HONOR
THEN
ROBERT RASMUS
We were awakened before dawn. I honestly don’t know whether I dreamed it or whether it really happened. I’ve asked buddies I’ve seen since the war: Can you remember these ambulances and army surgeons getting their gear out? I have such an absolute recollection of it, but nobody else remembers it. It had a dreamlike quality: just seeing surgeons ready to work. Here we were still healthy, still an hour or two from actual combat. It added to the inevitability that really bad, bad things were going to happen.
...
We weren’t able to bring those bodies back with us. The mortar fire became too much. The next morning, our squad was assigned to go back and recover the bodies. It was sunshine and quiet. We were passing the Germans we killed. Looking at the individual German dead, each took on a personality. These were no longer an abstraction. These were no longer the Germans of the brutish faces and the helmets we saw in the newsreels. They were exactly our age. These were boys like us.
I remember one, particularly. A redhead. To this day, I see the image of this young German soldier sitting against a tree. This group was probably resting, trying to make their escape. The whole thing might have been avoided had we been more experienced and called down in Germany for them to surrender. They probably would have been only too glad. Instead, out of fear, there was this needless slaughter. It has the flavor of murder, doesn’t it?
What I remember of that day is not so much the sense of loss at our two dead but a realization of how you’ve been conditioned. At that stage, we didn’t hate the Germans just for evil the country represented, their militarism, but right down to each individual German. Once the helmet is off, you’re looking at a teen-ager, another man. Obviously you have to go on. There are many, many more engagements.
…
You were constantly behind the lines and then moved up. You’d pass through your artillery and you knew you were getting closer. Pretty soon things would thin out. Just an hour earlier there were an awful lot of GI's around. As you got closer to action, it was only your platoon, and then it was your squad ahead of the other two. You were the point man for the squad.
I thought, this is incredible. We’ve got these great masses of troops, of quartermasters and truckers and tanks and support troops, then all of a sudden it’s so lonely. You’re out ahead of the whole thing.
Pictured above is a Nazi soldier on the Western Front during WWII. Photo by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
NOW
CLAIRE BRISENDINE
It seemed like, at the time, people thought that [World War II] had to happen, that it was unavoidable. I mean, what was the alternative? I think it would have been great if it could have been avoided, because obviously the loss of life was incredibly substantial, but... I also have a problem with, generally, the principle of countries acting as police for other countries, when they’re not necessarily involved with each other. So, I have a fundamental problem with that idea, but at a certain point is it appropriate to just let things happen and not get involved?
I definitely think that [war] should be avoided. I have a problem with the idea of a “just war,” which is what World War II is always referred to as, but I have never been able to come up with a better alternative.
Do you think it is honorable to be a soldier?
I don’t, actually. I think that it’s an honorable impulse to serve your country, and I think it’s an honorable impulse to protect people. The idea of signing yourself up to commit violence on other people’s orders is fundamentally not honorable.
Do you equate war to murder?
It always seems to involve murder. It’s hard for me to say that war equals murder, but has there ever been a war that didn’t involve murder? I would have to consider civilian casualties as murder.
Do you trust the government?
[Laughs.] No. It’s just, it’s too big. Why should they tell you everything? Your parents don’t tell you everything. So if you think of your government as being in place to protect you, hopefully, at it’s best, even in that act, they’re not going to tell you everything. It’s a nice idea to say that we should know everything all of the time, but I don’t even know if that’s useful, I don’t know if that would be better. I think it makes sense to me that some things can’t and shouldn’t be public knowledge, but how do you control for what is and what isn’t?
Claire Brisendine is a teacher in the arts department of the Baltimore School for the Arts.