"The jungle came alive and took him"

In James Jones' book World War II: A Chronicle of Soldiering he writes about the invasion of Japan as being eerily as Arnold Toynbee had described war under democracy--total war. The whole of the civilian population would be put to the grim task of defending Japanese soil, and in preparation it would be trained and equipped with what tools it could use to carry out this defensive order. But Jones does something very terrific with the imagery of an American GI setting his first foot in an invasion upon the Japanese shore that bears repeating here.

What it must have been like to some old-timer buck sergeant or staff sergeant who had been through Guadalcanal or Bougainville or the Philippines, to stand on some beach and watch this huge war machine beginning to stir and move all around him and know that he very likely had survived this far only to fall dead on the dirt of Japan’s home islands, hardly bears thinking about. (p. 189)

Jones' point is two-fold here. He is discussing the experience of war from the perspective of the GI who dodges chance because bullets, explosions, and shrapnel are all chance encounters on the battlefield. That's how they were engineered. This GI, having lived through several tours of duty, witnessed several different battles, came within inches of whirring rounds and screeching artillery fragments, now recognized he would likely perish at the final stage of a war with all this battle-hardened experience. That experience would help him to both appreciate the scope and danger of any battle, and he could see more clearly than ever before that this would be the greatest battle and the one most likely to end his tour, in a fusillade of enemy fire, face-down on the beach. The second point follows closely from the first. All the Americans taking part in the Pacific war or reading its daily accounts in the newspapers understood the religious zealots that Japan had made for the war effort. The military had to introduce flamethrowers to burn Japanese out of their bunkers and cave complexes. So few Japanese would surrender during the island battles that the GI who had witnessed it and the general who would plan future landings recognized that only in death would the Japanese rest their weapons. And with this ghastly prospect we find ourselves looking upon the Japanese like a roving colony of army ants. Each Japanese body served a purpose to the greater whole, the colony, and each Japanese man, woman, and child was prepared to throw their bodies into the war effort, dying to save their land from invasion.

Reading this passage I cannot help but think about a scene from the film Aliens where the marines first encounter them in their hive, lying in wait along the walls and the ceiling. In that scene, the walls come alive and begin attacking the marines. To imagine the ambulatory population of Japan stirring about in preparation for war was a chilling image. Japan then had a population 64% the size of the United States. That was a lot of life bent on killing or dying in its attempt to do so. This is a very chilling image indeed.

I chose a quote from a movie from a year later--Predator. In that film yet another alien lurks about the jungle in a rapidly shifting camouflage that allows it to literally become the trees and leaves around it. When it comes at you, it looks as if the jungle, at any moment, could detach itself, like a piece of wall paper, and come at you.

These two images, your surroundings teeming with killers or the jungle coming alive and taking you, operate at the margins of normal experience. People are unaccustomed to seeing beings serve both as scenery and as agent at least not in contemporary experience. When the jungles of Africa gave way to the seasonally dry savannahs through a climactic event precipitated by the joining of the Americas at the isthmus of Panama, perhaps the first human-like experience of being chased upright became a possibility. These monkey ancestors, walking upright between increasingly distant stands of trees, most likely fell prey to those predators that lurked in the bushes, barely noticeable, blending in as part of the jungle, appearing as part of that jungle. How many monkey-men went through life with damaged limbs, deep claw gashes, hobbled gaits from near misses with these early predators? Enough to focus that groups' attention on, one, walking in groups, and two, carrying sticks and stones.

It seems as if war is outside of time. It is at once a primordial consciousness of fear, killing, and survival. At the same time it consists of the bleeding edge of technology. This combination of primordial impulses and of cutting edge techniques and tools creates a disruptive model for war in the everyday consciousness of humans. War chews up the countryside. War fills the fields with dead, dying, and rotting bodies. War shatters minds. War disintegrates countries. War erases memory. War enforces the building of its memorials.

Thanatos, the Egyptian god of death, also came to be known in psychoanalytic terminology as the 'death impulse.' In the grand dialectical symbolism of human consciousness, thanatos and eros fought for supremacy, and that would get expressed in the actions of humanity. I am truly unsure how opposed these two impulses are. Many more support emotions and conditions are required for them to be effected in the interpersonal spheres of humanity. I am sure of the fact that human experience is smooth in the center and jagged at the edges. Marginal experiences can be at once vivid and otherworldly. And the stresses of the mind to process information and act in these margins creates blank spaces and discontinuity. The one counter that warfare has learned from this is to drill troops in order that their training makes their actions spontaneous and machine-like. Training will save a man in the pitch of battle because just six months ago that man was milking cows and chasing young girls around his small town. Now he's in Guadalcanal, not Kansas. And he's holding a rifle, not a pitchfork. And to get there, he's taken his first train ride, then his first plane ride, and finally his last boat ride to his final resting place: face down in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific island wearing new boots, and a new uniform, carrying a rifle that he never had a chance to shoot. Chance had got him first, and now he no longer would have another chance to dance with Shelly or flirt with Betty. No, GI Joe lay dead, in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific atoll.

Paul Fussell, writing on the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, makes an expedient out of the need to use it. Forty years on and in the bosom of an academic career, Fussell had both the time and the experience as a GI to reflect upon this decision. His subsequent answer was for its dropping. He also cites that chilling passage from Jone's account of World War II as a component of the thinking that led to the rationale to drop the bomb. The oft-cited statistic which should at least be suspect for its utter neatness is 'one million.' That's how many soldiers the US would have expected to lose in order to take the main islands of Japan and force Japanese surrender. The atomic bomb was an expedient, and God knows those men--having dodged so many bullets, having watched so many comrades die, having sent their share of enemy off to his eternity--they would want no more of it. The whole effort--which was then more so than now, a chain of cooperation among men and women in the coordinated effort to mobilize, build, and wage war--was fatigued. It had had enough. Or perhaps it simply meant that the rear-echelon troops, the sons of senators and powerful businessmen, the movie stars, and the filthy rich would finally be required to take their turn marching into a battle that as yet remained critically abstract and distant enough for them to maintain organizationally.

On that note, perhaps we lost an opportunity for democracy in total war. Perhaps we lost a chance for the war experience to truly level all stations of society, to reduce even the sons of the rich and powerful to rotting corpses. They too would have had that existentially transforming experience that comes from killing an enemy or being shot at or simply lying awake in a fox hole, using your helmet as your latrine. Yes, to have the rich boy exit the croquet greens and find himself in Army greens shitting into an old ration tin inches from his 'suite mate' in a fox hole during a lull in artillery fire while all around him a ghastly bone army poked here and there out of the soil and the smell of decay and the fat buzzing of carrion flies hung about. That is democracy when a rich boy gets his better manners stained over with fear, drill, and survival. When the rich boy is reduced to a wet, fatigued, and vacant expression of battle weariness; when the rich boy's mind is too shattered to run daddy's business, that, that is when we have achieved a modicum of democracy. To have us all ferried about, thrown into alien settings, and rung out emotionally by artillery fire is to reduce us all to the basic datum of battlefield experience, which becomes the common bond, the common understanding, the common traumatic thread by which we can build a society together. In this democracy, this utopia of my mind, we all share the same injury.