EPILOGUE
The Imprint of Battle
If battles are the generators of history, are they all of roughly equal importance? If we can agree that they change events in a manner that the development of the comic book or gender issues within the cloister do not, what gives precedence of memory to particular engagements, allowing some to leave a larger imprint on history than others? Why is Delium more recognized than the battle of Nemea (394 B.C.), but less than Marathon (490 B.C.), Shiloh more so than Bentonville (1865) but not as much as Gettysburg (1863), or Okinawa more familiar than Peleliu (November 1944) and in turn not so well known as Guadalcanal (1942–43)?
In these three studies I sought to demonstrate how millions of unsuspecting people have been changed by events that are either forgotten or hardly known—and that there are battles important in insidious and often undetected ways, even if they are deemed not so critical by the arbitrary calculus of history. But what precisely is that logic of history? If all battles have important ripples, what determines which engagements deserve more official recognition both formally and in the popular imagination?
Various criteria come to mind; yet it is nearly impossible to sort out their comparative weight on any given occasion. We should, of course, note the more narrow interests of military historians that focus attention on set pieces like Leuctra, Adrianople, Austerlitz, Chancellorsville, and Inchon because they are stellar examples of tactical brilliance, and thus enshrined as case histories in which the mind of a single general can determine the fate of thousands. In most cases, however, the tactics of Epaminondas at Leuctra or the efficacy of longbows at Crécy are not as well known to the public, and so public recognition requires more from battles than the bloody art of killing—even if such esoterica of new maneuvers and weaponry can have effects upon millions not yet born.
Oddly, the number of combatants in and of itself is not always a reliable indicator of a battle’s perceived historical import. The enormous American and Japanese forces on Okinawa (eventually to number together nearly a half million on land, on sea, and in the air) no doubt explain the ferocity and horrific losses that in turn changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of veterans as well as those of the relatives and friends of the fallen. Yet most Americans seem to know more about Guadalcanal or perhaps even Iwo Jima. As noted, more probably fought at Nemea than at Delium; the former may have been the largest hoplite battle between poleis in the history of the Greek city-state—an engagement that many classicists nevertheless recall nothing about. The Nationalist Chinese lost an army of nearly six hundred thousand at Suchow in late 1948—and few outside China know a thing about the battle. How many fought can help determine a battle’s legacy, but there is also more to the historical equation than the mere number of combatants who file onto the field of battle.
Does the sheer number of dead, then, more likely guarantee remembrance? Usually, horrific casualties capture the attention of future generations—but tragically not always. Otherwise the siege of Leningrad would be far more noteworthy than Little Bighorn—900 days of constant killing and perhaps a million dead versus an hour or so in which 215 were annihilated. Yet the latter, not the former, is probably the most written-about battle in modern military history. There is a cruel arbitrariness to formal history that puts the fate of a few hundred over the tragedy of hundreds of thousands—in addition to the still greater number of those affected by such catastrophic losses. Clearly the dead alone do not determine whether a battle is well known or merely a footnote of history.
Location seems particularly important. Again, we know at least something about Delium because, like Marathon, it took place near Athens and was seared into the memory of prominent contemporary Athenians whose lives and works we still are familiar with today. Thucydides, after all, gave it three hundred lines. But Coronea, Oenophyta, Nemea? These are fights in the rural hinterlands, closer to Thebes or Corinth than to the grandiose city Pericles built, and so their thousands of dead have always rested in obscurity. Okinawa took on an importance greater than Tarawa or Burma not simply because of its butcher’s bill, but in part perhaps because of its proximity to the Japanese homeland. Had the al-Qaeda terrorists of September 11 chosen to crash their hijacked jets into Fresno’s only two existing “skyscrapers,” there may well have been three thousand Americans dead while at work in their offices, but it is not so likely that the nation itself would have been so radically transformed. The reason is not just that the World Trade Center is a national icon and known internationally and our Security Bank Building is not.
