"It Ain't the Dying that's Scary ... It's the Killing"
By Carl M. Cannon
December 14, 2023U.S. Army Signal Corps
This is an excerpt from Carl Cannon’s foreword to River City One: A Novel (Simon and Schuster, 2023) by John J. Waters. What follows is part two in a two-part series on how Americans come home from war. Part one can be read here.
Standing on the cliff at Pointe du Hoc sixty years after D-Day, I encountered a German tourist at the same spot. He stepped aside in deference to me, an obvious American, and instructed his family to do the same. I had been gazing out at the Normandy coastline while envisioning the seven thousand ships in the Allied armada that had come to liberate a continent. What this man, who was not even alive when Hitler wreaked havoc on Europe, was thinking I can only imagine. The words that came to my mind were from Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. As Robert E. Lee surrendered, Grant found himself trying to reconcile his respect for the bravery of the Confederates, including Lee, with contempt for the depraved institution that had induced them to take up arms against their own nation in the first place. It was a cause, Grant wrote, that was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
As twenty-first century America undergoes one of its periodic reckonings on race, we are reexamining slavery’s legacy. Yes, it’s true that Jim Crow was a conscious attempt to maintain white supremacy in the South. But that’s not all. I believe it was also driven by the same motivation that fueled the odious “Lost Cause” narrative as well as hagiographic books ranging from Gone with the Wind to Lee’s Lieutenants: namely, a revisionist impulse to show all that killing and suffering hadn’t been for nothing. This is not to say that the battle-tested Union men who marched with Grant—or those in the Greatest Generation, for that matter—didn’t pay any psychic price. We know better.
More than fifty years after the fact, a onetime American soldier named Earl Crumby who earned a Purple Heart in the Battle of the Bulge, wept while describing for writer Tim Madigan the kind of details veterans do not describe to children. Crumby’s wife of many decades had died a few years earlier, but his tears that day weren’t for her. “As dearly as I loved that woman, her death didn’t affect me near as much as it does to sit down here and talk to you about seeing those young boys butchered during the war,” he told Madigan. “It was nothing but arms and legs, heads and guts. You’d think you could forget something like that. But you can’t.”
https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2023/12/14/it_aint_the_dying_thats_scary__its_the_killing_998930.html
