WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #63, March 2, 2022
Glenn Petersen. War and the Arc of Human Experience
Todd Miller, Build Bridges, Not Walls
GLENN PETERSEN. War and the Arc of Human Experience. Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.
Glenn Petersen flew seventy combat missions in Vietnam when he was nineteen, launching from an aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf. He’d sought out the weighty responsibilities and hazardous work. But why? What did the cultural architecture of the society he grew up in have to do with the way he went to war? In this book he looks at the war from an anthropological perspectivebecause that’s how he’s made his living in all the subsequent years: it’s how he sees the world. While anthropologists write about the military and war these days, they do so from the perspective of researchers. What makes this a fully original contribution is that Petersen brings to the page the classic methodology of ethnographers, participant observation—a kind of total immersion. He writes from the dual perspectives of an insider and a researcher and seeks in the specifics of lived experience some larger conclusions about humans’ social lives in general. Petersen was long oblivious to what had happened to him in Vietnam and he fears that young men and women who’ve been fighting the US military’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq might be similarly unaware of what’s happened to them. Author TOC Reviews Features
Subjects:Social Science / Violence in Society, Biography & Autobiography / Military, Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, History / Military / Vietnam War, Psychology / Psychopathology / Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
BUILD BRIDGES, NOT WALLS
Here’s a glimpse of Todd Miller’s beliefs and his narrative method at the end of his latest book, Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders. City Lights Books, 2021. [This book will also be mentioned in a Climate Memo Mondays, for it is about building bridges through the wars and chaos of the climate calamity.]
He opens in the middle of an anecdote (a little story, 117-18) about Giovanni’s lacerated feet after his long journey to reach the US border from his home in Guatemala, heading to Dallas where his brothers worked. Fortunately he had found a clinic and emergency medic, Cordelia Finley, to wash and medicate his raw blisters. Miller locates him in Sasabe, Mexico, one half mile from the border, not only geographically but in relationship to the other stories he has told about people and borders: Juan Carlos from the opening pages and throughout (a main thread), Alfaro in Altar “the man searching for his missing daughter,” and armed Border Patrol Agent Lenihan, in whose rescuing, bloodied arms the refugee Roberto had recently died. The single paragraph, as in classic novels, connects to walls and bridges in many major directions from beginning, middle, to end and back again.
After three paragraphs providing details of Giovanni’s desperate journey and Cordelia’s merciful healing, Cordelia makes a potent connection with the “trench foot” of World War I and, from that sharp physical image, with her view of the US-Mexican border as a “low-intensity war zone.”
The entire Story is told this way in rich permutations and diverse sequences of anecdotes, connections/contexts, commentaries. To make a grammatical analogy, it’s like the most common of sentences in the English language, the cumulative, which can chain endlessly. In this instance, the hugely enlarged world martial context is followed by one even larger—the climate emergency (paragraph 6): Giovanni is from a town in the corredor seco, where “droughts have risen in intensity over the last decade,” encompassing “large parts of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.” A UN report is mentioned. We realize we have returned to a major recurrent theme: where do all these refugees come from, and why?