How We Are Changed by War

A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom

D.C. Gill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135148935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The prolonged conflict in Iraq has shown us war's transformative effect. Civilians rivet themselves to events happening halfway around the world, while young soldiers return home from battlefields, coping with the memories of those events.

How We Are Changed by War examines our sense of ourselves through the medium of diaries and wartime correspondence, beginning with the colonists of the early seventeenth century, and ending with the diaries and letters from Iraqi war vets. The book tracks the effects of war in private writings regardless of the narrator's historical era allowing the writers to 'speak' to each other across time to reveal a profound commonality of cultural experience. Finally, interpreting the narratives by how the writers conveyed the content adds a richer layer of meaning through the lenses of psychology and literary criticism, providing a model for any society to examine itself through the medium of its members' informal writings.

1
The Metes and Bounds of Narrative and Self

There was an orderly in one of our regiments & he & the Corporal always slept together. Well, the other night the Corporal had a baby, for the Cpl. turned out to be a woman! She has been in 3 or 4 fights.

(Civil War letter by a Union soldier qtd. in Wakeman 1994, xii)

One of the soldiers directed my attention to a youth apparently about seventeen years of age well dressed with a lieutenant’s badge on his collar. I remarked I saw nothing strange. He then told me the young man was not a man but a female.

(Civil War letter by Confederate Robert Hodges qtd. in Wakeman 1994, 3–4)

A corporal was promoted to sergeant for gallant conduct at the battle of Fredericksburgh—since which time the sergeant has become the mother of a child. What use have we for women, if solders in the army can give birth to children? It is said that the sergeant and his Capt. occupied the same tent, they being intimate friends.

(Civil War letter by Elijah H.C. Cavins qtd. in Wakeman 1994, 5)

The above passages show how assumptions of reality affect what individuals are able to see. In other words, people often perceive what they expect to perceive. The above writers expected to see only men in military uniforms. The identity of a soldier implied as much to them. But in each case this reality is exploded as the writers discover that the soldiers under observation are women. The importance of these letters is not that women were posing as men, but rather that they were not seen as posing as men. Since, in Victorian society, the definition of the good soldier included the element of maleness, war stories could only include heroic soldiers qualified by that gender.

Nineteenth-century observers, who saw individuals performing the soldier’s role (such as the corporal, who had survived three or four fights, the lieutenant wearing a badge, and the soldier promoted for “gallant conduct”), were then blinded by their story of what was real. Lauren Burgess, who edited Private Sarah Wakeman’s letters, remarks that many of these women did not even look particularly male: “Upon meeting two women who had been found in his command, Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan remarked that one of the them was ‘comely,’ so much so that he couldn’t understand how she had successfully impersonated a man” (Wakeman 1994, 5).

One explanation for such limited perception can be found in understanding the importance of paradigms. William Schultz, a psychologist, defines paradigms as “conceptual frameworks or models that, much like perceptual sets or gestalts, create a tendency to ‘see’ some data and not others. More than that, the paradigm actually preselects certain facts as meaningful” (Schultz 2002, 78). Schultz suggests that to perceive any situation with its cacophony of details weighted evenly would prove overwhelming. Too many sensory impressions easily hamper individuals from discerning patterns necessary for survival.

For example, an individual camping in an isolated mountain forest on a rainy autumn day might busy himself recording impressions of the day: the cold slide of water down his neck, the goose-bumps on his arms, the sound of a loud rustle behind a thicket of shrubs, the smell of wood smoke, the arthritic pain in his big toe, the itch on his right hand, the taste of rain on his lips, etc. But now if this individual pays equal attention to each sensation then he might not be aware of the approaching bear until it is too late to take appropriate action. Likely, though, his mind has “preselect[ed] certain facts as meaningful.” He consequently forgets the pain in his big toe the moment that he hears the rustle in the bushes. Why? Because the loud rustle triggers the “conceptual frameworks” of the wilderness experience. This sound heard anywhere else (such as in a suburb of a major urban area) would not have the same “meaningful” connotations. In the “perceptual set” of a wilderness, a loud rustle often equals a large (and possibly dangerous) wild beast. In an urban area, it might equal a stray dog or possibly a dangerous human being.

