My uncle, my mother’s brother, was killed in the North Africa campaign. He successfully bombed a Nazi supply train, but his plane blew up in the explosion–perhaps because he hadn’t been informed it had munitions, perhaps because he was unable to pull the plane up fast enough since he’d been injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. His death broke my mother–he was her lodestar in a very unhealthy family situation. The damage of his death reverberated into so many lives, including mine. And how I, a generation later, reacted to accurate information about the context of his death exemplifies how hard it is to deliberate about war.
He was injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass and awarded a medal. So, at some point, I looked into the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. The first thing I read said that it was a clusterfuck, especially in regard to how the Army Air Corps was unnecessarily exposed to risk because the person in charge of the campaign—–was an incompetent, indecisive, inexperienced coward. Fredenall so fucked up the situation that he was sent back to the US (a still controversial decision, since some think he should have been discharged).
When I read that Fredenall was incompetent, especially in regard to the Air Corps, I was in a rage.
I was immediately puzzled by my own rage. It would make sense for me to be outraged that Fredenhall was an over-promoted incompetent coward who put my uncle in such danger. But, to be honest, that wasn’t my first (or even third) reaction. I was outraged because someone was saying that my uncle’s death was the consequence of incompetence.
It took me a while to understand why I was more angry that someone suggesting his death was the consequence of incompetence than I was at the incompetent who might have caused his death.
What I learned from my rage about the criticism of the Kasserine Pass campaign is that it is tremendously difficult to say that a loved or ancestor has died for a bad cause, in a bad way, or because of bad leadership.
Eventually, of course, I worked around to realizing that some people are incompetent, some wars are the consequence of political figures bungling or blustering or trying to stabilize a wobbly base or just having painted themselves into a corner. Even in a just war (and I do think American intervention in WWII was completely just) there are unjust actions, and incompetence, and failures of leadership. But it still hurts.
What I learned from my own reaction is that deliberation about a war is constrained by considerations of honor. I want my uncle honored. And it was hard for me to understand that honoring him meant being willing to be critical about the conditions under which he died.
Our first impulse in honoring veterans, especially the dead, is to say that they died for an honorable cause and they died nobly. But they didn’t necessarily die for an honorable cause. A CSA soldier was not dying for an honorable cause–he died for slavery. But he died. And he left behind grieving people who wanted to believe his death was noble and meaningful. And it’s hard to say someone in our family died on the wrong side of history, or because of incompetence. We want our ancestors honored.
That we want them honored shouldn’t make us lie about how, or what for, they died. The more we lie about the past the more we poison our ability to deliberate about the present.
Alistair Horne’s compelling and painful Savage War of Peace suggests that France was irrationally and disastrously intransigent in regard to Algeria because of a feeling that they had to recoup the honor they’d lost in Vietnam and WWII. It seemed to me that the people most in favor of invading Iraq were people who believed that the US could have won Vietnam had it not been for a stab in the back by liberal media. They wanted to refight Vietnam. That, of course, was Hitler’s argument about the Great War and in favor of another one (a sadly effective argument). The whole “it wasn’t about slavery” argument is just as irrational as my wanting my uncle not to have died because of an incompetent leader—a CSA soldier dying for the cause of slavery died for a terrible cause; my uncle probably died because of a terrible leader.
Our inability to be critical of a war because it feels like dishonoring the dead means we can’t deliberate about war, we can’t be honest about our own history, and we try to prove ourselves honorable by engaging in more war (or violence to protect our narrative about a war, as in Charlottesvile).
My uncle was a hero. Fredenall was an incompetent, over-promoted putz who completely bungled the Battle of the Kasserine Pass and whose bungling might have contributed to my uncle’s death.
All of those things can be true at the same time.
We cannot let our desire for honoring the military dead preclude deliberation about how and why they died. Memorial Day should be so much about honoring the people who have died in war that we try to prevent future wars and future deaths. We have to live in a world in which we honor the military dead without thinking we are prohibited from being critical of the cause for which they fought, the people who led them, or the political discourse that caused them to go to war. We should honor their deaths by learning from them and making deaths like theirs unnecessary.