Michael A. Messner - Guys Like Me: Five Wars, Five Veterans for Peace

Guys Like Me

Also by Michael A. Messner

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Out of Play: Critical Essays on Gender and Sport

Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements

Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity

Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports

Coauthor

No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport, and the Unevenness of Social Change

Sex, Violence and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity

Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women

Editor

Sport, Gender and Sexuality: Critical Concepts in Sports Studies

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Gender Reckonings: New Social Theory and Research

Masculinities, Gender Relations, and Sport

Mens Lives

Paradoxes of Youth and Sport

Sport, Men, and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives

Gender Through the Prism of Difference

Guys Like Me

Five Wars, Five Veterans for Peace

M ICHAEL A . M ESSNER

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Messner, Michael A., author.

Title: Guys like me : five wars, five veterans for peace / Michael A. Messner.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012690| ISBN 9781978802810 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978802827 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: VeteransUnited StatesBiography. | VeteransUnited StatesAttitudes. | Peace movementsUnited States.

Classification: LCC U52 .M48 2018 | DDC 303.6/6092273dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012690

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright 2019 by Michael A. Messner

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For all veterans of warspast, present, and of all nationswho work for peace and justice in their communities and in the world

Contents

If peace begins with the individual, it is realized collectively with peace movements, for peace is not simply a matter of praying or hoping, although they, like dreaming, do not hurt. Instead, peace happens through confronting the war machine and taking over the industries that make it possible, which include the industries of memory. It is no surprise, then, that peace seems so much harder to achieve than war, which offers us an immediate profit.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies

My grandfather, Russell John Messner, became especially grumpy around Veterans Day. I would donate a dime and pin my Buddy Poppy on my T-shirt, putting on display the pride I felt for my grandfather, my father (a World War II veteran), and others who had served in times of war.

On the morning of Veterans Day in 1980, Gramps sat with his breakfasta cup of watery coffee, a piece of burnt toast slathered with marmalade, and a single slice of cool liverwurst. A twenty-eight-year-old graduate student, Id recently moved in with my grandparents in their Oakland, California, home. I tried to cut through Grampss cranky mood by wishing him a happy Veterans Day. Huge Mistake. Veterans Day! he barked at me with the gravelly voice of a lifelong smoker. Its not Veterans Day! Its Armistice Day. Those gawd damned politicians changed it to Veterans Day. And they keep getting us into more wars.

My grandfather was hyperventilating now, his liverwurst forgotten. Buncha crooks ! They dont fight the wars, ya know. Guys like me fight the wars. We called it the War to End All Wars, and we believed it. He closed the conversation with a harrumph: Veterans Day!

The Armistice had been signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, but Private Messner was one of the unlucky doughboys who had to remain in northern Russia six months longer, as part of a counterrevolutionary U.S.-British force that triedand failedto defeat the Soviet Red Army. In the years following his return home, Armistice Day symbolized to Gramps not just the end of his war, but the end of all war, the dawning of a lasting peace. This was not an idle dream. In fact, a mass movement for peace had pressed the U.S. government, in 1928, to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international Treaty for the Renunciation of War, sponsored by the United States and France and subsequently signed by most nations of the world.

When I was a little boy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I would occasionally pry a story from Gramps about the Great War. But like many veterans of his generation, he was reluctant to talk about it. Mostly I had to read between the lines to get much information, and the artifacts he pulled out of his gun cabinet offered me tantalizing glimpses. A small scrap of paper, signed by a British officer, read: Transport Officer: Please supply bearer with 3 sleighs for the purpose of moving material to burn Kitza 10:III:19. The sleighs, Gramps told me, were pulled by reindeer across snow and frozen lakes, and were loaded with canisters of gasoline that were used to burn down the Russian town of Kitza as the U.S. troops retreated.

Pvt. Russell J. Messner, 1918 (author)

Nearly breathless with excitement, I asked my grandfather, Did you ever kill anyone in the war? He snorted disapprovingly at the question, paused, and then told me a seemingly unrelated story: We had no running water, and one night I woke up so thirsty. So I got up and drank from a puddle of rainwater in the middle of a dirt road. The next morning, in the daylight, I saw that the puddle had a big pile of horse manure in it. I wanted more, but I think he knew that I attached a false sense of glory and excitement to wara common perspective for boys like me who cut our teeth watching John Wayne movies and playing fantasy war games with our friends on suburban lawns, spraying Krauts or Japs with imaginary bullets from plastic burp guns before heading inside for a pitcher of ice-cold cherry Kool-Aid prepared by Mom. There was nothing glorious about war for Gramps; war was freezing your ass off, drinking water with horseshit in it, and praying every day to escape the nightmare and get back home safely. The rest, I guess, was unspeakable, except in coded snapshots couched in dark humor.

When I was in college in the early 1970s, I became one of millions of people who opposed the American War in Vietnam. I had learned not to talk about it with my father. A World War II veteran, still serving as a captain in the Naval Reserve, he had no patience for the antiwar movement: There are some dirty jobs out there, and somebody has to do them, was his retort to anyone who opposed the war. I once hinted about my antiwar sentiments to Gramps, and he hit me with a big surprise: Did you know the VFW was antiwar in the 1930s? No way, I stammered. As Europe was once again plunging into war, Gramps told me, his VFW and other veterans organizations were urging the United States to stay out of the conflict, to remain neutral. Look at this, he said, as he pulled from his gun cabinet a single magazine page glued to a thin sheet of cardboard, its ragged edges obscuring some of the documents opening lines. It was a Memorial Day 1937 VFW position paper on war and peace. It presented evidence that the U.S. government had joined the fighting in World War I partly out of the pursuit of profit for rich industrialists. It declared, The Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States was the first veteran organization to pressure the U.S. Congress to stick to the VFW platform of Peace for America. World War I veterans were urged to lead the country in making a solemn pledge that the sacrifices of our hero dead were not made in vain. My grandfathers penciled edits remained on the page from the day he read the statement aloud at a Memorial Day VFW meeting.