Reminds me a bit of my dad. Dad was in the Phillipines - Luzon. He was a alcoholic and very distant from my mom and us five kids. It wasn’t until he died that my aunt told me he was on a detail whose job it was to retrieve the bodies of fellow soldiers who had died in battle. Yes, I know this is part of war and the commitment to leave no fellow soldier behind. However, what the Japanese did to those bodies was despicable. He had a hard time with the memories of what he saw.
It made it a bit easier for me to forgive him. A year or two before he died, he wanted me to contact an old army buddy that he was hoping was still alive. I regret that I was too selfish and couldn’t be bothered. I know now that he needed to talk to someone else who had been through it. He was alone in his memories. I so very much wish I had looked up that buddy.
Sad but interesting, and well written. Thanks for posting this.Glad to see one good piece from the “new” New Republic.
This is actually a moral equivalence hit piece. The GI is just as rotten underneath the do gooder facade as the enemy was. The slant of this article makes me sick, especially on Memorial Day.
So, GIs weren't the Greatest Generation after all? Has the author even read the book? Where does it claim the American soldier was anything other than the "complex" individual the author asserts? Read With the Old Breed, the classic about the American soldier in the Pacific War.
Saving Private Ryan sends two messages: First, "Earn this. Earn it." Vindicate the legalized mass murder your side had to commit to defend the right. Second, being nice gets you killed. Neither of these makes the GI a noble knight. What he does afterwards does. For the GIs of the author's arbitrary "afterwards," they were still at war. By the way, combat soldiers were only a fraction of the adult American male population, so they're probably not a good sample to account for a generation.
"Just as capable of depravity," as one commenter wrote, is just describing the human condition, and it leads to the fatuous moral equivalency argument. Everyone is "just as capable," but what counts is how well-reined that capability is. The claim of the author that the GIs murdered "in cold blood" is ridiculous. In fact, the longer they had to be in Dachau, the more inflamed they would be. And Dachau wasn't even the worst. GIs' cruelty in response to what they witnessed was not at all depraved. If you say it was, then you lose the distinction between them and Germans of the Holocaust or Japanese of the occupation and of the POW camps, who truly murdered in cold blood.
Obviously the letters were a catharsis for Wilsey. And, being an MD, he was doubtless confronted with what all combat MDs are confronted with -- being part of an endeavor that is the antithesis of their vocation. Moreover, physicians must live for precision and exacting standards. Is it no wonder many take that home with them?
Suggested reading on how people cope with war trauma: Malcolm Gladwell's, "Getting Over It" http://gladwell.com/getting-over-it/
I don't think that's accurate. Dachau did have a gas chamber, but my recollection is that it was not used. Dachau was not a death camp.
Well I knew a some guys who were at Dachau on April 29, we left 2 companies there, one to guard Dachau and the other to guard the Autobahn. The rest of us went to Munich. Other units moved into Dachau as we moved out. The incidents mentioned could have happened later but I never heard of them. Maybe I was too busy moving toward Austria to get the war over.
He's absolutely right on that.
And God Bless Patton for not having these men prosecuted.