Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Be. Jakub Hamari
The Making of an American War Veteran
Master's Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph.D.
2016
1 / declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
Author's signature
2 I would like to thank my empress Agáta. Without her, you would not be reading this right now. A great deal of support from my family deserves my utmost gratitude. This is my feeble attempt at showing it. Jana Opočenská, your life's work on feminism and fight against patriarchy has made me the person I am today. My thanks also go to my late grandfather Michal Hamari. Your soldiering is not forgotten. You are loved and will be sorely missed. I also thank the Prophet of our Lord - Bob Marley. His wisdom taught me that there will never be enough darkness in the world to extinguish the light of Jah. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS 4
1 INTRODUCTION 6
2 WORLD WAR II 8
2.1 Eugene B. Sledge: With the Old Breed 8
2.1.1 Family 8 2.1.2 Boot Camp 9 2.1.3 Religion 10 2.1.4 Battle Fatigue 12 2.1.5 The Aftermath 14 2.1.6 Women 15 2.2 Robert Leckie. Helmet for my Pillow 19
2.2.1 Boot Camp 19 2.2.2 Family 20 2.2.3 Religion 21 2.2.4 Aftermath 21 2.2.5 Women 22 3 VIETNAM WAR 26
3.1 Philip Caputo: A Rumor of War 26
3.1.1 Family 27 3.1.2 Boot Camp 28 3.1.3 The Deployment 29 3.1.4 Religion 33 3.1.5 Aftermath 34 3.1.6 Women 36 3.2 Ron Kovic: Born on the Fourth of July 41
3.2.1 Boot Camp 41 3.2.2 Deployment 42 3.2.3 Family 43 3.2.4 Religion 46 3.2.5 Aftermath 46 3.2.6 Women 49 4 4 IRAQ INVASION 52
4.1 Jess Goodell: Shade It Black 52
4.1.1 Deployment 52 4.1.2 Religion 55 4.1.3 Aftermath 56 4.1.4 Family 58 4.1.5 Gender 61 5 CONCLUSION 67
6 WORKS CITED 71
5 1 INTRODUCTION
I finished my BA studies with a thesis based on Anthony Swofford's autobiographical novel Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other
Battles. I have been mesmerized by the author's honesty and skilful way of writing. I believe that a good MA thesis should be wider in its scope when analysing a topic. That is, it should cover one topic, but approach it through various takes, which is more than one author has. Since Swofford himself refers to many authors (not just literary), who have influenced his way of writing and perceiving of the world, I have decided to do something similar in my MA thesis and out of the multitude of influences on the topic I have chosen five writers, who have made an impact on the war memoir genre of the twentieth and early twenty-first century.
My primary focus of this work will be the way Marines (as my thesis deals only with authors serving in the USMC) reflect upon their time in the military and how their familial and religious background influences the way a particular author perceives women in their work. Crucial to this is the transition from a civilian teenager to a war veteran. In cases of some authors it is impossible to pursue this as they have chosen to pursue a military career at a later age, but still, they were barely out of their teenage years. For each author I will also analyse their social background to find similarities and differences between these authors. For the time frame of these writings, I have picked the span from WWII, the Vietnam War and more contemporary war memoirs revolving around the Iraq invasion of 2003 and the ensuing conflict.
Concerning WWII, I will focus on With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, the memoir by Eugene Sledge, and Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie. These two authors were members of the United States Marine Corps and thus shared the fate of many young Americans who fought in the Pacific theatre of operations. Through the 6 work of these two authors, then contemporary, debates about the effects of warfare on young people arose. Their memoirs are still popular and have served as the base on which the HBO miniseries The Pacific is built.
Concerning the Vietnam War, I have chosen Born on the Fourth of July by Ron
Kovic and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War. These books caused a similar effect on the wide public and once again drew to light the horrors which veterans carried within them. Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War inspired a 1980 TV miniseries, which is one of the earliest cinematographic works focusing on the Vietnam War. Born on the Fourth of
July was adapted for the screen by Oliver Stone and was awarded two Academy awards and four Golden Globes.
The final part deals with a more contemporary war memoir, which is Shade It
Black: Death and After in Iraq by Jess Goodell. She describes her deployment with the
Mortuary Affairs unit in Iraq as well as how women are perceived by their male counterparts in USMC and finally the terrors of PTSD, which started once she returned to civilian life.
7 2 WORLD WAR II
2.1 Eugene B. Sledge: With the Old Breed
Eugene B. Sledge's military career began on 3 December 1942, when he enlisted to the USMC in Marion, Alabama (Sledge 5). Straight away, Sledge joined the officer's program. He gave up the option of staying in college a while longer and thus becoming a possible recruit for the Army's more technical and safe branches. Sledge wanted to enlist as soon as possible and be deployed into combat even faster all to the distraught of his family, which viewed the "[...] Marines as cannon fodder."
Nevertheless, on 1st of July 1943 he sped off to Atlanta to report for duty (Sledge 5).
2.1.1 Family
The Marines served as a surrogate family for Sledge during his stay with them and he always thought of the USMC in that way. "I realized that Company K had become my home [...] It was home, it was 'my' company. I belonged in it and nowhere else" (Sledge 106). The esprit de corps resonated heavily in him and in the face of people who lack the esprit it became even more visible, especially when meeting the members of the Army: "That was my first encounter with men who had no esprit. We might grumble to each other [...] but it was always rather like grumbling about one's own family - always with another member. If an outsider tried to get into the discussion, a fight resulted" (Sledge 32). This supreme spirit of camaraderie is something, Sledge believes, omnipresent in the USMC but altogether absent from other branches of the military. It was, to the Marines, as if the United States with its four military branches were not in war, but that the whole war was waged by the tightly knit few of the USMC. What mattered was to keep other Marines out of the harm's way, surviving the carnage and nothing else. Sledge after Peleliu openly admits his disregard 8 to the patriotic speeches of politicians and propaganda war of the journalists proclaiming that there is something as a "just" or "good" war and to fight in it is to do one's service: "I recall some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how 'gallant' it is for a man to 'shed his blood for his country,' and 'to give his life's blood as a sacrifice,' and so on. The words seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefited" (Sledge 158).
Sledge never finished the officer's program, because it reminded him too much of college and he professed that he would not want to "sit out the war in college" so he flunked the program and joined as an enlisted man (Sledge 6). The boot camp period brought some revelations for Sledge because here he started to believe that they (the infantry) were to be turned only into human shields for the more important units (Sledge
9). This thought resonates heavily in him: "It never occurred to us why so many were being assigned to infantry. We were destined to take the places of the ever-mounting number of casualties in the rifle or line companies in the Pacific. We were fated to fight the war first hand. We were cannon fodder" (Sledge 16).
2.1.2 Boot Camp
Sledge's unit's drill instructor (DI) opposed the yelling cliche as he issued his orders "in an icy, menacing manner that sent cold chills through us. We believed that if he didn't scare us to death, the Japs couldn't kill us" (Sledge 10).
Before deployment, Sledge got the chance to become less generic as a Marine and more specialized in warfare. When given the chance he started to occupy the 60mm mortars (Sledge 18).
The period of boot camp and the ensuing days of specialized training after it have led Sledge to another revelation, which would affect his civilian life. After 9 learning about war and going through war, he saw the inconsistency and contradictory nature of civilian life and its values, when confronted with wartime values. Sledge has seen his share of hand-to-hand combat with the Japanese soldiers and he took to heart what the instructor told them about fighting the Japanese. "Don't hesitate to fight the
Japs dirty [...] war ain't sport. Kick him in the balls before he kicks you" (Sledge 21).
This goes against the spirit of sportsmanship the young Americans were brought up in.
Values like no hitting under the belt, playing fair, no deceiving and enjoying an honorable fight by the rules did not apply anymore. These values were sewed into every fabric of Sledge's being and were interconnected to how he reacted with the outside world. Even before his actual deployment, Sledge's value system was undergoing severe changes. Sledge now had to face the fact that war was not a venerable venture and that civilian ideals did not apply when confronted with taking the life of another person or seeing close ones getting wounded or killed. He was deeply moved by this first glimpse of the nature of warfare and this realization augmented his views on such insignificant civilian pastimes as hunting, which ceased to be just a sport for him. "This,
I realized, was the difference between war and hunting. When I survived the former, I gave up the latter" (Sledge 21). After the war, Sledge goes back and compares the young Marine Sledge with the one after witnessing the chaos and slaughter of the
Pacific: "Maybe it was the naive optimism of youth but the awesome reality that we were training to be cannon fodder in global war that had already snuffed already millions of lives never seemed to occur to us" (Sledge 22).
2.1.3 Religion
As the deployment crept close, the psychological weight of the uncertainty of what was about to happen to Sledge started to appear. "Would I ever see my family 10 again? Would I do my duty or be a coward? Could I kill?" (Sledge 26). The question of violence committed on others deeply troubled Sledge as he was a devout Christian and on multiple occasions he refers to God and says that his religion got him through some of the worst parts of the war. He states that he always prayed and sometimes out loud
(Sledge 79).
Systematically, during the boot camp period, Sledge came to realize the insignificance of an individual in the time of war. "[...] we were expendable! It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and culture that values life and the individual. [The moment] your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness"
(Sledge 108). When he finally saw the combat zone firsthand, he saw more than his religion could explain whilst seeing the savagery of combat. "I felt sickened to the depths of my soul. I asked God 'Why, why, why?' I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all. I had tasted the bitterest essence of war [...] and it filled me with disgust" (Sledge 66).
It was on Peleliu where Sledge had lived through a very spiritual moment, which strengthened Sledge's resolve and he promised to make his life amount to something after the war. During a conversation with two officers, he heard: "You will survive the war!" and as he was puzzled by this exclamation, he asked the fellow Marines, whether they heard it too. They did not, nor did they survive Peleliu (Sledge 99). In great contrast to this stands a scene, where during the invasion of Okinawa, Sledge witnesses a Protestant communion. In the hideous setting of war torn Okinawa, the holy rite seems so pointless that doubts about God after months of shock and suffering start to set in
(Sledge 260). "The battle of Okinawa, also known as Operation Iceberg, took place in
April-June 1945. It was the largest amphibious landing in the Pacific theater of World
11 War II. It also resulted in the largest casualties with over 100,000 Japanese casualties and 50,000 casualties for the Allies" (Hammel).
2.1.4 Battle Fatigue
It was before Sledge's departure to the Pacific field of operations, that he for the first time spent time with an actual WWII veteran. This combat Marine was the instructor who taught Sledge how to operate with precision the 60mm mortar. Sledge goes on to describe the veteran as follows: "He had an intangible air of subdued, quiet detachment, a quality possessed by so many combat veterans [... ] Sometimes his mind seemed a million miles away, as though lost in some sort of melancholy reverie"
(Sledge 18). Sledge realizes that he has not met these qualities in anybody else than combat veterans. He recollects that it was this instructor's disposition, which he encountered some time later in his war buddies after the battle of Peleliu (Sledge 19).
After disembarking the ship Sledge encountered the shell-shocked Marines, who took Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester about a month before Sledge's arrival. "Their friendliness and unassuming manner struck me. Although clad neatly in their khakis or dungarees they appeared hollow-eyed and tired. They made no attempt to impress us green replacements" (Sledge 33). These men saw what awaited the fresh replacements.
Back home, they were the heroes of the Pacific. In the endless rainy days on Pavavu, they felt anything but. It was another WWII Marine, Robert Leckie, who was one of those who went through Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester and Peleliu and enjoyed the warm welcome of the Australian civilians who were praising Americans as heroes and liberators of Australia (Leckie 141).
