Friday, January 31, 2003
Letters from the War
Preparations for war have been striking close to home lately. When I walked my daughter to school the other day I heard that a neighborhood parent has been called back to his military unit. I didn’t realize that he is a combat engineer. Those are the troops that build roads and bridges in the war zone, working under fire to help front-line units advance. At my office I had a phone call from the spouse of a reservist. She needed to skip a meeting to attend an informational session for families of the soldiers whose units are being called up. Perhaps you also know some of people who may be in battle soon.
Because they risk so much to carry out their stark ethic of public service, soldiers set a high standard for the civilians who stay behind. Before we ask them to risk their lives, on our behalf, and to take the lives of others, in our names, we owe the most careful deliberations. Neither you nor I can pay back that neighbor for his sacrifice, but we can pay him respect by understanding the gravity of his task and taking the utmost care with our decision.
Yet understanding war is a thing that many of us civilians are little qualified to do. Nevertheless, we look for clues where we can. A few weeks ago I found a remarkable new book of letters written by soldiers during the Second World War. The book, by Rod Gragg, is called From Foxholes and Flight Decks. There are fifteen short chapters that introduce aspects of American experience during the war. But the heart and soul of the book is something different, a rare and eerily realistic glimpse into the letters written by the soldiers themselves. In each chapter there are one or two pockets, and folded up and tucked into each pocket is a full-sized, photographic reproduction of a letter. When I unfolded the first letter, a bit of the distance from me to the war evaporated.
If you read carefully, you see the young writers finding different ways to bring a reader closer. When Captain Alfred Birra readies himself on the boat before assaulting the beach at Normandy, the silence of the troops around him helps a reader measure the enormity of the experience. He says, “this precise moment, when the assault boat was being lowered from the mother ship, was the loneliest time in [my] life. No one says a word except the man at the cables. As the boat goes down the rail, the ship disappears and with a slap that jars everyone aboard, the craft hits the water. The cables are cast off and now you’re entirely on your own and alone.”
The young writers are strategic about their letters because they want people back home to come closer to the experience. Harold Porter waits a month before mailing his parents a grueling account of the Dachau concentration camp, when he finally knows that the horrible details won’t be blotted out by military censors. When you unfold his letter, you see Private Porter’s clear penmanship on four pages of S.S. stationary taken from the concentration camp.
Other writers wonder if their experience can be understood. Swinging between hope and despair, Walter Commander guesses that this letter to his wife “may be the one she reads just before the baby comes.” He struggles to find words adequate to the chaos and brutality. “I want so to wring out my heart to you,” he says. “...the whole world is lost somewhere between the Hell of earth and the promise of Heaven. And irretrievably lost. No one can redeem what has been lost in our souls for having sinned thus against ourselves. Our children have the right to spit on us for what we are.” “I love you,” he says at the bottom of the page, and signs it with a solitary letter W. Soon after, he was relieved of both torment and hope, dying in combat on the Italian front.
His words, like the words of the other young writers, are clues about the gravity, the cost of war. These folded messages remind us that, in return for the severity of their service, we owe today’s soldiers and their families, these neighbors of ours, only the most careful decision about setting the spark to this new war.