Question: How Many Deaths Will It Take Till He Knows?

The answer, my friend, is the title of this column, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a 1962 Bob Dylan classic.  This week Dylan, age 71, received from President Obama the highest civilian honor in our country, the Medal of Freedom, given for "meritourious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States or to world peace or to cultural or other significant endeavors."

Congratulations, Bob! Cute pictures of Barack and Bob: doesn't Bob look sort of like Moammar Gadhafi?

Speaking of many many deaths, I read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy in May.  I’d never read it before.

Got me thinking about war novels.  My impression was that I hadn’t read very many, the same way I don’t go to war movies – too painful, too scary, too violent, too depressing, too insistent that I deal with the world when I’d rather ignore it.  Why spend money and time on that?

But reading on Wikipedia about war novels, I realized that in high school and college and sometimes just because a book is getting a lot of buzz, I’ve read quite a few war novels.

I’m curious to hear from readers what war novels you’ve read, recommend, admire. (Wikipedia defines it as: a novel in which the primary action takes place in a field of armed combat, or in a domestic setting (or home front) where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, or recovery from, war.  Yeah, I know, Wikipedia is limited; just bear with me on this….)

War novels I’ve read include: The Iliad, The Aeneid, The Book of Revelation, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Dante, War and Peace, The Red Badge of Courage, Mrs. Dalloway, Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms), Solzyhenitsyn, Slaughterhouse Five, The Quiet American, Catch-22, Cold Mountain, Sophie’s Choice, Atonement, John le Carre, The English Patient.

Oh whoops, this is supposed to be a column about America.  Well, that’s a list of what this particular American has read….but I wonder; do people from different countries write and read different kinds of war fiction?

Tolstoy has a funny quote about different nationalities.  It’s in a section where he is commenting on the difference in military leadership style of the German and Russian generals of his side’s army; he dislikes the Germans.

A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally both in mind and body irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world and therefore, as an Englishman, always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does to believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth -- science -- which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

Tolstoy reminds us that war is not a science, or a machine, but a human force and tragedy.  And that self-assurance of any nationality does not win wars.  He particularly defends the head of the Russian forces, General Kutuzov, who was apparently much criticized for not fighting Napoleon’s army more aggressively.  Tolstoy paints a picture of a wise old man of war who knew the folly of overreach and the wisdom of restraint.  By retreating he actually won, while Napoleon, by advancing, lost.  It’s sort of the Zen of war.  Tolstoy says, “The strongest of all warriors are these two – Time and Patience.”

For the first 900 pages or so of War and Peace I was struck by the difference between the war scenes (Battles of Austerlitz, Borodino, the retreat from Moscow) and the peace scenes (salons in St. Petersburg, opera in Moscow, farms and children.)  I wondered if Tolstoy had read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth was Prejudice and Darcy Pride (or was it the other way around?) Was Tolstoy contrasting men/public/battle (war) and women/domestic/emotions/art (peace?)

Then I realized war was in most scenes (conflict, pride, regret, debt) and so was peace (hope, love, future, God.)  Maybe every novel has something to do with war?  Harry Potter, Wind in the Willows, Agatha Christie – are these war novels?  Is war simply part of the human experience? 

On this past Memorial Day weekend our US Department of Defense announced the beginning of a 13-year commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the disastrous Vietnam War.

The unusually ambitious project that started on Monday was authorized by Congress and will be carried out by the Defense Department through 2025, tracking the progress of a war that began with a relative handful of advisers before escalating to more than 500,000 American troops. By the time the last troops left in a negotiated withdrawal followed by the famous helicopter evacuation from the roof of the embassy in Saigon in 1975, more than 58,000 were dead.

The first phase of the commemoration, through 2014, will be devoted to recruiting partners and support. Organizers envision tens of thousands of commemoration events across the country from 2014 to 2017. Then until 2025, they plan to work to sustain the effort through oral histories, forums, seminars and the like (see the New York Times).

I wonder if these commemoration events will include the role of the anti-war movement in ending that war.  Like maybe a performance of Dylan singing “Blowin’ in the Wind?”

Asked about the song’s meaning, Dylan said in an interview in Sing Out! Magazine in 1962:

There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, it’s in the wind – and it’s blowing in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some  ...But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know . . . and then it flies away. I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many   . . . You people over 21, you’re older and smarter.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter