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From the Walls of Troy to the Vietnam Wall: War in Literature Dr. A.R. Anderson Office: 114-A Old Main Phone: X-4853 E-mail: [email protected] “To an Army Wife in Sardis” Some say a cavalry troop, others say an infantry, and others, still, will swear that the swift oars of our fleet are the best sight on dark earth; but I say that whomever one loves is. — Sappho, Greece, c. 500 B.C. In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes in “How to Tell a True War Story”: “In a true war story, if there is a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning.” If a war story seems moral, O’Brien cautions, “do not believe it. If you feel some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.” My cousin, Darrel Hamer, never sought to avoid Vietnam, but he never wrote his own war story. He believed that there are still Americans lost in Asia, but “it’s been too long, they’re too long gone now. They’ll never find them now and nobody cares a goddamned bit anyway.” When he first came home, he always manned the petition tables on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July when veterans demanded a full accounting of MIA’s in Vietnam. Then suddenly Darrel changed. His weekends at the Griffith, Indiana VFW began with beers on Friday and more beers on Saturday. Even after being diagnosed with emphysema, he kept smoking two to three packs a day. When I asked him to tell me about the war, he got very angry, and couldn’t talk about other soldiers by name. There was just “this buddy” or “this other guy.” He was upset about the Vietnam War websites. “They’ve made what we did into a goddamned video game. They don’t know crap about war, that war, any war, and play war with us like cartoon toys and there’s no blood and no respect. Just find the right block on the upside down v.” My war story is about Marine PFC John Harrison Brancato. We were never even close to being real friends. We sat next to each other in a sort-of “make-up” algebra class. He flunked it the first time; I was re-taking it to remove an intolerable C from my record. I was in the pre-college curriculum; Brancato was in the “industrial education program”--a program so low that John’s guidance counselor wouldn’t talk to him. He’d attend a half- day of class, and then work after school in an “internship program” to prepare those with no real hope of a college degree for their “future careers.” 2 In the social order of our school I was the “nerd” and John was the “greaser.” He wore the Brylcreme and the black, high-heeled boots, and honest-to-God rolled packs of Lucky Strikes or un-filtered Camels in his tee shirt sleeves. He just wanted to get married and have a family, so he joined the Marines for the secure future his recruiter promised. Government documents record how the true war story of Marine PFC John Brancato, serial number 2381041, ended on Wednesday, February 7, 1968, in Quang Nam Province, Republic of Vietnam. John was “Casualty type A1 hostile, died,” Reason “other explosive device (ground casualty)”--military for he stepped on a land mine. John’s tour of duty began on Saturday, December 30, 1967--so he fought there for barely five weeks, and he died less than a month before his nineteenth birthday, April 6. His place on the Wall is “Panel 37E-Row 081.” Back home in Countryside, Illinois, John’s memorial playground was dedicated one month after I graduated from college. John Brancato was in the ground; I was off to Los Angeles, and a Master’s Degree in American Literature at USC. This is the first time I tried to tell John Brancato’s story. “Homefront Guilt” I went happily 2-S until the government said it wasn’t really fair-- so many “too dumb to go to college” boys dead hundred a week over there. But I was registered in Cicero, and there were lots of greasers there to go-- enough young men in dago-tee’s to go off and fight North Vietnamese. Instead, alive, I’ll go on for BA, MA, Ph.D.-- and write about Brancato, John who went to ‘Nam instead of me killed by a land mine in Quang Nam. Now there’s a plaqued-rock in his hometown for little kids to play around-- too young to know what “valor and honor” mean so little in tribute to a dead Marine killed just before he’d made nineteen. Now, just gone, so hard to see so proud, that confident boyish face— did Brancato really take my place? and did he really die for me? 2 3 Right now in Iraq, Afghanistan, and off the Libyan coast, how do we respect the many more boys like John Brancato who’ve died? Why and how must we honor these soldiers even if we disagree about if their wars were justified or a mistaken? What about those thousands of Americans who, like Sappho, await the safe return of the men and women they love? Why have so many veterans taken their own lives? Why so much “collateral damage” in these wars against terrorism? All of these questions haunt us; each demands our attention. For me, every time I’m sitting safely at home reading another war story or reworking this syllabus, I still think about John Brancato. He went to war, and took some other boy’s place—maybe mine. I’ll never get to know Darrel’s war story. He died on September 14, 1998, of congestive heart failure. He was 57 years old. Texts: Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (Ed. Link and Pizer), Norton Critical Ed.; Fusell, The Norton Book of Modern War, Norton; Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A WW II Story of Survival, Resilience, Redemption, Random House; Homer, The Iliad, (Fitzgerald Translation), Farrar-Straus-Giroux; O’Nan, The Vietnam Reader, Anchor. Written Work: Writing assignments for War in Literature will be based upon your reading and thematic interpretations of the primary texts (the stories, poetry, fiction, journals, letters, and biography we read). You may also supplement your essays with scholarly articles, professional journals and full-text library searches. Your writing will be primarily individual critical analysis; the literary war journal project will be complete in collaborative groups. Individual Analysis Papers: • The Literature of Ancient War (20%)—will be a 5 page cause/effect or comparative analysis paper of the historical, political, economic, and social reasons why so many “civilized nations”—especially the ancient Greeks—have gone to war. These papers will be a necessary and valuable foundation for our discussions and the preparation of your other individual and collaborative literary analysis. The primary text for this paper will be The Iliad. • The House Divided: America’s Civil War (15%)—will be a 5-7 page analysis of the paradoxes and oppositions of the Civil War—the destructive power of abolition, slavery, and western expansion that created a war of unmatched brutality, remarkable clashes of courage, cowardice and patriotism. From all of these forces came the frightening beautiful story of Henry Fleming in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage—what many critics agree is the finest American war novel ever written. • The Horrors of Truly Modern War: World War I (20%)—will be a 5-7 page response to how World War I literature portrays the sheer, paradoxical terror of the confrontation between woefully outdated Victorian Era military strategies and twentieth-century killing technology that annihilated an entire generation on all sides. Primary texts include All Quiet on the Western Front and selected poetry, journals, letters, and memoirs from The Norton Book of Modern War. 3 4 • The “Greatest Generation”: World War II (20%)—will be a 5-7 page examination of the emotional and psychological effects of combat on the “citizen soldiers” who fought WWII—Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” who defeated the Nazis, Fascists, and the Japanese Empire. Primary texts will be Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and selected letters, journals, poetry, and fiction from The Norton Book of Modern War. • America’s House Divided . Again: The Vietnam War (15%)—will be a 5-7 page examination of “the ‘Nam.” Not since “brother fought against brother” at Bull Run, Shiloh, and Gettysburg has any war torn at the very fabric of our country’s heart and soul. How did this divisive conflict affect our national character, and influence our beliefs about our wars since then? Primary texts will be the short fiction, poetry, and journalism in O’Nan’s Vietnam Reader. Collaborative Class Project (10%): War is much more complicated than knowing the names of famous generals and the dates of important battles. It is more intense and frightening than even the best literature written about it. And, it seems the most constant, unchangeable force that defines humankind. Our warfare journal is a collaborative project designed to expand our shared knowledge and understanding of the complex historical, social, political, and economic causes that draw countries into war. As a class we will vote upon one (1) of the following journal options. Each of you will research, develop, and present a 3-5 page article for the selected warfare journal.

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