These men were not the only ones whose "battle fatigue" evolved to create a presence, which struck Sledge. A case study for Sledge's encounters with traumatized
12 veterans could be another fellow Marine named Haney. This man seemed to be out of sync with the actual world: "Haney was the only man I ever knew in the outfit who didn't seem to have a buddy [... ] He simply lived in a world all his own. I often felt that he didn't even see his surroundings; all he seemed to be aware of was his rifle, his bayonet, and his leggings. He was absolutely obsessed with wanting to bayonet the enemy" (Sledge 44). Haney was so different from the other men that he was not dubbed
"Asiatic" (a term used by WWII Marines to refer to victims of the Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder or anybody, who was deemed insane enough). Sledge states that Haney
"transcended the condition" (Sledge 44). Nearly everything about Haney was too intense for the new replacements to comprehend, be it his relatively high age, his lack of communicating and generally antisocial behavior, his constant rifle cleaning and ensuing bayonet practice lessons, the way he mumbled to himself while wolfishly grinning, and even the way he bathed left Sledge wide-eyed with puzzlement. "[...]
Haney held his genitals in his left hand while scrubbing them with a GI brush the way one buffs a shoe, [the brush] was designed to scrub heavy canvas 782 (web) gear, dungarees, and even floors [...]" (Sledge 43). Gunnery Sargent Elmo M. Haney was a
WWI veteran and after his return from France he taught at a school in Arkansas for several years until rejoining the USMC and his old unit. He fought at Guadalcanal and
Cape Gloucester, where he was awarded with a Silver Star for heroism. During the second day of the Peleliu invasion, he withdrew from the lines, as he could no longer cope with the battle. He was more than fifty years old (Sledge 43). Haney was indeed one of the few who the young Marines learned to call with endearment "the Old Breed".
When the battle for Peleliu ended, even the heavily disturbed WWI veteran Haney stated he had never seen anything as terrible, possibly pushing him to the brink of insanity (Sledge 170).
13 After Peleliu Sledge became visually and emotionally closer to the veterans of
Guadalcanal than to the pre-war Sledge. "My facial muscles were so tensed from the strain that I actually felt it was impossible to smile. With shock I realized that the faces of my squad mates and everyone around me looked masklike and unfamiliar" (Sledge
72). The war disturbed many to the point that they could not return to civilian life at all and they wished for was to return to the carnage, disgusted with their disillusionment and oblivious civilians with their petty troubles (Sledge 290).
2.1.5 The Aftermath
After the invasion, the bodily and spiritual torment was mirrored in Sledge's hollow-eye stare, which became a tell sign of the destruction and waste of life he lived through. Even though the battles had been fought, Sledge's civilian life was plagued with memories of the horrors of war. "[Returning to war] became the subject of the most tortuous and persistent of all the ghastly war nightmares that have haunted me for many, many years" (Sledge 256). Another particular nightmare is that of a rotting soldier saying: "I am the harvest of man's stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust [...]
People back home will wonder why you can't forget" (Sledge 294). This dead soldier
Sledge saw even in his waking hours. The "living dead" visions are something Sledge shares with Goodell as well as Caputo, who too have seen their share of dead people.
The author laconically states his thoughts on wartime, as "[war] is such self- defeating, organized madness the way it destroys a nation's best" (Sledge 91) and he admits that others will have to endure what he had endured for his country as it is the citizen's responsibility do defend the civilian way of life, even though it would mean sacrificing thousands of lives. The ending sentence of the memoir paints such a grim picture - "With privilege goes responsibility" (Sledge 344). 14 2.1.6 Women
Sledge in his memoir almost completely omits women. He mentions his family back home on several occasions but he almost never directly interacts with American women. There is only one mention of Sledge encountering an American woman personally in his narrative. This happened on Pavuvu, three days after Sledge's twenty first birthday, when he returned from the desolation of Peleliu. There was an American
Red Cross nurse, who was giving grapefruit juice to the returning troops.
I looked at her with confusion as I took the cup and thanked her. My mind was
benumbed by the shock and violence of Peleliu that the presence of an American
girl on Pavuvu seemed totally out of context. I was bewildered. "What the hell is
she doing here?" I thought. "She's got no more business here than some damn
politician." [...] I resented her deeply. (Sledge 178)
Her physical presence in the Pacific shocked Sledge, because the idea of nurses handing out paper cups with juice to battered combatants most likely did not cross his mind.
This idea aggravates Sledge and this innocent young lady becomes the physical manifestation of the aggravating idea. He was twenty-one and was already labeled as one of the Old Breed by the fresh replacements and an idea of a woman among the troops was as outlandish as politicians fighting the war themselves. This Nauta and
Young label as Old-fashioned sexism, involving "overt contentions that women are inferior and that their roles should be restricted to those consistent with femininity"
(Nauta and Young 166). In their essay, Nauta and Young also state that the military affiliated people tend to have more traditional gender role attitudes than the civilian population does (Nauta and Young 167). They also add that when it comes to types of sexism (i.e. positive and negative), focusing on the positive did not yield results, so the
15 leadership should address the negative types of sexism, such as Sledge's Old-fashioned sexism (Nauta and Young 171).
During the invasion of Okinawa Sledge's unit met two Okinawan women with their children at a local well. Sledge and the other men are amused, when during breast feeding one of the mothers squirts milk into the face of her misbehaving older son
(Sledge 212). There is no animosity between the people gathered at the well. The group was nervous in the beginning because of the prejudice which all the participants had in them, but there was no ensuing confrontation. The Americans kept to themselves there and perceived the civilian Okinawan population as pathetic and in total dismay, caused by the successful Allied invasion (Sledge 211). The women were most likely afraid.
They were at the well alone in the middle of a warzone; this means that their respective partners were probably killed as the Japanese Empire suffered horrendous losses on
Okinawa. The children relieved the tension of the moment at the well and Sledge states that the Okinawan children won their hearts many times during the Okinawan campaign
(Sledge 212). His narration of this scene is fixed on the children and the women are mentioned and have meaning only because they belong to the children amusing the tired combatants. Sledge leaves this scene happy or amused because women did not interfere with his concept of the world - even in war, women take care of children and that is how the world should be. Once again, the author objectifies these women and even the enemy women are good if they do not interfere with the author's worldview.
On the third occasion of Sledge's encounters with women, the woman is not even present. Sledge was sitting with his friend in a foxhole, when the friend showed
Sledge a picture of a girl he was having an affair with. Sledge just comments that he should be extra careful when posting his reply letters (Sledge 277). Even though a devout Christian, Sledge only makes a funny comment about his friend's situation and 16 does not comment on the moral ambiguity of his friend's doings or what the women feel about their situation.
The last interaction with a female is the most important one as it shows Sledge's protective instinct. During a mop-up operation, Sledge found an old woman, who was severely wounded and she begged Sledge to mercy kill her because of her wound.
Sledge refused and went to get a doctor; while the two were returning to the old woman's hut another Marine executed her. Sledge berated the executioner until an officer arrived at the scene to relieve Sledge, who admits that he never learned if the
Marine was ever disciplined for his act (Sledge 315). To describe his own outburst
Sledge uses the phrase "I blew up" (Sledge 314). He lost control of himself, because he could not protect the vulnerable suffering woman. Sledge tried to save the enemy civilian, which was not at all that uncommon. Several civilian survivors of the
American onslaught through Okinawa state that they would not survive the war if it were not for the help, which they received from their American enemies: "The
Americans brought Shimabukuro clothes and food and they treated her wounds.
'Without the Americans' kindness, I wouldn't be here today. They helped me to recover and I was so grateful. At the time, all Okinawans felt the same" (Mitchell).
Lt.Col. Dave Grossman argues that a man's instinct to protect a female is so strong that he can become virtually uncontrollable. He claims that this finding officially led to the restriction, issued by the leadership of the Israeli Defense Force, that no woman can serve in combat roles alongside men in the IDF, because she could become the vulnerability of her unit (Grossman 1996).
Eugene B. Sledge is not a vocal supporter of women's fight for equality, but neither is he an apologist for the patriarchy. He deeply cares for women, because women must not ever be in war. In his efforts to protect them, he wants them to stay 17 safe and not get involved in what he got involved in. Be it the grapefruit juice dealing nurse on Pavuvu, who was out of step with her surroundings, or the mother on
Okinawa, who did not care for the alien soldiers around her and started breastfeeding her child. If the Americans could not interrupt her, so would not her older son. Even his friend's affair becomes a light topic among the decaying worm-riddled dead, mud and the constant shelling. The worst what Sledge could think of it was that his friend could mistake the address of his mistress for the one of his wife, because anything that would ensue from that could not be worse than being in war.
18 2.2 Robert Leckie: Helmet for my Pillow
Robert Leckie's joining the Marines was hindered by the fact that he needed to be circumcised as per USMC regulations. Nevertheless, he sought to get enlisted the day following Pearl Harbor (Leckie 3) and became a machine gunner (Leckie 24). Since
Leckie and Sledge served in the same military branch and during the same war, their accounts confirm one another but there are several major differences as well. Leckie had a difficult time adjusting to the regulations and the circumcision became the physical manifestation of his disregard for regulations and following orders, although he did not lose his faith and kept in mind the bigger picture.
Sledge had to endure horrific events before he lost his trust in journalism and politicians and started to doubt the civilian population's resolve, but Leckie already joined the USMC being skeptical and he is vocal about his opinions: "It is an American weakness. The success becomes the sage. Scientists counsel on civil liberty; comedians and actresses lead political rallies; athletes tell us what brand of cigarette to smoke"
(Leckie 7).
2.2.1 Boot Camp
The training period was confusing for Leckie as he felt that he was, very much like Sledge, reduced to just a number. After being issued clothes and getting a regulated haircut he states that he felt encased in khakis and surrounded by chaos (Leckie 9).
Leckie came to realize that his time with the other men was only limited to the period of boot camp and after that period the bonds of friendship would be severed by every
Marine's respective role in the war. Realizing this, Leckie did not build any lasting relationships with others (Leckie 12). This is also in contrast to Sledge, who saw the camaraderie in the USMC right from the start and was wholeheartedly aware of the 19 fabled esprit de corps. Leckie could not adapt because the lack of privacy he felt
(Leckie 13) and also because he was appalled by the overuse of the word "fuck" by his fellow Marines. He states that from mere Privates to PhD.s, the word was everywhere and that if a foreigner would hear their conversations, it would appear that they were fighting because of that word (Leckie 17).
2.2.2 Family
After the ordeal of boot camp, Leckie joined the H Company and became very fond of it as he compares it to a family unit inside a clan, similarly to Sledge (Leckie
32). The USMC of the time apparently sought to form tight bonds among servicemen to boost their willingness to fight and their resolve to risk lives for one another in attempts to fulfill orders. Once in the stable unit of H Company, Leckie soon found three friends with who he could share the experience of war (Leckie 40). These young men shared the same need for thrills like fast cars, drinking and sex. They seldom discussed the war and the ethics of the war were to them something only the journalists and politicians would talk about (Leckie 50). The bond with his friends serves as a contrast between
Leckie and Sledge, who never quite used the term "friend" in his description of fellow
Marines. For Sledge every Marine was a potential friend because they share the bond of
USMC. Leckie draws much energy from his time with the other three Marines and they become reappearing characters throughout the whole book. Friends gave Leckie the same level of comfort, which Sledge sought in religion. When Leckie drives off to war, he writes that it was a wonderful way to go to war and compares himself to the Russian noble from War and Peace, because his friends gave him enough energy to feel that way (Leckie 52).
20 Leckie seldom mentions his real family. He states that Mid-May 1942 was the last time his family set eyes on him for nearly three years (Leckie 51). Apart from that, he mentions that his father, oblivious to the realities of war, wanted to send him the classy dress blues uniform to Guadalcanal. Leckie states that he cherished this absurd situation because it helped him keep his sanity (Leckie 133).
2.2.3 Religion
When the assault was about to commence, even the habitually cynical Leckie started praying. Not for himself, but for his family and friends, who would live and would have to endure the fact that Robert Leckie is no more among the living. He gave all control to God and Virgin Mary "like an older brother clapping the younger on the back and saying, 'John, now you're the man of the house'" (Leckie 59). Leckie does not talk much about God, compared to Sledge, but he nonetheless is a believer and prays for others. He even prays for the dead (Leckie 93). When stricken by malaria, which kept him out of the patrols on Cape Gloucester, he states that he had forgotten his own religion (Leckie 253).
