War: A Brutish, Inglorious Waste
By the end, the reader has been exposed to the literary equivalent of the justifiably famous opening segment of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Imagine the brutal intensity and horrifying realism of the terror of the battlefield depicted on-screen for twenty-seven unrelenting minutes in that film running through your head for as long as it takes to read through this book. Fear is the guiding emotional tenor of most of the pages of this story because the author was a sane individual when he enlisted and a sane individual when he was discharged. Only someone who has not fully crossed over the line into one of those “pathic” mental states could experience what the author writes about without fear becoming an almost oppressive companion. Only one aspect could account for maintaining that sanity and not giving in so fully to the fear as to become paralytic.
Basic Sanity Training
What saves an everyday, ordinary guy with no training as a warrior whatever from going made when daily facing the “kaleidoscope of the unreal, as though designed by some fiendish ghoul” that is combat and its aftermath? Training. The military is really a very weird machine, existing solely for the process of transforming perfectly nice people into killing machines. (Without, notably, ever inventing a machine for reversing that process once the job is done.) The word “training” and references to instruction before deployment thickly populate the text. Basic training is, of course, at the time a hated period marked by humiliation and excessive brutality on the part of charged with turning nice young men into killers. Like any normal person, the author comes to regard this cruel and violent training as torture. By the end, however, it is precisely this cruelty and violence which he credits for getting him out not just alive but still sane:
“That we had survived emotionally—at least for the moment—was, and is, ample evidence to me that our training and discipline were the best. They prepared us for the worst, which is what we experienced.”
The Power of Propaganda
Running like an invisible thread just below the surface of the book that holds it all together is the subtly mechanized theme of how propaganda may be the single most important element for winning a war. The author actually drops out of officer training school to enlist as a lowly infantryman because he fears that school will delay his entry into the action by two years. Even during the violence and humiliation of basic training, he confesses that neither he nor anyone training alongside him seemed to recognize “the awesome reality that we were training to be cannon fodder in a global war that had already snuffed out millions of lives never seemed to occur to us.” Once he delivered to the Pacific theater, the soldiers in the enemy army are no longer Japanese as it becomes not just easy but second nature to dehumanize them through the collective dismissal of their culture by derisively referring to them at all times as “Japs” or “Nips.”
