My father served as a G.I. and a chaplain’s assistant during World War II. He almost never spoke about the war. It was only after he died that my family found a box in the attic stuffed with over a thousand letters that crisscrossed the Atlantic between my Dad, writing while fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and ministering to survivors at Buchenwald, and Mom, penning at her desk in Brooklyn.
Those letters revealed something far more powerful than the myth of The Good War: an ordinary man, body wounded in Belgium and soul torn in the camp, coming home with two gifts: his life and his trauma.
Dad was a member of what Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.” The label is incomplete, inaccurate, even dangerous. It implies a unique stratum of superheroes who responded to a call to arms in a way that no other generation had, nor ever would. I learned through my parents’ written words that in truth, the members of “The Greatest Generation” were an ordinary bunch of Americans. They were interested in getting good jobs, making money, raising families, avoiding a world of troubles, and having a good time dancing to “Rockabye My Baby, There Ain’t Gonna Be No War.” And there wasn’t. Until there was.
The large majority of Americans didn’t volunteer to serve. They waited to be drafted. We were dragged into war, and that’s how it should be. When Brokaw writes of the Normandy invasion, “It was daring, risky, confusing, bloody, and ultimately glorious,” he gets it right until the last word. When writer and Marine veteran Phil Klay writes, “I don’t believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events,” he’s closer to the truth. Or as my father wrote my mother, “War is hell. And who wants to live in hell.”
One of the very few times Dad opened up to me, he said, “You know what you were fighting for? Your lives. Your life, and the life of the guy next to you.” Dad got wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, then spent months as a chaplain’s assistant ministering to the dead, near-dead, and walking dead in Buchenwald concentration camp. Based on his letters, I’m certain that he felt no glory in war and would have given anything to avoid his generation being named after it.
Even if my father had been talkative about his war experiences, I doubt I would have
absorbed much of it. I was born into what was called by Tom Wolfe “The Me Generation.” Our kind wasn’t interested in the past. We were marching into a full-color future to fix the problems created by our forebears, especially, and starting with, war. That was the plan, anyway.
I’ve spent years struggling with anxiety and depression, and now I believe that a part of that is due to what the war did to my father. I could see it in the difference between the
loving letters he wrote to his sweetheart and the stentorian, often unhappy man who helped raise me. There’s even a theory that says deep trauma can turn on genes related to stress, increasing stress-related disorders that may be passed down to their offspring.
So let’s not make the mistake of sanctifying any war, or romanticizing the suffering it brings to multiple generations. That risks dragging more very young men and women into military incursions that are about fighting, instead of about an end to it. Let’s quit staring up at the silvery warplanes and look down at the broken bodies. The only glorious thing about war is the moment it is over, and the greatest thing about my parents’ generation is not that they fought it, but that they finished it.
Roger Schulman is an Artist in Residence with Sacred Heart University’s FTMA Film and Television Graduate Program.