not regularly on campus. (Working class women in gainful employment!) As I learned more about that war, my anger grew that my country was destroying a land and a people that had done nothing for us . The loss of American and Vietnamese lives, the horrific wounds, it all felt like both a waste and a tragedy. Since 1964, ending the war as early as possible has been my job 24/7 (that is, when I’m not at my paid job).

There are two things that remain fresh in my memory during those years. My organization opened an anti-war storefront coffee shop near Fort Dix, New Jersey, the camp where thousands of recruits received basic training before being sent to Vietnam. We offered coffee, cake, music, posters, magazines and anti-war talks to any soldier who came in during off-duty hours – and they did come in. I met young people from as far away as Nebraska and Iowa, and as close as Queens and Brooklyn. I wonder if any of them refused to deploy to Vietnam like some of the soldiers did back then. However, that cafe made me understand how vulnerable, scared, excited, unprepared and unaware they were of what they were about to face, and most importantly, ignorant of the country they were invading.

Our store is open from 5pm to any time. On the inevitable night bus ride back to the Port Authority Terminal, I couldn’t shake my sadness. Night after night, on the way home, I remember thinking: If only I had the power to do more to save their lives, knowing that some of them would come back in body bags and others would Some people would be hurt physically or emotionally I remember it well. for what? That’s why conversations with them remain in my memory as both a burden and a blessing.

The second thing that stood out to me happened in Washington, D.C., in May 1971, when a large group of Vietnam veterans, who had been through the worst of it and had seen it all, decided to do something to draw national attention to this goal. Focus on ending the war. The method they chose was to use actions to express their disavowal of their previous involvement. As they walked through the Capitol, a long line of uniformed men tossed Purple Hearts and various medals into trash cans. Most then briefly stated why they hated the war and could no longer keep the medals. I was there and I will never forget their faces. One soldier resisted an obvious urge to cry, walked away without a word, and collapsed on the shoulder of a comrade. A lot of us were watching, crying.

breathing war

During those years, I wrote about politics, but never a novel. Reality overwhelmed me. It was not until after the war that I began to write about my world in novels, a world that had always been shrouded in war.

Why does war rarely appear in American novels? Novelist Dorothy Allison once wrote, “Literature is a lie that tells the truth.” Yet in a society where war is ubiquitous, this fact is lost in many novels. Today, the novels I see have many cultural or political reference points to mark their stories, but war is usually not among them.

My suspicion: It has something to do with class. If war is all around us, but for many non-working class Americans it is increasingly less a part of our daily lives, if war is something others do in our names elsewhere, we are Our world is reflected in the novel, then that thing is somehow not us.

My own impulse is to integrate the war into our world in the same way that the South African writer Nadine Gordimer once integrated apartheid into her novels—that is, without lecturing or pontificating or even pointing it out . When American fiction ignores the fact of war, whose effects remain hidden and not even briefly mentioned as simple markers of time and place, it also accepts peace as the backdrop for the stories we tell. This is, in its own way, denial of the lie being told.

The shadow of war is a hard truth for me, and I have my old neighbors to thank for that. If war is the backdrop for my novels about everyday life, it’s because it’s in the air I breathe, which automatically means that my characters breathe it too.

Copyright 2013 Beverly Gologorski

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