2.2.4 Aftermath
In a documentary made by the Vice YouTube television channel named
Foreigners Fighting ISIS in Syria: The War of Others, a German Antifascist of nom de guerre Cihan Kendal states: "You need to have a rational approach towards killing. You need conviction that the war is legitimate" ("Foreigners Fighting ISIS in Syria"). This is the argument, which Leckie also uses for the sacrifices of war to not be made in vain, because otherwise it would devalue the role of the victims in their individual sacrifices.
21 Leckie takes upon himself the role of the victim in the epilogue. He contemplates that the sacrifices of the war were made sour by the atomic bomb. The new dead are to be immolated because of the conflicts, which will be risen from the fear of the bomb. The memoir ends with a prayer, in the name of those wounded and killed
(whose sacrifices seemed less pressing now due to the atomic deterrent) asking God for forgiveness for the creation of the new bombs (Leckie 305).
2.2.5 Women
Leckie first published his book in 1957, the same year Kerouac's On the Road came out, and when it comes to writing about bars, drinking, and women the two would be a match for one another. For Leckie, women are a means for an end, i.e. sex. He is very much fond of the female sexuality and he never in his memoir states anything negative about women, in general. During his training in he used to run through the cafes of New Bern with his friends in hopes of having sex with the local ladies, who were open to their advances. One of his friends even married such a girl after an hour of knowing each other. Leckie even pawned his golden watch so that the two could get married (Leckie 46). He is swooned by females, but it is the individual women who fail and displease him.
One such woman is the nurse in the mental ward, where Leckie got incarcerated after angering an officer. Leckie did not know from the start that it was a psychiatric institution, but when he realized it he decided to play the part of a deranged person until he got to see a psychiatrist, who would evaluate him and send him back to his unit. In order to get his evaluation meeting, he asks the nurse for some razor blades to settle a grudge. The psychiatrist sees him the following day (Leckie 263). This scene is opened with a rant about the nurses in general. Leckie shares deep resentment for nurses, 22 similar to that of E. B. Sledge, but for a different reason. Sledge does not like the idea of women in war. To some degree Leckie agrees with this point, but proclaims that nurses only get in the way of the real help - corpsmen, medics and doctors, i.e. men. Leckie sees nurses as accountants keeping records and infuriating patients: "We wished the
Navy nurses to hell and gone, to anywhere but in the hospitals," (Leckie 262). Campbell closes her paper on women in uniform during WWII with an idea for further states, which comprises of women serving in the Pacific.
Medical studies should routinely discuss the role of nurses a's well as doctors
and corpsmen. Similarly, studies on women's history should include the role of
women in the military and women in para-military groups such as the Red Cross
and USO volunteers who served overseas. We can then obtain a comprehensive
picture of the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II. (Campbell 139)
It would be interesting for her study to incorporate the experience of actual veterans, who came to contact with these women.
After Guadalcanal, Leckie and the rest of his unit was sent to Australia for recuperation. Leckie names the chapter dedicated to his stay in Melbourne Lotus-Eater and it is a fitting name since Leckie describes his stay there as the "Great Debauch"
(Leckie 139). When the Americans arrived, they were in awe just from the sheer magnitude of women lining the streets, who were "cheering, hugging themselves and each other, dancing up and down, blowing kisses, extending to the United States First
Marine Division the fairest welcome" (Leckie 140). They were the heroes, the deliverers, who saved Australia and to them belong the spoils. Leckie fulfills his juvenile fantasy and goes into a spiral of drinking, eating steak and eggs, escaping the
Military Police and hunting for sex.
23 Three Australian women stand up among the unnamed many Leckie mentions.
His first prey named Gwen lured him to her apartment under the impression of having sex only to state that nothing will happen until Leckie marries her; Leckie naturally refuses: "[...] I arose from that unrewarding couch and reinvested in my uniform and my dignity. And I left" (Leckie 142). In the beginning of his Australian adventure, he was seeking only sexual endeavors. With the progression of his stay in Melbourne,
Leckie moves from sex hunting to wanting something deeper, only to return to his lotus eating.
The second girl, known by the name of Molly, was dating several Marines at a time, but it never bothered Leckie because he enjoyed the ad hoc haven of Melbourne, which could end any day if the war asked for Leckie's unit. She was warm and human to him, as she was to other Americans. He enjoyed her for her not wanting to get married to him and going to USA together. She shared with Leckie the interest in
"ourselves as persons, not ourselves as futures" (Leckie 146). They both knew that their relationship would end and she was thankful for the war bringing them together. It was not the war that made them apart though, it was another Australian girl named Sheila.
Leckie met Sheila on a tram and he used his wits to ridicule her into submission, which was going out to the Luna Park with him (Leckie 148). He saw her every chance he had for a month. He humored her widowed mother with stories of America. When they spent time together, Sheila made him stay over at her mother's house, where the lovers found refuge. It all lasted until she disclosed that she was moving to Tasmania and that she was married. When she returned from Tasmania after few months there, they spent the night together and she left him for good the following morning. He was now the one who received ridicule from other Marines, when he returned to the company (Leckie 152). 24 His failed attempts at romance did not leave him bitter. He knew that the relationships made in Melbourne could not last. Still, he felt the need for human cordiality and the best place to look for that was women. Sheila changed this, as after her, Leckie was satisfied with having just sex with the Australians.
After Molly and Sheila, no more affection. Only the chase. How does it go?
How should I know. I am not a Casanova, nor is this a textbook for the amorous.
It is cold, yes; it is calculating, of course; but a man should not risk involvement
when satisfying lust. He must never be romantic. He must leave romantic love to
the unrequited poets who invented it. (Leckie 149)
Apparently the ladies of Australia thought something similar as they formed crowds in the dock when the Americans were leaving. Leckie and the other Marines soon realized that the women were not there to say goodbye to them, but they were there to say welcome to the freshly arriving batch of troops on a just arriving boat. The
Marines, astonished by the quick change in the Australians' demeanor, inflated thousands of condoms and threw them in to the wind, which brought those condoms right back to the docks (Leckie 194). This was a hurt gesture to show the Australians that there were some Marines who really cared about the women. Leckie did not inflate any condoms that day, as he felt no need for it. He was not hurt like the others; he came to understand the unwritten mutual agreement between the partaking lotus-eaters, the women and the combatants: "Hail and farewell, women of the West. We who are about to die insult you" (Leckie 195).
25 3 VIETNAM WAR
3.1 Philip Caputo: A Rumor of War
Philip Caputo opens up the narrative of his book in a way similar to Swofford
(Swofford 2). Both of these men provide the reader with a disclaimer of acknowledging that what they write about makes no attempt to capture historical data and provide political analyses. Caputo states: "In a general sense, it is simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them" (Caputo xiii).
The prologue also provides some insight into why so many young Americans decided to join the Vietnam War. One of the most serious reasons Caputo puts forth is the presidential era and general atmosphere surrounding J. F. Kennedy: "[...] we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy's challenge to 'ask what you can do for your country' and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us" (Caputo xiv). He is very vocal about his antipathies toward the late president and calls him "most articulate and elegant mythmaker" (Caputo 69). He openly states that the chaos of
Vietnam was also a product of the doctrine, which stated that a high body count is desirable and thus the answer to Kennedy's question was "Kill VC" and create organized butchery (Caputo 230). Almost a year into the conflict, the men were even offered an extra ration of beer and the time to drink it if they killed a Viet Cong (Caputo
311).
Even the gruesome realities of the conflict could not stop Caputo to develop some sense of longing for war, once he became a civilian again. Caputo needed to see the war's end so much that he returned to Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon (Caputo
340). Other Marines confessed to him that they feel this notion too: "Though we were civilians again, the civilian world seemed alien" (Caputo xvi). Caputo interprets this longing as a result of being exposed to the intoxication of the skirmishes and by the 26 strong sense of intimacy between battalion members, which he describes as a
"tenderness that would have been impossible if the war had been significantly less brutal" (Caputo xvii). The brutality of the war, as Caputo analyses it, was created by the fact that Vietnam was in a state of conflict for twenty years and the conflict took place in the jungles during a ferocious civil war and revolution (Caputo xviii).
3.1.1 Family
Caputo grew up in the safe rural areas of Illinois and, during his late teens, all he wanted were danger, challenges and violence. He admits that he longed for the America of before it became a country of salesmen and shopping centers (Caputo 5). Caputo also adds that going to war was a way of escaping the safe suburban life (Caputo 4). He wanted the thrills of the romantic recreations of war produced by Hollywood and favorably starring John Wayne (Caputo 14) and after some time in Vietnam he actually starts to feel like he is acting in such film himself (Caputo 106) only to sober up after few months of the war having seen what his movie-like companions are capable of, he comes to understand that "one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy" (Caputo 137). A similar lesson about teenage brutality was learned by Leckie, who encountered a Guadalcanal veteran, who by then
"was hardly acquainted with a razor" and who went mad after choking a Japanese to death (Leckie 246). The conflict in Vietnam was America's teenage war. "They were teenagers leading teenagers in a war of endless small unit operations, trapped together in a real world reenactment of Lord of the Flies with guns and destined to internalize the horrors of combat during one of the most vulnerable and susceptible stages of life"
(Grossman 265).
27 The early Sixties was a time of constant tension and Caputo joined the Marines because he knew that in case of a fight the USMC would be the first military branch to enter the conflict (Caputo 6). This was made even easier for him, because at age of 19, he found himself in the uncomfortable situation, where his parents regarded him as an irresponsible boy in need of guidance. To oppose his parents he signed up with the military, but he at least signed up for the officer's course to make them feel better about the situation (Caputo 7). Many other volunteers were in fact not so voluntary, as Caputo states. His case resembles that which was fairly common among young men of that time and place. Joining the military had its benefits - some men joined to evade prison, higher education was paid for by the government, medical care and housing was provided as well, and there was a certain amount of respect to be had when acquiring the Marine uniform. The draft would come almost certainly anyway so Caputo had enlisted before it with hope for having student deferments "like the upper-middle-class boys who would later revile [Vietnam veterans] as killers" (Caputo 28).
During the war, Caputo's feelings towards his unit resemble those of Leckie and
Sledge. He got transferred from his unit after spending several months with them and going to battle with them. He felt sorry that he had to leave them as he found home among them: "My friends and my outfit were in Vietnam. I belonged there. The regiment, in fact, was home" (Caputo 154).
3.1.2 Boot Camp
Caputo regards the USMC boot camp as a site suitable for a religious clique similar to Teutonic Knights as the USMC demand "total commitment to its doctrines and values" (Caputo 8). These beliefs are learned through constant humiliating, kicking and harassing until they produce a Marine or a drop out. Violence was vigorously 28 praised and bloodlust was desired. Men were taught how to kill efficiently and take pride in their killing skills (Caputo 12). In one class session, the whole classroom was to chant in unison "ambushes are murder and murder is fun" (Caputo 36). The idea that killing in the war should be fun for those who are about to go to war is connected to the notion that males are warriors and that they should enjoy the proving grounds of battle.
This should not be seen as a surprising phenomenon; Birgit Brock-Utne argues: "Our acceptance of a remasculinised society rises considerably during times of war and uncertainty. War as a masculine activity has been central to feminist investigations"
(Brock-Utne 205).
Caputo was eager to done medals on his uniform and for many other officers
Vietnam would be the best place to earn these tokens of glory (Caputo 17) and the hopes of a quick and a decisive victory were also very high (Caputo 69). The training was successful, because the young officer Caputo was so self-assured, before departure to war, that only thing he could see was glory: "I was twenty-three years old, in superb condition, and quite certain that I would live forever" (Caputo 43). The feeling of immortality lasted for some time even in Vietnam, but vanished after his close friend got killed by a sniper when filling canteens near a river (Caputo 162).
3.1.3 The Deployment
After reaching Vietnam, Caputo recalls how numbing the war was. The men had to wait days on end for orders which would never come and look for an enemy who was never seen. The atmosphere of the conflict early on was that of a movie-like anticlimax.
