[Two hundred
years ago this week, the U.S.
declared war on the North African nation of Algiers, leading to the
unremembered conflict about which I wrote in Monday’s post. That
Second Barbary War is one of many such forgotten wars in American history,
and for this series I’ve highlighted and analyzed others, leading up to this
special weekend post responding to a relevant recent piece by one of my model
AmericanStudiers.]
On how and why
we’ve managed to forget one of our most visible communities.
Given the amount
of news and media coverage dedicated to the American military, it would seem
preposterous to suggest that we have in any way forgotten that national
community. But in his extremely impressive recent Atlantic cover story “The
Tragedy of the American Military,” writer and journalist James Fallows
makes the case that we have in some key ways done just that. To quote the start
of his first main section, “This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the
military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so
familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not.” And shortly
thereafter Fallows ties this argument to both the specialized nature of our
current volunteer military (noting that many more Americans now live on farms
than serve in the military) and, most relevantly to my mind, the distant nature
of our 21st century wars. “As a country, America has been at war
nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans,
roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point
in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.”
The whole piece
is challenging, provocative, and well worth your time, and I wanted to use this
weekend post to link to it. But I also wanted to suggest a connection between
my week’s series and these current acts of collective forgetting or elision.
That is, it seems highly relevant to me that we tend to remember well—or remember
at all—those wars for which we can develop relatively clear and coherent
narratives, and that can make us feel good about their outcomes and effects in
the process: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II. The obvious and
definite exception is the Vietnam War, which forced its way into our collective
consciousness for a variety of reasons—the innovative
media coverage it included, the protests
and divisions it spawned, the generation
of filmmakers it inspired—and has remained there. But while Vietnam
narratives certainly don’t tend to make us feel good, I would argue that they
have likewise become clear and coherent, a shared set of images and stories
through which we understand that conflict. Whereas when we have not developed
such a set of narratives, as I would argue we have not for any of the wars on
which I have focused this week—and, perhaps, we have not for our contemporary
wars—we have a far more difficult time remembering or engaging with them at
all.
So am I suggesting
that what we need is more established narratives of these forgotten histories,
past and present? I’m not—if anything, as
I’ve written elsewhere, I think our established narratives of wars like
World War II themselves need challenging and complicating. No, I’m suggesting
the opposite: that if we better remember the messier past wars, the histories
that can’t be reduced to images or narratives nearly as easily or neatly, it
might well make it more possible to remember and engage with our contemporary
messy wars as well. And thus, to come back to Fallows’ main point, to remember
and engage with the lives and experiences of all those Americans who have participated
in those wars—not just in the sweeping and superficial “Support the troops”
way, but in all their more complex, messy, and human stories and details.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other under-remembered conflicts you’d highlight?
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