By Todd DePastino
Below is one of the toughest first-person homecoming stories I’ve ever read. And it doesn’t come from an abused Vietnam Veteran or a forgotten Korean War soldier. It’s from a member of the “Greatest Generation” who fought a noble war against Nazi Germany and came home to cheers and parades.
Someone I know handed the old typescript to me a few months ago. It had been written by her father in 1946, who had served in World War II and came home a changed man. The woman was disturbed and a bit puzzled by the contents. She’d known that her father had ordered all his papers destroyed. For some reason, this piece, folded neatly in an old book, had escaped the fireplace.
I’m glad it did.
We take comfort in the American story of World War II as the “Good War.” We as a nation, the story goes, fought as one, unified by moral certainty. The triumph of 1945 was complete and unambiguous. And the country’s sacrifice was re-paid on a global scale over decades with unparalleled power, prestige, and prosperity. The period after World War II was the apotheosis of American Civilization.
But the words below tell a different story, one sequestered in darkness but just as real.
These words were written by an infantry veteran who had seen the European war up close and came home unable to make peace with what he found waiting for him.
He doesn’t write about Victory or the cost of peace or a wish to return to a normal American life. Rather, he’s writing about what war reveals—about the human capacity for selfless courage in extremity, and the crushing disappointment of returning to an American society that seems, to him, organized around petty fraud, power-grabs, and moral blindness.
The essay is jarring. Its aim is to discomfit the reader. But the sentiments it expresses are not unique to the writer. I’ve seen and heard dark echoes of them before, in the voices of veterans conscious and honest enough to broach them. They are expressions of anguish and despondency, of hopelessness and loss of faith in humanity. It’s the voice of a man descending into nihilism. The words may be rare, but the feelings they articulate were common among veterans in 1946.
Historian and friend of the VBC David Nasaw has recently argued that many WWII veterans were “wounded” in ways their era did not know how to name or treat. These were the millions of returning servicemen who didn’t “snap back” and who carried home rage, nightmares, isolation, depression, and a sense of estrangement from civilian life.
War is always about suffering. But postwar American culture, so eager to “accentuate the positive” and turn sacrifice into uplift, somehow bypassed the stages of grief needed to move on and rushed headlong into a sunny new day.
This anonymous author refuses the sunshine. He won’t say, “it was all worth it.” He even dispenses with the normal conventions of respectable complaint. His prose keeps circling one blunt question: What was all that suffering for, if the world it secured is run by the same old greed, crookedness, and power worship?
It’s as if the author has moved on from simple disillusion to accusation. He resents postwar America, and he damns himself for his inability to accommodate himself to it.
The word “apocalyptic” is useful here in its older sense: not “destruction” or “end of the world,” but “unveiling.” This essay reveals knowledge of the world that had been hidden. The war had shown him something transcendent that he cannot now unsee. In combat, he witnessed the highest order of heroism and self-sacrifice. He saw first-hand humanity most noble. It was a true brotherhood of courage, endurance, and love for another that shone so brightly it eclipsed everything he’d known back home.
Back home. To call it a letdown is understatement. Back home was the human spirit at its most anemic. All the nobility wiped away, replaced by petty scrambling, “angle-shooting,” advantage grabbing—and all of it accepted as normal.
The essay below shatters another meta-narrative that governs our understanding of World War II. Notice he never says, “War is hell.” In fact, it’s almost the reverse: the hell of war reveals a kind of decency that gets lost when the shooting stops.
And it points to something scholars and clinicians today often call moral injury—the suffering that comes not only from fear and loss, but from a shattered sense of what is right, what is honorable, and what one can reasonably expect of one’s community.
Psychiatrist and author Jonathan Shay says that homecoming is not simply “returning,” but a trial in its own right, a struggle all its own, where veterans can feel betrayed by institutions, alienated from civilian values, or stranded between worlds.
The author below describes that stranded feeling plainly, decades before we had the vocabulary to name it.
The most haunting section comes late, when he imagines a “hallucination”: world leaders held under guard, forced to negotiate peace in a cemetery of white crosses, their arguments confronted by the dead.
“Don’t laugh,” he commands the reader. “I mean it.”
He knows the reader inhabits a different world, where such a scenario is preposterous, impossible to imagine. But, for him, the war implanted a different sense of the real, one where the dead have a say, and the powerful get treated like everyone else.
To read the essay below is like peaking at a first draft of some of the best postwar veteran writing. You can glimpse faint traces of Norman Mailer, James Jones, Paul Fussell—even wartime Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin. These writers belong to a darker WWII literary tradition that extolled the valor, courage, and sacrifice witnessed on the battlefield, while exposing the violence, hierarchy, dehumanization, and hunger for power that ruled on the homefront.