Boredom became extensive and it also helped with the corroding the men's sense of what was right and wrong. Caputo recalls men who returned form ambushes bringing
29 human ears as trophies and the shock it installed in him, that men, mirror images of him, could do such things (Caputo 67).
Vietnam became almost a physical being in a sense that the dust was everywhere and everything was covered in it, including the food and water the men consumed and the air they breathed. Caputo felt encapsulated by the war-torn land
(Caputo 59) and was afraid of the blinding nature of the jungle (Caputo 85) but still, he longed to meet the enemy head on: "Contact: that event for which so many of us lusted
[... ] it might have been an unholy attraction, but it was there and nobody could deny it"
(Caputo 71). Before a possible conflict the men were briefed that a dead Vietnamese counted as a dead enemy combatant and if the Vietnamese tried to run from the
Americans, they were to be shot as partisans (Caputo 74).
During his first combat mission Caputo meets a supposed Viet Cong. She is an elderly woman threatened by an allied Vietnamese soldier. They let their prisoner go, much to the resentment of their Vietnamese ally, who warns them that they need to learn that harassing old women is how things get done in the war (Caputo 90). After several weeks of similar experience the men start to lose their boyish nature and begin growing more professional and more callous, developing an "emotional flak jacket", as
Caputo calls it (Caputo 95).
Caputo starts recognizing the stages of cafard, a French term for what the jungle war does to its participants, and realizes that he is also affected; and with the men he is commanding they start to resemble those disturbed veterans Sledge wrote about as:
"The marines are all in the same state of mind as I, 'fed-up, fucked-up, and far from home.' [...] their eyes have that blank expression known as the 'thousand-yard stare'"
(Caputo 99). Mentally disturbed men start appearing in Caputo's unit as they see more of their friends fall victim to the evasive enemy, booby traps and maddening heat 30 (Caputo 105). A serious case of group hysteria ensues during one ambush, which results in a frenzy when the men uncontrollably burn down a village and kill the livestock of the local inhabitants. Caputo comments that the burning of village Giao-Tri was more than madness but also an act of retribution committed toward people who aided the Viet
Cong. The members of Caputo's unit, him included, begin to hate and to learn what the
Vietnamese ally told them about the necessities of war (Caputo 110). On another occasion one man executes a Viet Cong prisoner of war and Caputo comments that given their orders it was a perfectly natural thing to do (Caputo 119) and by the end of
1965 executing prisoners (combatants and civilians alike) becomes a reflex (Caputo
229). Ethics became vague, but nonexistent would be the correct term as Caputo states that "ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology" when contemplating that it is wrong to burn a village with grenades but acceptable to level it to the ground with airstrikes (Caputo 230). The abyss of technological superiority of the US military visible in Vietnam is unequal to no other war USA fought until Afghanistan. Abell states: "An earlier study (1967) by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) found that the United States had 700,000 scientists, engineers and technicians working in research and development, with 63% of their activities related to the military" (Abell 37). Such think tank was impossible to overcome for the communist allies, so they resolved to asymmetric warfare.
Caputo was relocated to the rear as a staff officer responsible for cataloguing the casualties; he nicknamed himself the "officer in charge of the dead" (Caputo 175). An occupation which was by far less life threatening compared to that of a unit leader and to some degree less gruesome than that of Jess Goodell during the Iraq invasion of
2003, but punishing never the less: "It was also a job that gave me a lot of bad dreams,
31 though it had the beneficial effect of cauterizing whatever silly, abstract, romantic ideas
I still had about the war" (Caputo 165).
The war's dynamics shifted and by November 1965, the expeditionary nature of the war became a war of attrition. Caputo recalls listing eight casualties a week, almost the WWI casualty rate of some British battalions (Caputo 218). It was in November when he, at his own request, was transferred back to a line company because he could not take more of counting of the casualties (Caputo 230).
After his return to the line company he completely ceased to care about his life
(Caputo 260). During one combat maneuver, while under heavy enemy fire, Caputo stood up and started shouting and taunting the enemy: "I was crazy. I was soaring high, very high in delirium of violence [... ] I was John Wayne in Sands oflwo Jima. I was
Aldo Ray in Battle Cry'" (Caputo 269) and he started to enjoy the death he caused: "[...] and a part of me enjoyed that, too, enjoyed watching the first Viet Cong die" (Caputo
270). After the Christmas cease-fire was broken, Caputo stopped caring for civilian casualties all together as he ordered a village to be burned down, because there was some evidence that the villagers were in league with the Viet Cong (Caputo 285). He remembers an absence of feelings regarding this incident. Violence carried a sexual-like intensity and destruction was the outlet for it. The destruction of one particular village served as a catharsis for Caputo and his men (Caputo 305). Burning down villages became an accepted norm as much as counting the dead.
After one fit of night terrors Caputo devised a clandestine plan for apprehending some Vietnamese, who were identified as sappers by a local village informant. In the dark of the night, the operation goes awry and Caputo's men end up mistakenly killing the informant and his father. Thus, in the summer of 1966, Caputo stood trial for the murder of innocent civilians. He admitted to his attorney that he ordered the men to go 32 through with the operation after he had a break down (Caputo 324) but he refused that it was a premeditated murder: "It had not been committed in a vacuum. It was a direct result of the war. The thing we had done was a result of what the war had done to us"
(Caputo 326). Caputo builds an argument of his case that "the war in general and the
U.S. military policies in particular were ultimately to blame for the deaths of Le Du and
Le Dung. That was the truth and that was the truth which the whole proceeding was designed to conceal" (Caputo 330). He felt threatened by the American military but he knew that there was only one verdict the judges could rule. This verdict cleansed the doubts of the public that young Americans were capable of murder. Caputo was found not guilty and some few days later he left Vietnam (Caputo 336).
3.1.4 Religion
What fellow Catholic Leckie came to believe about the immortal soul in the
Pacific stands in stark contrast to what Caputo learned in Vietnam: "I could not believe that those bloody messes would be capable of a resurrection on the Last day [... ] They had seen their last day, and not much of it, either. They died well before noon" (Caputo
128).
The local camp chaplain confronted Caputo about Caputo's alleged heartiessness. This man believed Caputo was not thinking enough about the wrecked homes of the dead Marines. This ensued after Caputo had to parade the enemy dead for a General's visit. Caputo states that he could not connect the mangled corpses to something transcendental and says that "[the corpses] had undergone a considerable demolition, and it was hard to believe a Holy Spirit ever resided in them" (Caputo 179).
His thoughts trailed back to the widow of his friend who was killed by the river and
33 concludes that it probably makes no difference to her if her husband died for nothing or for something (Caputo 180).
3.1.5 Aftermath
In 1967, Caputo lived to see the fulfillment of the contract he had in the USMC, he received a degree, but, as he states, he was otherwise ignorant about the matters of ordinary life like marriage and building a career (Caputo 3). Caputo starts showing symptoms of the combat veteranitis, which is the same conditions as the battle / combat fatigue, which plagued Sledge and Leckie. Caputo states that recovery was less than total even after many years (Caputo 4) and that all the virtues taught by the USMC were taught at the price of "diminished compassion" (Caputo 21).
The lack of combat experience in the civilian majority of his listenership kept
Caputo from honestly answering what he felt when he went to battle for the first time:
"The truth is, I felt happy [...] I felt happier than I ever had" (Caputo 81). Caputo could not convey this feeling of happiness to those closest to him because he was afraid that they would label him a war-lover.
After being charged with the income of dead bodies Caputo becomes aware that the process of emotional aging is moving dramatically forward for him "[...] emotionally about three decades. I was somewhere in my middle fifties, that depressing period when a man's friends begin dying off and each death reminds him of the nearness of his own" (Caputo 192) and after his return to the line company he sees that the same rapid aging is at work there as well (Caputo 308). During the period as the overseer of the dead, he started having nightmares; the dead people he knew started parading in front of his eyes even when he was awake, the living started taking on the visage they would have once killed (Caputo 201). An eerie state of mind mirroring that 34 of Sledge's visions of the dead soldier on Okinawa (Sledge 294) and that of Goodell in
Iraq (Goodell 92). Caputo blamed himself for being relatively safe when others were dying and he started contemplating suicide. At other times, he just wanted to kill somebody (Caputo 202). Other men took this urge further: one stood trial for killing a fellow Marine after the latter refused to wake up and replace the former during night watch duty (Caputo 203).
Perhaps the final blow to Caputo's resolve was the death of another close friend whom he met during the officer's training course in Quantico, Virginia. Caputo regards him as a patriot who died pro patria and who stayed faithful. The unfaithful were the
United States of America, a country, which, in Caputo's eyes, wishes to forget the war altogether, and to which the name "Vietnam", became a curse (Caputo 224).
When Caputo was returning from war he came to realize that the only victory they won was that they endured the conflict. "None of us was a hero. We would not return to cheering crowds, parades and pealing of great cathedral bells" (Caputo 337).
Almost ten years after his return from Vietnam, Caputo was in Saigon as a journalist covering the fall of Saigon for Chicago Tribune. He felt the need to go back and see the war end (Caputo 340). In the years ensuing his discharge he became a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and returned his decorations to president
Nixon. He remarks this gesture was as futile as the war itself (Caputo 343). He was one of the last people evacuated from the American embassy and reflects that the moment bore special significance as it marked the first war which the United States lost (Caputo
346).
In 1975 Caputo was shot in Lebanon, after surviving Vietnam, physically unharmed. During his recuperation, he sold the book Rumor of War (Caputo 348). By the mid-seventies the public had enough of journalist writing about Vietnam, but 35 nobody yet seriously tackled literature based on Vietnam, as it was almost a taboo
(Caputo 349). The public was divided between democrats and republicans, but nobody from the ruling elites went to war in Vietnam, as it was the working class who were shipped overseas. The civilian teenagers protesting the war were mostly children of the parents who sent poorer teenagers to war (Caputo 349). Caputo's aim was to shock the public with his honest account of the war, so that they would question their own morals
(Caputo 350).
Caputo tries to show the audience that the Vietnam War was not unique in the long run as other wars will be waged and their outcomes will mean little to those who suffered in them. The healing after Vietnam may still not happen well into the future as
Caputo states that the Appomattox and the Civil War resonate loudly even after a century (Caputo 354). He wishes his book to be viewed as a collective journey of a nation represented by the journey of one young man who crossed from youthful illusions to evil and moved to "a new and truer light of self-knowledge" (Caputo 355).
3.1.6 Women
Seldom does Caputo mention women in his memoir. His familial interactions never mention a "mother" only "parents", as it is in the case when he describes his housing predicaments (Caputo 6). His wife is mentioned in the epilogue solely (Caputo
339) and he states her as one of the reasons why he no longer feels the need to prove anything to anybody (his two children and his age of 33 were the other stated reasons).
It is possible that he felt his familial duties were something that held him back in life, although I do not think this is true. Caputo never passes blame for his experience on anybody else. He does not even pass blame for the carnage to God. Caputo's astute talent of deconstructing the presented suffering to binary participants (e.g. his acute 36 awareness of the widowed wife of his friend who was killed when getting water) is only matched by the skill set of another Vietnam veteran- Ron Kovic. Concerning Kovic, his ability to immerse himself and understand the roots of the suffering of others originated from his wound and his ensuing experience of life after the wound. Caputo's wound becomes physical only once he tries to return to combat as a journalist. His eyes provide the visceral images, which are then decoded, and his psyche effectively is Caputo's wound, which grants him levels of compassion hardly imaginable for someone who did not undergo similar circumstances.
Thus, the best proposed approach for decoding his attitude towards women is to cross-reference his work with the work of other Marines cited in this thesis.