Rather—terribile dictu—there were not Fresnans in New York’s twin buildings, but instead far more influential men and women who write our books, edit our newspapers, bring us the evening news, run our companies, and monitor our financial health. These so-called movers and shakers saw firsthand, and in some cases were in, what would become an inferno of twenty acres in the very midst of the most powerful city in the history of civilization. Shiloh was located in between North and South, easily accessible by river transport, and a strategic nexus of the entire enormous Western theater in a manner that even the greater nightmare of Cold Harbor was not.
Timing is critical as well, both in the more immediate sense of a battle’s effect on the tactical and strategic computation of an ongoing war, and on the pulse of a larger popular culture. Delium closed down an entire front; in the same manner Shiloh opened one up even larger. The much-heralded Chaeronea ended the free Greek city-state; the nearly forgotten second battle of Coronea a few miles away did not. In contrast, it is hard to determine precisely what the terrible shelling and bombing at Khe Sanh accomplished—other than perhaps blowing apart as many as fifty thousand North Vietnamese in a few weeks and serving as an exemplar of American courage, tenacity, and frightening lethality. Okinawa will be forever connected with the decision to drop the atomic bombs and the armistice that came only six weeks after the island was declared secure; and yet we know less than we should about its suicidal horror only because the end of Nazism and the close of the European theater were simultaneous events that drew American attention away from the Pacific. Chance has much to do with the hierarchy of formal historical commemoration.
But just as important as space and time in calculating the immediate military ripples of battle are the more long-term cultural and social currents that can arise. September 11 seemed to be a divide in a variety of contexts, coming immediately after the end of the Clinton administration and in the inaugural year of the Bush presidency—marking an end to a two-decade era of apparent restraint in the face of dozens of past terrorist attacks upon the United States. The loss of three thousand was almost immediately recognized by Americans as the straw that broke the camel’s back—in the same way perhaps the invasion of Poland became the powder keg of World War II, while the earlier extinction of Czechoslovakia is nearly forgotten. The lost at Pearl Harbor seemed to have had more effect on the world than the many thousands butchered at the Rape of Nanking—the former brought to Americans their own dead and led them to war, the latter provided us abstract outrage at the fate of far distant others.
Cannae is also heralded in a way the immediately prior brutal fighting at Lake Trasimene and Trebia is not. Hannibal’s masterpiece victory took place no closer to Rome and saw not too many more casualties than Trasimene. But Cannae came at the end of a string of Roman defeats and left Italy demoralized and bereft of frontline legionaries for almost six months—Rome itself being relatively vulnerable to immediate attack. Tet was a devastating military defeat for the communist forces in South Vietnam and one of the most lopsided victories in American military history. Yet it is remembered today with a strange mixture of humiliation, loss, and regret—inasmuch as the fighting in Saigon broke out just a few weeks after an American administration had promised that the war was near a close and the enemy exhausted. To many influential Americans—and especially Walter Cronkite—that the communists could lose forty thousand men in and around South Vietnam’s major cities oddly seemed to reflect power rather than the promised desperation. Timing, the offspring of fate and chance, can be everything in determining an engagement’s legacy.
There are, of course, the flukes of history that affect, perhaps unfairly and cruelly so, the degree of historical deference given to battles. Had Socrates not fought at Delium, we would have no mention of the fighting in any of Plato’s dialogues. Little Bighorn is infamous because of the improbability of Native Americans killing all opposing federal troops who a decade earlier had fought so magnificently on both sides in the Civil War—and perhaps also because the annihilation of every single American soldier under Custer at that small hillock came amid chauvinistic celebrations of the centenary of the nation’s birth. That being said, had colorful, handsome, boisterous, and unstable George Armstrong Custer been absent we would have known much less of a final encirclement forever immortalized as “Custer’s Last Stand.”
