In July 1943, I had just turned eighteen and had been a private in the Marine Corps for about five months. The American war against the Japanese and Germans had not yet reached the halfway point. The look of innocence and optimism on my face, in a photograph I have preserved from that time, reminds me of the similar expressions I've seen on the faces of some of the young marines preparing for combat in Saudi Arabia. I recall having little real fear of being wounded or killed—that fear came later on. The conflict in the Pacific was still far off, and while there had been some terrible battles, with many Army, Navy, and Marine casualties in the Solomon Islands (and large Army losses in New Guinea and the Aleutians), the carnage was a remote abstraction to me; besides, I was eager to test my manhood. I couldn't know that the worst was yet to come.
For most Americans World War II was suffused by an authentic love of country, reflecting matters of necessity and idealism that were far more scrupulously defined than those of the war in the Persian Gulf. There have been grievous moral deficiencies on both sides in the war with Iraq. This was not the case in that other war, a Manichaean collision of good and evil which probably allowed America its last moment of true decency. In those years we felt almost physically defiled: our security had been menaced, our survival was at risk, our national soil had been violated by the Japanese atrocity at Pearl Harbor, which had left nearly 2,500 Americans dead. (There was Hitler, too, but we marines gave little thought to the European war, which was an Army and Navy operation.) Beautiful ideas like courage and sacrifice and pride had thrilling resonance for American kids, especially one like me who had pined to become a marine long before Hirohito became a household name. Culture and tradition merged in me to generate a surging passion for military honor. But to this day I don't find such passion freakish or even unusual. Despite the niceties concerning peace and peacemaking, our society has always possessed a bloodthirsty streak, encouraging most boys to cherish the arts of war and to relish becoming legal killers.
More than once I heard my father, who sheltered the spirit of a poet-philosopher within the person of a naval engineer, say with acid distaste that America's natural destiny was war. He should have known because war roosted like a bad memory in our family's past—my grandfather had been a fifteen-year-old Confederate soldier, two great-uncles were killed in that conflict—and the steely hand of the military touched every corner of our environment. This was in Virginia, the most bellicose of American states (not excepting Texas) and in a part of the commonwealth so thoroughly militarized that by the mid-1930s it resembled an armed encampment. Within twenty miles from home were the Norfolk naval base and air station, Langley Field (now Langley Air Force Base), the Army Transportation Corps facility at Fort Eustis, the coast artillery base at Fortress Monroe, the naval mine depot at Yorktown, the naval shipyard at Portsmouth. These places, in the midst of the Depression, brought a measure of local prosperity. My father was both dependent on the military and bruised by it—he was basically a peace-lover—and it made him a prophet.
I'll never forget his high moment of prophecy. He was employed by Newport News Shipbuilding, then as now the largest private yard in the nation, where as a middle-level engineer he helped create such behemoths as the aircraft carriers Ranger, Yorktown, Enterprise, Essex, and Hornet. One of my luscious childhood memories is of being taken to the launching of Ranger, the first American carrier built from the keel up, and of watching the wife of the president, Mrs. Herbert Hoover (whose slip was showing), make three attempts at bashing a champagne bottle over the ship's prow before she succeeded, drenching herself in a sacrament of foam. The shipyard adjoined an apartment building where we lived and where the bedlam from riveting hammers and pile drivers and other machinery caused my mother hectic distress. As if this noise weren't enough, there was often the roar of the new B-17s—the Flying Fortresses—as they climbed out of Langley Field, sometimes joined by the racket of naval fighter planes, and on one such hot summer day my mother had been driven frantic. Ordinarily a patient and reasonable woman, she began to complain bitterly of the ghastly noise, its effect on human beings, the waste of money, the chaos, the futility—all, she said, to maintain a bloated military establishment in peacetime. My father, usually so gentle with my mother, erupted, calling her an ostrich, blind to reality. “We are preparing for war!” he exclaimed with a gesture toward me. “For a war which I pray our son will survive and—if we're lucky—wars our grandchildren will survive, too. War, my dear, is the destiny of this nation—was, is now, and ever shall be. We will be fighting wars forever—as long as we have the money and the guns!”