The first opportunity for such cross-referencing is when Caputo states that his fellow Marines draw great strength, feel unit cohesion and acquire a sense of belonging from the notorious cadence chants. The cadence mentioned by Caputo talks about a girl who is reluctant to have sex with the song's lyricist but her sister is not reluctant at all
(Caputo 20). The idea of young Americans, who are about to go to war, and whose greatest moral boost is a song glorifying sexual endeavors with members of one familial unit is disturbing enough, but Jessica Goodell adds to the severity of the problem of perception of women and their objectification. She states that cadences as these are something not only absolutely normal and widely accepted; they are revered as something sacred and to even change the lyrics would be thus a sacrilege (Goodell 66).
Goodell learned this firsthand when, while leading the cadence in her unit, she switched the roles between the song's characters, so that the sex-desiring protagonist would be a female and the receiver, the object of this sexual act would be a male. After this she was approached by one of the sergeants, who told her that such language is unacceptable.
When she inquired if it is acceptable for men to sing such profane lyrics about women, 37 she was told that those songs were around for a long time and that it is disrespectful of her to change them (Goodell 66).
Caputo does not voluntarily disrespect women. He does not objectify them himself; he accepts the way the USMC communicates to its members the misogynic ways of warfare, because the USMC believes these ways will raise the combat effectiveness of its members. This misogyny is deeply rooted in the romantic aura the
USMC likes to lure its potential recruits to. Caputo states how Marines in Vietnam enjoyed that their unit was called the Expeditionary Brigade, reminiscent of the colonial wars, and that PTSD was not battle fatigue anymore but they, the privileged few, could call it le cafard like the French did during their time in Indochina. They got used to calling their first weeks in Vietnam their "splendid little war" (Caputo 66). Caputo even tried to read Kipling back then to reinforce this romantic notion of young white imperialists saving the world from savagery, either pagan or communist. To the political rhetoric of the Kennedy and post-Kennedy era pagan and communist were interchangeable terms anyway. He could not sate this need though. The romantic notion of the colonial wars brought up by Kipling is interrupted by another romantic notion -
Caputo cannot focus on his Kipling book because he cannot stop thinking about a girl in
San Francisco (Caputo 97). Caputo never before in the memoir did anything similar. He never mentioned a female before. Her presence in his mind, when in Vietnam, serves for him as a distraction from romantic and dangerous ideas of glory, which would most likely get people killed, if let loose. He cannot focus on Kipling because of her and he wants to focus on Kipling, because he wants to believe in some romantic ethos. It is a woman who protects his mind from vague and dangerous ideas of grandeur. It deeply troubles him, that he cannot remember her face clearly anymore, even though they have been apart only for five months and he cares for her deeply (Caputo 98). Still, it is 38 enough to keep his wits about him and leave the safe haven of the officer's tent, where they give PTSD elegant French names and instead, because of a girl, he takes a more demanding but self-preserving walk among the men who see the war first hand and who have no need for elegant names when regarding themselves as "fed-up, fucked-up and far from home" (Caputo 99).
Caputo, like Kovic is completely honest with the audience about his experience with non-American prostitutes (Kovic 122). For Kovic these women were the Mexicans and he was not the invader but the investor in tourism in Mexico, a capitalist adventurist. Caputo through his sexual adventures in Vietnam reinforces the romantic ethos of the would be colonial conqueror enjoying the fruits of his labor, given this case
- Danang's prostitutes (Caputo 142). His first encounter with the prostitutes of Danang was embarrassing and he did not like the prostitutes in that particular brothel very much anyway. The second place was better since it was occupied by Australian advisors who had a multitude of Johnny Walkers and who got Caputo so drunk, that he woke up next to a Chinese prostitute with whom he had sex questionably before passing out but certainly after he woke up. He does not omit the price for which he acquired the services (Caputo 145). Caputo mentions the effects which drugs have on him in the postscript (Caputo 352), so it is of little to no wonder, that when sober he refused the prostitutes as he describes one as "a boney creature of indeterminable age [... ] with opium-glazed eyes " and the other one he calls "the clown-like thing" (Caputo 143). He gets drunk to prove his manhood and to protect the reputation of the USMC from the
Australians' ridicule (Caputo 144). This effectively sends him into his own hyper masculine, alcohol fueled conqueror trance, where having sex with beings, in sobriety described as above, seems like such a good idea that, as a representative of capitalism, he even pays for it. The only flaw Caputo mentions in regards to this prostitute is her 39 "hard, commercial look" (Caputo 144). What Caputo saw in her look was the mirror image of himself. He, as well as the Chinese prostitute, went to Vietnam to do business.
Without him, she would not have acquired his capital. Without her, he would not have a
(business) partner for sex.
40 3.2 Ron Kovic: Born on the Fourth of July
The edition analyzed in this thesis is the 2005 edition with a new introduction by
Ron Kovic. In this introduction Kovic directly addresses USA's involvement in the war in Iraq. He comments that the then latest American conflict mirrors the one in Vietnam
(Kovic 19). Kovic states that the PTSD-affected soldiers are lining the streets, filling homeless shelters, or escaping to Canada, while other veterans speak up against what
Kovic calls "this immoral and illegal war" (Kovic 21). He proclaims that the Bush administration mislead people and that it, in effect, created from war on terror a war of terror (Kovic 22). He states that he found clarity in life through spreading of the message of peace and nonviolence (Kovic 24). Another thing that sets him apart from other authors is his use of language when describing particular situations. In recollections of his anxious moments, Kovic slips from the first person narration to the third person narration, attempting to separate oneself from the pain. This technique allows the reader to become immediately aware of what were the levels of stress the author felt during that particular time and how Kovic, the author, perceives such passages of the text, whilst writing them.
3.2.1 Boot Camp
The narration of the boot camp period switches to the third person narration and
Kovic becomes a character himself. Kovic describes how senseless the screaming of the drill instructors was and how bad it made him feel as a human being but it also made him more determined about not failing the boot camp (Kovic 85). The transition from a civilian to a recruit is by comparison similar to the one of Leckie and shows what the most important aspect of boot camp really is - to strip naked before the leadership and throw all vestiges of his civilian life into a box and walk away (Kovic 86). 41 The narrative, near the end of the boot camp chapter, falls into a pastiche of bits and pieces of Kovic's thoughts, which borderlines with poetic Dadaism "[...] oh hail
Mary full of grace the Lord is motherfucking cocksuckersl oh Our Father KILL! KILL!
KILL! KILL! Who art in COMMIES CHINKS JAPS AND DINKS hallowed be IF
YOU WANT TO BE MARINES ... HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE PAY THE PRICE
PAY THE PRICE [...]" (Kovic 98).
3.2.2 Deployment
The actual narrative of the memoir starts directly after Kovic is wounded and paralyzed in Vietnam and transported to the hospital, which is functioning in horrible conditions, where instead of a doctor and a medical assessment of his wounds he gets a priest and his Last Rites (Kovic 34). He wants to survive the surgery and live more than ever before. Kovic sees his fresh wound as God's punishment for killing children and a fellow Marine (Kovic 35). Everything changed for Kovic when he killed the corporal.
He began having suicidal thoughts and when he fruitlessly tried to confess to his commander what he had done, the commander waved him away saying that Kovic was looking too much into it and that combat zones are confusing. Kovic felt good about this because he confessed his sin and the authorities did not believe him (Kovic 190).
The primary breaking point of his deployment was the moment when his unit massacred a group of children in one village (Kovic 200). Kovic remembers how confusing it was for him to recognize the civilians from the enemy and how much easier it was just to hate them all (Kovic 196). Yet again the leading officer stepped in and said it had been a mistake and told the men not to worry about it (Kovic 203).
The narrative then draws to a close with Kovic feeling that something crucial is about to happen and that life will never be the same after it happens. He had a 42 premonition about being shot (Kovic 210). Bullets smashed his spinal cord that day and, even though he did not know either of it yet, he became paralyzed from his chest down and his combat deployment in Vietnam was over. While he was certain that he would die soon because of his wounds, he felt tremendously disenchanted about the whole adventure he got into: "All I could feel was the worthlessness of dying right here in this place at this moment for nothing" (Kovic 214).
3.2.3 Family
Kovic fondly remembers his childhood and teenage years, when he enjoyed baseball (Kovic 58) and playing games with friends, with whom Kovic wanted to join the USMC as early as possible (Kovic 66). Kovic's family was catholic and middleclass and valued traditional patriotic features. His mother and her conventional upbringing of her son was a great influence on his value system and his perception of the workings of the world. "The traditional mothers put the blame on genes: 'boys will be boys', while the feminist mothers put the blame on environmental factors, including themselves - their lack of time as well as absent fathers, the influence of sport coaches, the influence of the fathers of the friends of their son, of television, videos and games" (Brock-Utne
208).
During his stay the hospital, Kovic found inspiration in a play about the life of
Franklin Roosevelt, which he had his mother bring him because he knew that she would not understand him and could not offer him much solace. He also did not want to disturb her even more than his wounds did (Kovic 50). His attempts to shield his family from the severity of his wounds became impossible and Kovic realized this as soon as his mother saw him strapped to machine, which was supposedly designed to help him
(Kovic 56). 43 During his growing up, war films served as a crystal ball into his dreamed-out future. He wanted to be Audie Murphy and John Wayne in their respective war blockbusters. The films served as an inspiration for the boys so that they would reenact war in the local woods (Kovic 65). He recalls profound sadness as the Russians beat the
USA in the race for space when the USSR launched Sputnik (Kovic 67) and when
USA's rocket Vanguard exploded: "[...] we were losing the space race, and America wasn't first anymore" (Kovic 69). Kovic was ecstatic when it came to sports and this sport mentality was transfigured into his early political views. Growing up and seeing the sixties as a big sports event was easy - the USA acting as a team competing against the opponent USSR in the space race, nuclear race, arms, etc. For Kovic, it was a game and he was a hardcore fan and a lifelong member of Team USA right from his early childhood.
Sports stars become heroes when they are admired for their athletic
accomplishments. We yearn to feel connected to them, want to be like them, and
enhance our self-esteem by imagining an association with them and basking in
the glow of their success. When our heroes perform well, we feel like winners.
{Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols 18)
Teitlebaum focuses on the creation of the hero concept in human society and comes to a revelation that the process of acknowledging these larger than life figures and longing to be like them stems from childhood. Sports, along with films, are the most accessible reservoir of these extraordinary people {Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols 18).
School helped Kovic build his body in the wrestling team, his ambitions and also his sense of patriotism, as it reinforced his paranoia and he began seeing communist spies everywhere (Kovic 71). His ambition and need for attention had no
44 limit then, he wanted to be the champion of Massapequa and he wanted to be revered as their hero (Kovic 72).
His mother pushed him onward, fueling his ambitions and when he displeased her, she asked God to punish him (Kovic 75). He was so ambitious that he did not show up for New York Yankees tryouts as he feared what could happen if he failed (Kovic
78). After he fluked a possible career in baseball, he decided for the Marines because he did not want to end up selling groceries like his father (Kovic 80). After being wounded, it was his father, the grocery man, who by himself reconstructed their house, so that it would fit the needs of his paralyzed son. It was also his father who bathed him clean after Kovic returned home in a drunken rage and urinated all over himself. His father, unlike his mother, never gave up on him (Kovic 119).
When Kovic met the USMC recruiters in school he felt like he was shaking hands with John Wayne and Audie Murphy. They told him: "[...] the Marine Corps build men - body, mind, and spirit. And [through them] we could serve our country like the young president had asked us to do" (Kovic 82). The young president who bewitched Kovic was the same president who was called a "mythmaker" and a
"witchdoctor" by Caputo and the depth of the spell is manifested in Kovic's wishes to make it through the boot camp just on the strength of Kennedy's motivational speeches, not wishing to let the dead president down by his personal failure (Kovic 93).
Kovic is always motivated by the fear of failure - he fears that he could let down his parents, his country, his God, etc. this life in constant fear was not healthy for Kovic during childhood and adolescence, and his lapse into decadence in Mexico can serve as the telltale sign similar to those of fallings out of grace relived by athletes. Teitlebaum also states the steps needed to protect the future generations from such self-destructive behavior: "As a society, we are now obliged to prepare our children to deal with the true 45 nature of things, sometimes before they are emotionally ready to absorb them, as the scope of childhood innocence becomes truncated" (Athletes Who Indulge Their Dark
Side 164).
