Discussion of the Topic:
In 1999 the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) was on a regularly scheduled three-month-long deployment in the Pacific Ocean when a fire aboard the USS George Washington (CVN-73) prevented them from taking their rotation in the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Southern Watch. Kitty Hawk, a few weeks away from returning to its home port of Yokosuka, Japan, was tasked to immediately redeploy to cover the gap in the rotation. The crew, having only been trained for the anticipated threats of a cruise under Threat Condition Normal, was not ready to go into a hostile environment where there was a chance of unconventional warfare. Making all speed toward the Gulf, the officers and the Damage Control Training Team (DCTT, pronounced DE-set) stepped up every possible training program on the aging ship.
September 11, 2001 was still a long ways away, and the 1991 Operation Desert Storm was a long time before. The only recent activity in the Gulf that had made international news was in 1998 when Iraq allowed weapons inspectors to enter the country. Before Saddam Hussein had struck an agreement, the 1MC (1 Main Circuit, a public address system) at Recruit Training Facility Great Lakes, Il., crackled to life in the middle of one of the many, nearly identical days I spent at Basic Training. After a short briefing on the situation in Iraq, all of us recruits looked at each other with confusion and foreboding. Before we could flood our Recruit Division Commander with questions, he departed the barracks, leaving us alone to grapple with the news we had just received.
“Are we going to war?” asked a fellow recruit whose name I will never remember, but whose wavering voice and deeply concerned expression I will never forget.
I had enlisted in a peace-time Navy. Of course there was a risk of conflict at some point, but on January 5, 1998, with the ground frozen beneath my new boots and the snow relentlessly blowing in my face, everything had been right with the world. “I am doubtless caught up in the current of national life, but I hardly feel involved. I am like a passenger on a boat.”1 Until the point when I stepped onto a plane to let my own “journey begin” (being the time before potential recruits were told to “accelerate” their lives), my parents had been a consistent presence in my life, with a filtering effect on the outside world.2 They “marched in front of” me, marking out what had been important enough to be called historical in our own family collective, but after January I had to turn back to see them.3 While we were all still in the same national collective, it doesn't record the memories of every single person, because, as Maurice Halbwachs put it, national histories act as “a faithful résumé of the most important events that have changed the life of a nation.”4
My parents had not mattered enough for even one mention in the history books, nor had I. Like Carolyn Steedman our stories were from the “borderlands” where historical memory doesn't quite match up with personal experiences.5 She found a way to create a foundation for her life in various psychological texts, including mothering theories that allowed her to place both herself and her mother into a framework to be analyzed, slowly concluding that her mother had been “good enough”.6 From those deep psychological analyses of her childhood mixed with fairy tales and her own recolections she builds stories that ground her memories into a narrative about her life, and when it has been told, it becomes a history unto itself.7 She brings the borderlands into focus when the national histories had no reason to record them. This does not work against Halbwachs' statement because her childhood becomes a stand-in for many others like hers, but not exactly like hers. My childhood was nothing like hers, and her history is as a foreign language to me; a 1950s London childhood has little in common with 1998 Navy Basic Training.
I had enlisted in a peace-time Navy. Of course there was a risk of conflict at some point, but on January 5, 1998, with the ground frozen beneath my new boots and the snow relentlessly blowing in my face, everything had been right with the world. “I am doubtless caught up in the current of national life, but I hardly feel involved. I am like a passenger on a boat.”1 Until the point when I stepped onto a plane to let my own “journey begin” (being the time before potential recruits were told to “accelerate” their lives), my parents had been a consistent presence in my life, with a filtering effect on the outside world.2 They “marched in front of” me, marking out what had been important enough to be called historical in our own family collective, but after January I had to turn back to see them.3 While we were all still in the same national collective, it doesn't record the memories of every single person, because, as Maurice Halbwachs put it, national histories act as “a faithful résumé of the most important events that have changed the life of a nation.”4
My parents had not mattered enough for even one mention in the history books, nor had I. Like Carolyn Steedman our stories were from the “borderlands” where historical memory doesn't quite match up with personal experiences.5 She found a way to create a foundation for her life in various psychological texts, including mothering theories that allowed her to place both herself and her mother into a framework to be analyzed, slowly concluding that her mother had been “good enough”.6 From those deep psychological analyses of her childhood mixed with fairy tales and her own recolections she builds stories that ground her memories into a narrative about her life, and when it has been told, it becomes a history unto itself.7 She brings the borderlands into focus when the national histories had no reason to record them. This does not work against Halbwachs' statement because her childhood becomes a stand-in for many others like hers, but not exactly like hers. My childhood was nothing like hers, and her history is as a foreign language to me; a 1950s London childhood has little in common with 1998 Navy Basic Training.