I know many literary critics who can recall that Cervantes fought at the Battle of Lepanto, or that Byron wrote a poem about Don Juan, but otherwise know nothing of the battle’s gruesome details or larger historical context. They certainly care little about the near-contemporary siege of Malta or the horrific fighting on Cyprus weeks before Lepanto. Take Teddy Roosevelt away from San Juan Hill and the Spanish-American War is not much more seminal than an entire series of successful U.S. interventions at places now unknown and unremembered in Cuba and the Philippines.
Tactics, numbers, the dead, location, timing, political aftershocks, and luminaries all, then, affect the ripples of a given battle. But there is still this lingering question not of actual, but of perceived, import—one that goes directly to the heart of culture, the nature of history, and the dominance of Western civilization. Quite simply, we know about some battles and not others because veterans, eyewitnesses, or historians wrote about them—and often for reasons not entirely explicable by the criteria outlined above. We are still numbed by Hernán Cortés’s final obliteration of Tenochtitlán, where maybe 200,000 Aztecs perished in the inferno; yet less than a half century earlier that same doomed people may well have sacrificially murdered nearly 90,000 of its neighbors at a daily rate that sometimes exceeded the killing tally of Auschwitz—a fact almost unknown today. But then there was no Bernal Díaz del Castillo or Bishop Sahagun around to record thousands walking up the great pyramid to their deaths—and neither printing presses, a book market, nor a literate reading public in Nahuatl-speaking Mexico. Well before Little Bighorn there were tens of thousands of Native Americans who butchered each other yearly—but no yellow journalists, New York papers, or dime-store novelists to record the carnage for posterity.
The divide is not explicable simply in terms of literacy and illiteracy, or the presence of traditional history versus a less sure oral tradition. There is something about Western civilization itself, and particularly in recent years American culture—the power of market capitalism, the dynamism of individual freedom, and the zeal of unbridled inquiry—that combines to skew the remembrance of battles. In Russia, of course, Leningrad is more important than Little Bighorn, and our own myopia about the relative significance of the two battles is irrelevant to most Russians. Yet it remains true that more books—printed in English, available to millions in Europe and the United States, serialized in magazines and adapted to the big screen—deal with Custer than the hundreds of thousands who died among snow, rats, and typhoid to stop Nazism. Someone in Buenos Aires is more likely to know of Custer’s blond locks than about the Russian or German generals at Leningrad.
So the ripples of battle in their formal sense are guided by the presence of historians, and that means originally Westerners, and more recently in large part Europeans and Americans. And such distortions do not always play out in bias toward Westerners, especially in the present age. In April 2002 the Israeli Defense Forces entered the West Bank community of Jenin to hunt out suspected suicide-murderers, whose comembers had blown up hundreds of Israeli civilians over the prior year. Although fewer than sixty Palestinians were killed in Jenin—the great majority of them combatants—the world media seized upon the street fighting, dubbing it “Jeningrad” as if they were somehow the moral equivalent of one million Germans and Russians lost at Stalingrad. Yet just days after the Israeli withdrawal from Jenin, Pakistan squared off against India. The stakes were surely far higher: One-fifth of the world’s population was involved. Both sides were nuclear powers and issued threats to use their arsenals. In the prior year alone nearly four times more Indians and Pakistanis were killed than Palestinians and Israelis. By any calculation of numbers, the specter of the dead, the geopolitical consequences, or the long-term environmental health of the planet, the world should know all the major cities in Kashmir rather than a few street names in Jenin. And if the world sought to chronicle destruction and death in an Islamic city, then by any fair measure it should have turned its attention to Grozny, where an entire society of Muslim Chechnyans was quite literally obliterated by the Russian army.
The idiosyncrasies of historical remembrance of battle do not hinge alone on the presence of a Socrates or Teddy Roosevelt in the ranks. Sometimes there are wild cards of culture and politics as well. In this case and at this time, the fact that the Israelis fit the stereotype of affluent and proud Westerners abroad while the Palestinians were constructed as impoverished and oppressed colonial subjects brought to the equation the sympathies of influential Americans and Europeans in the media, universities, and government—the prominent and sometimes worrisome elites who determined to send their reporters, scholars, and diplomats to Jenin rather than to Islamabad or Grozny.
