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

Non-Citizen Soldiers

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

I can’t say that I devoted much time to the question of  citizenship and military service until I wrote a book about immigrants in the army.  My working assumption, to the extent I had one, was that only citizens could be soldiers and that soldiers had to be citizens.  It turns out that things were – and are – a little more complicated.

In the years immediately preceding World War I, when the wave of European immigration crested, becoming a citizen entailed a lengthy two-step process.  First you had to take out your “first papers,” renouncing the government of your country of origin and declaring your intention to transfer your allegiance to the government of the United States; then you had to reside in the U.S. for five years (and be able to prove it).  Only then did you qualify for citizenship.  That naturalization process was still in effect when the United States entered the Great War on April 6, 1917.  The reinstitution of a draft (for the first time since the Civil War) a few weeks later raised the immediate question of whether immigrants were subject to conscription.  The answer was yes: if they had taken out their first papers, they got drafted along with everyone else.  Eventually the War Department raised an army of some 4.7 million men, nearly 20% of whom had been born overseas.

Immigrant families, many of whom had come to America to spare their sons mandatory service in imperial armies, were stunned that a draft had followed them across the Atlantic.  Rumors began to circulate that foreign-born boys who enlisted would be granted citizenship at once.  Joe Chmielewski, a 20-year-old Polish-born coal miner in the hills of western Pennsylvania, believed the rumors and signed up at Columbus Barracks in Ohio on June 17, 1917.  Lots of other guys did the same, though they soon found out that all they had secured was a fast-track to the trenches.

That changed on May 9, 1918, when Congress enacted an amendment to the naturalization law that essentially allowed foreign-born soldiers on active duty to become citizens at once.  No more first papers; no more residency requirement.  If you were fighting for Uncle Sam, you were in.  It was a fitting and timely response to the demographic and political realities of the day.  Tens of thousands of foreign-born soldiers were shipping out to France that spring; bloody battles loomed – Catigny, the first major American engagement of the war, started on May 28; the costly push to take Belleau Wood would drag on for most of June.  From then until the Armistice was declared, American forces were involved in one high-casualty push after another – the Aisne-Marne offensive in July; St. Mihiel in the middle of September; the Meuse-Argonne from September 26 until the war ended on November 11, 1918.  Immigrant soldiers fought and died in these battles alongside their U.S.-born comrades.  Those who survived took advantage in substantial numbers of the streamlined naturalization process.  According to some sources, over 280,000 immigrant soldiers became citizens by virtue of their service in the war (others put the figure at 123,000).

There has been an interesting new twist on this naturalization process in the post September 11 era.  On July 3, 2002, President Bush granted the right of immediate naturalization to all foreign-born soldiers serving honorably at any time on or after September 11, 2001.  (The five-year residency requirement for civilians remained in effect.) Bush’s clear intent was to underscore the fact that from September 11 forward, the nation was in a permanent state of war.  Any military service is now deemed active duty during a period of hostilities – with no end in sight to the war.  The right of immediate citizenship also extends to those serving in the Selected Reserve of the Ready Reserve.

So, as things stand now, if you were born overseas and are currently fighting or have fought honorably in a war for the U.S. even for a single day, you’re in if you want to be.  Just two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security further streamlined this process by eliminating the requirement for foreign-born soldiers to file biographic information that had previously slowed down the naturalization process.   As the Immigration Prof Blog points out, this new DHS rule has the effect of “removing administrative redundancy and increasing efficiency for those who risk their lives for the nation’s security.”  DHS secretary Janet Napolitano notes that the newly streamlined process, which takes effect on February 18, “reflects our commitment to honoring those who come from all over the world to serve our country and become its newest citizens.”

If you are an alien in the military and want help with the naturalization process, go to the military section of the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.  To have naturalization forms mailed to you, call toll-free800-870-3676 and ask for the military packet.

