David Griffith was fourteen years old when the United States went to war with Iraq in what later became known as the Gulf War (August 1990-February 1991). Like most American children, he never directly experienced war. War was something that happens “over there.” Yet he became an intimate spectator in a war that was heavily televised (though still censored). His major form of participation in the Gulf War was to absorb American propaganda about the war, follow media reports and “support the troops.” Meanwhile, in school, he was learning about other wars—such as World War II. Yet he didn’t learn about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in history class. It was something he learned about in concert band while playing Daniel Bukvich’s Symphony No. 1: In Memoriam Dresden.
David wrote: “When you learn something through music, it stays with you. It embeds itself in your memory. Like Hiroshima, Dresden became a part of my imagination. I think when something is so embedded in your memory like that, it’s always there subtly influencing your vision and your sensibility. I feel like I’m always trying to exorcise those original feelings I had when I first learned about Hiroshima and Dresden. In many ways, that’s what my book A Good War is Hard to Find is; it’s an attempt to come to some measure of peace over the issues raised by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Simply by virtue of being American, I felt deeply implicated by Hiroshima and Dresden, and when Abu Ghraib happened I felt it even more acutely, so much so that I felt I had to write about it, or else I couldn’t live with myself. Violence taints. Writing about the violence was like confessing, a ritual cleansing.”
The United States and Great Britain bombed Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. The city was destroyed and thousands of German citizens killed. Some historians and writers have alleged that the bombing of Dresden, like the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and like the torture and abuse of prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib, was a war crime.
THE DAY THE bombs started falling on Baghdad, my Notre Dame jacket, a dark blue satin jacket with NOTRE DAME stitched across the front and a pugilistic leprechaun on the sleeve—my most prized possession–had been stolen out of my locker. They also stole a package of Hostess Sno-Balls and a peanut butter and honey sandwich–snacks that I would eat after school to give me energy for wrestling practice. I weighed 110 pounds and wrestled in the 112 pound weight class.
A young policewoman came to the house to take a report. It was maybe seven in the evening. Before the police woman arrived, I was sitting downstairs in the dim living room trying to do my algebra homework, but instead watching live images of explosions lighting up the Baghdad skyline.
It was impossible to understand what was happening on the screen. There were no soldiers. My picture of war came from Vietnam: shaky handheld camera footage of soldiers cautiously trudging through the jungle.
Instead what I saw was a view of the action from a hotel rooftop, narrated by journalists who had chosen to stay in the city even after being warned of the danger. The journalists, Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw, tried to communicate what it felt like to see these images, rating the power of each bomb blast based on how violently the windows rattled or the hotel swayed. At times the burst of light as a bomb detonated made the screen go completely white. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the television.
When the policewoman came downstairs, she started watching the footage too. She looked stunned, as though she’d never seen a television. “They’re bombing Baghdad,” I said. “Wow,” she said.
The entire time the woman took my statement about the stolen jacket, her eyes cut back and forth between the notepad in her hand and the television.
I got the jacket back. One day I was walking down the hall at school and a kid passed me wearing the jacket. “That’s my jacket,” I said. “No, it’s not,” the kid sneered. One of the deans of the school happened to walk by at this moment and asked what the problem was. “Look in the sleeves,” I told him. My mother had written GRIFFITH in permanent black marker in each sleeve. Sure enough, when the dean turned the right sleeve inside out, there was my name.
Things were like that then. Open and shut. Yes, it is. No, it isn’t. Everything seemed good, clean and orderly. I learned that there was such a thing as justice—I had witnessed it.
At night, I was learning that war could be humane and just. Night after night, first-person footage from the nose of smart bombs allowed me to see with my own eyes that American bombers weren’t dumping their payloads indiscriminately over cities, like the Germans did to Britain and the Brits did to Germany and we did to the Japanese during World War II. These were “smart” bombs; this was a “smart” war in all the various connotations of “smart”: intelligent; shrewd and calculating; amusingly clever; with a neat and well-cared-for appearance; fashionable and stylish; vigorous and brisk; causing a sharp stinging sensation.
