War, Peace, the Homefront and Uncle Sam

I.

In our house when I was growing up, there were three WWI posters that my great aunt had saved in her attic. My father rescued and framed them, hanging the posters in the hallway at the top of the stairs. I walked past them on the way to my room which was at the end of this hallway. There was no way I could avoid Uncle Sam trying to recruit me every time I went up the stairs. He never budged, determined to enlist me before I could even read. I had the sense that he was measuring every ounce of my patriotism: I Want YOU for US Army, he called out, pointing and glaring straight at me as I made my way up the stairs. I always continued forward, nearing closer to that long, protruding finger as though responding to his beckoning, feigning my conscription, only to turn the corner to my room.

There is some speculation as to whether Uncle Sam was a real person. (Many historians point their fingers to Samuel Wilson, a meat packer from Troy, New York, who during the War of 1812 provided large supplies of meat to the US Army. Soldiers noticed that the crates of meat were marked with the letters "U.S." and it was then said that the meat was from "Uncle Sam" Wilson.) I knew he was real because Uncle Sam appeared before me in many forms. At night, if the hall lights were not on, Uncle Sam’s white stars would stand out, glowing softly. When I was sick the red YOU became demonic, hurting me if I looked at it for too long. In the late afternoon when the sun had drifted into the hallway and hit the walls in a slant, half of the poster would be cast in shadow, sometimes leaving Uncle Sam’s face concealed in darkness, yet his hand would be exposed, dangling in the sun. In the morning if it wasn’t overcast, if the light filtering inside the house was bright enough, I could see my reflection in the glass as I came up the stairs, my face on top of his.

II.

Uncle Sam has disappeared. He no longer urges civilians to enlist in the military. Today, Uncle Sam has been replaced with slick, sensational ads, often enhanced with computer graphics. At the end of these commercials, the slogan "Be all that you can be" is sung, the last "be" drawn out so it lingers in your head after the commercial break is over. These commercials emphasize the fact that you can make money for college and gain valuable skills which will make you a desirable employee. Enlisting is something to do for your future, for your advancement. They never mention that you might have to fight, that you might have to kill.

I do not love war. I am attracted to it, though. I have a fondness, a sense nostalgia for war that, I imagine, only one who has never been in a war, nor ever lived in a country that was at war, could possibly have. All I know about war is what I have read or seen on TV. The military is glossy, idyllic with abstract notions of loyalty, honor, and courage intertwined in a cause worth fighting for, in principles worth defending. Good guys take on the bad guys. Heroes rise and fall. These stories and images, ranging from the gruesome to the glamorous, have created for me an idea of war that is black and white, like that of Picasso’s Guernica: war is exciting; war is terrible.

I think that ultimately, I am attracted to war because it is irrational; it doesn’t make sense. This should repel me and it does to a certain extent, yet in that action of repulsion, I am somehow inexplicably, drawn in.

I did not grow up on war stories. My father’s father was too young for the First World War and too old for second. My imagination had to make do with war posters and a ration book which my grandmother saved and my dad now saves. My mother’s parents were in an internment camp during WWII. They do not like to talk about it. They refer to it as "camp" so that growing up, my mother thought that they were talking about a summer camp, a resort of some kind. A photograph we have of my grandmother with her friends in bathing suits smiling outside of a barrack comes to mind. I see more than just a photograph, though. I see stories that could be told and aren’t.

My first war story was at summer day camp when a counselor told a riddle on a rainy day to try and stump us since we were stuck inside and growing tired of playing Heads up, Seven up. The riddle was about a man with one arm who goes to his mailbox one day and finds a package. When he opens it there is an arm inside and a note. After reading the note he repackages the box and mails it. After being told this information, we could only ask yes or no questions. We didn’t figure out the full story that afternoon, but the next day after some hints, we had figured out that the man was a veteran of WWII. He had lost his arm in the war, though not through a wound inflicted by the enemy. It was amputated to feed his platoon who was starving on some island somewhere in the Pacific. Each day, someone in his platoon sacrificed an arm, everyone except the medic, who performed all these amputations. In the end, the men were rescued and the medic never had to sacrifice an arm. Years later though, he feels so guilty, he cuts off his arm and mails it to one of his platoon members, asking him to send it on to someone else in their platoon so that it might circulate among all the surviving men.

This was my first experience with war that shook me, that shocked me. It made me sick to think about this story, it still does, but I wanted to think about it, I still do. Though the story was not even based on an actual incident, it deeply impressed me. In my world of cartoons and dolls, a world in which the Cold War unbeknownst to me was disintegrating, and war was present only in my brother’s GI Joe action figures, this story was exposure to something that seemed distant and unreal, only now it somehow seemed closer. War was something that had happened, not in my lifetime, but in the lifetime of those who were still alive. It struck me that they knew something that I did not. This is still true.

In many ways the riddle is not solved in my mind, nor can it ever be since I have lived through a war: Is this what war does to people, strands and scars them? Haunts them? I turned these questions over in my mind to the point where I did not sleep well that night or the next. When I closed my eyes I saw severed arms. I was nauseous. I did not want to go back to day camp.

I have not been exposed to blood and guts and gore. I, therefore, do not nor cannot quite grasp the frailty of the human body. Tendons and bones and cartilage have not bared their vulnerability to me. I guess that I would like to think that the body is like the game Operation I played as kid, the game where you were the surgeon (equipped only with metal tweezers) and your job was to extract certain plastic organs (shaped like a heart, a liver) from the patient whose body made up the game board. But if your tweezers touched the red edges of the organ cavity, there was a buzz and you lost your turn- and that was that, the only consequence for your mistake was losing your turn. There was no blood, no death in this game.

I have this sense that my generation is missing the defining experience that a war stirs in the hearts of the young and old. (Although really there is no distinction between young and old- it is a collective heart, just as war inflicts a collective wound, or results in a collective triumph, a collective loss.) History books always make war out so that there is a lesson learned by a war, that we are a better nation and better people for having been through war. Yet historians seem plagued by the notion that in telling their war story they must justify war, that they must somehow prove it was worth the sacrifice.

III.

Next to Uncle Sam was another poster from WWI, depicting a woman without a name. Her physique was fleshy, robust; her pale skin barely distinguishable from the white of the paper. With her robe and short dark hair, she was part flapper, part statue of liberty. FIGHT or Buy Liberty Bonds, she says, one arm clinging to the white robe that is threatening to slip of her body, the other arm extended outwards as though hailing a cab on a busy street corner. She was silent, beautiful and I imagined her voice was not a voice so much as a reverberation, an echo; FIGHT or Buy Liberty Bonds, she says, as though I had a choice in the matter, that there were options in her war, multiple destinies.

Unlike Uncle Sam, she does not have a familiarity or instant recognition with Americans. She stands on the outside, and it is for this reason that she was the one who always enthralled me. I knew that Uncle Sam did not really want me for the US Army; I didn’t climb trees or even like to get my dresses dirty, but this woman who looked at me so pleadingly, desperately wanting me to buy war bonds, spoke directly to me— a girl who played with dolls, someone who was left behind and left out of any real action because there was no war to fight in.