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In Memory of Colonel Armstrong

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

“Reading your blog is a strange endeavor,” my old friend Joyce wrote me recently, “because I just don’t think about you writing of war.”  Joyce has a point.  I’m a guy who likes to hike, ski, garden, read poetry beside the ocean, coddle my sleepy old dogs.  War and the rough camaraderie of soldiers are about as far outside my ken as investment banking or particle physics.  I’ll confess that when I started work on The Long Way Home I didn’t know a battalion from a brigade.  But I was lucky because I had a friend on the inside – Bob Armstrong, Colonel Robert Armstrong, United States Army Reserve – who was happy to serve as my guide and guru to all things military.  I won’t say Bob was a typical soldier – those who knew him can attest that there was nothing typical about Bob.  But he was a soldier, first and foremost, and he spent a hell of lot of his too short life attending to the soldier’s business of war and peace.   To the extent that I ever felt comfortable writing about what it was like for guys to fight in the Great War, I have Bob to thank for it.

We met in the autumn of 1975 as grad students at Oxford.  Bob had a few years on me because he had taken a detour after high school: instead of going on to college, he had enlisted in the army and served in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and 5th Special Forces Group.  Our first encounter took place in a grotty student pub near our college and I remember thinking, How the hell did this guy get into Oxford? Bob was on the short side, maybe five foot seven, wiry, intense, tightly wound, as blunt in his delivery as a sawed-off shotgun and incredibly foul-mouthed.  Whatever or whoever offended Bob – pretentious fellow students, idiotic college rules, English food or weather or manners – he would curse out foully and unhesitatingly, preferably right in the offender’s face.  When I learned that Bob had been in the military, I thought typical and gave him a wide berth.

But somehow we fell in together and gradually, as I got to know Bob, I came to realize that under that profane exterior there lurked not exactly a heart of gold – but a sharp, curious mind; a highly developed sense of morality and responsibility; a fierce, fearless loyalty to people and ideas he believed in.  For reasons I’ll never fathom, that loyalty got fastened on me.  God knows my opinions and actions elicited plenty of eye-rolling and the occasional mutter of “You asshole.”  But our time in the trenches as Yanks at Oxford made us comrades and for Bob that was a permanent condition.

Bob got his degree a year before me and for a while I kept up with him mostly through our mutual friend Jim Moran.  Bob went on to get a Ph.D. in agronomy and genetics from Purdue University, but his path was far from conventional.  In a couple of decades he burned through two wives, before finding a soul mate in Leslie in middle age; he fathered two children and adopted two more; he tried his hand at half a dozen careers including teaching at a New England private school, working for the CIA, and heading up a mysterious government-owned corporation dedicated, in Bob’s words, to shifting America’s energy source “from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates.”

The one constant in Bob’s life was the military.  Vietnam wasn’t enough for him, so he signed on with the United States Army Reserve and put in regular stints training young soldiers.  This work took on considerably more urgency when these young people began fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Bob eventually was promoted to the rank of colonel but he fervently wanted to be a general; a fellow officer told me that the only reason Bob didn’t make it was that he was too outspoken around superiors.  Bob never could resist calling an asshole an asshole.

Though I didn’t often agree with Bob’s political views, I still took delight in how he expressed them.  He once boasted to me that he belonged to the very small cohort of people who had voted for both Ronald Reagan and Ralph Nader; he hated George Bush (“born with a silver spoon up his ass” as Bob put it) and assured me that he and his military pals loathed Cheney and Rummy and their war of choice on the cheap in Iraq.   Bob had a special string of curses reserved for people who abused power and threw their weight around; a born iconoclast and bitter cynic, he quailed under authority; yet strangely, he thrived in the rigid hierarchical structure of the army.  A complicated guy.

Bob and I got a lot closer in middle age when I started traveling frequently to D.C. on research trips.  It was in the cafeteria of the National Defense University, where he worked in the final years of his life, that Bob helped me clarify the idea for The Long Way Home.  It pleased him no end that our interests had converged after all these years and he was tireless in answering my questions and putting me in touch with colleagues and contacts inside the vast military bureaucracy.  With a little arm-twisting, Bob secured me an interview with Brigadier-General John Nicholson, then head of the American Battle Monuments Commission (the organization in charge of the nation’s overseas  military cemeteries and monuments).  “The General was a little suspicious,” Bob told me before the interview, “and he kept asking, ‘Is this guy a liberal? You’re not sending me a liberal, are you, Bob?’ So don’t blow my cover.”