This anonymous essay belongs in that company not because it’s polished or event particularly eloquent, but because it’s raw unprotected speech: a veteran trying to say what the culture does not want to hear.
And the sentiments the essay expresses aren’t unique to World War II. They’re part of a larger pattern of the returned warrior, stretching back to antiquity. But you don’t need to read The Odyssey for precedent. You don’t even need to leave American history to read stories about homecomings as second battlefields. Veterans since the American Revolution have returned with altered expectations and sharpened moral senses only to find the peacetime homes they left to be smaller, noisier, more distracted, and less honest than what they remembered.
This does not make veterans morally superior. But it does make many of them morally awake in a way the rest of us could learn from. War strips away illusions. That stripping can yield wisdom, but it can also yield despair.
Read one way, the essay below might come across as petulant whining or over-the-top complaint. But, in truth, it’s much more than that. It’s a valuable primary source from the first postwar year, a moment when Victory had not yet fully congealed into myth and the messy business of rebuilding the world hadn’t scaffolded cleanly into mid-century modernity.
The author has not yet escaped paradox. He has seen human beings at their best under the worst conditions, and he cannot reconcile that with the ordinary peacetime order. He asks whether the American world can ever be worthy of the sacrifices he witnessed.
And then he answers the question in a way that shouldn’t sit well with any of us.
I have always known what I know now about the selfishness rampant in the world, but never has it bothered me to such a great extent. Long before the war, I was thoroughly awake to the ins and outs of business, the workings of pressure, the grasping crookedness that ruled most of the nation’s daily transactions, the squeeze for power by the few, and the not-so-blissful ignorance of the many.
It has taken a war, however, to get me thoroughly angered by the whole mess, and to wipe out the last vestiges of hope for a better world.
If it were not for the fact that I have a family that I would not consider treating so shabbily, I would say a happy farewell to decency and plunge into “getting mine” in whatever ways occurred as most simple and ruthless.
I probably would organize a few kindred souls, trained as I am in the handling of weapons, and just go ahead and take what I wanted.
I realize, of course, that “crime does not pay,” and “murder will out,” but these are generalities which are not always true, and I believe that it would not be difficult to circumvent the law even in the supposedly impossible blunt and violent methods, just as it is simple to circumvent the law in gentler, more legal ways as thousands do daily, not only going scot-free but actually winning enough admiration as successes that they spend much of their time speaking as oracles before our better luncheon clubs and business societies.
As it is, I so dislike these gentler and more legal squeezes, and the mentalities of our respected citizens who work them, that I cannot abide being around them for long enough at a time to get into their financial bracket.
Since family ties prevent a violent career, and distaste for personal relations with the so-called respectable racketeers preclude an honorable career, I shall probably move along in my accustomed ways along the fringe of society, entering into the swim enough to earn a living, but never enough to get rich, and being thoroughly disgusted and unhappy both for my country and myself the rest of my life.
I realize that talking like this brands me either as a Communist who ought to be “reformed with a rope,” like the Reds in the Hecht-MacArthur drama, or a pity-seeking malcontent reminiscent of the characters of the so-called “lost generation” that followed the First World War, and who didn’t know what they wanted either.
Maybe there would be some truth in either illustration, but I doubt it. Maybe I started out as an idealist, but I doubt that, too. I think rather that I have made a mistake in starting out to live on an ethical plane which, neither religious nor idealistic, had as its primary premise that conduct be based on the test that the action contemplated must not be injurious—seriously injurious—to other persons.
As any normal person can see, this leaves a lot of room for having a good time, and permits a great deal of freedom, so that it cannot be scored as fanatical. On the other hand, it also rules out many lines of action which normally win many people a good deal of wealth and fame.
I most certainly do not advertise my own attitude as typical of veterans generally, because I have not made it a point to check on their reactions to our post-war world. Since we all had a good deal in common, however, it is not too illogical to imagine that somewhat the same thoughts may be going through the minds of many.
This is, by all means, the thoughts of one man on the state of the nation, the world, and its individuals, and if others share its pattern it is only because their experiences have built up the same reactions.
I read every day about the actions of the Paris Peace Conference and the wrangling of the Security Council of the United Nations. The headlines tell me about hundred-million-dollar black-market rings selling thousands of cars to those best able to afford them. Daily, in a little public-relations job which I am doing, I meet angle-shooters who will stop at nothing to get in their little innings with a crowd of 100,000 persons whom they expect to gather near here for a celebration very soon.
I lie in bed at night, with only the bright green and malevolent eye of the radio dial in the bedroom, and listen to the late newscasts that tell of the apparent hopelessness of the best political minds of the world as they struggle, not for peace, but for a slight lead in the race for power with which to win the next war. As the erudite-sounding commentators spew forth the sordid story about the struggle in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor for oil, I don’t need anybody’s interpretation to tell me that the oil struggle is bound up both with the nations’ mad desire for war reserves, strategically placed, and the equally mad desires of certain gigantic corporations to get their fingers greasy in these same oil pools.
