The Chicago Humanities Festival asked me months ago if I had any ideas for the current festival, whose theme is “Peace and War: Facing Human Conflict,” and I suggested putting historian Joseph Ellis on a panel that would try to explain what about valor in combat is so important to some that if they can’t claim it honestly they’ll lie.
The protagonist of Pouncey’s book is a scholar, MacIver, who is dying over a winter in the dilapidated country house he’d shared with his late wife. He decides to organize his own last days and thoughts by writing a story. Pouncey made MacIver a historian of the First World War who’d fought in the Second and whose son was a casualty of Vietnam. The story MacIver writes as he dies is set in the trenches of Flanders.
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Edward Tick with a guide last month in Vietnam, presenting a new home to an elderly woman whose hut was destroyed in the recent typhoon
But as Pouncey reminded me, there’s an English expression, “I had a bloody good war,” and that’s probably the war noncombatants pine for, a war that sends a soldier back into the world sound of mind and body, conscience clear and all tests passed. The war itself wasn’t necessarily good–though of course that helps. But the war experience was good, and in later life modesty becomes it. I’m guessing that when visitors remarked on the Medals of Honor Judge O’Brien liked to display in his chambers, he said he was just in the right place at the right time.
I’m guessing here, but my guess is that some impostors pretend to have fought battles to appear not simply brave but also substantial. Perhaps they want others to see them as they want to see themselves–as morally complex, subtle, up to life’s hardest choices. They may be wasting their energy: the public seems much less impressed by the lessons of battle than by the bellicosity of arrogant noncombatants. Colin Powell, who knew war, gave his name to a doctrine preaching caution above all and overwhelming force when force is necessary. But when the Bush administration proposed invading Iraq, the public showed no more regard for the secretary of state’s reservations than those around him in government did, and eventually Powell fell into line. Ellis, Pouncey, and Tick could wrap up their panel on the seductive power of the idea of war by trying to explain to us why it is that when war is in the air, the wise old warrior becomes last year’s man.