Bob was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2000 and he fought the cancer bravely and stoically for as long as he could.  I last saw him at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was being treated, on a bitter cold day in the later winter of 2008.  We talked about the 1918 influenza epidemic which he had studied in depth (Bob’s work at NDU focused on ways to combat the spread of infectious agents) and the disastrous aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles.  It worried me that Bob didn’t swear once or call anyone an asshole.

More than anything Bob wanted to live to see his youngest daughter Katie established at a good college.  Devout rationalist though he was, he never stopped hoping for a miracle cure.  Our friend Jim told me that on the last day, the doctor told Bob that it was okay to stop fighting.  Only then did this soldier-scientist surrender.  Bob died on April 3, 2008, eight months shy of his sixtieth birthday.

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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.

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Service and Sentiment

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Last Sunday I stumbled on a review in the New York Times Book Review of a new book about the First World War called The Remains of Company D by James Carl Nelson.  Reviewer Elizabeth D. Samet, an English professor at West Point and the author of Soldier’s Heart:  Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, was not impressed, but to me the book sounded promising.  Nelson, a journalist fascinated by his grandfather’s service in the Great War, set out to reconstruct whatever he could about the battlefield experiences of the men in his grandfather’s unit, Company D, 28th Infantry Regiment, First Division (the same division, incidentally, in which my great uncle Hyman Cohen served; both Uncle Hyman and Nelson’s grandfather Pfc. John Nelson were wounded at Soissons in July, 1918 – in Hyman’s case it was exposure to mustard gas, which seared his lungs and left a permanent scar on his chin).  The Remains of Company D is clearly a labor of love and imagination – an endeavor to breathe vivid life into archives, old newspaper accounts, letters, regimental histories.

Samet found little to admire in Nelson’s book; but what struck me most in the review was the stinging slap she delivered in the closing paragraph:  “Nelson ultimately falls victim to the civilian’s temptation to sentimentalize someone else’s war – to imagine that mysterious ‘nightmares and knowledge’ must inevitably texture the veteran’s every moment.”  This hit a nerve.  The pain I felt for Nelson got me thinking about my own endeavor to write about “someone else’s war.” It seems to me that this “temptation to sentimentalize” arises, ultimately, from gratitude, from a sense of humility mixed with a little shame:  they served, I didn’t – at the very least I owe them respect.  If that respect verges into reverence, if it triggers the civilian writer to imagine a soldier’s private nightmares, well so be it.

Maybe the fundamental problem for civilians who write about war is that we don’t know the answer to the nagging question of how we would behave under fire.  We devote years of our lives to finding soldiers to write about, following in their footsteps, reading their diaries and letters, poring over their unit histories, seeking out and standing by their graves.  We squeeze our eyes shut and try to imagine what it was like for them – and inevitably, what it would have been like for us.  What would I have done the first time a shell whistled down in my vicinity or the first time I heard what one Doughboy described as the “queer zeep-zeep, like insects fleeing to the rear” of machine-gun fire?

The civilian writer stands at the graveside and wonders.  We can’t know.  We can’t not ask.  If asking leads us into the temptation to sentimentalize – well, maybe that’s an occupational hazard.  Better too much imagination devoted to the veteran’s “nightmares and knowledge” than too little.  We learned that lesson after Vietnam – at least we citizens did.  Some members of our government, including those who voted to send troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, have decidedly not learned that lesson.  Take Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, commonly known as Senator No, who opposes passage of a bill to aid wounded veterans and their strained families unless the money to fund it be offset with immediate budget cuts.  “Now he is demanding balanced books for wounded vets?” fumed the editorial page of the New York Times on November 15.  “Sheer embarrassment should drive the senator into retreat as he trifles with veterans’ needs and burnishes his petty role as Dr. No.”