Like it or not, Westerners from Herodotus’s time to the present age carry historical weight far out of proportion to their numbers, and so create waves where there should only be tiny ripples. In the decade of the 1990s alone there were literally millions of innocent Africans butchered in Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia, and Mozambique, more killed in a single month than all those lost on the West Bank or in Israel proper in the last half century—but for a variety of perverse reasons those dead carried little moral capital with the arbiters of the world’s attention and memory.
Of course, history is only a capricious recorder of battles, the craft that elevates remembrance of a few thousands who battled at Thermopylae over the hundreds of thousands who perished in oblivion when Cambyses conquered Egypt. But there are also the parallel ripples—those that I tried to chronicle in this book—of private experiences and individuals who are lost to the historical record, but not lost to the great train of events that equally affects the human condition, whether that be the decision to drop the A-bomb, the lessons of battling suicides, the Lost Opportunity, Ben-Hur, Euripides’ Suppliants, the complete annihilation of Thespiae—or the death of an obscure Swedish farm boy in 1945 on far distant Okinawa.
Quite apart from what most people remember or read, some forgotten battles will silently and without acknowledgment still continue to change the way they live and think. So we do not know what saint or monster, what devilish cult or humane religion, or what great poem or worthless doggerel will arise out of the holocaust of mass killing and fighting in Rwanda, but right now, unbeknown to the world, the swells from that horrendous hand-to-hand slaughter are billowing out, and on what shores they will finally lap we can hardly imagine. And we Americans in our professed greatest age of security and affluence are not immune from battle and its ripples.
The United States was roused from its siesta on September 11 to learn in dismay that millions abroad were pleased over its losses. Many of its supposed friends among “moderate” Arab regimes were silent. Some, in fact, either inadvertently or deliberately, may have been involved in aiding and abetting the terrorists themselves. Post-9/11 polls revealed that as many as 70 percent of those surveyed in most Arab countries shared a dislike of the United States. The bombing exposed a previously ignored but vast fault line between the Western and Islamic—and particularly Middle Eastern—worlds, all the more dramatic given near-instant satellite transmission of celebrating throngs in the streets of the West Bank, Pakistan, and Egypt. Terrorism on a grand scale in minutes strips away the pretensions of peace. It shows things the way they really have been among the masses rather than how events and ideologies were supposed to be presented by those elites in government, universities, and the media.
Millions of Americans had forgotten that the easy use of the Internet, participation in the World Cup, or showy foreign jets at major Western airports had little to do with the nature of civil society abroad. For all the veneer of Westernism in the Islamic world—cell phones, television sets, luxury hotels, and fast-food franchises—citizens of the United States were rudely reminded in the aftermath of 9/11 that there are few, if any, legitimate democracies in the Arab Middle East. Whether theocrats in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan, dictators in Libya, Syria, or Iraq, or milder autocrats in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, not one government is subject to audit, recall, or removal by its populace. Such an absence of consensual politics permeates all such unfree societies that are more likely to be without religious tolerance, free expression, truly secular institutions, sexual equity, and an unbridled media.
This sudden sobriety ushered in on September 11 also reminded us of the vast differences between freedom and tyranny in a supposedly uniform global culture at “the end of history.” After the honking in the streets celebrating the American dead in some Muslim countries, few Americans perhaps saw Mr. Arafat as a responsible force for peace, the tribal yet ultramodern sheiks of Saudi Arabia as temperate friends—or even many of the NATO allies that voiced anger at America in the months after as real comrades in arms.
Neither diplomats nor strategists immediately could grasp that the world—as happened after Salamis on September 28, 480 B.C. or the Fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453—had suddenly cracked apart and would not be put back together with quite the same pieces. Thus the 9/11 tragedy and its aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq led to fundamental rethinking about NATO, the role of the United Nations, and American relationships with continental European countries. Europeans loudly pronounced a new anti-Americanism and talked of a separate “German way”; Americans silently seethed and were resigned to give them their wish. After September 11, Europeans vented against the American protectorate even as average citizens in Des Moines and Tulare quietly shrugged and likewise asked why the United States at great cost is defending a continent that has a larger population and economy than its own.