3.2.4 Religion
Religion was an important factor in Kovic's upbringing. "I loved God more than anything else back then and I prayed to Him and the Virgin Mary and Jesus and all the saints to be a good boy and a good American" (Kovic 61). When he reached puberty and started masturbating he was adamantly convinced that it is a mortal sin and he repeated Acts of Contrition and begged God's mercy after masturbating (Kovic 75). He wanted to have sex with girls but after hearing a sermon on chastity he did not want to offend God, as he wanted to stay a good Catholic more than anything (Kovic 77). What pleased Kovic during the boot camp was that before sleep, there would be a signing of the Lord's Prayer (Kovic 96).
Kovic was considerably shaken after accidentally killing the young corporal. He decided that he would become a priest after he described what he had done in a letter addressed to his family (Kovic 192). He wanted to become a healer.
After getting home and visiting a local church, the priest based his sermon against communism and the importance of victory in Vietnam on Kovic. "[...] people came to shake his hand and thank him for all he had done for God and his country, and he left the church feeling very sick and threw up in the parking lot" (Kovic 112).
3.2.5 Aftermath
Kovic's paralysis and ensuing recovery, which was never complete physically and mentally alike, reflects in various aspect the self-destructive downward spiral
Teitlebaum names "the dark side" and connects it with his case study - athletes 46 (Athletes Who Indulge Their Dark Side xi). This group of individuals is often in the society's spotlight and their injuries, misconducts, and the effects those have on athletes are publically advertised. Teitlebaum focuses on athletes but he states that his findings are applicable with the rest of the populace as well.
We all have a dark side that is tempted at times to violate boundaries; generally,
however, respect for society's standards and good judgment prevail. In addition,
the realistic appraisal and anticipation of consequences for stepping over the line
is sufficient to serve as a deterrent against the acting out of antisocial impulses.
Such restraint is often lacking in the lives of celebrity sports heroes who make
pathological and self-destructive choices that lead them into corrupt activity.
(Athletes Who Indulge Their Dark Side 39)
This would exactly fit Kovic's profile as per the evidence provided below. His treatment and his socialization become grueling tasks. He is moved from Vietnam to a hospital for veterans in the Bronx. The conditions there are even worse than those in
Vietnam as there was no "acute" suffering which could be elevated. In this hospital the suffering was stale and instead of blood it smelled of feces (Kovic 48). The men there had to ward off rats from nibbling at their wounds with breadcrumbs (Kovic 51).
Kovic's wound occupied his waking hours both physically and mentally. He wanted to understand why the war was going on and if the benefits outweighed the suffering of thousands of people. For Kovic the hospital became a continuation of the war in itself
(Kovic 53).
After being sent home from the hospital, Kovic became a star of the Massapequa parade as a veteran. Instead of feeling joy that he was in the center of everybody's attention, he felt like an animal displayed in a zoo: "[...] and the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to get the hell out of the back seat of the Cadillac and go back 47 home to his room where he knew it was safe and warm [...] he felt trapped, just like in the hospital" (Kovic 108). The parade was a difficult moment for Kovic, as he felt confined. As the crowd of people was staring at him, instead of mutual understanding he felt that he was an extra piece of the show to be set into the line-up between other performers. Some of the other performers would later use him as a prop in their own propaganda speeches without even letting him speak (Kovic 111).
Coming home and recognizing his wound as a permanent one becomes increasingly difficult for Kovic and he starts to drink so much that his parents tell him to leave. He decides to try his luck in Mexico where he finds an enclave of wounded
American veterans and where he feels good for a time as there is never a shortage of drugs, alcohol and prostitutes (Kovic 123).
Kovic realized that he did not want to stay intoxicated in Mexico forever but once he returns to the US, Kovic hurts himself during exercising and has to go through the crucible of the veteran's hospital again (Kovic 131). In there, he is again humiliated, drugged and is told "you can take your Vietnam and shove it up your ass" when he asked for decent treatment (Kovic 133). It is during this second stay in the hospital that he starts changing from the pro-war veteran to the anti-war one (Kovic 135).
The breaking point was when the shooting at Kent State happened: "I felt like crying. The last time I had felt that way was the day Kennedy was killed" (Kovic 137).
Immediately after he learned the news he sought out the demonstrating students and later joined their rally in Washington. He started to feel good about the turn his life had taken now: "In the war we were killing and maiming people. In Washington on that
Saturday afternoon in May we were trying to heal them and set them free" (Kovic 141).
Shortly after Washington, he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War movement
48 and began holding speeches in schools and roaming around demonstrations (Kovic
147).
Kovic was in high demand and there was no end to places where he could speak against the war, but popularity also brought animosity towards Kovic and he was receiving threats, he was called a traitor and a communist. But he could not stop speaking. If he did, he would be alone again and since talking about Vietnam brought the horrors back to life he wanted anything but (Kovic 151).
During the Republican National Convention, Kovic and many other veterans traveled cross the country to say what they think about the war in front of Nixon, who
Kovic calls a liar and calls the war a crime against humanity. He tries to make the public understand that what their government is doing is not just: "If you can't believe the veteran who fought the war and was wounded in the war, who can you believe?"(Kovic 177). When Nixon went on stage, the veterans shouted him down and disturbed his acceptance speech. Kovic states that all those years of rage and sorrow led to this point and that it was a great accomplishment (Kovic 181).
3.2.6 Women
Not being able to establish a sexual or any other meaningful relationship with women was something that troubled Kovic before and after his wound: "He cried inside for a woman, any woman, to lie close to him" (Kovic 124). When he was in Mexico, he sought the local prostitutes. One ran away because she pitied him so much that she could not have sex with him (Kovic 115). His second prostitute offered him to stay and live with her and her daughter; he promised to marry her and raise her child with her.
The second day, even tough he felt immensely happy with her, he sobered up and never went to see her again (Kovic 128). After her, Kovic would sleep with a different 49 prostitute every night of his stay in Mexico. He abandoned her, because he feared responsibility and gave up on possible happiness in fear of failure, like he abandoned the Yankees or the dying officer, whom he promised that he would write to his wife back home and did not (Kovic 208).
His strict catholic upbringing, which was overseen by his mother, lead to
Kovic's repressed sexuality. An example of how his catholic education repressed his sexuality is the waves of guilt, which followed his numerous masturbations during his adolescence. He knew that he was committing a sin when masturbating because it was against God, as per the Catholic Church, as per his mother's education, which required her son's full obedience or God would punish him and she would not let him do any sports (Kovic 75). Like Caputo with the Chinese prostitute, Kovic's understanding of barter (even during early childhood), shows signs of successful capitalist education. He is set before the fact (administered by his mother), that if he is good and does what he is told, both his mother and God will love him. If he revolts, he will live in sin like the communist heathens do.
After returning from Vietnam Kovic is no more debilitated in his efforts to establish relationships with women solely on the account of his shyness but also he feels that his life suffered because of his wound. His wound ostracizes Kovic in multiple ways. He feels that because of his wheel chair he is robbed of certain joys, like walking in the sand with his beloved (Kovic 115). Mainly though, he feels robbed of his penis and with it the ability to feel bodily pleasure and to procreate life as his church taught him.
His public speeches attract a schoolteacher named Helen, a single mother with two children, and they start seeing each other. Soon afterwards, Kovic was in a relationship, but he wanted her to know that he felt pressured by her love (Kovic 158). 50 During one of his breakdowns he asked Helen to marry him but afterwards he could not remember why he asked her to do it (Kovic 161). He introduced her to his parents and told everybody that they were getting married. Eventually, they did not because Kovic felt the need to be alone for a while and Helen was pressuring him into forming a strong
Christian family, which he could not provide since he could not even go to church anymore and waited for her outside when she went (Kovic 161).
51 4 IRAQ INVASION
4.1 Jess Goodell: Shade It Black
Jessica Goodell's narration reflects upon her time spent with the USMC's
Mortuary Affairs Unit in Iraq in 2003 and her subsequent attempt to adjust back to civilian life. She tried to follow the society's standards of living - getting educated, having a job, finding a husband, etc. Since all these social constructs did not stem from her but from the outside pressure, the values of the civilian society became irrelevant, when she wanted to adapt after her return from war. She struggled with substance abuse, her abusive partner and parents, who were at lost with what to do with their child.
4.1.1 Deployment
The rhetorics of war had to be changed dramatically for the War on Terror. No longer was there an enemy superpower, which threatens sovereignty of other countries. War on
Terror reintroduced the aspect of moral obligation to go to war, because what the enemy does cannot challenge the West materially but it challenges the Western world's moral status quo prevalent after the Cold War. One of the rallying calls to arms was women rights in despotic Islamic countries.
[...] with regards to the US invasion of Afghanistan, President George W Bush, in his
29 January 2002, State of the Union Address suggested that "The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters in Afghanistan were captives in their homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free, and are part of
Afghanistan's new government." (Peksen 456)
When Goodell is asked why the Americans go to war, she states that the truth may sound self serving to some but it is that they wanted to help the people of other 52 countries, in her case - the people of Iraq. Even when dead, the Iraqis were aided by the
Marines of the Mortuary Affairs as they processed the remains of Iraqis and prepared them for their relatives to perform the customary funeral rites (Goodell 78).
The fact that the Americans do not belong in Iraq is pronounced from the start of the narrative as Goodell drives her convoy through the empty land, which is seldom crossed by anything living and in which anything living must be lost, because otherwise it would not be there (Goodell 17). Goodell recalls the great vast emptiness of Iraq's landscape, which was made even greater by the level of sleep deprivation the Marines had to undergo (Goodell 16).
The emptiness of Iraq stands in stark contrast to the crowded streets of the cities with civilians, who regard the Marines as more dangerous invaders than other soldiers.
Every civilian could hold a detonator, which when set off would mean the death or more work for Goodell's Mortuary Affairs team (Goodell 19).
The civilians were rightfully scared of the Marines, because the Marines would kill civilians who would refuse to obey their orders (Goodell 21). Those Iraqis who were brave or desperate enough were employed in the USMC camp. Later in the conflict even they would leave, as the insurgents killed the families of those who would aid the invaders (Goodell 77).
The job of Mortuary Affairs made Goodell and her unit pariahs among other
Marines. It was the sensory difference - they smelled different and their clothes were stained in different places than usual. They also sat away from the rest of the camp's population in the mess hall: "Some thought we'd bring them bad luck, and we didn't want them thinking that. We especially did not want them to know what we know"
(Goodell 57). As if being in the Mortuary Affairs unit was not undesirable enough, being in the USMC brought with it higher chances of encountering death. 53 The risk of death in Iraq shows considerable variability. It is highest in the
Marine Corps and lowest in the Air Force and higher among enlisted troops than
among officers. The death risk is much higher for men than for women and
declines sharply with age. Hispanics have a higher death rate than non-
Hispanics, but blacks have unusually low mortality in Iraq. (Buzzell and Preston
564)
The journalists are always a sensitive topic for the people in war, because those journalists show families back home what it is like in the warzone and at the same time, they remind the soldiers that time back home does not stop. These messages are often misleading and sometimes they are outright fabrications like the one Goodell encountered. She had to process the bodies of four Marines, who she hadn't even identified yet, and she saw the whole incident resulting in their respective deaths unfold in the news. That was, at the given time of the procedure, impossible. The journalist fabricated the names of the dead and so people back home would believe that their sons were dead or alive based on that news bulletin. As Goodell states it is not only a matter of respect towards the deceased or the odious nature of modern journalism, the consequences are much more serious - "a misinformed public, ill-advised political leaders and families who are devastated" (Goodell 96). By the end of her narrative,
Goodell is adamant that the media glorify violence and wars to spread the lies of the elites and indoctrinate the public (Goodell 176). This is a valuable insight, because in the previous works analyzed, the male authors refer to the "movie-like" quality of combat and how they wanted to be like John Wayne and other actors who represented the brave young men, i.e. the paragons of masculinity - defending their homes, their values and their very way of life, i.e. the United States.
