Joe Rocket Ballistic

A Just War Is Hard To Find - Johnny Got His Gun & The Good War Analyses

To find out if there is such a thing as a just or good war, we first have to look at the terms just and good. The problem lies in how both terms can be interpreted; they do not have a solid definition other then what you find in the dictionary. What's just or good for one is unjust or bad for another. This is much like Joe Bonham's rant about the term liberty in Johnny Got His Gun: "What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's just a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he's talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?" (Trumbo 123). Whether the term is 'Liberty' or' Just', the problem is that the further removed words are from the things they describe, the more room there is for the meaning of the words to shift to accommodate the desires of whoever is using them. Therefore, a war can only be good or just for a certain individual or a group of people, no matter what makes them a group. Furthermore, let's keep in mind that history is cyclical and with that, so are wars, whether they are small rebellions or global conflicts involving many nations fighting on various battlefields around the world. Since the beginning of time, mankind has always been involved in conflict. When times get hard, when religions or political views collide, or sometimes simply because of a miscommunication or mistake: mankind has been and will always be at war. Sometimes, the entire world is dragging itself down into catastrophe, nation by nation, folk by folk, men by men. When such an event occurs, nations fight for their own ideals and beliefs, sided by allies with similar motivations. We call this a World War. So far, two World Wars have come and gone, the Third World War - is only a matter of time.

Although per Treaty of Versailles the Germans were blamed for World War I, this is not true. The Germans were simply the scapegoat. Of course, they didn't make the situation any better and were indeed one of the major forces in The Great War, but the real perpetrator is mankind's inherent properties of fear, desperation, and most of all - survival instinct. This may sound dramatic; however, let's not forget that humans can be driven to do things beyond our imagination when one is starving. Jacques Raboud accounts: "It can happen again. We are all good people, but if we are led a little too far, we are going to believe everything we are told. We are ordinary people, who can also be weapons for evil Hitlers" (Terkel 422), and it is easy to lead hungry people too far. However, hard times are old times now. Neither my generation, nor my parents' generation has faced any real hardship compared to generations before them. In Stud Terkel's The Good War, Big Bill Broonzy sings a country song in a Chicago nightclub on how a sharecropper's mule died on him. Four young hipsters made a scene and walked out on him. Broonzy accounts how those kids never had seen hardship, how they never had seen cities bombed out, how they never had bombs fall on them. Then Broonzy asks: "Must a society experience horror in order to understand horror" (14)? Broonzy hits the nail on its head. Robert Rasmus further recalls his childhood: "At that [14] age, you look forward to the glamour and have no idea of the horrors" (38). Although both men talk about different periods of time, they outline some major sociological facts that contribute to the outbreak of war.

First and foremost there is pride. It does not matter whether its nationalism, family pride, or peer-pressure as Rasmus further illustrates when explaining "The reason you storm the beaches is not patriotism or bravery. It's that sense of not wanting to fail your buddies. Having to leave that group when I had the flu may have saved my life. Yet to me, that kid, it was a disaster" (39). Philip Morrison states the nationalistic rally of the USA: "In cold objective fact, Pearl Harbor was the greatest American victory of World War Two. It mobilized the country" (516). Despite the lives that were lost on that day, this is in essence very true. Secondly, there's the unification of a nation in times of need for all the people of that nation. An old-time folk singer who'd been with an anti-aircraft battery of the Sixty-second Artillery explains the united-we-stand feeling: "You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We were in a tribal sort of situation, where we could help each other without fear. I realized it was the absence of phony standards that created the thing I loved about the army" (5).

Thirdly, there's the horrendous double political agenda many governments (try to) keep (under lid and seal.) In this aspect, war has been very good to various nations, especially Germany and the USA during both World Wars. Without disagreeing with the right of any nation to act based on self-interest, when taking action, try not to make it seem like something it is not. For the US it was most notably World War I, which revived the whole country which lay on its back following the Great Depression. Where World War I had revived the USA: World War II made the USA seem like it was on steroids. Their technological advances, or much rather acquirements, made other nations look like kindergarten nations. For Germany, at least until they were defeated, World War II also did a lot for the country. It created jobs for everyone. The whole country was mobilized and almost entirely united behind a genius that became a mental case. The Germans were desperate, the war helped them get a job, and with that job they could feed themselves and their children, and that's mankind's most basic instinct. In the end, Germany's success and insane motivation brought the USA all the spoils of war, as one of the nuclear engineer for the Manhattan Project, Philip Morrison, explains: "When we beat the Nazis, we emulated them" (515) and "The Germans made the rocket. The cruise missile and the ballistic missile are also German inventions" (515). Yet it was the USA that ran off with this technology, fine-tuned it, and perfected it. Morrison makes a dazzling conclusion when he says "We fought the war to stop fascism. But it transformed the societies that opposed fascism. They took on some of its attributes" (516).