Those prescient words still give me a chill. At the time they scared me. Still, my father's rage and apprehension didn't prevent me from signing up as a marine not many years later, making me an eager apprentice in one of the wars he had so accurately predicted. I was an officer candidate. To become a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps seemed to be the most elegant destiny in the world. Much of the giddy crush I had on the Marine Corps derived, of course, from the sheer glamour of the outfit. I longed to be among the toughest and the best, these hellraising leathernecks with their grand history of machismo and martyrdom—and there was also the uniform. Countless young men have been lured to their deaths by the promise of a sexy uniform. The gold bars, the smart blouse of forest green, the mirror-bright cordovan shoes, the trim barracks cap with the braided quatrefoil—such dash would cause a splendid flutter among the bevy of girls one hoped to conquer while home on leave. But that brief lull would be a pathetic trade-off for the reality of Pacific combat, with its dirty dungarees and horror, which loomed more threatfully close when I did finally receive my commission in the summer of 1945. The war against Japan had produced murderous pandemonium, and there were few of us second lieutenants who were not conscious, sick to our souls, of the fate of our fellow fighting men at two recently concluded slaughters: Iwo Jima (Dead: Americans, 6,800; Japanese, 20,000) and Okinawa (Dead: Americans, 12,500; Japanese, 135,000). I became a connoisseur of such appalling statistics.
My comrades and I were spared the fate of so many others by an incandescent event of history: the atom bomb. It was while I was in training to lead a platoon of riflemen in the invasion of the Japanese mainland that the cataclysm occurred. Had the war not terminated with such a prodigious bang, my platoon would almost certainly have been participants in that final bloodbath (Predicted dead: Americans, 100,000; Japanese, upward of 1,000,000). During the quiescent time that immediately followed my return to civilian life the idea of war seemed so inconsequential that my father's augury faded from my mind. Peace seemed to stretch out into the limitless future. The hiatus, however, was but an historical split second; the conflict in Korea commenced in 1950 and I, who had been reckless enough to remain in the reserves, was called back to active duty. Softened and sweetened by peacetime pleasures, I was no longer the gung-ho marine and in near-disbelief I struggled for long nightmare months in the swamps of North Carolina, relearning infantry tactics I would use in the killing of—or in being killed by—a new and ferocious Asian enemy.
My luck held out. I was released from duty because of an eye defect, and as the upheaval on the Korean peninsula receded in time it seemed significantly less a just war than World War II, and one I felt no guilt in having been excluded from, though good friends died at places like the Chosin Reservoir and though I experienced anguish over the eventual carnage (Dead: American, 33,000; South Korean and U.N., 75,000; all Communist forces, in excess of 2,000,000).
I was too old for the war in Vietnam, but it aged me nonetheless. My father's bleak pronouncement on that summer day returned over and over again as the war in Southeast Asia unfolded throughout a decade. The sons of friends were killed; my soul felt snapped during those ugly years. It was an unutterably sordid catastrophe (Dead: Americans, 58,000; South Vietnamese, 99,000; North Vietnamese, at least 1,000,000) and it so undermined the American Dream that it did seem scarcely possible that we could allow in our lifetime another such death-happening.
But now as I set down these reflections I see the grave faces of the boys in the Arabian desert—faces luminous and attentive like mine was over four decades ago—and I realize with a shock that these kids are the age, not of my father's grandchildren, but of his great-grandchildren, and that if he were alive today he would have lived to see his harsh vision not merely made true but realized in ways beyond his darkest imagining. He would have been verified in his belief that war was the destiny of America and he would have wondered, as I do now, how many young human beings of whatever nation would ultimately be fitted into those bleak parentheses historians use to list the warrior dead. Perhaps few, perhaps many, but in any case it will be a prophecy fulfilled.
[Previously unpublished. Styron wrote this essay in February 1991 at the invitation of Life magazine. It was to be part of a special issue on the upcoming full ground invasion of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. The issue was canceled when a cease-fire was negotiated in March 1991. The text here is taken from the surviving typescript, preserved among Styron's papers at Duke University.]