What alternately shames and puzzles me, as I grow older, is that the Pacific war seems to trouble me more than the European war. How can brutalities be parsed? I'm certain that my emotional fixation on the Pacific War has to do with my early childhood impressions of the two theaters of WWII. I was so young. I turned ten years old during Thanksgiving week of 1945. And, of course, I knew so little about anything as an elementary-school-boy.
But I do remember the racial overtones of the War in the Pacific. The Japanese were dehumanized. They were the others, the inhuman and brutal -- those characterized by the fanatical banzai attack -- those others who fought to the death on god-forsaken landscapes in another world with which I felt no concrete connection. Perhaps it's also true that American involvement in Korea and Vietnam has reinforced my prejudices, hard as I may try to press those prejudices down beneath my level of consciousness.
I've read scores of books about that entire period. But it appears to me that I have read four books on the Pacific for every one I've read on what I long-ago came to characterize as the "German War."
And Yes! There's the rub. Though my name -- Meadows -- is Scotch-Irish, both my paternal and maternal grandparents' names are German -- Houk, Westphal, and Osterheld. In fact, though I was raised Methodist, my one-hundred year-old aunt recently told me my father was Jewish -- a supposed fact that should help me identify more strongly with the holocaust. But it doesn't, perhaps because the holocaust is too completely horrible to grasp by someone not immediately caught up in it.
Could be that my life has been so good and easy that I haven't learned to fear and hate. Or perhaps more accurately I have learned to suppress my fears and ignore my prejudices.
Could be that despite what I have learned through voluminous reading and study of WWII -- and despite my German heritage -- I remain what I have always been: a Methodist choir-boy who grew up to be a school teacher. I grew up playing high-school football with German and Italian Catholic kids who thought of themselves as I learned to think of myself: we were all just American kids.
Furthermore, I never fought in any wars. I was too young for WWII and Korea, pulled my draft-time before Vietnam, and was never recalled into the army during any period of unrest during and following the Vietnam war.
The battles I fought have all been on the big screen. I served in the Army as a water-safety instructor. I braved the ravages of sun-burn, sinusitis, ear infections, and athletes-foot. I won the Good Conduct Medal -- which just goes to show how little my officers paid attention to me.
Again, I'm anxious to see Hanks' production. What I'm hoping is that now, late in my life, I can come away with a keener sense of what that war meant, who those others really were, and what that might mean today.
I've studied all my life!
I've lived all my adult life
on college campuses.
How can I still be prejudiced?
Everyone empathizes best over what they identify with. So, isn't it more likely that any indifference you feel stems from a lack of empathy instead of prejudice?
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