The fourth and last sociological fact revealed by Broonzy is that societies must experience horror in order to understand it. This fact runs parallel with the idea of how a society must face hardship in order to understand it, and out of that, appreciate times of non-hardship. As for experiencing horrors in order to understand it, following are several accounts out of Terkel's collection of World War II stories with regards to understanding horror after experiencing it. "It was sunshine and quiet. We were passing the Germans we killed. Looking at the individual German dead, each took on a personality. These were no longer an abstraction. They were no longer the Germans of the brutish faces and the helmets we saw in the newsreels. They were exactly our age. These were boys like us" (5). "I felt sickish, I was cold, I was scared. And I couldn't even get one last cigarette" (6). "You never get the picture out of your eye: the interchangeability of the stacks of human bodies and the stacks of cords of wood" (7). "I was pulled in two directions: Gee, I don't wanna get killed. And, Boy, this is gorgeous country" (43). "After Pearl Harbor, I never played with dolls again" (9). "I recall saying to myself, Hey, this Japanese guy, he probably came from a drug store or a farm raising rice and has a mother and father just like this American soldier" (535). Joe Bonham in Johnny Got His Gun is a prime, though fictitious, example of the ultimate sacrifice during a war: "He was a dead man with a mind that could still think. He knew all the answers that the dead knew and couldn't think about. He could speak for the dead because he was one of them. He was the first of all the soldiers who had died since the beginning of time who still had a brain left to think with" (Trumbo 153).

After four years of war, or entirely after a war, people generally start to question things more thoroughly and demand answers, whether they are answers in the sense of actual words, or deeds. Looking back at things, the general consensus is that although most would do it again, they do wonder what the heck they were fighting for, what they were loosing their limbs and lives for. One account mentions: "Our enemy was, patently, obscene: the Holocaust maker. It was one war that many who would have resisted "your other wars" supported enthusiastically. It was a "just war, " if there is any such animal. In a time of nuclear weaponry, it is the language of a lunatic. But World War Two..." (Terkel 15). And also: "I came back much more circumspect in my judgment of people. And of governments" (7), this conclusion was reached after asking one's self what or who they were fighting for. Joe Hanley reflects back on his tours of duty as "No wars can be just. During combat, I would say to myself, This whole damn thing isn't worth one ounce of American blood or anybody's blood. You're wondering, What am I doing this for? How did I get into this mess? (276). Alvin 'Tommy' Bridges doesn't hold back: "How goddamn foolish it is, the war. They's no war in the world that's worth fightin' for, I don't care where it is. They can't tell me any different. Money, money is the thing that causes it all. I wouldn't be a bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote 'em are the men that make the money, make the ammunition, make the clothing and so forth" (392). Joe Bonham's comical yet serious comments should not be left out here: "Then there was this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for. Was it freedom from another country? Freedom from work or diseases or death? Freedom from your mother-in-law? Please mister give us a bill of sale on this freedom before we go out and get killed" (Trumbo 146).

