In trying to imagine my father Jim’s feelings at the outbreak of WWII, I again had to confront the pacifist stance I grew up with. When my Quaker teachers of the Fifties would herald the latest conscientious objector to jump in front of a submarine to prevent its launching, they added that if everyone behaved that way, there would be no war. So I, with a child’s literal logic, assumed the reverse was true. Since conscientious objectors didn’t want war, and did what they could to prevent it, then military men must want war, and served to make war happen.
This actually became the prevailing countercultural opinion during the Vietnam years, when returning soldiers were reviled by hippies and war protesters (like myself). In holding all participants accountable for the war, we were implicitly accusing them of wanting war. It was a slippage of logic that allowed us to reduce a highly complex situation to simple black and white, and to take out our frustration over a seemingly interminable conflict on an easily identifiable scapegoat: those in uniform. It also spared us any grief over those who died; they had chosen to make war, after all. I didn’t realize what a high stake I had in this stereotyping; if I could see my father as simply a trigger-happy young man who had fallen for the bloody myth of patriotism, I didn’t have to grieve him. I actually was proud of my “objectivity” during the Vietnam era, in dismissing Jim from the calculus. I used cliche’s like “Live by the sword, die by the sword;” “You reap what you sow,” and “Better Red than dead,” (which I callously told my father’s sister, Aunt Peg, once when I was railing against the Vietnam War. She said I was dishonoring my father, and almost threw me out of her house). The cliches lulled me, standing in for thinking, learning history, or even facing the truth of who I was: a girl with a hole in her heart.
