The Poetry is in the Killing
An excerpt from
The Mourner's Song
War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam
by James Tatum

To the dismay of peaceful readers, Homer's descriptions of wounding and killing are copious and exquisitely detailed. Although modern critical descriptions of the Iliad never fail to acknowledge the major role battles play in the poem, these scenes are rarely at the center of commentary. We linger over the deaths of Patroclus and Hector because we get to know them so well. Few other heroes gain such loving readerships. Today, a reader of the Iliad is likely to skip over the fray, from the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles, and go to such famous moments as the parting of Hector and Andromache and the meeting of Priam and Achilles in book 24. These are cardinal moments in the poem, and each of these inspiring, tragic moments arises from scenes like this:

The spear smashed in the bone and he fell to the ground headlong
on his face. Meanwhile warlike Menelaos stabbed Thoas
in the chest where it was left bare by the shield, and unstrung his limbs' strength.
Meges, Phyleus' son, watched Amphiklos as he came on
and was too quick with a stab at the base of the leg, where the muscle
of a man grows thickest, so that on the spearhead the sinew
was torn apart, and a mist of darkness closed over both eyes.
(16.310-16, Lattimore)

Only the greatest heroes of the Greeks and an occasional Trojan champion such as Aeneas survive their wounds to fight another day. As we might expect in a Greek poem about a Greek war, the Trojan enemies and their allies suffer more. Yet death in battle has a way of leveling differences. As Elaine Scarry has observed in The Body in Pain, our wounds and deaths in wars denationalize us, reducing us to a fundamental, stateless human identity.

The "unmaking" of the human being, the emptying of the nation from his body, is equally characteristic of dying or being wounded, for the in part naturally "given" and in part "made" body is deconstructed. When the Irishman's chest is shattered, when the Armenian boy is shot through the legs and groin, when a Russian woman dies in a burning village, when an American medic is blown apart on the field, their wounds are not Irish, Armenian, Russian, or American precisely because it is the unmaking of an Irishman, the unmaking of an Armenian boy, the unmaking of a Russian woman, the unmaking of an American soldier that has just occurred, as well as in each case the unmaking of the civilization as it resides in each of those bodies.

Half of the Iliad's war music is devoted to battle, told in precise details that become as characteristic of the poem as its similes. In a war poem filled with the compression of opposites, Patroclus's metamorphosis is the most extreme. The gentlest of warriors becomes the most ferocious, and in the shortest time. Once he enters the battle in Achilles' armor, no one is more merciless with his enemies.

He fell thunderously, and Patroclus in his next outrush
at Thestor, Enops' son, who huddled inside his chariot,
shrunk back, he had lost all his nerve, and from his hands the reins
slipped—Patroclus coming close up to him stabbed with a spear-thrust
at the right side of the jaw and drove it on through the teeth, then
hooked and dragged him with the spear over the rail, as a fisherman
who sits out on the jut of a rock with line and glittering
bronze hook drags a fish, who is thus doomed, out of the water.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Next he struck Euryalos, as he swept in, with a great stone
in the middle of the head, and all the head broke into two pieces
inside the heavy helmet, and he in the dust face downward
dropped while death breaking the spirit drifted about him.
(16.401-14, Lattimore)

               The sharp stone hit him in the forehead
and smashed both brows in on each other, nor could the bone hold
the rock, but his eyes fell out into the dust before him
there at his feet, so that he vaulted to earth like a diver
from the carefully wrought chariot, and the life left his bones.
(16.740-43; 16.739-43, Lattimore)

                         Now
you spoke in bitter mockery over him, rider Patroclus:
"See now, what a light man this is, how agile an acrobat.
If only he were somewhere on the sea, where the fish swarm,
he could fill the hunger of many men, by diving for oysters;
he could go overboard from a boat even in rough weather
the way he somersaults so easily to the ground from his chariot
now. So, to be sure, in Troy also they have their acrobats."
(16.744-50; 16.743-50, Lattimore)

Meriones, though you are a dancer my spear might have stopped you
now and for all time, if only I could have hit you.
(16.617-18, Lattimore)

Few of Homer's commentators have wished the Iliad a battle longer than it is. With fully half the poem devoted to violence and mayhem, there are as many battle scenes as a romance would devote to the obsessions of lovers and their intrigues. Pope knew battle scenes were likely to be as unpopular with Homer's newest readers as with those reading them for the hundredth time. He explains not only their proportions in the poem, but their variety. Killing one's enemies can be carried out with as much craft and studied variation as any other art. Consider this sequence from Achilles' slaughter of Trojans in book 20:

                    Now Tros with his hands was reaching
for the knees, bent on supplication, but he stabbed with his sword at the liver
so that the liver was torn from its place, and from it the black blood
drenched the fold of his tunic and his eyes were shrouded in darkness
as the life went. Next from close in he thrust at Moulios
with the pike at the ear, so the bronze spearhead pushed through and came out
at the other ear. Now he hit Echeklos the son of Agenor
with the hilted sword, hewing against his head in the middle
so all the sword was smoking with blood, and over both eyes
closed the red death and the strong destiny. Now Deukalion
was struck in the arm, at a place in the elbow where the tendons
come together. There through the arm Achilles transfixed him
with the bronze spearhead, and he, arm hanging heavy, waited
and looked his death in the face. Achilles struck with the sword's edge
at his neck, and swept the helmed head far away, and the marrow
gushed from the neckbone, and he went down to the ground at full length.
(20.468-83, Lattimore)

The battles of the Iliad have the "inquisitorial approach" that John Keegan desires: get at the truth of what happens in battle, do not aim simply for a verdict about what led to victory or defeat. Keegan excludes traditional military history, of the kind that Basil Liddell-Hart writes, with its deliberate focus on generalship and strategy rather than the accidents of human misery. What Keegan does convey in The Face of Battle is the aesthetics of the battle, much the same kind of scenes that the Iliad gives us in such abundance:

Wounds and their treatment, the mechanics of being taken prisoner, the nature of leadership at the most junior level, the role of compulsion in getting men to stand their ground, the incidence of accidents as a cause of death in war, and above all, the dimensions of the danger which different varieties of weapons offer to the soldier on the battlefield . . . hand weapon, single-missile weapon, and multi-missile weapon . . . to demonstrate, as exactly as possible, what the warfare, respectively, of hand, single-missile and multiple-missile weapons was—and is—like, and to suggest how and why the men who have had (and do have) to face these weapons control their fears, staunch their wounds, go to their deaths.

Keegan's inquisitorial approach is in full force in a war writer like Paul Fussell, who combines the roles of critic and soldier into one angry profession. His treatment of Ernie Pyle, the most popular American war correspondent in World War II, exposes the gap between the soldier's and the civilian's imaginations of war. It points to the realities that the soldier would know, and the poet.

One of Pyle's best-known pieces is his description of the return to his company in Italy of the body of Captain Henry T. Waskow, "of Belton, Texas." Such ostentatious geographical precision only calls attention to the genteel vagueness with which Pyle is content to depict the captain's wound and body. Brought down from a mountain by muleback, Captain Waskow's body is laid out on the ground at night and respectfully visited by officers and men of the company. The closest Pyle comes to accurate registration is reporting that one man, who sat by the body for some time, holding the captain's hand and looking into his face, finally "reached over and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of arranged the tattered edges of the uniform around the wound."

While delivering an account satisfying in its own terms, this leaves untouched what normally would be thought journalistically indispensable questions, and certainly questions bound to occur to readers hoping to derive from the Infantry's Friend an accurate image of the infantry's experience. Questions like these:

1. What killed Captain Waskow? Bullet, shell fragments, a mine, or what?
2. Where was his wound? How large was it? you imply that it was in the traditionally noble place, the chest. Was it? Was it a little hole, or was it a great red missing place? Was it perhaps in the crotch, or in the testicles, or in the belly? Were his entrails extruded, or in any way visible?
3. How much blood was there? Was the captain's uniform bloody? Did the faithful soldier wash his hands after toying with those 'tattered edges"? Were the captain's eyes open? Did his face look happy? Surprised? Satisfied? Angry?

With characteristic savagery, Virginia Woolf makes the same point in Mrs. Dalloway. Set in a fine June afternoon in postwar London, Mrs. Dalloway captures with great precision the ability of those confronted with violence not to see it, and the power of those who are not witnesses to it to recapture that violence, completely, in their imagination. The veteran Septimus Smith kills himself at the moment a Dr. Holmes is barging his way past Smith's wife, Rezia.

There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia's (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings—what did they want? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. "I'll give it you!" he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer's area railings.

He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground: through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party?
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away.