Although the war brought out terrible inhumane things in many soldiers, not all hope was lost, take Eliot Johnson's recollection for example: "The relief I felt that this boy was gonna make it - I can't remember whether he was German or ours. It didn't matter. Isn't that interesting?" (Terkel 256), or Father George Zabelka's, a chaplain (military priest) during World War II, accounts: "All of us went to communion, the GIs and the Japanese prisoners" (534). As earlier discussed, Wars also do a lot of good to the home front, especially if the home front is not one of the battlegrounds. In the USA's case, it brought much more to the USA then just scientist achieving technological milestones. Several accounts from Terkel's book make this clear: "The war [...] it does something to your country" (9) and "World War Two changed everything" (10). Interestingly enough, war also does a lot of good from a feministic point of view as per the following account: "It is exquisite irony that military work liberated women from the private world of Kche [Kitchen], Kinder [Children], Kirche [Church]" (10). With many men heading off to war, and many never coming back, women took over factory jobs and other 'man-jobs': "She and her sister at the dinner table were talking about the best way to keep their drill sharp in the factory" (10). Although the GI Bill did not provide much money, partially thanks to this Bill, Jack Short concludes "Everything in my lifetime since the war has been positive. I don't mean that war is positive. They're all negative as far as I'm concerned" (144). And continues "The war changed our whole idea of how we wanted to live when we came back. We set our sights pretty high" (144). Ex-admiral MacLeish weaves the past and the present nicely together in saying "World War Two has warped our view of how we look at things today. We see things in terms of that war, which in a sense was a good war. But the twisted memory of it encourages the men of my generation to be willing, almost eager, to use military force anywhere in the world" (13).

A thing that cannot be ignored when discussing a 'just' war is imbalance and civilians. Father George Zabelka regrets that "we should have felt horror then that these were civilians. We had gone through the "just war" theory of Saint Augustine: civilians were not to be harmed. Yet it never occurred to us" (533). As sad as it may be, sometimes it takes killing to prevent killing as even Zabelka realizes: "This was going to save millions of lives. We would have lost a million soldiers invading Japan. But, as a priest, I should have considered: We're killing little kids, old men and old women, burning them to death. I don't recall any feeling of guilt at the time" (534). Not only the US would have sustained major casualties, Japan also would have lost many soldiers, and unpreventable civilian casualties, in the event of a mass invasion. Additionally, war elsewhere in the world would have continued to rage on leading to more casualties there. Does this justify the death of the little and the fat one's victims? There is no definite answer on to that.

Now, anno 2007, we face a dark and grim period. Destruction has become so available and so cheap. The world still does not understand it. The physicists have nothing to do with it any more. It's an industry. It's bought and paid for (515). We're now about half-way through a period which undoubtedly will be looked back upon as the Age of Oil in hundreds of years from now. The problem is that the western world is running out of it and can no longer produce more than it consumes. OPEC do not have this problem, yet. This is our generation's World War in the making. Afghanistan, Iraq, they are only warnings that most people choose to ignore. All humans are inherently stupid and things do not look good for our children. Then again, just as it can take one Hitler to unite a nation a run it into the abyss - attempting to drag the whole world with it, it may just take one person to become 'smart' somewhere along the way and unite the world, or at least a nation to set an example, and fight for a better tomorrow. The eternal problem is that every reaction has a counter-reaction. Imagine trying to resolve the issues of peak oil and/or global warming by massively switching to hybrid technologies and alternative fuels. This might just create more terrorists in Saudi Arabia due to increased poverty and dissatisfaction such a policy might cause for that particular country. Who will make the right decision even if there would be such a thing as a right decision? Charles A. Gates concluded back in 1984 that "if there is another war, there will be no winner. It is madness "(264). Madness: that about sums it up.

In closing, it is often interesting how history can be significantly influenced by one person or by an event or decision that may not last longer than a split-second. What if the Japanese fleet - steaming onto Pearl Harbor - had been spotted early? What if Adolf Hitler got killed in a car crash at a younger age? The problem is that we will never be able to predict things, prevent things, nor go back in time and change the past. As such, we have to deal with things as they come. In essence, none of the negative or positive consequences of war can make a war just or unjust. 'Just' can mean one thing to one person and completely different thing to another person. This reduces the value of the word to absolutely nothing. We simply have to start living with the fact that wars, no pun intended, 'just happen' at certain times. The holy grail of peace on earth lies not in a united worldwide religion or government. The key may just lie in the human genome project, maybe if we can rewire our genes, we can 'instruct' ourselves not to act as simplistic, selfish, and greedy cavemen. Maybe we can all just go back to being monkeys and throw banana peels at each other all day long! How peaceful would that be?

"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" - George Santayana

Works Cited

Terkel, Studs. The Good War: An Oral History of World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Trumbo, Dalton. Johnny Got His Gun. 1939, New York: Citadel Press, 1991.