Our history teacher didn’t talk about the Gulf War. She didn’t even pull down a map of the world and point to the Middle East so that we at least knew where it was taking place. Then again, I suppose she had bigger problems to worry about—some kids in the class couldn’t locate Illinois on a map.
Neither do I remember talking about the war with my friends, unless it was to ask whether we’d seen the latest awesome press conference footage—General Schwarzkopf standing in front of a television monitor narrating the flight of a bomb as it entered the chimney of a building or through the window of a munitions depot.
Oddly enough, I thought about the war the most when I was at band practice. That fall the band director, a man named Scott Casagrande, passed out the sheet music for Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam, Dresden, 1945), a piece dedicated to the firebombing and subsequent obliteration of the German city of Dresden. One look at the part in front of me and I could tell that this was unlike anything I’d seen before. The parts were written aleatorically, meaning that instead of notes on the staff creating a melody and countermelody, there were diagrams and instructions telling us to play our instruments in unorthodox ways to represent the bombing of the city. The trombones were to drone on a low B-flat to mimic the rumble of bombers approaching the city. The trumpets sounded the wailing air raid sirens. Next the score instructed the entire band to frantically whisper the word “firestorm” over and over in German, to capture the panicked gossip that spread through the city as the first wave of bombers dropped jellied gasoline in order to prepare the way for the incendiary bombs that would ignite the city.
The trombone drone of the bombers continued as the flutes began mimicking the sound of bombs whistling toward the earth. The percussion section commanded a whole battery of drums to conjure up the bomb blasts and shook thunder out of a sheet of metal. As Dresden burned we blew air through our horns to create the violent winds brought on by the rapidly rising heat that sucked victims into the burning rubble of buildings and blew over structures weakened by the initial blasts. When it was all done, roughly 30,000 civilians had been killed, many buried alive in basement bomb shelters and then burned beyond recognition by the great fire that burned for weeks to come. After playing the piece, I always felt emotionally drained and distant, as though I had experienced something traumatic, having felt the presence of a darker reality.
I don’t remember when I first had the idea, but at some point I approached Mr. Casagrande and asked him if I could find some images that could be projected on a screen above the band while we played. I have to believe that this idea wouldn’t have been possible without the live war footage I took in every night on CNN. I was not a technologically savvy kid. (I used to hold a tape recorder up to the television to record my favorite songs from MTV.) But hearing this music, I saw images.
At the public library, I found photos from books on World War II: bombers in flight, photos of bombs falling in a cluster, aerial photos of the majestic city of Dresden with its Baroque domes and soaring spires. I found photos of the city on fire, photos of the smoldering wrecked buildings and, finally, photos of a wooden cart piled with scorched black corpses.
The AV director, Mr. Baldwin, made the photos into slides. Over the course of several rehearsals I sequenced them to the music, so that the image of bombers corresponded to the droning of the trombones, the falling bombs corresponded to the whistling of the flutes, and so on.
On the night of the performance, I stood back behind the heavy black curtain at the rear of the stage with my finger on the button of the slide projector. I began with a picture of the city before the bombing and then toggled back and forth between the image of the bombers in flight and the cluster of bombs falling toward earth in order to give the sensation of many bombers dropping many bombs.
I felt powerful, like the Great Oz, proud to be inspiring fear in this audience of parents and school administrators, perhaps disturbing their pat notions of war and its costs. In some ways, I’ve been trying to get back to that feeling ever since—trying to find moments where what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing come together to reveal a disturbing truth.
However, I must confess, at no point as I stood behind that curtain was I consciously thinking of the war in Iraq. Dresden was different, I told myself. Dresden was butchery, barbarity. The bombing of Iraq, as I saw on television every night for a few months, was clean, efficient, just.