Free The Souvenir by Louise Steinman Page B

returned home?
    These questions haunted me. Hoping to find some answers, I raided the shelves of the history section of the tiny Port Townsend library. When I returned to Los Angeles, the questions returned with me.
    In his book
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
, Dave Grossman, a psychologist and army colonel, focuses on the long-term effects that the experience of killing exacts on the soldier’s psyche. Along with other military historians, Grossman believes the heaviest burden of war is usually carried by army infantrymen—men like my father.
    He cites one particular World War II study: After sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers suffer some kind of psychological damage. I remembered how, in one of his letters, my father complained, “Our division seems determined to set a record for consecutive days of combat on the front lines.” By the time the campaign for Balete Pass was over, the Twenty-fifth Division had been committed to the front lines for 165 days of
continuous combat
.
    By far the most startling World War II statistic I read in his book was that only 15 to 20 percent of army riflemen in World War II would fire at the enemy. They did not run or hide, but they
simply would not fire
. To the question, Why did these men fail to fire? Grossman explains that there is within most men an intense resistance toward killing their fellow man. He then describes the techniques the military uses to overcome this innate and powerful reluctance. They must inculcate the idea that one’s enemy is not a human being.
    â€œFor the war to be prosecuted at all,” writes historian and World War II vet Paul Fussell, “the enemy of course had to be severely dehumanized.” When someone is dehumanized they no longer have a face, a family, a history, a reason to be alive, or a reason to allow them to be left alive. “When you see a dead Nip, you won’tcare. But no matter how many times you see a dead Yank, you’ll never get over it,” a seasoned soldier told journalist Murray Kempton when he first landed on New Guinea.
    This was true on both sides. John Dower points out in his landmark study
War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
that this dehumanization contributed to the brutality and mercilessness of the conflict in the Pacific. “As World War II recedes in time it is easy to forget the visceral emotions and sheer race hate that gripped virtually all participants in the war,” Dower writes, explaining how “each side portrayed the other as its polar opposite: as darkness opposed to its own radiant light.”
    â€œBestial apes” is how Admiral William F. Halsey referred to the Japanese. “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs,” he exhorted the troops. American wartime propaganda posters depicted the Japanese as subhuman and repulsive, “louseous Japanicas,” vicious jungle creatures, tailless apes to be exterminated.
    On the other side, Japanese soldiers were told they were on a divine mission, fighting against a demonic foe, that American GIs were monsters who rifled corpses for gold teeth and took no prisoners alive. The Americans and British were considered savages who “ate raw meat and had mouths dripping with blood.” Roosevelt and Churchill were depicted in Japanese political cartoons as debauched ogres. The Japanese military turned the war itself—and eventually the concept of mass death—into an act of collective purification: “One hundred million people, one mind” was a popular slogan during the war.
    By the 1930s, the traditional Japanese warrior code of honor called
bushido
, which called for humane, courteous, and kind behavior (adhered to by the Japanese Army in World War I), had been radically altered by the Japanese government and military, who inflamed feelings of hatred toward the enemy. The military training endured by