When War Becomes Us
In his “A Terrible Love of War” the late psychologist James Hillman, who had treated the wounded returning to the U.S. from World War II, writes with no sense of exaggeration that war is normal. From a psychological perspective Hillman suggests war is also sublime and reminds us how much literature, including “War and Peace” and “A Farewell to Arms” explores the aesthetic and even the beauty of war. And even mundane war experiences can become, in Hillman’s words, the “one great lyrical passage” in a person’s life. He quotes a Londoner who had lived through the Blitz:
“I shall always remember above all things in my life the monstrous loveliness of that one single view of London …stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with pin-points of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares, and the grind of vicious engines …These things all went together to make the most hateful, most single scene I had ever known.”
Hillman brushes aside statements that war is impossible to understand or imagine. Hillman suggests that such remarks get us off the hook and absolve us of responsibility. He reminds us that Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense for much of the Vietnam War, later wrote that the war was essentially a failure of imagination. In comparing Pearl Harbor and 9/11 Michael Hayden, Director of the National Security Agency, suggested that “perhaps it was more a failure of imagination this time than last.” Hillman will have none of it. He suggests we have a responsibility to understand the language of war, the mythical and religious components and effects of war on the individual and collective psyche. We need to wrestle with the archetypal components of war, the rational and the irrational, remembering that the god Mars has no eyes. It is all engagement.
It is as if I have been hearing Hillman’s words for the better part of a lifetime. And the voices of family members across generations who have been exposed to war. I suspect some of them would agree with Hillman that there is a god in the gun.
When Trump roared about his imaginary but successful seven-to-ten-day war that would obliterate Afghanistan (He demurred to save the ten million casualties), I thought about serving on an ammunition ship in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War. Sailing with five cargo holds stuffed full of 2,000-pound bombs and other incendiaries for almost a full-year cruise was a serious matter. During a typhoon in the South China Sea, the bombs broke free in all holds. I recall hearing the skipper saying the Lord’s Prayer over the IMC system as we were throwing our bunk mattresses and pillows into the cascading bombs, trying to slow down their movement. We had lost most engine power and came very close to sinking. I later checked the navigation chart that indicated we were basically being pushed sideways.
After I left the Navy, I read that we had dropped more bombs and other projectiles on North Vietnam than we had dropped on the entire European theater during World War II. I have been slow to understand this madness, even after addressing it in my first book of poems, “That Kingdom coming Business.”
When Trump roared, I thought about how little veterans actually talk about war. My uncle fought in the of Battle of the Bulge; many family members endured the Battle of Britain; and another brother was one of the first Brits in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped. Many men of an earlier generation of my family fought and died in the trenches and on the sea in World War I. War exists within the fabric, soul and history of my family, but it remains largely unspoken, repressed, and too painful to be brought into the daylight.
Recently I was chatting with my older sister Pat who was, she reminds me often, there at my birth. She worked at the Admiralty that was responsible for the Royal Navy. She remembered the Blitz, the Normandy Invasion and especially the models of hundreds of Navy ships, scattered through the oceans of the world, decorating the walls of the Admiralty. There were many losses. She apparently described all this to me in person when I was an infant on site, inculcating in me, as the story goes, a love of the sea and the Navy.
My sister had lost her father from wounds suffered in that “first war” as she called it and she had escaped from six bombed-out houses in London during the Battle of Britain and after. Her American husband who fought in the Battle of the Bulge died years later from the effects of PTSD. There were other, more recent, casualties, as if war has never left the household.
I asked her how she has managed to survive into her nineties with so many dark memories. Her face lit up and she pointed to her heart, as if that is the place she holds, remembers and transforms memories. I tell her often that she has taught me so much about God, life and especially forgiveness. Her losses due to war and its aftermath have been great but she remains as radiant as the morning.
My late older brother John was sent to an orphanage when he was about five. John remained in the orphanage until he was about sixteen. Soon after he left, he was on a British transport to Japan. The ship held a contingent of Army men who would record the damage done to Hiroshima, walking through the remains of a city with Geiger counters, measuring levels of radiation. I recall his returning to our North London flat after the war and dumping his duffle bag on the upstairs landing and in my memory never mentioned the war to me in any detail during most of his life. That is, until he was suffering from Parkinson’s and other ailments that might have been associated with his time in Hiroshima.
One night in a Tucson bar not long before his death he spoke of his march through Hiroshima, the leveled city, that burnt-out case, and the burial ground for tens of thousands. He saw and remembered all this and seemed to keep most of it inside. For him it was the whiteness, the heaps of volcanic ash, and the almost total destruction. Everything that was not flattered, burnt or destroyed was twisted and demented. He kept coming back to the bodies displayed in what seemed like an endless crematorium. It was as if he was talking about the end of the world.
As the story goes my father tried to enlist as a rear gunner in the British Air Force early in World War II but was denied because of his earlier association with the IRA in Dublin. I’ve always thought the story might be apocryphal and settled on the photographic truth that my father was a London cop during World War II and pulled his share of people from burning buildings, drove buses across bomb-damaged streets, receiving a citation or two. He never mentioned any of this and died at an early age before I could pick his brain.
There was one time when I was about ten my father pointed with his right index finger to an odd bomb-like shape in the ceiling of the room where my two brothers and I slept. All he said was “That is where the incendiary came in.” Then he left the room and never mentioned it again. Various family members were certain that a German incendiary bomb had been dropped on the house, coming through the roof and then largely fizzled, leaving that shape in the ceiling. It is still not clear who put out the fire, though my father figures in any family scenario. The bomb was apparently dropped during the Blitz, years before my birth. I later learned German bombers dropped one million incendiary bombs on London during the Blitz. This was not one bomb for every household, but close.
After my father’s show and tell I rarely went to sleep without thinking about and reliving that night. London was slow to rebuild after the war and bombed out buildings and corrugated tin bomb shelters littered our Crouch End neighborhood in North London for much of my childhood. It was our playground and at the time seemed quite normal.
These days I find myself going back there, in dream and in person, remembering the bits and pieces of conversations, the remembrances all said without bombast and declaration. It is my father’s finger drawing, my sister’s message from the heart, my brother’s sad tale of a levelled Hiroshima. I remember my mother’s last words to me hours before her death, perfectly British and understated: “It’s hard,” she said, taking eighty years of war with her, leaving notes, letters and drawings for her children to ponder.
I recall returning to New York City after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers and watching them burn and smolder for months from my bedroom window. I remember breathing that air full of particulates. In a way I still am, taking in a collective, communal breath.
With help from Hillman I have come to understand that war becomes us and takes up a presence in our psyche and soul. War can have a mythical pull and invites us into a word of myth and re-creation. War demands a re-imagining. For him this is soul work and a first principle of psychology: to be understood any phenomenon must be systematically imagined and re-imagined. Hillman underscores the importance of this work, reminding us that philosophy and religion have largely failed in this task.
The elder voices that I hear suggest war requires an honoring and recapitulation in time, memory and even prayer. My older sister Pat, who holds almost a century of war in her heart, will be on the front page of this remembrance.
This is my plight and my task.
Or, to paraphrase Hillman, in my fiction is my fate.
