Don't Know Much About: The Hidden History of America at War: Untold Tales from Yorktown to Fallujah

381 Pages·2015·2.12 MB·English

by  Davis

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We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a
portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who gave their lives
that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should
do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we
cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or
detract.
—Abraham Lincoln (November 19, 1863)
Dedicated to those who
“gave the last full measure of devotion”
Introduction
“It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.” (Dulce et decorum est
pro patria mori.) —Horace, Odes (23 BC)
“There never was a good war or a bad peace.”
—Benjamin Franklin (September 11, 1783)
“War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a
continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other
means.”1
—Karl von Clausewitz (1833)
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is
worth a war, is much worse.”
—John Stuart Mill (February 1862)
“War is barbarism.… It is only for those who have neither fired a shot nor
heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood,
more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
—William Tecumseh Sherman (June 19, 1879)
W
ar stories. We have been telling them for a very long time. You can start
with Bible tales of Egyptians drowning in their chariots in the sea or a shepherd
boy with a slingshot killing a giant, or the epic siege of Troy in Homer’s Iliad.
Move on to the American classics—from James Fenimore Cooper to The Red
Badge of Courage, Hemingway, The Killer Angels, and The Things They
Carried. Then watch all the way through Hollywood’s long love affair with
wartime, from The Birth of a Nation to Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now,
Glory, and The Hurt Locker. Tales of men in combat are at the heart of our
literature, culture, history, and mythology.
Unfortunately, many war stories have been told and retold so many times—
repackaged and often heavily embellished along the way—that the truth behind
them has been whitewashed and airbrushed, buried under a thick gloss of
romanticism, lyricism, patriotic fervor, and propaganda. As Walt Whitman,
mournful observer of America’s Civil War, once wrote, “The real war will never
get in the books.”2
My first taste of war and battle came in the backyard of my boyhood
suburban home. The lawn and woods behind my house in Mount Vernon, New
York, filled in for the Alamo, Gettysburg, and Normandy. Weighted down by a
small armory’s worth of toy weaponry, my friends and I did regular battle with
Santa Anna’s Mexicans, the Johnny Rebs, and the Nazis. Then we went up the
street to the playground and played some stickball.
This was the late fifties and early sixties. John Wayne, Audie Murphy, and
Charlton Heston were comfortably fixed in the pantheon of America’s war gods.
War, as we knew it, was glorious, exciting, fun, and harmless. And soldiers were
revered as tough guys with soft hearts.
My late father was one of them. He had served in North Africa and Italy
during World War II and, along with several of my uncles, was one of those
“Greatest Generation” veterans. These were the men, we had learned growing
up, who had been willing to sacrifice everything for their country and each other.
Ordinary “citizen soldiers,” they were the noble, patriotic, average Joes who had
whipped the Nazis and the Japanese.
My father rarely spoke of his wartime experiences—a silence I now greatly
regret. I had never really asked, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” But I
could tell from the mention of a glorious sunrise glimpsed in North Africa or the
few choice words in Italian, as well as the mean meatball recipe he had brought
home, that his wartime experiences had mattered deeply to him. I still believe
that his army years were among his happiest. I never knew for sure.
Instead, we went to movies like The Guns of Navarone and The Longest Day,
sat together to watch television shows like Combat and The Rat Patrol, and went
camping with army surplus sleeping bags and tents to places like Fort
Ticonderoga in upstate New York, or Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I still have my
souvenir of that latter visit—a wooden toy revolver stamped with the dates of the
battle: July 1–3, 1863. I also possess a powerful recollection of standing on that
battlefield—Lincoln’s “hallowed ground”—and feeling that something
extraordinary had happened there.
But then a switch was thrown. Within a few years, my playlist had a new
sound. The folk songs and antiwar anthems of Bob Dylan and Richie Havens
spoke to me far more convincingly than the “Fighting soldiers from the skies”
elegized in Barry Sadler’s 1966 hit song “Ballad of the Green Berets.”
By 1968, the answer blowing in the wind meant that John Wayne’s jingoistic
bravado was no longer box-office boffo. The Green Berets, the movie inspired
by Sadler’s tune, was described by a New York Times critic as “so unspeakable,
so stupid, so rotten and false in every detail that it passes through being fun,
through being funny, through being camp, through everything and becomes an
invitation to grieve.”3
My reading list had changed, too. Johnny Tremain—the book that brought the
American Revolution alive for me—was replaced by Johnny Got His Gun,
Dalton Trumbo’s bleak story of a quadriplegic victim of World War I. This was
more than shifting literary tastes. Radical changes were reshaping mass media
and the political landscape. Late in February 1968, when legendary television
newsman Walter Cronkite, fresh from a reporting trip to Vietnam, told the
