The Long Way Home
An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin

Adequate to the Experience

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

Here in the northern latitudes we’re winding down to the bottom of the year – a time some dread but one that I found frankly exhilarating.  The weather has been uncharacteristically clear and very cold in Seattle, so in the few hours the sun is above the horizon we actually have shadows, long sharp-edged patches of black that move across the ground and seem to goad us to step up the pace of daily life.  Quick, get it done, read, written, packed, paid for, shipped out before the light fails and dark returns again. The brief blinding clarity of these days makes me hyper-vigilant, apprehensive, as if something unexpected is about to happen.

Which brings me back to my obsession du jour – how best to apprehend and recount the awful reality of war.  There was a comment on my last post that got me wrestling with this anew.  Okay, it was by my brother Dan – but hey, who better to wrestle with?  A propos the supposed sentimentalizing of war by civilian writers, Dan wrote, “It’s only natural to want to find meaning; the trick, I guess, is to avoid imposing it. Those who ‘were there’ have an advantage: they know what it felt like. But translating that feeling into language and meaning that are adequate to the experience – not so easy, probably no easier for the first-hand witness than for the civilian.”

Dan has a point.  While researching The Long Way Home I read countless letters, journals, diaries, battle descriptions and unit histories penned by soldiers and officers during and right after the war.  What struck me most was how rarely any of these accounts translated the feeling of being there “into language and meaning adequate to the experience.”  The guys wrote mostly about food and weather and how their feet felt after marching; the officers wrote about terrain, maps, ammunition, road conditions, supply lines, numbers of casualties and prisoners.  War is the oldest literary cliché there is, the hardest one to crack and shuck off.  Most don’t even try.  As Italian-born Leonardo Costantino wrote in his diary on October 4, 1918, at the low ebb of the Meuse-Argonne campaign, “Feel very tired and hungry.  Try to locate [my buddy] Archi but was impossible.  War is worst than Hell.  That is all I have to say.”

All of which makes David Finkel’s accomplishment in his new book The Good Soldiers that much more moving and impressive.  Finkel, a Washington Post reporter, followed a single battalion on the outskirts of Baghdad for a year of “the surge” from April 2007 to April 2008.  At the center of the narrative is Battalion 2-16’s tough, earnest, relentlessly upbeat lieutenant colonel Ralph Kauzlarich – but the real heroes here are ordinary guys, most of them in their late teens and early twenties, who go out on daily missions into the blasted east Baghdad neighborhood of Rustamiyah, search houses for weapons and insurgents, hand out soccer balls to Iraqi kids, write emails home, and, when they’re unlucky, get their arms and legs and heads blown off by EFPs (explosively formed penetrators).  Finkel immerses you so completely in the daily reality of war that you lose track of strategy, purpose, mission, meaning – everything except the burning desire to survive another day.  The hell comes mostly afterwards in the form of recurring nightmares, shattered marriages, physical and mental wounds that never heal.

What The Good Soldiers most reminds me of is Erich Maria Remarque’s Great War classic All Quiet on the Western Front.  It’s that unflinching, that vivid, that attuned to the hopes and fears and innocence and depravity of the guy in the trench or the Humvee.  Remarque and Finkel don’t impose meaning or assumptions; they don’t come at war with preconceived ideas and then try to find incidents and images that fit.  They both give each soldier the full measure of his humanity – even as that humanity is battered, tested, and sometimes destroyed by the horror of war.  “He had talked of the goodness here,” writes Finkel of Brent Cummings, an officer in the 2-16, “and the need to act morally.  ‘Otherwise we’re not human,’ he had said.”  But when insurgents let loose with a shit storm of EFPs just days before the 2-16 was supposed to come home, Cummings rages as the neighborhood’s American-funded sewer system is destroyed.  “Stupid people.  I hate ‘em.  Stupid fucking scumbags.”

“This book,” wrote Remarque in a prefatory note to his 1929 novel, “will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.”

Both Finkel and Remarque enact the tragedy of a human with a gun and a soul touching his finger to the high voltage wire of dehumanizing horror.  To me, this is the essence of the best writing about war.  Fiction, reportage, memoir, essay – the genre doesn’t matter.  What matters is the courage and respect to tell the truth about people pushed to the limits and beyond.  This written truth is more real than the clips on CNN of smoke and blood on sidewalks.  More real than the testimony of generals.  More real while you’re in the spell of the words than the shadows gathering outside your window.

Finkel like Remarque before him has found language “adequate to the experience” of war, as Dan put it.  Maybe all I’m saying is that both of them have written literary masterpieces.

3 Comments  |  Permalink  |  Posted in Blog Posts

Comments

1. Andrew Himes  |  December 12th, 2009

   David, thank you for this remarkable essay. I think you’ve gotten to the nub. For any participant or close observer of a war, the human experience overtakes the motive or strategic outcome of a war. The trauma of any war outweighs its rational justification. The horrific reality of any war overwhelms our ability to make sense of it. So more bad poetry is written about war than perhaps any other human subject, because violence confounds our ability to either understand it rationally or express it artistically.

2. Bill Rogers  |  February 2nd, 2010

   David, I just learned that Erich Maria Remarque also wrote HEAVEN HAS NO FAVORITES, which eventually (and after Remarque’s death) was made into one of my favorite movies, 1977’s BOBBY DEERFIELD. This is irrelevant to your book, but interesting nonetheless.

3. Bill Rogers  |  February 2nd, 2010

   I can recommend three contemporary books to those who liked THE GOOD SOLDIERS. They are:
   1.THE FOREVER WAR by Dexter Filkins
   2.THE FOURTH STAR by David Cloud & Greg Jaffe
   3. WHERE MEN WIN GLORY by Jon Krakauer

   Bill

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