This example reveals Schultz’s definition of paradigms to be based in stories. A rustle in a wild thicket conjures the tale of a bear looking for food. A rustle in the neighbor’s azaleas conjures tales of home invaders. Paradigms act then as cultural stories overlaid onto an individual’s sensory input. An early seventeenth-century English colonist, newly arrived in what is now called Massachusetts, might possess the paradigm that all humans who dress scantily in animal skins and live a nomadic lifestyle must belong to the racial group that colonists called “Indian.” If then, one day, this individual happens upon a group of such people, he may be intellectually incapable of seeing them as any ethnicity other than that of Amerindian. Since they fit into his paradigmatic definition, that is all he can perceive, at least initially.

The catch to paradigms is that they don’t always reflect a quantifiable reality. The ominous rustle in the bushes might be amorous raccoons as opposed to bears, and the savages in animal skins could be tipsy colonists playing a joke on the newcomer. Regardless, these stories act as instinctual safeguards to quicken reaction time. No need for the camper to think about what is actually causing the rustle; best to react first, just in case.

In such ways, paradigms limit their possessors because they only allow people to be confronted with the expected and the familiar. They are what the philosopher Nietzsche spoke of when he claimed that,

ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear … there will be the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, nothing is there.

(qtd. in LaCapra 2001, 37)

When journal or letter writers replace reality’s chaos with the tidiness of a paradigmatic story, they may be shaken when such stories prove false. “The news of today,” writes Confederate Kate Stone in her diary entry of June 10th 1863,

is that our men were repulsed at Miliken’s Bend and are falling back to Delhi… . It is hard to believe that Southern soldiers—and Texans at that—have been whipped by a mongrel crew of white and black Yankees. There must be some mistake… . It is said the Negro regiments fought there like mad demons, but we cannot believe that. We know from long experience they are cowards.

(Stone 1995, 218–219)

War questions the comfort of such accepted truths as held by this diarist. Alienating people from their stories, conflict more often forces individuals to rewrite of their narrative of what is real, compelling them to add, to delete, to highlight, and to punctuate anew. Even so, war can never obliterate Americans’ reliance on stories because they are natural-born tellers of tales. How do Americans allow others entrance into their lives? They introduce themselves to strangers through a web of words, furnishing names and dates as if they conveyed some intrinsic flavor of identity.

But do the names and dates offered in conversation by someone identifying himself as Bob Jones, born March 7, 1959, in Hoboken, New Jersey, who attended New York University from 1977 to 1981 and who now works for Smith, Jones & Smith Insurance Company, actually reveal anything about the man? Likely not. The words do, however, paradigmatize him. They allow people who he meets to define how Bob Jones is supposed to behave in relation to himself and to his community.

Civil War diarist Charles Wainwright brings up such storied expectations when confiding to his 1864 journal the incident in which a General of a surrendering regiment deliberately awaited the approach of an enemy officer before he drew his pistol and killed the other man. “I have not heard in all this war of such a dastardly act before,” protests Wainwright, “and cannot but hope that the shot was not fired by General Hagood himself. His name at first was reported as Hayward, which really grieved me, as the Haywards of South Carolina are gentlemen” (Wainwright 1998, 455). Shaken by the treachery of the act, Wainwright is even more horrified that it could have been committed by an individual whose story should have prevented it. A “Hayward … of South Carolina” is defined as a “gentleman,” who is defined as an individual, who restricts his acts to those which are culturally honorable. This represented Wainwright’s paradigm of the “Haywards of South Carolina.”

Language and Limits of Narrative Identity

The storied labels that people put on themselves, to define who they are, are what French novelist Jean-Paul Sartre laments when he asks, “How then shall I experience the objective limits of my being: Jew, Aryan, ugly, handsome, kind, a civil servant, untouchable, etc.—when will speech have informed me as to which of these are my limits?” ((Sartre 1992, 675). Such “limits,” likewise, dictate that if Bob Jones, the insurance salesman born and bred in New Jersey, has an inexplicably Virginian accent and appears not to know his replacement values from his liability limits then something is likely wrong. People meeting him may quickly suspect that Bob Jones’s story of himself is faulty in some way.They could well harbor deep doubts as to his mental or legal trustworthiness.

The experience with Jones unsettles those who know him because life stories are what the psychologist Loyttyniemi describes as “the fiber with which we are connected to others” ((Loyttyniemi 2002, 199). Socially, people convey themselves through the stories that tell others of their distinctiveness. These life story tellers then listen for other people’s stories that match up with their own. This allows them to connect emotionally with others offering compatible stories.