“Are we going to war?” I seem to remember was the unspoken conversation all of us on the Hawk were avoiding. I sat on Sponson Six, the designated smoking area on a small outcropping off the stern of the ship, with my feet dangling over the blackness of the open ocean at night, trying to not look at the faces intermittently lit by the glow of cigarettes in the process being chain-smoked. Our gas masks were awkwardly strapped onto our legs in their standby positions, our uniforms still drenched in sweat from the long hours “sucking rubber” and drilling the CBR (Chemical, Biological, Radiological) procedures. We had just gotten done acting as if the ship had been sprayed with a Chemical agent; the sun had been up when we started. I was the Boundary Team Leader, ensuring the doors were properly sealed, and had been “contaminated” but the chemical agent did not make it through my MOPP suit (Mission Oriented Protective Posture), the paper-thin charcoal filled gear alleged to be enough to keep you safe.
My friend, Jason W., had not been as “lucky” and DCTT determined he had been “exposed”; he was given a black tag—expected to die regardless of medical treatment—and sent to a containment area. Even though his “death” had been simulated, the protracted process of being confined with hundreds of other people left to “die” over the course of many hours (they were very long drills) had left him shaken. His far-from-steady hands dropped five or six lit cigarettes into the water before he could stammer out, “I don't want to die.” Looking back at it now, that might be the last intrinsically humanizing thing I can remember hearing him say.
My friend, Jason W., had not been as “lucky” and DCTT determined he had been “exposed”; he was given a black tag—expected to die regardless of medical treatment—and sent to a containment area. Even though his “death” had been simulated, the protracted process of being confined with hundreds of other people left to “die” over the course of many hours (they were very long drills) had left him shaken. His far-from-steady hands dropped five or six lit cigarettes into the water before he could stammer out, “I don't want to die.” Looking back at it now, that might be the last intrinsically humanizing thing I can remember hearing him say.
About a month later, having taken up our station in the Gulf, Jason spent 45 minutes manning a fire hose inside a burning space, having gone in with 30 minute supply of air. After realizing that he spent 15 minutes sucking in nothing but (very real) toxic black smoke, he gained a new perspective on life. For the rest of the time I knew him, he tried to redeem his life for himself. He had breathed in an air of death that had changed the type of people with whom he could talk, and altered the type of happiness he was able to seek. His happiness became always today, and no other time reference could “arouse envy in” him because his “image of redemption” that his happiness had become “indissolubly bound up with” placed him permanently in the now.8 After each of us received new orders around 2001 and went our separative ways, no one I later reconnected with has learned Jason's future fate. In our decade-old collective memories, he continues to live in that “now”.
These events are as a foreign language to most, because 1999 was the eighth year of general peace outside the occasional short-lived (at least on TV) NATO or UN peacekeeping missions. The big scandal was the Clinton impeachment, and the big scare was the Y2K bug. Most people, at least in my own imagination, were partying like it was, indeed, 1999. The idea that somewhere in the world the Hawk was stacking up 200-pound bombs for our 70+ fighter/attack aircraft 24 hours a day, catapulting the pilots off the end of the deck with enough high explosives to open large craters in reinforced bunkers, and having the jets trap back aboard with no bombs—for months on end, as one of 12 aircraft carriers, with more than 60,000 sailors at any given point, to have taken up this mission in continual rotation since 1991 – that doesn't fit with the narrative of general peace.
I remember climbing down the poorly-lit vertical trunk, a set of tiered ladders five stories tall, into the ship's Bomb Assembly Area. As a Journalist Petty Officer Third Class I was sent to photograph and interview the Aviation Ordinancemen that supplied the pilots with all the bombs. It always sounds a bit strange that I went to interview bomb-makers, but then I remind myself that the entire crew ate where thousands of tons of explosives had been pre-staged, and countless lives lost. The mess decks where chow was served were also bomb handling areas and mass-casualty triage and emergency medical stations. Memento mori is impossible to avoid aboard an aircraft carrier.9 I asked how many bombs they had built, and how many returned to the ship. The final tally of the number of high-explosive bombs was 40,000 pounds sent up to the flight deck, and zero pounds came back down—we were only in the Gulf for three months.
How do we translate this “language” of systematic, continual violence into the native narrative of general peace and prosperity for the rest of the United States? How does a pre-9/11 world come to understand the meaning of a different but equally pre-9/11 world where 19-year-olds are confronted with their own mortality? Where all the preparations for war are made, and the bombs are—and have been—raining down for years, but no one back home pays any attention because there is no civilian news media watching? As Rea Tajiri points out in her film, History and Memory, there are things that happen when no cameras are around to record it. Even when the camera was in my own hands, no one series of images could have captured the meaning of the Hawk's presence in the Persian Gulf. Sometimes the limiting perspective of the camera lens excludes the type of meanings necessary to make the memories of one collective translatable to another collective.