Culture, like politics, is not immune to these billowing waves of combat. And we can look to the past to see that cultural repercussions usually follow from battles. The catalysts for modernism were Verdun, the Somme, and the general carnage of the First World War trenches. Out of those infernos spread the belief that the old foundations of staid manners, traditional genres of art and literature, unquestioning patriotism—dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—and national politics had somehow led to Europe’s millions being gassed and blown apart for years in the mud of the French countryside without either victory or defeat.
Perhaps the present brand of postmodernism was born primarily in France as well. After the humiliating drive of the Panzers through the Ardennes in May 1940, the collapse of Europe’s largest army in six weeks, and the rescue by the Americans and British in August 1944, theories were easier to accept than facts. For a few elite but stunned postwar Frenchmen, fiction was more palatable than reality, text and discourse a refuge from a truth as unacceptable as it was bothersome.
The crater in New York at the very epicenter of American arts and letters perhaps will have a similarly profound though more likely opposite effect—as we reply to a temporary loss with a more confident pursuit of victory rather than embarrassing denial. Without the World Trade Center on the New York skyline, it will be discomforting to suggest that events are mere historical fictions or constructions of power. Who now will insist that papier-maché and urine jars best capture the human condition? Not that such art and literature born often out of sarcasm and nihilism will evaporate. Such sensationalism will not—at least for a time and among a few. But most people, desperate for transcendence and something real—and perhaps even exquisite—amid the recovery from catastrophe, will gradually be less interested in the clever but empty games of relativists who spawn such faux-art a few blocks away from the detritus of the greatest foreign attack on American shores in our nation’s history.
Carefully arranging together some concrete and steel, putting it on display in a gallery, and then calling such impressionism “art” will not be as popular as before. Millions, after all, have seen and then judged the jumbled mess on a far grander scale—mixed with flesh and bone no less—to be not sculpture, but a catastrophe and an abomination. Where terrorism and killing take place is often as important as how many fight and die and who wins.
The creed of contemporary multiculturalism sought to establish that all societies were roughly equal and that the “other” was but a crude Western fiction. But we were reminded that people like the Taliban who did not vote, treated women as chattel, and whipped and stoned to death dissenters of their primordial world were different folk from citizens of a democracy. A chief corollary to such cultural relativism was that Americans have wrongly embraced a belief in the innate humanity of the West largely out of ethnocentric ignorance. But surely the opposite has been proven true: the more Americans after September 11 learned about the world of the madrassas, the six or seven varieties of Islamic female coverings, the Dickensian Pakistani street, and murderous gangs in Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, then the more, not less, they are appalled by societies that are so anti-Western.
Blasts in Manhattan followed by televised pictures of women in burqas having their brains blown out in an Afghan soccer stadium have a tendency to make people rethink what they had been told—and just maybe to realize what a rare and beautiful gift is the Western heritage of democracy and freedom. So it was also after Thermopylae and the invasion of Poland in 1939, and so it is after 9/11—a date that has blown apart history as we have known it over the last few decades.
Others among the influential for a moment after the retaliatory strikes of October 7, 2001, talked of moral equivalency—the conventional wisdom that American precision targeting of an enemy in time of war carried the same ethical burden as the terrorists’ deliberate mass-murdering of civilians at peace. But billions worldwide knew that the selective wreckage of al-Qaeda safe houses in Kabul was not comparable to the smoldering crater that was once the World Trade Center. Why else were terrorists and the Taliban hiding in mosques and infirmaries to avoid American bombs while their own manuals instructed killers to commit mass murder in Jewish hospitals and temples? So the reality that average folk viewed on their televisions made them question the bottled piety of the last decades that they heard from a powerful and influential few. And in that moral calculus, September 11 shocked an affluent and at times self-satisfied American citizenry into confessing that it was no longer either too wealthy, too refined, or too sensitive to kill killers.