But when such life stories prove false then a fundamental trust has been broken. Puritan preacher Cotton Mather insisted that the seventeenthcentury confessions of accused witches must be truthful or else

one would think all the Rules of Understanding Human affairs are at an End, If after so many most Voluntary Harmonious Confessions, made by Intelligent Persons of all ages in sundry Towns, at several times…. If these Confessions are false,it is a thing prodigious beyond the Wonders of the Former Ages, and it threatens no less than a sort of a Destruction upon the World.

(qtd. in Fowler 1992, 390–391; emphasis mine)

Not only do false stories threaten people’s trust in the narratives of everyone else, but it highlights the malleability of one’s own life story. With a careless or mischievous comment by another, anyone’s life story may be “rewritten” to their detriment. Outraged, Confederate soldier Eli Landers writes home in 1862, answering allegations made by a townsman with whom he has served:

I heard that he said that I was not in the fight at South Mountain and that I run before I got into it and that I never had been in nary fight and all such tales that would degrade an honorable solger. We know the way to find whether those words is well to rely upon is to ask the officers that has been in command of me all the time and see what they say about it. I think they will all say that I have always been found at my post … I have always tried to discharge my duty in the service of my country as a solger and for him to talk about me in that way it hurts my feelings very much. He has never been in but one fight but if he dont give me satisfaction when he comes back I think he will be in another one. I intend to have satisfaction either by words or deeds.

(Landers 1997, 98–99)

Significantly, Eli Landers allows the violator of his life story to redress the wrong through the very medium of his transgression, “words.” The violator can mend Lander’s reputation by admitting that his story of Landers is wrong and that Lander’s own story is right. In essence, his accuser has to take it back. He has to reverse the flow of words away from the comprehension of the other and return it to the silence of his own mind.

Cultural Narrative, Identity, and a Common Reality

The story of a nation operates much like an individual’s own life story. Not consciously created, a country’s story develops usually from select facts arranged into a pleasing story. It is analogous to how many people create a coherent story of their day from the bedlam of a million sensory/intellectual inputs. Selected highpoints convey a taste of how the person experienced the period from dawn to dusk. These highpoints usually reflect on the storyteller; they tell listeners not only what happened, but to whom it happened.

For example, if I see myself as a responsible person then I am likely to include only those elements of my day that reflect this identity. And so, if describing to someone about my car being stolen, I am not likely to confess that I left the car with the engine running, unlocked and parked in front of the local halfway house for juvenile delinquents. I am more likely to focus on the actions of the thief and the prevalence of crime, without focusing on my own irresponsible contributions. In my version of reality, I play the role of the completely blameless victim to that of the car thief as a vicious miscreant.

The pattern of this self-edited story contains a comfortable black and white aspect. My audience knows exactly whom to root for and whom to condemn. As psychologist Carol Feldman points out, national narratives are also “highly patterned” (Feldman 2001, 75). They repeat variations on a cultural theme. The United States, for example, often casts its role in stories as the liberator of the underdog, especially when going to war. This story has fueled military “liberations” of countries from external oppressors, as in the cases of Kuwait in the 1990s and the Philippines in the 1890s, and the deliverance of inhabitants from internally oppressive regimes, as in case of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Not officially emphasized in this narrative of fighting for the underdog is a focus on more self-serving issues, such as Kuwait’s role in oil production or the fact that, after helping liberate the Philippines, the U.S. refused to recognize the new republic, bought the country for twenty million dollars from Spain, and waged a three-year war against its former allies in order to colonize the country itself.

The story of a nation is not then an inclusive storyline. It strains rather to establish an overriding narrative that reflects back to itself the part of its identity that it favors. This benefits citizens by providing them with a number of successful subplots and character roles that can be adopted. Cultural roles allow citizens to play larger roles in their societies than they might have otherwise played based on their own limited talents. The identity of insurance agent Bob Jones, for instance, becomes more when he rescues his neighbor’s children from a burning house. He becomes a “hero” or someone who has “done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience” (Campbell 1991, 151).

The negative side of such a role is that it often shadows the rest of the individual’s identity. Sociologist Goffman explains how even...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Metes and Bounds of Narrative and Self
• 2 An Opportunity for Change
• 3 Conversion
• 4 A Growing Estrangement
• 5 The Complexity of Spectatorship
• 6 Eye of the Storm
• 7 A Continuing Aftermath
• Bibliography
• Index