In a recent political campaign I saw patent lies hurled by both sides that were so foul that, spoken personally man to man, they would have resulted in a duel, and I saw money passed over the counter by both sides to buy votes. I saw a notorious politician with a death grip on his town withhold his votes until the last of the count to make certain that he would deliver the winning bloc, no matter how few or how many were needed.
The point of all this is that I knew such things went on before the war, and I could take them or let them alone then. I found them bitter pills now and then, but I could stomach them. It was a big country, full of all kinds of people, and everybody knew the world wasn’t perfect, and that sort of thing wasn’t as bad or as widespread as you might think. I even thought they were funny now and then.
But I can’t take it anymore. When I see such things taking place, or read about them, or lie quietly in bed in the dead of night, with my wife sleeping beside me, and hear them on my radio, anger rises in me like a wave of heat, and I feel that desperate sense of loneliness and despair that condemned men must feel on their prison islands. I see no way out for myself or anyone.
In trying to explain why I, as a war veteran, and as a person and as a citizen of these United States, 1946, feel this way, let me digress to my own background.
When the war started, I was a newspaperman, and not too bad a newspaperman at that. I had about nine years’ experience, and was a city editor on a daily paper of considerable size. I had a wife and a little girl.
As I have already said, I knew the world wasn’t perfect (God knows that on a city desk I had plenty of opportunity not to be taken in by the passing scene), but deep down in me there had been a trace of idealism left, as well as a halting faith that there was some pattern of progress in the world’s gigantic woe, a sort of evolutionary uplift in man’s relation to man, because I asked for and got voluntary induction into the Army.
My Army career was extremely commonplace, considering it all took place in the Infantry, certainly the least commonplace of the branches of the services in point of combat and experience in the actual maelstrom of war.
I managed to get through enlisted service, the Infantry School, various training camps, and wound up with combat service with a good outfit in the European Theater. I had good luck there, managing to eke through the Northern France and Germany campaigns with a couple of very minor decorations and a Purple Heart, and without being more extraordinarily frightened than anyone else.
But everywhere along the combat trail I witnessed such sacrifice, such courage, such harmony and gigantic achievement, and, most important of all, such selflessness and good will among men, that the ordinary everyday world in which men gouge and cheat and belittle one another became for me forever a tragedy of wasted lives and efforts.
It has become a saddening thing to me to observe that men are incapable of such selfless action and sweet-willed comradeship unless they are put under terrific stress—that life is bearable only if they do react in that manner.
I give you a few examples.
I have been in foxholes directing mortar fire from before daylight until long after dark, standing in water over my shoepacs, so that my feet are totally numb. I am returning to a Command Post about a mile behind the line in my blacked-out jeep, thoroughly disgusted with a reconnaissance in force which hasn’t too much information and which has resulted in unexpectedly heavy casualties, when I am hailed from the shadows by a soldier.
I find that he and another buddy are half dragging, half carrying a third rifleman who has had a bullet through his stomach since noon, and who has missed the battalion’s ambulances because the three of them were pinned down until so late that it was thought all casualties were in. The wounded man is surprisingly conscious, although far from normal. We load him into the jeep and get him back to the aid station, where we lay him on a stretcher so the medics can go to work on him. He grins, and says: “Nice of you to stop, Captain.”
Another.
On patrol, a rifleman steps on a shue mine, and his foot is blown off to the heel. The patrol is hit hard by a local action, fights hard, and in moving about finally has to pull back without a chance to pick up the mine victim, who is presumed to be dead anyway. Through the snow, he crawls all night, one foot mangled and bleeding, until at daylight he is heard faintly calling from the foot of the hill which is our defensive position. Dodging shoe mines and a German anti-tank ditch, a volunteer patrol brings him in. While the medics work on him in the aid station, I watch him give the Battalion Operations Officer all the details he can remember about additional mines he has encountered during the tortured hours he has been crawling back. Never a word about his own misery passes his chattering lips. His concern is with the mines and how others can avoid them.
Another.
A patrol is selected for an obviously suicide mission of daylight reconnaissance into a fortified line— the Siegfried Line. They are being briefed. They know the patrol, while important to a higher echelon, cannot possibly be so important to them as individuals that they will gladly sacrifice their lives. There is fear in the eyes of every man going on the patrol, including both lieutenants. Yet not a word of protest is spoken, not an expression of fear. Casualties: fourteen out of fifteen, including six dead and eight wounded.