54 One of the most unforgettable moments of her deployment was when a body was brought in for processing and Goodell realized that the mangled corpse was, in fact, still breathing. The Marine was shocked to learn this and she was even more, when she called an officer with a medic and requested what to do. The only piece of advice she got was: "Just wait." Goodell honestly admits that she has not yet come to terms with the event and that it had profoundly shaken her believe in the "leave no man behind" motto (Goodell 120).
4.1.2 Religion
Most authors focused on in this thesis regard their religion as a pain relief and as something that helps them make sense out of the chaos and suffering surrounding them.
Goodell does not pray nor does she ask God for guidance. For Goodell, the power to believe in the future or to believe a noble purpose is above any traditional faith. She wants to believe that the war had a noble purpose: "I pray that we are not killing and being killed for anything as transitory as oil, money or power" (Goodell 187).
Spirituality for her is the souls of the dead. She writes that she could clearly feel the presence of the dead they had processed, and that others felt that way too: "We could feel the souls of these civilians, and these mothers and children who died horrendous deaths. Their souls were on the land and all around us; they were in the bunker with us"
(Goodell 81). There are no certain figures what high levels of stress can do to one's mental state and it must be taken into account that every individual reacts differently under stressful conditions, but Goodell says that every Marine in her unit felt the spirits of the dead; and the soldiers serving with her were all combat hardened veterans, who thought that they could not be shaken easily (Goodell 83).
55 4.1.3 Aftermath
Goodell was thoroughly instructed about the process used to preserve the human bodily remains, but at the end of this training, she was also told that the members of the
Mortuary Affairs should not treat PTSD lightly. By the end of her narration, Goodell knows all there is to know about the effects of PTSD (Goodell 28). Mortuary Affairs holds a special reputation among members of the USMC. Goodell believes that the
Mortuary Affairs is to the Marines what the Marines are to the general public back home: "[We] did things that had to be done but that no one wanted to know about"
(Goodell 39).
One of the most punishing labors of the Mortuary Affairs unit was inventorying the personal belongings of those killed. Anything the deceased would carry in their pockets would go to the relatives. Be it a suicide note, a sonogram of a fetus, or a used paper tissue. All these things would now become a part of a family heirloom (Goodell
38). Like Caputo while taking inventory of the dead bodies in Vietnam, Goodell started to see dead people even when awake. She starts shading their missing parts with black, just the way they should do it in the Mortuary Affairs documents (Goodell 92).
Goodell had difficulties adjusting to the civilian life after her discharge. She could not connect with the general civilian public. All she saw were the gumball-like civilians who were constantly eating while wearing their bright clothes (Goodell 128).
Apart from the visual difference of the civilian life, everything seemed to happen too fast and agreed upon conditions could change effortlessly: "Strangers become best friends - 'brothers' - or they become lovers - 'soul mates' - in an instant. Relationships and marriages ended overnight [... ] I couldn't be sure that one would show up to an agreed upon lunch date or actually meet me in the library as we had planned" (Goodell
129). 56 The USMC purged all the sense of materialism from the Marines and once back in the "real world" they were left to their own devices: "The disorder was also in our lives, in our interactions, our relationships as well as in their absence" (Goodell 130).
What got out of order were the relationships she shared with her former USMC colleagues. Goodell once requested help from another veteran, who refused her as if the things they went through together in Iraq ceased to hold value outside Iraq once their deployment ended (Goodell 151). In an attempt to shed the fragments of her military career, Goodell starts to appear as feminine as possible visually. She wants nobody to guess that she served in the USMC, although she confesses that it did not help her in her predicament and search for closure (Goodell 163). Williams states in her research that female Marines have tendencies to show of their femininity unreservedly. They embrace it because it indicates strength of character, self-confidence and dignity (Roos
301).
Only in moments of solitude did the tormenting memories of her Iraq experience materialize: "I started questioning what we were doing in Iraq and what / had done there
[...] I started to drink" (Goodell 162). Goodell, in addition to her drinking, started abusing anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medicine, while also adding marijuana to the mix (Goodell 172). Eventually she starts seeing a mental health specialist, but she sees no positive effect in these sessions, as she cannot believe anybody, who did not go through the same ordeal as she did, could understand her predicament (Goodell 165).
Even though Goodell starts her psychology studies and progresses with great success, she does not manage to stop drinking as every new piece of knowledge deepens her own awareness of how severe her wound is (Goodell 171).
Goodell overcame her trauma, or at least its debilitating effects, and she states that it is through the practice of unselfishness that she could reach happiness. She also 57 mentions that this resilience needs to be nourished by "good friendships, families, and communities" (Goodell 178). Her hope for the future is to help others with their struggle and to establish communities based on the virtues like sacrifice, which also can be found in the USMC myth, but all has to be submitted to love and free will (Goodell
179). Through actively aiding others, she wishes that she would be able to once again attain some glimpses of hope for herself (Goodell 183).
4.1.4 Family
Goodell was raised in a middleclass family near the Chautaugua Lake. Her father led her towards musical education and her mother showed her where a good wife's place is in the patriarchal society - in the kitchen, cooking food for the family
(Goodell 112).
As a young teenager she enjoyed sports like soccer and long distance running, both of which built up her endurance and stamina enough to survive the tedious running the USMC puts its members through (Goodell 113). Her dream was to be educated as a lawyer, like her father, and create a lawyer firm with him. This dream was shattered by her parents' divorce (Goodell 114). When she called her parents that she enlisted in the
Marines, neither of them said a word and she hung up on them (Goodell 115). Smith and Rosenstein argue that gender roles are not so important when it comes to the military, as the work and workplace are fundamentally already understood to be highly masculine and rigidly hierarchical (Smith and Rosenstein 13). This is in opposition to
Goodell's experience; when she wanted to be a tank crewmember, she did not know about the restrictions for tank crews to be all male in 2001 (Goodell 114). It was not until a historical transformation of the American military, announced by Defense
Secretary Ashton B. Carter in December 2015, that women could enter any combat 58 roles (Rosenberg and Philipps). It is a historic moment for any country to fully integrate women and open all roles for them, but it is also historic for USA, because of how late this resolution was passed, considering that countries like Romania, Australia, Poland,
Denmark, and Germany are already successfully managing the talents of their newly- found military personnel (Fantz). America lagging behind in military management is nothing new, considering that conscription was implemented only after being impelled by WWI (Vining and Hacker 354). The importance of USA implementing these changes is now more than just a gesture. The leaders of the presumably strongest military in the world have acknowledged women as capable operatives in the most punishing and masculine employment the mankind has ever invented. This is altogether a positive development and there is evidence confirming that mixed combat units are able to function effectively.
Women from such units, via soldiering, influence the perception of women even in the harshest conditions or the most patriarchal of societies. Evidence of such positive social progress, which started in military units, can be found in the modern day Syria. In the war torn region of Northern Syria called Rojava a "revolution in the name democracy, socialism and women liberation is taking place amid surrounding war" ("Syria's Feminist Utopia").
Abdullah Ocalan, the founding leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), has established a political program for the people of the region, which focuses on "self- governance, socialist economics and most radically for the region - a central role for women in leadership" (Syria's Feminist Utopia"). Democratic centers were set up in
Rojava and women hold over 40% of the leadership positions at every level. No other
"democratic" governing entity on planet Earth is at the moment achieving anything remotely close to this (Seeker Network 2015). PKK in Rojava proves that the including of women in combat roles plays a great role in the way society, which is protected by armed forces utilizing women effectively, perceives women in general and helps the society
59 cleanse itself from the rigid and outdated structure of the patriarchal state. Male authors discussed in this thesis were employed in male dominant military, which reflected the male dominant society of their times. The traditional views were imprinted on Sledge and Leckie, who, albeit not directly practicing them, never challenged them. The turbulent era of the
Vietnam War lead to a shift of perception of women in the society in the United States.
Kovic becomes a member of a movement deeply connected to the civil rights movement and thus to the feminist movement. The military establishment disillusions Caputo and he becomes a journalist covering the atrocities committed by mostly young men led by outdated regimes and statesmen. Goodell comes with a new perspective to the genre, the perspective of women. Her battlefield ten years ago is strikingly similar to where the fighting women of the Rojava region are currently battling the ISIS oppressors. She too is deeply affected by how the military and its backward ways affect its members, male and female without distinction. War is a social construct similarly to the way chauvinism is a human concept, but war with its destructive potential has the ability to challenge and change the current state of things. From this rises great hope for women worldwide, because their sacrifices made are paving the way for future generation of women, who will not be forced to suffer the same wrongdoings their mothers and grandmothers had to endure. "A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its government in a reactionary war" (Lenin). Goodell and her Rojava sisters-in-arms could become the essence of Lenin's quote: purely by committing themselves to the cause of peace through the destruction of a common enemy.
After the deployment in Iraq, Goodell relied on her relationship with an unfaithful abusive man she nicknames Miguel, who was also a former Marine and who was very violent when Goodell trespassed her territory as a woman. If Miguel had served in a military which respected women enough to grant them the same possibilities
60 as it grants to men, his perception of fellow "sister-Marine" would have most certainly been different. This did not happen and Goodell had to endure the way he was. He would get into violent fits and attack Goodell, but she would stay with him, because he offered her the security of a world she knew - he was the embodiment of the USMC in her civilian life and even after she runs away from him, she returns five days later
(Goodell 155). Goodell muses that the ex-servicemen are fine only if they reenlist and see combat again, if they only reenlist they still can be well but if they stay in relationships with another disturbed ex-servicemen believing that they can save one another - that it is the moment, when they are in trouble (Goodell 159). In was her father who offered her a helping hand, when he let her stay at his house after she finally gave up on Miguel. He even tried to get her involved in activities at a local church, but
Goodell could not at the time appreciate his efforts and soon had to move out. She moved to her mother's but the situation was the same as the one at her father's home
(Goodell 169).
4.1.5 Gender
Goodell addresses the topic of women in the USMC often throughout her memoir. Her focus spans from the mere verbal highlighting that somebody is a woman
(i.e. not "Benson, the mechanic" but "Benson, the female mechanic") to profane nickname giving and ends with sexual harassment and rape.
The reason of the maltreatment of women in the USMC lies in the deep roots of the USMC, which established itself as a solely patriarchal society. When men fail it is because they are lazy (this is seen as a character flaw) or out of shape (this is the physical manifestation of laziness) and they are thoroughly harassed for any shortcomings (and thus, they are perfected). This harassment often leads to suicide, 61 which is for true Marines a sign of cowardice, so when a male Marine commits suicide because of bullying; the bullies are reassured in their opinions about the given person's weaknesses and general unfitness to stay among the true Marines (Goodell 42). Goodell illuminates that the USMC frequently attracts physical men who hardly finished college and these men tend to act not reflectively, when encountered by something that challenges their worldview; they act violently (Goodell 80). When women fail it is because they are women. There is nothing they can do about it; they are the embodiment of flaws and their existence induces flaws in others, i.e. in men (Goodell
46).
The repressed sexuality of the young men is showing vehemently. If a woman agrees to exercise or watch a movie or eat with a man, the onlookers automatically perceive her as his sexual partner even though she is not. Other men will approach her with the prospect of sex and if she refuses them, she is labeled as frigid and/or homosexual, or maybe both (Goodell 59). Thus, women are discouraged from forming purely friendship bonds among men, which leads to a never-ending spiral of rejection inflicted by women and reinforces the prejudice of men. Being discouraged to actively commit to the esprit de corps because of such reasons would seem preposterous to the
WWII veterans.
The women face another danger, more subversive than direct approaches from their fellow Marine counterparts. The other danger is that the woman becomes the center of every male's attention (even homosexual males have to acknowledge women among the group) and thus, for some women, this is the first time they feel in the spotlight, wanted and even beautiful. Some cannot decode the often-conflicting distinctions of military life and break under the pressure (Goodell 65).
