Archives » Monday, December 15, 2008
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David Botti
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Dec 15, 2008 08:45 AM
Photo: David Botti
As
WWII entered its final days, the French writer Marguerite Duras, then a
member of the resistance in Paris, waited to see if her husband had
survived the German concentration camps and would be coming home. The
notes she took of that time were subsequently published as The War: A Memoir,
in which she relays her observations of a once occupied city expecting
what seemed an immanent liberation and start of a new era. As she
watched the quotidian life of Paris resume once again, Duras wrote:
"Peace is visible already. It's like a great darkness falling, it's the beginning of forgetting."
Her
words have always struck me in the way they apply to a vast number of
aftermaths throughout my own lifetime and history; with peace does come
forgetting, at least on a larger scale.
In our nation's
current wars abroad peace certainly has not been totally achieved, but
in some ways it seems the forgetting has already begun. I've noticed
that among fellow veterans and vets of other wars there is a common
theme often invoked: nobody out there really cares about what the
troops went through, or, Americans just want to forget their messy
wars. It's almost a natural instinct: to fuel a perpetual candle in
the face of America so that it remembers what some Americans did far
beyond the country's borders.
But there is also the view of
those Americans unaffiliated with the military to consider. In those
early days when I first came back from Iraq I was frustrated people
weren't paying as close attention to the war as I expected them too. I
thought them apathetic, lazy, and selfish. It took time for me to step
back, calm my emotions, and realize some of my expectations were too
critical and colored by the shock of coming home. In truth, there was
certainly a very fertile middle ground.
It's this balance that
I've tried to achieve with this blog: highlighting veterans and
military issues that are important to understand, not because they are
just important to veterans, but because they're important for every
American. The enormous influx of war veterans back into American
society since September 11 means a new and unique demographic is now
firmly in place.
This is my last blog post here at Soldier's
Home. When I began the blog last October I decided to name it after a
semi-autobiographical Ernest Hemingway short story written about a WWI
veteran returning to the quiet life of a Midwestern suburb. Nearly
everything he wrote rang true almost a century later: the drifting,
loneliness, and brooding. Using his story as a guide I hope I've been
able to highlight both the daily news events in veterans affairs, while
also taking note of those experiences that can transcend generations.
After
writing this blog for more than year I can say that the most crucial
stories are not those affecting just veterans, but the stories that
reflect the country as a whole through its veterans. Marguerite Duras
saw a new generation coming of age at the end of WWII on the cusp of
forgetting the recent past. And even now, it's easy to see dialogue
about the wars we fight diminishing as the years pass by. It used to
be that it was largely up to America's veterans to carry on the memory
of their fallen comrades. But if we can learn anything from history,
it's that in order not forget we have to collectively want to remember.
I don't know if this is possible. We're still in the thick of
it. But I hope the stories I've posted here helped bring the veteran
experience to the civilian consciousness, and I thank you for letting
me try.
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