One could go on like that for days. He could tell about the trench-foot case walking up a mountain with 150 pounds of machine gun, ammunition, pack and individual weapon and ammunition. He could tell about the sharing of K-rations and sleeping bags and responsibilities, until the repetition seemed endless. It would only go to prove what I have said: that a time of stress such as Infantry suffer in a war, and no doubt many of the other branches, is conducive to bring men to heights which they do not ordinarily reach.
Lest I be errant in the record, I must add my own little bitterness, although I have never felt that simpering reaction that one hears mentioned so much: “I lost my mother last week,” or “I lost my wife last winter.” My own brother, who entered the Army with me, and who was never farther from me in four years than the next regiment, was killed about a thousand yards away from my own position. I have always felt that the loss was not mine, but his, since he was a bold and fearless fighter who would have been mightily angered at being killed by a huge shell hurled from far away, giving him no chance to fight back, whereas he would willingly have taken his chances in close combat with a worthy opponent and would probably have won.
I mention this only because it is relevant, perhaps, to my reactions to our present mess, although I try not to let it have any influence on my judgment.
I had many friends before the war whom I considered good friends, and still do, and there will be others in the years ahead. It is easily understandable, though, that no friends ever can be so close and dear as the ones with whom you have shared experiences like I have recently described. These wartime buddies meet but seldom now, and when we do, there is an air of restraint, sheepishness almost, as though we were now being forced to meet socially persons we have observed only recently with their “hair down,” so to speak—persons embarrassed at having to greet casually those who hold their greatest and most intimate secrets.
I have not joined any veterans’ organizations, and doubt that I shall. I share with many other veterans a dislike for the putting on of soldier suits to display what one was once upon a time, and nothing has always seemed more absurd to me than a paunchy man trying to orate for the benefit of disinterested strangers at an American Legion convention his peerless feats of a quarter century ago—unless it is the sight of a Grand Imperial Potentate of the Shrine or Masons dressing up like a Turkish harem-owner or Admiral Dewey because it inflates his ego.
Furthermore, I have watched the Legion turned skillfully to fit the aims of ambitious people in business and politics too long to suspect that any future veterans’ organizations will fare any differently.
I see there a weak point in my lament. One might ask: If the veterans who went through the things you describe can’t see their way clear to set up a better world, who else do you expect to do it?
The answer there is that I don’t think the veterans can or will do it, and I don’t expect it to be done. I have already stated that I think men are incapable of acting in normal times as they do under stress, and, like it or not, I am aware that veterans as a group are once again settling down into the old familiar routines and habits, and, as a class, are just as bad and as badly off as anyone else.
Maybe I am just disgruntled and disgusted, and it’s all in my own mind, and I am just whimpering. Actually, I am not. I would not speak these thoughts to people I know, or write them publicly other than anonymously.
I am merely stating a personal postwar reaction for what it is worth. I knew what I know now a long time ago, as I said before. The only difference now is that four years have changed my ability to be blasé about it. I have seen the glory of the possibility of real selfless cooperation among men, and I regret that it will never be used for other than destructive purposes—except in rare instances by individuals who will be promptly categorized as either crack-pots or suckers.
The only difference now is that, also, the misdeeds I see every day rankle personally and that I am unable to control my reactions. It’s getting me down.
When I lie in bed and listen to the late news, and hear how Mr. Byrnes and Mr. Molotov are quarreling raucously over what our beloved press chooses to call the aims of their two nations, or blocs of nations, but what experience has shown to be the aims and the desires of a few, and a powerful few, of the individuals of those nations; when I recall the legions of bodies over which their angry voices reach, and over whose bones the new wars breed—then my gorge rises and I lose what little control I have.
Instead of turning over and going to sleep like any respectable and smart young fellow would do, considering that he has to get out the next day and outwit a few people, I dig spurs into an imagination which comes up with a hallucination like this:
A few of the men in my old outfit are selected as an honor guard for the Peace Conference. Byrnes and Molotov and the British delegate and the Yugoslavs and Chinese and all of them, strangely enough, are not free to come and go, but instead are in custody of the honor guard. Every night, the Sergeant of the guard sends a detail to bring in the delegates, and lock them in their rooms until morning. Every morning, we go get them again and take them to the solemn meeting place of the Nations’ Peace Conference.
It is a military cemetery somewhere in France, a city of white crosses on a hilltop overlooking one of the casual winding rivers of that lovely country. Mr. Byrnes’ little camp table is placed squarely on top of a grave, and Mr. Molotov’s is, too. Whenever either one of them rises to protest, he is facing a small metal dog-tag. A private from some outfit is figuratively staring him in the face, accusingly. At night, under the soil, these men talk leisurely about the events of the day, and make bull session fun of the silly old men, who in their own eyes have been such great and important figures.
The honor guard has its orders, also. The delegates can receive and send no communications—and they cannot leave until they have set the world aright.
Don’t laugh. I mean it.
And thinking impossible thoughts like these, I drift off to sleep.
