D.C. Gill - How We Are Changed by War: A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom

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How We Are Changed by War

The prolonged conflict in Iraq has placed a spotlight on wars transformative effect. Civilians are riveted to events happening halfway around the world, while young soldiers return home from battlefields, after extended periods away, coping with the memories and the mental and emotional changes brought about by such extreme experiences.

How We Are Changed by War examines the changes to Americans during wartime through the medium of their diaries and correspondence, beginning with the colonial period of the early seventeenth century, and ending with diaries and letters from Iraq War veterans. The book clearly discusses and describes the universal themes of war such as reintegration to society and the horrors of war through private writings regardless of the narrators historical era. This allows the writers to speak to each other across time to reveal a profound commonality of cultural experience.

How We Are Changed by War is a fascinating look at the writings of individuals who served their military in different eras, and a great example of how history is shaped by both memory and experience.

D. C. Gill is an independent scholar with a PhD in English from the University of Mississippi at Oxford.

How We Are Changed by War

A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom

D. C. Gill

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2010
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

2010 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
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invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gill, Diana C.
How we are changed by war : a study of letters and diaries from
colonial conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom / Diana C. Gill.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. WarPsychological aspects. 2. War and society.
3. Identity (Psychology) I.
Title.
U22.3.G55 2010
303.66dc22 2009036229

ISBN 0-203-85626-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 041587310X (hbk)

ISBN10: 0415873118 (pbk)

ISBN10: 0203856260 (ebk)

ISBN13: 9780415873109 (hbk)

ISBN13: 9780415873116 (pbk)

ISBN13: 9780203856260 (ebk)

To my great-great-uncle, Private William Billy Cover (18951918). This book is dedicated to him and to all the soldiers and civilians quoted herein.

Contents

Acknowledgments

My gratitude goes out to my husband John for his unwavering support over the years that it took me to write this book. I also want to recognize Dr. Joseph Urgo for his encouragement that kept me moving forward toward the books completion. In addition, much gratitude goes to Dr. Benjamin Fisher for his excellent grammatical suggestions, to my family (especially my father, William B. Clark, Jr.) for their example, to Alfred Gill for his diligence to the task, and finally to my editor Kimberly Guinta for her belief in the project.

Introduction

I sometimes reflect with amazement on my role in this war. I used to be a pacifisttalked about the infinite value of the human personality But here I am [at the front lines] Do you wonder that I say Im sometimes amazed at myself? I am more of a pacifist than I ever was, but as long as there are vermin like Japs and Nazis, they have to be exterminatedand it is hellish work.

(Letter from soldier Kermit Stewart during World War II qtd. in Fussell 1991, 564)

This book is, in itself, a letter. It is not a traditional letter that begins with Dear so-and-so. It is instead a letter written to a distant uncle of mine, William Billy Cover, who was killed fighting in World War I. Sixty years after he died, I met him for the first time. He came to life one day when my teenage self was rummaging through my mothers bookshelves and happened upon his makeshift diary. The volume, with its darkened pages, didnt look like a diary. It looked like what it was: an old mass-produced book of poems that smelled of dust. In its page margins my great-great-uncle had written notes to himself after hed enlisted. Sometimes he wrote about liking a particular poem, but mostly he wrote about feeling lonely and missing home.

This book fascinated me. With just a few pencil scrawls, its writer had come to life in my head. A young mans sense of self, his hopes, and his dreams were all there in how he wrote. Not only was his presence so remarkable, but his notes left me wonderingwhy did he write them? Theyd obviously provided him some solace, but how did scribbling his feelings down in the margins of a book that he never expected anyone else to read make him feel better about being lonely and frightened?

This study attempts to both answer the question and give a message received to the soldier who inspired it. Its audience is anyone interested in what people, both soldiers and civilians, have to say about their lives as they experience an event of war. Students of military studies, literary theory or psychology will hopefully find that this study complements the more empirical books in their fields. Facts are essential to any discipline, but so are the more qualitative examples of how people relate to such disciplines. This is admittedly a book of theory, but it is one grounded in the small practicalities of individual lives. In practicalities, the diarists and correspondents quoted herein speak of how their wars have affected them both personally and as members of a society.

Specifically this book focuses on wars transformation of an individuals sense of himself or herself. It is the evolution of ones identity that often provides people with the most telling souvenir of war. But what do I mean by a sense of self? When Kermit Stewart, the soldier in this chapters opening quote, writes, Im sometimes amazed at myself is he referring to a self that is as inborn as the color of his eyes or the number of his toes? Or is he referring to something that is made-upconstructedlike one might build a gas station or an office building? This book examines this second definition of identity, and of how war can destabilize a persons peacetime sense of individuality.

Kermit Stewart writes of such a transformation when he states that he is amazed at his self. He is amazed because he is able to commit actions that would have been considered abhorrent by the man that he had been before the war. The me who Stewart becomes is the not-me (Gregg 1991, 47) of who he had been before entering World War II. His letter tells the story of this transition. Such stories of the everyday found in letters and diaries are the heroic tales that Americans write of themselves, the unconscious legends that they make of their own lives during periods of unrest. They are the apparently inartistic but, nevertheless, dramatic stories that are told to explain who the writer is and to pinpoint his or her place in the world.

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