The Airship Daily is saluting all of the men and women who fought, volunteered and risked their lives to protect the nations they loved. Whether they served as soldiers, pilots or nurses, they’d like to pay tribute to this admittedly short list of authors that we’ve put together and, more importantly, to the impossibly long list of those everywhere who’ve sacrificed:
1. Tim O’Brien
O’Brien’s novel Going After Cacciato and his short story collection The Things They Carried could not have existed without his experience in the Vietnam War.
O’Brien was drafted in 1968, just two weeks after completing his undergraduate degree at Macalester College. By then, the war in Vietnam had reached its most horrific point in terms of American casualties. O’Brien served a 13-month tour in Vietnam as a foot soldier, being wounded twice and being promoted to Sergeant.
Here is just one great example of O’Brien’s writing on war from “How to Tell a True War Story:”
Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until, say, twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the point?
This one wakes me up.
In the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat Kiley. Then he took a funny half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped artillery round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts.
2. Walt Whitman
Whitman was 42 years old at the start of the Civil War. Just two years into it, the Whitmans in Brooklyn received news from the New York Heraldthat Walt’s younger brother, George Washington Whitman, was wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Walt left his family’s home and rushed to his brother’s side in Washington. After several frantic days of searching, he finally found his brother, who by some miracle only suffered a minor scratch at his jaw from an exploding shell. Still, Whitman dedicated three years of his life tending to the wounded during the Civil War. Whitman addresses this in his poem, “The Wound Dresser”:
“Thus in silence, in dream’s projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night — some are so young;
Some suffer so much — I recall the experience sweet and sad;
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)”
3. J. D. Salinger
Salinger was drafted into World War II in the Spring of 1942, allegedly carrying six chapters of The Catcher in the Rye in his jacket on the shores of Utah Beach during D-Day — his first day of combat.
Some claim that Catcher in the Rye would not have been the same without Salinger’s time in World War II, attributing the hard-boiled tone to his time in the war. The war certainly seeped its way into his short stories, like “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,”which is told from the perspective of Holden’s brother Vincent as he waits in an Army truck in the rain:
The lieutenant says, dripping: “Get in. Get in the truck boy.”
… Drenched to the bone, the bone of loneliness, the bone of silence, we plod back to the truck.
Where are you Holden? Never mind the Missing stuff. Stop playing around. Show up. Show up somewhere. Hear me? It’s simply because I remember everything. I can’t forget anything that’s good, that’s why. So listen. Just go up to somebody, some officer or some G.I., and tell them you’re Here — not Missing, not dead, not anything but Here. Stop kidding around. Stop letting people think you’re Missing. Stop wearing my robe to the beach. Stop taking the shots on my side of the court. Stop whistling. Sit up to the table.
4. Edith Wharton
Wharton was an American in Paris during the beginning of World War II, when she became a war correspondent, visiting the front lines and volunteering to bring relief to displaced refugees and soldiers fleeing the worst of the war.
Her experience is documented in Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belport:
A few hotels still carried on a halting life, galvanized by an occasional inrush of travel from Belgium and Germany; but most of them had closed or were being hastily transformed into hospitals.
The signs over these hotel doors first disturbed the dreaming harmony of Paris. In a night, as it seemed, the whole city was hung with Red Crosses. Every other building showed the red and white band across its front, with “Ouvroir” or “Hopital” beneath; there was something sinister in these preparations for horrors in which one could not yet believe, in the making of bandages for limbs yet sound and whole, the spreading of pillows for heads yet carried high. But insist as they would on the woe to come, these warning signs did not deeply stir the trance of Paris. The first days of the war were full of a kind of unrealizing confidence, not boastful or fatuous, yet as different as possible from the clear-headed tenacity of purpose that the experience of the next few months was to develop. It is hard to evoke, without seeming to exaggerate it, that the mood of early August: the assurance, the balance, the kind of smiling fatalism with which Paris moved to her task. It is not impossible that the beauty of the season and the silence of the city may have helped to produce this mood. War, the shrieking fury, had announced herself by a great wave of stillness. Never was desert hush more complete: the silence of a street is always so much deeper than the silence of wood or field.
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