Stretching Walter Benjamin's linguistic sense into the realm collective memories, an experience may be a “nucleus” that “goes beyond transmittal of subject matter” because the content of the experience and the expression of it form a “unity” in one context, but not the greater national collective.10 “Translating” the collective memories of Kitty Hawk sailors might have been an impossibility at the time. What is signified by any expression about the experience of the sailors aboard the Hawk in '99 might have only been understood in the most shallow of surface meanings until later. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the common understanding that the Persian Gulf War solved the Iraq question changed, and the “language” of the American people moved closer to the “language” of the military. By reexamining the original experiences, a closer meaning in translation might be understood in a deeper way.11 Before the Twin Towers fell, most Americans generally felt safe, at least from foreign aggression. The idea of dying from intentional exposure to chemical warfare might as well have been a foreign language, except for people like Jason.
My stories, even when they are difficult to translate from my collectives into the dominant culture, should not stand in the place of other, more worthy and interesting potential histories. The things you have read today are merely a small demonstration that time has progressed, and society has changed enough that these kinds of borderland memories might be more understandable than they were when they were too foreign to be intelligible. An entire generation of young adults has never known peace, and we are in danger of forgetting that there once was a pre-9/11 world. At the same time, remembering only the peace runs the risk of painting too Rockwellian of a picture. A balance ought to be struck. The often unheard voices of veterans can tell us about the rough edge of the social contract.
Goals of the Project:
The primary goal of the project is to record stories of veterans so that their stories can become histories. If they are not recorded, then their voices remain in the boarders of society. From those recordings, translations of their meanings from the military collective into the dominant culture might be possible.
Goals of the Project:
The primary goal of the project is to record stories of veterans so that their stories can become histories. If they are not recorded, then their voices remain in the boarders of society. From those recordings, translations of their meanings from the military collective into the dominant culture might be possible.
This will differ from other projects, like the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project, by making as much of the primary source materials open to the public, within ethical and legal boundaries. While one of the goals is to produce a “translation” of these experiences, it is important to preserve the originals and make them accessible. The only way to learn how to translate is by doing translations. The best translators are not necessarily the ones that get published.
Focus of the Research:
The types of national histories that might be illuminated by their unique, but limited perspectives is impossible to fully predict. It most assuredly covers the intersection of national policy and international enforcement. Equally likely is recording the human cost of international affairs. My personal memories, for instance, cover the events from Operation Southern Watch, the Iraq Disarmament crisis, September 11th and the period immediately following (I was transferred to a command in the Pentagon in October 2001), and the Invasion of Iraq (from the perspective of someone that was immediately affected but not deployed in-country). All veterans have their own stories of how national history impacted their lives in ways not common and not often recorded in national histories.
The period of study is limited to the mid-to-late 20th century. The study would be open to the peace and wartime experiences of any military member, active duty or veteran. While this does represent a large number of people, veterans are generally dispersed into society in such a way as to cease to be an obvious collective post-service.
Other Sources:
Other Sources:
While there is a large body of work about veterans, there are few attempts to offer simple translations of their own experiences as a means to examine historical events. Many are like the government reports on Veteran Affairs, and Bret Moore's work on understanding Veteran students.12 Some authors, like Emmett Early who uses films as a way to examine the veteran experience, attempt translations of military experiences by examining veterans from popular culture.13 Few attempt to use the veterans' own stories as a way to examine larger histories, outside specific products of oral history projects like the Vietnam Archive of Texas Tech University.14 It may simply be too soon for projects that attempt to work with veterans oral history materials post-Vietnam, but I wish to challenge that assumption as well.
1 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (1980), pg. 53.
2 “Let the journey begin” and “Accelerate your life” were the late-90s, early-2000s recruiting slogans.
3 Halbwacks, pg. 67.
4 Halbwacks, pg. 77.
5 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (1986), pg. 5.
6 Steedman, pg. 90-2.
7 Steedman, 143.
8 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (1968), pg. 255-6.
9 Memento mori, Latin, “remember that you die.”
10 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (1968), pg. 75.
11 Benjamin, “Task”, pg. 75.
12 There are too many government reports to list here, but one example is the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, “Reevaluating the Transition from Servicemember to Veteran,” (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2012). For an example of non-government documents, see Bret Moore, “Understanding and Working With the Veteran Student: A Guide for Educators,” (Indianapolis, Ind.: Pearson, 2012).
13 Emmett Early, The Alienated War Veteran in Film and Literature, (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2014).
14 Richard Verrone and Laura Calkins, Voices From Vietnam: Eye-witness Accounts of the War, 1954-1975, (Cincinnati, OH.: F+W Publishing, 2005).
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