Knowledge of the past would have reminded us that battle does such things to a people. Socrates cannot be understood without appreciating that his thought came of age only during the murderous three decades of the Peloponnesian War. Battles, as Delium and Shiloh suggest, can create prominent men and can destroy them as well. The same is true of ideas. The pacifism of the post-Vietnam generation shamed Americans into thinking that all conflicts were bad. Relativism sometimes convinced them that they were not that much different from their enemies. Conflict resolution advised that there was rarely such a thing as a moral armed struggle of good against evil—to be scoffed at as “Manichaean”—and that strife is a result of misunderstandings and so can be resolved through give-and-take and rational discourse. But once more September 11 has returned America to the classical view of war as a tragic, but sometimes necessary, option for humans when unchallenged evil threatens civilization.
In 1986 a panel of the United Nations declared that war was an aberration and not in any way natural or innate to humans. Yet the Greek philosopher Heraclitus twenty-five centuries earlier had dubbed it “the father, the king of us all.” After the fall of the twin towers, Americans were more likely to believe a dead Greek than the most sophisticated lawyers and social scientists of the modern Western world.
In a single morning Americans also rediscovered the Hellenic idea that it is not wars per se that are always terrible, but the people—Hitler, Tojo, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden—and their repugnant ideas who start them. In this present conflict, the -isms and -ologies of radical Islamic fundamentalism that have infected millions can be shown to be bankrupt only by their complete repudiation, which tragically must come out of military defeat, subsequent humiliation, and real personal costs for all who embrace them. Only that way can both adherents and the innocent alike learn the wages of allowing their country to be hijacked by agents of intolerance. Ask the Japanese about the terrible sequelae to Okinawa.
The enemy in battle is never a person per se, but the fanaticism that has taken hold of him. Battle likewise is sometimes the only exorcist strong enough to rid the zombie host of such deadly demons. The brilliant memoir of E. B. Sledge about his ghastly experiences in the inferno of Okinawa is often cited as an antiwar tract. It is. But we remember that his recollection is also more than that—as the last lines of the book reveal: “As the troops used to say, ‘If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.’ With privilege goes responsibility.”
Even we in the supposedly enlightened West may also relearn from fighting rich and educated terrorists that conflicts can often arise not out of real, but rather perceived grievances—or, as the Greeks taught us, from old-fashioned but now passé ideas like hatred, envy, fear, and self-interest. The agitators for secession were not the millions of poor and nonslaveowning Southern whites who lived hand-to-mouth, but the few plantationists whose antebellum cotton sales had made them among the wealthiest men in the history of civilization. Japan had as many people and as little land in 1941 as it does now, but a very different perception then of its own grievance, national right, and imperial destiny. People and their leaders can go to war not because their bellies ache with hunger, but out of the belief that they may otherwise lose—or even not augment—the sizable fortune, influence, or real power they hold.
The terrorists of al-Qaeda, like the Japanese militarists, attacked America not simply because they were poor, exploited, abused, or maladjusted, but perhaps as much out of loathing, trepidation, and resentment of the West. That fact in and of itself seemed somewhat a refutation of perhaps the entire twentieth-century confidence in the assertions of social science that man’s nature is not absolute, unchanging, and timeless, but simply a construct of his contemporary environment and (often pathological) upbringing. After September 11 we were reminded that our own prosperous and peaceful era, not history’s long centuries, was the true aberration in its denial of an unchanging human character driven by timeless passions and appetites.
Battles that seem to allow horrible things to transpire as ordinary events—as we saw from Shiloh and Delium—can also transform more subtly the lives of thousands of both the renowned and ordinary, well apart from the grand cosmology of politics, war, and culture. Rudolph Giuliani before September 11 was a lame-duck mayor of New York City, a sort of has-been limping out of office, pilloried by the press, and caught in personal scandal and gossip—his unique potential for leadership still unchanged, but the requisite arena for its manifestation long ago gone by. After the attacks he immediately emerged from Ground Zero to steady the city in the twilight of his tenure—reenergizing himself as the embodiment of New York grit and calm under fire, and so acclaimed as Time magazine’s Man of the Year and America’s civis princeps. Given his character, a Plutarch would suggest, his time was not over as we thought, but waiting all along for the eye of the storm.