country, “We are mired in stalemate,” there was no longer any doubt that
America had undergone a seismic shift. The times, they were a-changing.
The subsequent withdrawal of President Lyndon B. Johnson from the 1968
presidential campaign, followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr.
and Robert F. Kennedy, continued the violent tremors that were reshaping
American attitudes during Vietnam. Racial unrest was turning bloodier, and the
antiwar movement and the response to it were growing more violent,
culminating at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as protestors,
journalists, and even some delegates were bludgeoned by Chicago cops in what
was later called a “police riot.” In that fateful summer of 1968, I had also begun
to contemplate the reality of going to war.
I turned fourteen in that watershed year. And I had come to see that war was
no longer fun and games in the backyard or sixty minutes of excitement on
network television. And it was certainly not a gallant but doomed charge across
a Pennsylvania wheat field in the summer sun. After the killings of antiwar
protestors by National Guard troops at both Kent State University in Ohio and
Jackson State in Mississippi in May 1970, a broad sense of an unraveling
America only deepened.
When the government announced an end to most draft deferments and a shift
to a lottery system beginning with the draft class of 1970, I soon got as close as I
would ever come to military service. As high school graduation neared, with my
eighteenth birthday and Selective Service registration upon me, I took an air
force pre-enlistment exam. Thinking that the air force was a palatable alternative
to a low lottery draft number, I was attempting to exercise a small piece of
control over my fate.
Many of my bell-bottom-wearing, peace activist friends were aghast that I
would consider enlisting in the detested military. But conscientious objector
status or heading off to Canada were not options on my table. Then I lucked out
with a high lottery number and dodged both the proverbial and real bullets.
Uncle Sam may have wanted me, but the feeling was not mutual.
In spite of my aversion toward the war in Vietnam, I had not lost my
admiration for the people who serve—or the literature and history of war. I had
always been fascinated by such books as Harrison Salisbury’s The 900 Days, an
account of the fight for Leningrad, one of the most brutal battles in World War
II, in which people were reduced to cannibalism. Or Goodbye, Darkness,
historian William Manchester’s riveting memoir of returning to the scene of his
World War II experiences in the Pacific. Gritty, real, and disturbing, these books
painted a picture of war completely at odds with the tidy version served up by
schoolbooks and Hollywood.
When I wrote Don’t Know Much About History, first published in 1990, one
of my goals was to make war real, to show how wars had been central events in
shaping American history, and shouldn’t be reduced to a bullet-pointed list of
dates, battles, and stock, simplistic causes. I wanted to tell real stories of real
people as a counterpoint to the mythmaking. And the tedium of most textbooks.
I continued the effort in a number of other books, including, in particular, Don’t
Know Much About the Civil War, America’s Hidden History, and A Nation
Rising.
But many people still know far too little about America’s wars and the role
the military has played in the nation’s history. We may show an obligatory but
fleeting sense of reverence for our war dead on Memorial Day. We kick off the
Super Bowl festivities with a stirring salute to the troops—a “feel-good”
moment that soon passes. We may mark Veterans Day with paper poppies and
by thanking some of the service people we pass in the airport. But we are
sometimes blinded by an image of a noble and unflinching America at war.
That is an understandable, even valid notion. Part of conveying a national
identity comes from creating a war narrative highlighting glory, idealism, and
sacrifice. It forms a central piece of the “foundation legend,” the story of a
nation’s birth meant to inspire and rally a people—not only in America but in
many countries. But that is not history. The underside of the story—the dark
tales of what men do in war and the grim toll exacted on civilians—is often
swept under the carpet as schoolbooks quickly jump from an overview of the
Revolution to the Civil War, and then briefly through two “world wars.” Some
wars are ignored entirely, while others simply get sucked into the black hole of
American history. We don’t do a very good job of teaching some of our most
important history. A few years ago, Colonel Cole C. Kingseed, a history
instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, told the New
York Times, “I might as well be teaching the Peloponnesian Wars.” He was
talking about the perspective of the class of incoming cadets in 2000 on the
Vietnam War.4
Which brings me to the reason for this book. Let me start by saying that this
is not an encyclopedic history of the country’s handful of congressionally
declared wars, which can actually be counted on one hand, as there have been
only five: 1812, Mexico, Spain, World War I, and World War II. In fact, the
tally is larger if you separately count the declaration of war against Austria-
Hungary in 1917 and the multiple declarations of war in 1941 and 1942,
bringing the total to eleven. America’s declared wars were with: Great Britain
(1812); Mexico (1846); Spain (1898); Germany (1917); Austria-Hungary
(1917); Japan, Germany, and Italy (1941); and Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania
(1942).
Nor does this book detail the hundreds of conflicts or other military
deployments, whether authorized by Congress or not. Since the United States