I agree with Elizabeth Samet that “sentimentalizing someone else’s war” is deplorable if it means getting misty over patriotic service while you vote to deprive veterans and their families of improved care.  But if it means finding out everything you can about when and why and how your grandfather was wounded in a wheat field in France 91 years ago and writing about it with reverence and love – then I’m all for it.

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Interviewing Private Pierro

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

Here in Seattle Veterans Day coincides with the height of the rainy season, which seems fitting given the wretched weather that the soldiers endured in France in the weeks leading up to the 1918 Armistice that Veterans Day commemorates.  “During the night, a cold penetrating rain began,” one soldier wrote of conditions on the first day of the Argonne offensive that ended the Great War.  “We couldn’t build any fires.  We had no overcoats, and had left our blanket rolls in the Bois de Sivry.  Some found overcoats and blankets left by the Boche, and rolled up in those.  The army slicker is as good as nothing, as far as heat goes, and as to turning water – well, we who wore them in the Argonne, knew what they were worth.  The moisture from one’s body collects on the inside of the coat, and as soon as the wind strikes you, you are cold for the rest of the day.”

Such was life in France in the fall of 1918.  The rain and wind outside my window seem blessedly benign by comparison.  But I really wasn’t intending to devote this blog to the weather but rather to the back story of one of the 12 immigrant soldiers featured in my book.  When I started researching in earnest in the summer of 2006, two foreign-born World War I veterans were still, miraculously, alive – 106-year-old Sam Goldberg and 110-year-old  Antonio Pierro.  Naturally, I wanted to meet both of them as soon as possible.

I don’t recall exactly how I tracked down Tony Pierro, but I do remember that a radio producer named Will Everett was extremely helpful in the process.  At the time, Will was taping interviews with the surviving World War I veterans for a radio program called The World War I Living History Project that he was putting together, and he had just spent a long, productive, if sometimes frustrating day taping an interview with Tony at the Pierro residence in Swampscott, Massachusetts.

I have learned over years of research and writing that some people jealously guard everything they know about a subject, while others share freely, even with perfect strangers.  Will was one of the latter.  When I called to pick his brain, he told me that the best way to set up an interview with Tony was to contact his nephew Rick, he advised me to use a loud clear voice in asking questions, and he warned me that I shouldn’t expect too many combat stories – after all the guy was 110.  Will added that my best chance of getting Tony to talk freely was to bring a pretty young girl along to the interview.

This last bit of advice amused me – 110 and still an eye for the ladies! – but Will was insistent so I pressed my oldest daughter Emily, who fits the bill nicely, into service.  I can’t say that Tony opened up much – he seemed to be dwelling peacefully deep inside himself and far back in the past.  But, with Emily sitting beside him and intercepting the occasional shy courtly smile, Tony talked some about the snakes in his family’s vineyard back in Forenza in the south of Italy, the dangers of dodging exploding shells in combat, and a French girl named Magdalena he had loved nine decades ago.  When we got up to leave, Tony took Emily’s 21-year-old hand in his 110-year-old hand, leaned over and kissed it.

I listened to Will’s documentary on Veterans Day, 2006 and was blown away.  Walter Cronkite hosts the program, and Will’s interviews with the dozen centenarian veterans are absorbing, surprising, and moving beyond words.

It never occurred to me when I set out to write The Long Way Home that I would be able to interview two veterans who had served when Woodrow Wilson was commander in chief.  It saddened me that both men died before my book was finished, Sam Goldberg on December 10, 2006, and Tony Pierro on February 8, 2007.  In fact, of the 12 men Will interviewed for his documentary, only one is still alive:  Frank Buckles of Charles Town, West Virginia, is the last of the last.  Even wonderful old Walter Cronkite passed away this past July.

If you’d like to hear the voices of these veterans and share in their memories, I urge you to get hold of a copy of Will Everett’s brilliant program.  I’d like to end this blog by again thanking Will and Rick Pierro for their help.  And I want to acknowledge Tony Pierro and the 4.3 million other Americans, half a million of them foreign-born, who served in the Great War that ended 91 years ago.

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