George W. Bush, who lacked his predecessor’s encyclopedic knowledge of names, places, and dates, was—after the election fiasco in Florida—considered a near-illegitimate president, tongue-tied and in over his head, his impoverished vocabulary purported proof of his intellectual levity. But the terrorists’ war proved that he, like the Greek iambic poet Archilochus’s hedgehog, “knew one thing, but a big one”: how to galvanize his people and lead them to battle against an evil enemy in the hour of his country’s great peril. That “big one” should never have had the opportunity to appear, but then conflicts also are illogical things and should also perhaps not occur. Few before 9/11 would have remembered that the original prime directive of the founders’ presidency was to protect the citizenry from foreign attack rather than to ensure healthy GNP, the Dow above 11,000, and an approval rating of over 60 percent.
We learned in the early part of the Afghanistan war that a slain Johnny Spann was an unheralded middle-class American with a fine record at the CIA, a captured John Walker a “mixed-up” child of affluence cavorting among the Taliban. The one died doing his duty for his country, the other fought for its enemies confused and searching for personal fulfillment. Both were caught in battle on videotape, their respective fates instantly suggesting that there were two very different Americans at cross-purposes even six thousand miles away. Not all reputations, then, were won and lost among the elite. Amid the grieving and less well known after September 11, there are right now thousands of undiscovered brave and anonymous souls who will vow to remember their fallen in all that they do and say for the duration of their lives. If the past is any guide to the future, Americans will see their spirit soon enough at shops, on television, and in bookstores for decades hence—and with it the knowledge that the voices of the battlefield dead can still speak among us in the here and now.
Whatever battles like Okinawa did to thousands of servicemen, it surely taught them that there are many in the world who do not like the United States and seek to use their wealth and power to kill as many Americans as they can; thus it was no surprise that throughout the national debate over the proper response to September 11, crusty veterans were neither shrill in their bloodlust nor apologetic pacifists, but rather reminded younger generations that they had seen it all before and unfortunately knew precisely what to do and how it must end.
Other than the distant bombing and hundred-hour ground war in the Gulf during a few days in 1991, and isolated actions in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, we have been mostly at peace from real organized killing for thirty years and so have forgotten in a brief generation that since the birth of civilization entire worlds have changed, both abruptly and insidiously, in minutes—once thousands fall to the fire and explosions unleashed by others. Americans are startled at pronouncements that “nothing is the same after 9/11,” dumbfounded that their own comfortable and relatively predictable worlds are now changed—and will continue to be different—for years to come. But if history demonstrates that Lexington and Concord, Fort Sumter, and Pearl Harbor all turned America into a different nation in a matter of minutes, why should we now be any less immune from the far greater bloodletting on September 11? If our understanding of Greek tragedy, art, philosophy, politics, and war were changed by a relatively obscure battle at Delium, why would not the destruction of the World Trade Center and the bombing of the Pentagon not similarly alter American culture? The Athenian fifth century was ushered in by the defeat of Xerxes—but only after the destruction of the first Parthenon, the desolation of Athens itself, the Persian effort to destroy or absorb Hellenic civilization, and the miraculous Greek counterresponse at Salamis.
Millions of the anonymous have had their lives altered in ways we cannot grasp for centuries, as a single battle—with all its youth, confined space, and dreadful killing—insidiously warps the memory of the friends and families of the fallen, twists the thoughts and aspirations of the veterans of the ordeal, and abruptly ends the accomplishments of the dead. In that sense the ripples of battle are also immune from and care little for what people write and read, in or outside the dominant West. They simply wash up on us all as we speak and in ways that cannot fully be known until centuries after we are gone.