What Fussell and Woolf are both after is what the Iliad provides in abundance. Here is a terse summary of one sequence that begins toward the end of book 4, a relatively brief passage marking a quick crescendo of battle, leading into book 5 and an even greater struggle when the hero Diomedes gets to shine because of the absence of Achilles. That book will be a proper aristeia or show of prowess (arete) in battle for Diomedes, something for which every hero strives. With a glance back to Fussell's list, we might reduce the information in Homer to basic questions: Who is killing or wounding? Who is wounded or killed? What is the weapon used? How and where wounded? What is the outcome of the action?

In the space of eighty-two lines (4.457-538), roughly two and a half pages in the translations of Lattimore or Fagles, and, say, less than ten minutes of spoken or sung verse:

1. Antilochus kills Thalysias's son Echepolus with a spear through his forehead.
2. Agenor kills Elephenor, Chalkodon's son, with a spear in the side.
3. Ajax kills Simoeisios, the son of Anthemion Simoeisios, with a spear beside the right nipple.
4. In outrage at this, Priam's son Antiphos aims at Ajax, but instead his spear cast kills Leukos with a wound in the groin.
5. Odysseus in reaction to that death kills Demokoon, a bastard son of Priam, with a spear to his head that runs through one temple and comes out the other.
6. Peiros kills Amaryngkeus's son Diores, first wounding him with a boulder, smashing the tendons in his right ankle, then spearing him next to the navel in such a way that the spear disembowels him and his guts spill out on the ground.
7. Finally, tit for tat, Thoas the Aetolian spears Pieros in the chest above the nipple, and Pieros, dying, drags the spear from his chest and strikes Thoas in the middle of the belly. They both fall dead, sprawled beside one another in the dust.

Even in this numbing summary the studied variation is unmistakable. The particular battle sequence from which this comes does not win the greatest prize of all for the Greeks in the first day's fighting, the capture or killing of Paris, but Diomedes will go on to wound both Aphrodite and Ares. Perhaps his greatest achievement—for those partial to the Greeks, certainly among the most satisfying in the whole poem—is not just his killing of Pandarus, whose arrow had wounded Menelaus and broken the truce, but the way Diomedes kills him. It is a fine example of retributive justice, where the punishment seems to fit the crime. As a warrior fighting against Diomedes, Pandarus is out of his league, not using the weapon he uses best, the bow and arrow. He throws a spear that grazes Diomedes and boasts about it. Diomedes' answer is a spear cast guided by Athena. As he often does, Fagles turns up the volume of what is already a gruesome enough passage in Lattimore.

With that he hurled and Athena drove the shaft
and it split the archer's nose between his eyes—
it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze
cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw
and the point came ripping out beneath his chin.
(5.290-93; 5.321-34, Fagles)

So I left them and made my way on foot to Ilion
trusting my bow, a thing that was to profit me nothing.
For now I have drawn it against two of their best men, Tydeus'
son, and the son of Atreus, and both of these I hit
and drew visible blood, yet only wakened their anger.
So it was in bad luck that I took from its peg the curved bow
on that day when I carried it to lovely Ilion
at the head of my Trojans, bringing delight to brilliant Hector.
Now if ever I win home again and lay eyes once more
on my country, and my wife, and the great house with the high roof,
let some stranger straightway cut my head from my shoulders
if I do not break this bow in my hands and throw it in the shining
fire, since as a wind and nothing I have taken it with me.
(5.204-16, Lattimore)

Many of Homer's later civilian readers have found such overkill overdone. For them Ovid's parody of Homeric battle scenes in the Metamorphoses is richly deserved. Like any effective parody, Ovid's springs from an intimate understanding of what drives the original poetry. Here, in his incongruous world, Nestor is a Polonian elder giving an interminable account of the fabled battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs—a myth about civilization versus the barbarians, recalled on the metopes or frieze sculptures of the Parthenon, no less. Homeric battle turns into a tavern brawl or gladiatorial combat in a Roman amphitheater. There have been many versions published since that get more words of the original across, but Rolfe Humphries' translation has the right mix of brio and absurdity:

Amycus robbed the inner shrine and from it
Bore off a chandelier with glittering lamps,
Lifted it high, the way an axe is lifted
To strike a white bull for sacrifice,
And dashed it at the head of Celadon,
Smashing his face so that no man would know it.
His eyes bulged from their sockets, and his cheek-bones
Splintered, and what had been his nose was driven
Into his palate. Pelates of Pella
Wrenched off a maple table-leg and used it
To knock Amycus down with, with his chin
Driven into his breast. That made things even,
As he spat out black blood and teeth together.
A second blow finished him off. Then Gryneus,
Staring, wild-eyed, at the smoking altar near him,
Cried out, "Why not use this?" and caught it up
With all its fires and hurled it at the throng
And crushed two men, Broteas and Orios,
Whose mother, so folks said, was named Mycale
And she, or so they said, had incantations
To bring the horns of the moon to earth, no matter
How much she struggled. "You shall not escape me
If I can find a weapon" one Exadius
Cried out, and found a weapon, a stag's antlers
Hung on a pine-tree as a votive offering.
And Gryneus' eyes were pierced by those twin prongs,
Eyeballs gouged out; one of them stuck to the horn,
The other rolled down his beard till a blood-clot caught it.

