Photo: David Botti
As WWII entered its final days, the French writer Marguerite Duras, then a member of the resistance in Paris, waited to see if her husband had survived the German concentration camps and would be coming home. The notes she took of that time were subsequently published as The War: A Memoir, in which she relays her observations of a once occupied city expecting what seemed an immanent liberation and start of a new era. As she watched the quotidian life of Paris resume once again, Duras wrote:
"Peace is visible already. It's like a great darkness falling, it's the beginning of forgetting."
Her words have always struck me in the way they apply to a vast number of aftermaths throughout my own lifetime and history; with peace does come forgetting, at least on a larger scale.
In our nation's current wars abroad peace certainly has not been totally achieved, but in some ways it seems the forgetting has already begun. I've noticed that among fellow veterans and vets of other wars there is a common theme often invoked: nobody out there really cares about what the troops went through, or, Americans just want to forget their messy wars. It's almost a natural instinct: to fuel a perpetual candle in the face of America so that it remembers what some Americans did far beyond the country's borders.
But there is also the view of those Americans unaffiliated with the military to consider. In those early days when I first came back from Iraq I was frustrated people weren't paying as close attention to the war as I expected them too. I thought them apathetic, lazy, and selfish. It took time for me to step back, calm my emotions, and realize some of my expectations were too critical and colored by the shock of coming home. In truth, there was certainly a very fertile middle ground.
It's this balance that I've tried to achieve with this blog: highlighting veterans and military issues that are important to understand, not because they are just important to veterans, but because they're important for every American. The enormous influx of war veterans back into American society since September 11 means a new and unique demographic is now firmly in place.
This is my last blog post here at Soldier's Home. When I began the blog last October I decided to name it after a semi-autobiographical Ernest Hemingway short story written about a WWI veteran returning to the quiet life of a Midwestern suburb. Nearly everything he wrote rang true almost a century later: the drifting, loneliness, and brooding. Using his story as a guide I hope I've been able to highlight both the daily news events in veterans affairs, while also taking note of those experiences that can transcend generations.
After writing this blog for more than year I can say that the most crucial stories are not those affecting just veterans, but the stories that reflect the country as a whole through its veterans. Marguerite Duras saw a new generation coming of age at the end of WWII on the cusp of forgetting the recent past. And even now, it's easy to see dialogue about the wars we fight diminishing as the years pass by. It used to be that it was largely up to America's veterans to carry on the memory of their fallen comrades. But if we can learn anything from history, it's that in order not forget we have to collectively want to remember.
I don't know if this is possible. We're still in the thick of it. But I hope the stories I've posted here helped bring the veteran experience to the civilian consciousness, and I thank you for letting me try.
