Archives » Friday, October 12, 2007
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David Botti
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Oct 12, 2007 10:40 PM
I’ve named this blog after a story Ernest Hemingway published in his 1925 short story collection, “In Our Time,” about the experiences of Harold Krebs, a young Marine returning to Kansas after fighting in World War One.
Krebs sleeps late every day, and passes time in his parents’ house, sometimes strolling through town or watching from his porch as the neighborhood girls walk by. He lies about his military experiences because people in town are sick of hearing about the war. He’s terse with his mother who prods him with questions about his future. He lacks ambition, drive, and an overall desire to interact with the rest of society. He reads history books about the battles he’s just fought. He compares life on the home front with the military life he’s just left.
The specifics of Krebs’ post-war experience are not necessarily the same for those veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, but Hemingway’s overarching portrayal of a brand new veteran’s feelings of displacement back in his hometown is a common theme I’ve heard among fellow veterans of my own generation.
As an infantryman in the Marine Corps Reserve, I left Iraq in late-July 2003, among the first waves of Iraq veterans to return home. I moved to New York City where the city’s daily life seemed to proceed unfazed by the four-month-old war. Others in my unit returned to their homes throughout New York State and beyond. Some deployed again to Iraq, others refused to even consider doing so.
I first read “Soldier’s Home” around 1999 for a college English class and didn’t think much of it. When I read it again after returning from Iraq, I felt relief that I wasn’t alone in feeling numb, depressed, and ambivalent about my future as a civilian. Hemingway, himself a war veteran, showed that at its core a soldier’s experience of coming home is similar throughout all generations.
Each war, however, brings its own sets of circumstances. Current issues such as veterans care, troop rotations, PTSD, and family hardship are among those which not only affect those involved, but the mood of the overall country as well. And then there are the private stories of the lone veteran who is one day in Iraq, and the next day back home away from his or her comrades – the only people with the shared experience of deployment.
New veterans are still being made every day the moment they board a homeward bound plane from Iraq, Kuwait, or Afghanistan. They will play an important part in American society for decades to come.
The purpose of this blog is to give the public a better glimpse of what life is like for that neighbor, or friend of a friend, or soldier interviewed on TV. If this blog can get readers talking, and even just a little more aware of the veterans around them, then it is most certainly doing its job.
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