Segment from Coming Home

Our Hearts Were Touched by Fire

The BackStory team reflects on the power of war to shape the lives of individuals and nations.

00:00:00 / 00:00:00
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This is a transcript of an earlier broadcast of this episode; there may be slight changes in wording in the rebroadcast.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, we’re marking Veterans Day with a look back at the history of soldiers returning home.

ED: I had a remarkable experience this last week of a veteran, my predecessor as President of the University of Richmond, 82 years old, Bruce Heilman. Got on a Harley and is riding across the United States, retracing the path that he followed in the wake of World War II, when he was 21 years old and hitchhiked from California to Quantico. He’s stopping all along the way to meet old comrades. He titled his new autobiography, An Interruption That Lasted a Lifetime. And the interruption was his four years in the Navy, which he joined when he was 17 years old.

And so now as he’s thinking about what else do I want to do my life, riding across country, connecting with his old comrades is the main thing that’s doing.

BRIAN: It’s true. We think about vets and we think about the war ended. They come back. They’re adjusted. But we forget the way the military that, as you point, Ed, that short experience in the military can sometimes just shape an entire lifetime. It becomes almost the organizing principal or the narrative of one’s life. This image, I’ve never met this man, but of him riding back against his trip East.

PETER: I would add that wars are the stuff of national identity and national mythology too. So it’s not as if we have veterans who cherish their unique memories. Of course, they do. They are incorporated into a broader understanding. And i think one of the problems with so-called bad or unpopular wars is they don’t fit neatly into a triumphal, forward-looking, progressive national mythology.

BRIAN: Which is why we literally have a black gash as our formal official public memory of the Vietnam War. The memorial is often referred to as a black gash. And if you juxtapose that to your point about the making of a national story, wars we lose are wounds. They’re black gashes in a national story.

PETER: That is a profound point, Brian.

ED: It strikes me that historians spend too much of our time talking about the causes of wars and not enough time talking about the consequences of wars. I have this little canned speech that I give against the concept of antebellum, because I said, actually, it’s always antebellum. We just don’t know when the war is coming. But we cannot organize our lives around a war that we do not know is coming.

And so I said get over this concept of antebellum America. On the other hand, postbellum America or postbellum Americas actually makes a lot more sense. And so I think that one way you can understand American history is a series of wars followed by unfolding consequences of those wars back home.