May Day

[Gerald]

Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, I imagine many historians will be taking out their chisels and stones in an attempt to capture the moment within the historical record. Most military histories hyphenate years of conflict and inscribe them on a tombstone formed by parentheses. When we walk through history’s graveyard, for example, we find: World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945) among the many rows of markers annotating warfare.

Since my own return from a combat zone, I’ve begun to challenge the many textbooks and treatises on war I once readily accepted as having been mined from the solid bedrock of fact. I believe historians have done a poor job of understanding the lifespans of most wars. I’m beginning to think all of them are, on a fundamental level, wrong.

I’ll concede that the start dates may be correct, but the end dates on the tombstones of war are certainly all wrong. This finality is an illusion, and it negates the continuation of war into the days, months, years, decades, and, I argue, the generations to follow.

The history of warfare should be written from hospital wards and psychiatric offices, from kitchen tables and bar stools at the local pub. Let the doctors and surgeons give their accounts of what happened. Let the widows speak. Let the children tell us the story of their lives. War’s history can be told by blood banks and prosthetics factories. For far too many, the suicide rate isn’t a rate or a chart or a statistic at all — it is the long trajectory of a war that has tracked them down through the years, finally, to claim them one by one, their deaths taking place in the periphery of history’s view.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...05/03/may-day/


Note: May 3, 2011, 2:20 PM