The Power of War

[In this excerpt, the final entry in my father’s first journal, a letter from a friend (Pablo Vyrros) sparks a reaction in which my father muses about the metamorphosis from “civilized man into a fighting savage.” He also expresses growing doubts about his personal life and his journaling objectives.]

November 18, 1942 (Middlebury College)

This afternoon another of those tremendous letters from Pablo. He’s found a new girl, – “no pledges, no vows, until after the war.” After the war, – we can’t escape it. We are putting by so much of life until after the war. If we postpone enough of it, probably it won’t be so hard to die. Here’s Pablo in the Army now about half a year. A few days ago one-third of his squadron leaves suddenly for the African front. And Pablo? Still in Texas and feeling lousy, cheated, emotionally unstrung, because he can’t be out there in the thick of the fighting, “to kill or be killed.”

That’s the power of war. You don’t go to battle because you’re patriotic, because you believe that you’re fighting for a better world. No! To hell with ideals! Go to war to fight, because the Army has made you a fighting man, and that’s your job. That’s what’s happened to Pablo. That can happen to me, in fact, is happening to me.

What, after all, can prevent the metamorphosis of a civilized man into a fighting savage? Religion, for one thing. But I have only a few ideas, no real emotional convictions. Then there’s love. I have Dottie. There’s my big chance. But even there I can sometimes feel the tie weakening. This week, for instance. I think we’re losing out. What’s the use? I’m asking myself. Even now we have no time for each other. The great work of growing together has come to an end.

I remember my cynicism of last year and am tempted back towards it. [Middlebury professor] Doc Cook’s impassioned talk on ideals and first causes left me cold today. Aimless flitting.

So this is the end of the first chapter of my Journal. I think that there is some development recorded here, but I am more than ever faced with the question, – Development for what? I don’t know the answer. 

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Journaling Rationale & Initial Thoughts on World War II

[One of my father’s first journal entries about World War II, written at the age of 20 while a student at Middlebury College. This entry gives a sense of my father’s objectives in writing a journal, and also illustrates how his own life’s experiences and concerns have eclipsed even momentous events such as the expanding war.]

July 30, 1942 (Middlebury College)

When this JOURNAL is read over some years from now, I may wonder why it contains so little mention of this present war. There are several reasons. In the first place, my affair with Dottie has obviously occupied a pre-eminent place in my mind. The second reason is allied to this; that the events, and among them a war that rends the whole world, have dwarfed beside this personal battle I have been fighting with my own self. I could have thrown in comments on the war, but they would have been oratorical only; and I have chosen to include in these pages what has had the realest significance in my daily life. Finally, the lack of contact with actual war and the limited information I have received concerning it do not form a basis for any intelligent discussion of its military aspects. Always possible, of course, is theorizing on the political, social, economic, or moral nature of the war, but during the past year I have carried the conviction that such theorizing was practically fruitless for me, my mind has been in such a flux, grounded on no standards which it dared trust. I could have brought my latent cynicism to bear upon it all, and could do so now, except that such a display seems now to me a fit exercise for a childish mind that would pamper itself. In short, I have not spoken, because I have felt that I had nothing in me worthy to be said.

This has been in part a ruinous attitude, for only by verbal articulation does my mind take those leaps forward which only can renew my confidence in its powers. Great thoughts may lash fitfully about it for weeks on end, but until I make the effort to crystallize them into written words, my mind is not free to move forward. It becomes more and more cluttered with these embryo thoughts, until its own sluggishness seems cause enough for its inactivity. Eventually it must force an opening and relieve itself, but too often these unplanned bursts are charged with emotion and take the form of melodramatic moods, when all expression is unprincipled, and hence fruitless, except insofar as it partially clears my mind for action. Usually this outburst comes as a confessional period, during which some other persons must stand before the flood of my mental flotsam, and perhaps think the worse of me for that not pleasant experience. All this social and spiritual waste would be unnecessary if I could consistently discipline myself to write out my thoughts at regular intervals, or whenever I feel the need. Principally for that purpose, this JOURNAL was begun.

And so tonight I confess that I feel more strongly than usual the tragedy of this war. It is never out of my thoughts, and is, in fact, more universal in the consciousness of all the people of the world than any other historical situation. The fear and suffering of war now breeds in the hearts of all of us a feeling, a kinship which centuries of the supposed fear, or love, of God could not breed. The people of Russia go down to death in the dirt by the millions, and as the magnitude of their suffering becomes more terrible, it becomes a part of a world-suffering, and we feel drawn together in a common fear. The agony begins in individuals, spreads through families, communities, states, and continents, and now overlays the whole world. A man’s heart is pierced and bleeds out its gushing blood; the world’s heart is pricked and trickles out its droplet for this man who dies. There it goes with every death, until ten million individual pricks have opened a great hole in the world’s heart and its blood boils forth and dries in the ground. But there is enough blood in the world’s heart to encrust the soil of whole nations, yet leave the world alive. And so it shall be now.

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