Have We Learned Nothing In 75 Years? Thoughts On D-Day And William Faulkner

A P-38, marked with D-Day invasion stripes

Like the children of so many World War II veterans—too many who are gone, too few who are still with us—I used to look at June 6 as the anniversary of something greater than the sum of its parts, something that would endure and truly change the world. My father was flying a P-38 over Normandy that day, watching from his aerial perch the horror that was unfolding far below his safe cockpit. Like many of his colleagues who witnessed D-Day from the ground, sea, and air, he didn’t want to talk about it in the years that followed; he knew the terror of combat, the feeling of futility at not being able to save the life of a buddy shot down in a dogfight or blown apart by a mine or drowned beneath the debris of a submarine attack. He knew what it was to kill another human being—to place another man’s airplane in his sights and pull the trigger and press the attack until the other man was either ashes or a figure beneath a parachute. He blew up trains; he destroyed factories. His was the guiding hand of wing-borne savagery, carnage, and death. By all accounts, medals, and commendations, he was very good at what he was trained to do. He outlasted those who were equally determined to kill him. And he came home to a wife, a daughter, and, eventually, a son. 

To know him as I did, was to know the most peace-loving human being I’ve ever encountered. Even though he remained in the Air Force for 30 more years—doing things in the Cold War that remain classified, and losing men under his command—he was not inclined to anger or temper; he preferred quiet resolution of conflict. When he finally retired in 1972, he traded a seat in a cockpit for a seat on a John Deere tractor and tried (not always successfully) to farm a modest acreage in Virginia and build and fly model airplanes…and embrace his family. My memories of my dad probably mirror the memories—with variations in details—of many kids of those warriors who, against all common sense, left their farms, their small towns and big cities, their schools, their businesses, and their families, to wrest freedom from tyranny at the very possible cost of their lives or at least parts of their bodies or minds.

My father believed, until his death in 2003, that what he and his fellow Americans and allies, particularly his British brothers-in-arms, accomplished between the late 1930s and the war’s end in 1945 was a necessary violence to stem what otherwise would have been an unthinkable reign of terror across the face of the world. He was not a dreamer of unrealistic outcomes; he knew full well that tyrants, despots, sociopathic stealers of public trust and fortune would rise again, would try again to walk their self-serving horror across vulnerable nations. But he would not have believed such an enemy would emerge within his own country; he would not have believed such a home-grown man, a usurper of a popular vote befouled by a foreign and treacherous foreign agent, would also seek to bond himself with other global tyrants—liars and murderers all—and turn his back on the welcoming torch-bearer at the gate of Democracy. That such a madman has followers is no surprise; the history of ruthless men is replete with the stories of the ignorant and willing sheep they led. In part, they are followers because they have been told to be afraid of truth, to fear change, to fear the unfamiliar. But to a greater degree, they are followers because they have forgotten what D-Day was all about; they have unlearned (or never learned) the immutable truth that democracy is hard work accomplished by many hands working as one.

Seventy-five years ago—D-Day, June 6, 1944—my father aloft and all those boys and men below him who were engaged in unimaginable violence could not have known that all they were fighting for, dying for, would two generations later be in a state of existential peril at the hands of a new madman and his cadre of know-nothing-see-nothings. Can it possibly be true that the sacrifices of so many Americans and allies were for naught? Have we learned nothing? We are being torn apart more and more every day; unraveled from within; a ragged, ruthless ripping of the fabric of sensibility and ideals meant to endure, to evolve, to become better.

Are we today at the endgame? Have we lost our resolve to push the inhumanity out of our lives and restore the very soul of the nation? Have we lost the courage of our convictions? Have the last 75 years been wasted? I want very much to believe we are better than that. Because I do not have a voice sufficiently powerful, or eloquent, or useful with which to properly engage and fend off forever this existential threat, and because I want very much to believe that what brave men and women have died for still means something, and can still be redemptive, I turn to one of my favorite writers, William Faulkner, winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. 

On December 10, 1950, Faulkner delivered his acceptance speech. At the time, atomic bombs were getting bigger, the world was growing fretful, if not fearful of annihilation. America, recovering from World War II, was on the verge of a new war, and barely a decade away from Vietnam. I read this speech whenever I begin to fear for the country…so I’ve been reading this a lot lately, and I will read it today, 75 years to the day after my father looked down on those bloody beaches and the treasure being offered up to the altar of freedom.

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”