Home Fires: Narrative and Memory at War

By Roman Skaskiw The New York Times

I am aware that two war movies, “The Hurt Locker” and “The Messenger,” have received multiple nominations for the Academy Awards. Though I’ve enjoyed war movies in the past, I haven’t seen either of these.

I’ve stopped watching movies about our current wars for the same reason I don’t like recounting my scariest moments for voyeuristic friends.  I am protective of my memories and don’t want them crowded out.

People seem impatient when I choose to talk about playing volleyball with interpreters, drinking tea with warlords, training police, or dredging irrigation canals. It’s as if you lack authenticity if you talk about anything other than killing or being killed.

The expectation bores into your memory, and you struggle to distinguish how you felt from how you are expected to feel. Often, it feels easier to surrender to expectation. There is truth in what Isaac Babel wrote in his story, “My First Fee”: “A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.”

I feel the reality of my experiences seeping through my fingers as my own life tries with all its might to resemble one of two stories: that of hero or victim. I can be the hero who in the face of danger mustered all the old truths of the heart, or, and perhaps simultaneously, I can be a well-intentioned victim of circumstance forced to commune with death through the moral ambiguities of war.

Whatever a veteran’s faults, they are all excused with four simple words: I’ve been to war.

We roll out a red carpet for such victims. Whatever a veteran’s faults — irritability, boorishness, aloofness, alcoholism, drug use, self destruction — they are all excused with four simple words: I’ve been to war. For many, the effects are genuine, sure, and we should help them. I do not want to dismiss anyone’s suffering. I do, however, want to acknowledge the seductive power of the red carpet of victimhood, and life bending to resemble a well-crafted story.

Read more at The New York Times