Pitzer in the News
2003-2004 Academic Year

War Stories: What Vets Choose to Say About Their Battle Days

Pitzer Professor Stuart McConnell Quoted in Wall Street Journal Article

from the Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2004; Page D1

Fifty years from now, when veterans of the conflict in Iraq visit the classrooms of their grandchildren, there's one question they're sure to hear: "What's the worst thing you saw during the war?"

"That's always the question," says 82-year-old Art Shay, who logged 30 missions as lead navigator on B-24s over Germany during World War II. Mr. Shay tells young people about surviving a bombing run in which 31 of 35 U.S. planes were lost. One comrade bailed out while holding his parachute chest pack, and the wind wrenched it from his hands.

"He was falling, and it was three feet beyond his fingers," recalls Mr. Shay, who for years relived the scene in nightmares. "I desperately wanted closure. I'd wake up disappointed that I didn't sleep long enough for him to reach his parachute."

As we struggle to explain the latest news from Iraq to our children — the bloody insurgency, the prison scandal, the beheading— the experiences of Mr. Shay and other vets provide a window into the challenges. Warriors who speak to later generations often grapple with when to tell their war stories and how much to sanitize them. It usually takes 15 or 20 years before soldiers openly reveal their worst experiences, and Iraqi war veterans will likely follow this pattern of "hibernation," historians say.

Some U.S. soldiers now home from Iraq have already begun visiting schools, but they're circumspect. Army First Lt. Emily Woolsey, 24 years old, recently spoke at the Chantilly, Va., middle school she attended during the early 1990s. She chose not to tell students about the several dozen fatalities her division suffered. And she requested in advance that no one ask her if she'd taken someone's life, "a question you don't ask a soldier," she says.

Many vets feel they'll never be completely understood by civilians. "There's a certain bitterness all veterans feel," says Eric Dean, whose book, "Shook Over Hell," argues that many vets don't realize they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

This Memorial Day, thousands of aging vets will gather at the new World War II Memorial in Washington. The event is being billed as both a reunion and a chance for these former soldiers to tell their stories to younger generations. Racing against mortality— about 1,100 WWII vets die every day— a Library of Congress project will dispatch scores of students to the site to randomly collect oral histories.

Contact with young people can be cathartic for vets if their audiences listen sympathetically, Mr. Dean says. But it has to be a sensitive dance. Students shouldn't probe reluctant vets too deeply. And the armies of World War II and Vietnam vets now visiting schools should be careful when comparing their experiences to the fighting in Iraq. Analogies don't always work, says Stuart McConnell, a history professor at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. "World War II was a necessary war. If you apply that lesson to a different set of circumstances, you may be fooling yourself and the people you're talking to."

Some historians say that happened in the 1890s, when thousands of Union veterans stepped up their visits to classrooms. They wore their old medals, but rarely spoke frankly about the horrors they saw earning them. "There were things veterans felt they could talk about only with each other," says Prof. McConnell. Because vets held back awful details, gung-ho younger generations entered the Spanish American War and World War I ignorant of war's realities.

My parents recall octogenarian Civil War vets being wheeled into their grade schools in the 1930s. Seventy years later, as a World War II vet, my father now feels an obligation to visit classrooms himself.

One story he tells students is about a night, late in the war, when 14 German soldiers unexpectedly ran through his unit's encampment. Quickly surrounded by Americans, the German soldiers begged for their lives, showing wallet photos of their mothers. My father felt pity, as he realized that these soldiers were all 14 to 16 years old -- Hitler's last draftees. Moments later, a U.S. corporal slammed the butt of his carbine rifle into the chest of one of the captured Germans. The corporal's unnecessary violence became one of many combat memories my dad cannot shake.

In Peoria, Ill., middle-school students are learning that such memories are often passed on for generations. They've been corresponding with some of the 200 or so living children of Civil War veterans (the offspring of old vets who married young women between 1900 and 1930). Several children of Civil War vet Charles Pool will visit the Peoria students on Memorial Day. They'll speak about how their dad lost his leg in the war, and watched a newly freed slave murder his master.

One son, Garland Pool, 76, served in the Pacific just after World War II. Each war has its dark sides, and the Iraqi prisoner abuses are just the latest installment, he says. "My goal is to teach young people about morals."

One student in Peoria, Mariah Bankert, 11, has an uncle serving in Iraq. She senses the connection between her uncle's experience and Garland Pool's service in the 1940s, between Mr. Pool's father and the Revolutionary War vets he knew growing up in the 1840s. "Pride in serving your country carries from one generation to another," she says.

But Mr. Shay, the World War II vet, wants kids to know that pride is just one emotion that swells up in vets. He wept when the Nightline TV program aired photos of Americans who died in Iraq. Veterans have no closure, he says. "We can live around the war and build over it, but it's always there.