May 28, 2001
Stories From Silence
Like the veterans of other wars, the veterans of World War II came home from combat with silence on their lips. It was the terseness that war teaches, reinforced by a profound desire to move out of the past and into the future. Those in the fighting generation knew that what had happened to them was not merely personal. They could explain parts of their war, but there were no good words to explain its deeper meaning or its horror, which always hovered just in the realm of the inarticulable. To many veterans, what could be said and what could not be said often seemed too close to tell apart.
The question on this day is always how to memorialize war and the men and women who served this nation in war. With each passing year that question gains in urgency for the veterans of World War II, and so the answer steadily changes. By the end of this decade, most of those veterans will be gone. The years now passing resemble for them what the 1920's were for Civil War veterans and the early 80's for veterans of World War I — a final farewell.
For the nation as a whole, the collective memory of World War II has been broken up by time, and what remains is individual memory, which becomes more and more precious as it becomes scarcer and scarcer. What we want now, as a result, is not the saga of the broad historical canvas of World War II — the sweep of international conflict — but the individual stories themselves, the ones that so many veterans did not know how or chose not to tell.
Those stories have a particular savor now, which is why they are so prevalent in the current proliferation of best-selling books and movies and television shows about World War II. Tom Brokaw and Stephen Ambrose, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg — these are names now as closely associated with World War II as, say, Bob Dole, names that have helped foster a new cycle of memory, helped the untutored post-Vietnam generations imagine the scale and the significance of World War II as well as its individual dramas.
In Washington, plans to build a national World War II memorial on the Mall have been under fire now for eight years, but not because there is any doubt about the pertinence or value of memorializing America's civilian and military participants. Those eight years, in fact, have witnessed an extraordinary cultural commemoration of World War II. There are some who would argue, cogently enough, that America itself, and what it embodies, is a memorial to the fighting and winning of that war.
We can all feel the attraction of the stories that remain from the early 1940's, stories told about the home front and the front line. They have in common the sense of a sudden dire meaningfulness, of lives transformed against a backdrop of truly global forces, of people snatched from the ordinary and forced to define themselves in ways they could not have imagined before the war began.
In retrospect, when the war began the nation suddenly
gleamed with purpose larger than self, larger, somehow,
even than peace. We go to the movies to see the saving of
Private Ryan or the attack on Pearl Harbor, we read about
citizen soldiers and the greatest generation, and our own
lives look pale in comparison, our times too ordinary.
But if you have ever sat down with a veteran and listened
to his or her tale, you know that it has one invariable
moral. The ordinary times are the blessed ones. That is
what the veterans fought for — for ordinariness once
again.