62 Goodell states that this forces the Marines into two levels of warfare. The first is the conventional war as seen on TV, the other is the asymmetric war waged by women against the patriarchy of the USMC. The stress the women are in is tremendous and suicides are frequent (Goodell 67). Goodell paints a bleak picture about the standing of women in the USMC, but another Marine addressing these issues, Connie Brownson, sees a positive development in the last years and hopes that it will proceed further.
Unlike other branches of the American military, however, the title "Marine" has
no suffix of "man" (e.g., Airman, Seaman, etc.) to identify its members. This, in
itself, alleviates one hurdle to female Marines' equivalency with their male
peers. The elimination of "dark green Marine" to identify African American
Marines as well as the elimination of the descriptor "Woman Marine" further
exhibit the commitment to eliminating race- and sex-specific discriminatory
language in the Marine Corps. (Brownson 5)
She believes this is inevitable and goes as far to state that the value system of the
USMC is embodied in traditional women traits: "[when] Marine Corps's core values, traits, and principles are embodied, women have a greater likelihood of inspiring their peers and earning their respect as equivalents" (Brownson 5).
Even when the trials of the day are over and the Marines retreat to their tents, they face a new dramatic difference between women and men - time off. Goodell describes that, when given free time, men tend to deepen their bloodlust through watching violent movies, while women tend to watch series like Sex and the City
(Goodell 62).
When approached directly by their male/female counterparts - they can either give in and establish a reputation of availability or they can refuse to partake and are thus labeled as frigid (Goodell 58). Being disliked by the group in these extreme 63 conditions can have fatal consequences, but so does having the reputation of someone who is willing to partake in sexual activity. These women easily become the victims of rape. As the society gets more violent, the attacks are more frequent (Sports Heroes,
Fallen Idols 155). The victim, for combinations of various reasons, cannot speak about the incident. If the victim wants to speak about the crime, the society the victim is in would most likely do its utmost to suppress this notion. Drake, in her essay on the rape scandals in the Air Force since Tailhook in 1991 to 2003 USAF rape scandals, states that this suppressing of the one who wants to profess the crime is in effect a witch hunt:
"Widespread perceptions of a 'witch hunt' atmosphere can also contribute to the silencing of victims of sexual harassment and violence" (Drake 52). She also states that violence is almost certain to follow, because "highly masculine cultures will also have greater prevalence of gender discrimination and sexual harassment" (Drake 60).
One of the more important examples of patriarchal offense in the USMC recorded by Goodell is the case when Goodell, in her martial arts class, is assigned to a sparring partner who weights around 250 pounds and drives her to the ground many times to prove the instructor's point - women cannot fight alongside men (Goodell 86).
When Goodell beats her platoon mates in running, she is not praised for her strength or persistence. The men are berated for the lack of theirs, because women can never, in the eyes of the officers, achieve such level of prowess (Goodell 88) and they teach it to the men who, in the light of the staged evidence, believe it (Goodell 101). In effect,
Goodell's experience states that women are tolerated only when not challenging the social structure of the USMC, and based on Jennifer M. Silva's research this is still the predominant case and will be until gender stops being uphold as a system of differentiation (Silva 939). Gender cannot be changed as easily as the system which is based on it. Even in the, ideally, genderless military, women are still expected to 64 somehow "do gender" while also maintaining the venerable qualities of the Marines. As
Silva states in her paper, the male Marines seek these qualities out when they are asked about which qualities a leader should have. Female responses differed from the male ones. What stands out is the finding that women try to keep their femininity, because they are pressured to do so, and at the same time they need to live up to the traditional male expectations of leadership. So "doing gender" becomes increasingly difficult when in genderless or male predominant society.
"While we continually produce ourselves, through social interactions and daily routines, as gendered beings, we do not experience this construction as conscious, but as internalized, embodied and authentic" (Silva 941).
Goodell expressed directly that she felt grateful when her colleague Pineda was always looking out for her, because she knew he had no ulterior motives. During incoming mortar fire, Pineda ran through the encampment to see if Goodell was safe.
"He never said he was trying to protect me like a brother would, but that's what he did"
(Goodell 99). Among others, Azar Gat supports the idea that kinship should be the model system for the military of the future: "Kinship—expanding from family and tribe to peoples—has always exerted an overwhelming influence on determining one's loyalty and willingness to sacrifice in the defence and promotion of a common good"
(Gat 671).
Goodell's familial feeling when working with Pineda serves as positive evidence for
Brownson's assumption that the spirit of kinship can replace the outdated misogynic traditional notions of the USMC.
For females to maximally succeed in the military, and particularly in combat
roles, patriarchy as the defining explanation for male-female interaction must be
discarded and the enabling concepts of equivalency and kinship must be 65 embraced. The continued strength of military organizations and the individuals within them emerges from the reciprocity of these two concepts. (Brownson 1)
66 5 CONCLUSION
This thesis focuses on the autobiographical narratives written by former Unites
States Marines Corp members. It especially focuses on the influences the authors had in their upbringing, such as their family and their religious affiliation.
Eugene B. Sledge proves to be the old fashioned Southern gentleman, who under the weight of circumstances does not approve of women being in the warzone.
His religion helps him get through the ordeal of the Pacific campaign and his feeling of esprit de corps installed into him by chauvinistic patriarchs during his training in the
USMC sustained his sanity. His family in back home and his relationships outside
USMC are seldom mentioned. He is also the only author who does not reflect on self- indulging activities like sexual intercourse or alcoholism.
Robert Leckie's narration is more eloquent than Sledge's; this might be the result of his thorough practice as a journalist. He also in great detail describes the decadent debauchery he has inclination to and seeks it out on every possible occasion, even if it means breaking the law. Even though the USMC required of him to lose a part of his phallus he gladly does so for his motherland and the USMC reinvigorates his feeling of manhood through making an efficient killer out of him. Women for Leckie are the source of primary gratification. When he has sex with them he feels like the apex predator, because the society he was raised in taught him to feel that way. As a result he discards women after sex like he does with condoms, when they served their purpose.
Similarly to Sledge, he pays little to no attention to his civilian family. Both of the
WWII authors go through periods of severe rationalization of killing and the justification of war. They also have little faith in the commitment of the civilian population of the world, who they are fighting to protect.
67 Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July share some degree of similarity. Both authors resent John F. Kennedy for lulling the
American public into a state of an eager obedience. Caputo refrains from casual sex with the Vietnamese prostitutes because they seem lowly in his eyes, but when his state of mind is altered with alcohol, he buys sex from a Chinese prostitute, which seems appropriate to his mercantile capitalist self, as he views the whole sex scene as a business transaction. Caputo muses about the colonial factors of his adventure in
Vietnam and the romanticism of the colonial expeditions. He, in effect, replaces the colonial imperialist predecessors, but maintains acting in the same vein as they did. His familial ties, like with the preceding authors, play a marginal role in the narration.
Kovic' starts his memoir (the 2005 edition) with an introduction, which mercilessly condemns the American government and deems the invasion of Iraq as crime against humanity. The memoir itself describes in detail his Catholic upbringing and his family as a whole. Kovic's mother becomes the driving force of guilt in Kovic's life and she channels her didactic angst through Christian imagery. Kovic under her influence goes to war against the heathen communists. His mother blesses him and sends him as a tribute from the civilized Catholic lands to pacify the savages loyal to Ho
Chi Minh. When he is paralyzed and the government, which sent him to war, abandons him like all the other veterans and does not provide sufficient physical or spiritual nutriments, he turns to alcohol and other self-destructive means of comfort. Not even his faith and family are supportive enough and his mother ostracizes him for being a failure, which leads to an even greater relapse and his decadent holiday in Mexico. He then finds his purpose as an antiwar agitator. Ron Kovic is the only author in this thesis who was wounded in his war so severely that his wounds paralyze him from chest down until this day, which, in his eyes, leads to his inability to have a functioning relationship 68 with women. He is proved wrong about this several time through his narration, but comes to acknowledge that he can lead a full life only after he felt that he has done enough to ease the suffering of the other veterans.
Jessica Goodell is the only female USMC war veteran covered in this thesis and she is also a veteran of one of USA's latest wars, which has severe global consequences, even after more than a decade - the Iraq invasion of 2003. Goodell, frankly comments on the harassment and sexual abuse women in America's military face on daily basis. She ponders where the root of this evil, which grows inside the military like cancer and resulted in not just her maltreatment, abuse and PTSD, lies. Her personal account is most unsettling considering that the contemporary military leaders of the presumably most elite fighting force on the planet have little to no regard to the life of its members and women in particular. If this is the case, then there is little room for doubt that any war the United States of America wage will be ever legitimate if the old chauvinistic structures are kept in place. An example, which could inspire the US military, is the participation of the fighting women of the Rojava region and other parts of the Syrian battleground, where the Kurdistan Worker's Party tacticians employed women even in combat roles. This has directly influenced the perception of women in the region and as a result women in the region are being elected into executive positions in the civilian and military society alike in numbers dwarfing those of the Western world. The development of the global society takes on a positive direction as the US military followed suit and opened all positions for women to occupy, including combat roles.
In conclusion, these examples of war memoirs written by American veterans during the last hundred years show that for the human society to advance forward it is
69 an absolute necessity to include women into all aspect of the military life, because the military deeply affects the life of the community it is sworn to represent and to protect.
70 6 WORKS CITED
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73 RESUME
This thesis deals with the war memoirs of five chosen American veterans, who have served in the United States Marine Corps. These authors are divided into three groups. The first section of the thesis deals with the Pacific campaign of the Second
World War as captured in With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, the memoir by
Eugene Sledge, and Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie.
The second part of the thesis focuses on Born on the Fourth of July by Ron
Kovic and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War. This section is dedicated to the Vietnam
War.
The last section deals with a more contemporary war memoir, which is Shade It
Black: Death and After in Iraq by Jess Goodell. She describes her deployment in 2003 with the Mortuary Affairs unit in Iraq as well as how women are perceived by their male counterparts in USMC and finally the terrors of PTSD, which started once she returned to civilian life.
The aim of this work is to analyze the transformation of an individual into a war veteran as described by the actual veterans in their literary works. Each section dedicated to a particular author is divided into subsections analyzing the given narrative and the author's influences in life such as family and religion, which formed their perception of women. Based on this analysis a method of improving the emancipation of women through their inclusion in combat roles is proposed.
74 RESUMÉ
Diplomová práce se zabývá válečnými memoáry pěti amerických veteránů, kteří sloužili v Námořní pěchotě Spojených států amerických. Tito autoři jsou roztříděni do tří skupin. První skupina se zaměřuje na válku v Tichomoří za druhé světové války, jak ji zachytili v Se starou gardou: Na Peleliu a Okinawě (With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa) Eugene B. Sledge a v Helma místo polštáře (Helmet for My Pillow)
Robert Leckie.
Druhá část práce rozebírá Narozen čtvrtého července (Born on the Fourth of
July), kterou napsal Ron Kovic, a knihu Nezaručená zpráva o válce (A Rumor of War), kterou napsal Philip Caputo. Tato sekce se věnuje memoárům vietnamské války.
Poslední segment práce rozebírá válečný memoár Shade It Black: Death and
After in Iraq od autorky Jess Goodell. Popisuje zde svůj výsadek v Iráku s jednotkou, která pečovala o těla padlých v roce 2003. Také se vyjadřuje k postavení žen a jak na ně pohlížejí jejich mužští kolegové v Námořní pěchotě Spojených států a konečně také pojednává o hrůzách posttraumatické stresové poruchy, která se u Goodell projevila, když pokusila vrátit do civilního života.
Cílem této práce je analýza transformace jednotlivce ve válečného veterána, tak jak ji popisují ve svých literárních dílech autoři, kteří sami prošli válkou. Každá část práce věnovaná určitému autorovi je dále rozdělena na podčásti analyzující samotný text a segmenty, které se věnují tématům, jenž ovlivnily autorův život, například rodina
či náboženství, a následně formovaly jejich názory na ženy. Na základě této analýzy je představena metoda, která by skrze začlenění žen do bojových úloh pomohla k vývoji
ženské emancipace.
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