Ovid's parody works because it plays on the artifice that underlies literary accounts of battle. It is just such precision that makes us believe some war stories—even when many of the wounds described are fantastic inventions—and disbelieve others. But it isn't "reality" at all that we are being mesmerized by. Homer's anatomical exactitude is no more than an illusion of what a battle wound might really be like. Those who hate war and want nothing to do with such grisly stories would have little to hate or to flee from if they did not face such battle scenes. Those who look forward to war and seek it out, whatever the cost, have a powerful stimulus to see if battle will be as terrible as the poets make it seem, or as funny.

In his study of the psychological costs of learning to kill in modern society, Dave Grossman maintains that there are fewer psychiatric problems in sailors and pilots because no one is trying to kill them, specifically, personally, nor do they have to see anyone they are killing. "Instead of killing people up close and personal, modern navies kill ships and airplanes. Of course there are people in these ships and airplanes, but psychological and mechanical distances protect the modern sailor." The American veteran Alvin Kernan tells what it was like to see pilots in an aircraft carrier plane crash in the sea and vanish almost immediately, without a trace left behind, being and nothingness summed up in a sentence.

The quickness with which active life, so much energy and skill in the banking plane, disappeared as if it had never been, stunned me.
It was the instantaneous contrast of something and nothing that caught my attention.

On the whole, memoirs of those at sea have a little less of the horrors of land warfare, if only because the resolution, as final of course as any, comes so rapidly. A striking theme about sea warfare and especially air war is the speed, the finality, the god-awful neatness of it. So often there is little trace left of what or who is lost. . . . The reality of death comes to you in stages. First it is an ideal—all men are mortal, as in the syllogism. Then it is something that happens to strangers, then to persons you know, but somewhere else, and at last it enters your presence, and you see death, on a runway or in a field, in a cloud of dust and a column of smoke. Though even that doesn't make your own death conceivable.

Our friend Bergie—the church-in-the-wildwood tenor, the gentle husband, the "father" of our Santa Barbara family—had simply vanished from our lives. There was no body, no grave, and no funeral, no one, it seemed, to mourn for. T and Joe and I put his possessions together—there was almost nothing worth saving—and gave them to the Adjutant to send home, and took his cot apart and moved it out of the tent. For a while there was a patch of dead wheat where the cot had been; but gradually it was worn away, until it was like the rest of the tent floor.

Compared to Okinawa or the Somme, air and naval wars seem cleaner wars in most respects. In other ways they may have been worse. The essential horror of death in battle was more accelerated than ever, often with everything over before either victim or onlooker could realize what had happened. Elmer Bendiner's The Fall of Fortresses, a memoir of the American bombing command in World War II, has just such moments, linking as it does the serene, almost Olympian detachment and beauty of the air with the sudden sharp realities of mortal death in air combat. He describes the situation of his plane's ball turret gunner, the kind of airman Randall Jarrell turned into the subject of a short poem, "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner":

I do not know how he withstood the torture wrapped within himself, powerless amid bullets and explosions, oppressed by the realization that at any instant he might be spattered to a mass of ugly tissue, like a cat run over on the highway. This might happen to any man in the crew, but the rest of us had the illusion of motion, of elbow room to give us security. There was nothing that Leary could do about his fate. He was as powerless as a rivet in his ball turret. He had been reduced to a neuter.

Bendiner writes of an evening in the Brevet, a pub for airmen in London: not a place for Grand Guignol or for solemn politics, but a place for lullabies, for seductions—what the alluring Hedy Lamar playing Tondelayo in the movies was all about. "In the morning I had been over Germany watching Tondelayo's sister plane"—a B-25D bomber had been named after Hedy Lamar's character—"through my port window. Along the fuselage to the tail ran a scarlet streak. It had taken me a moment to understand that there was no top turret and that the fuselage was painted with the blood of a gunner who had manned it before it was blown away. And here I was in the evening, charmed by total irrelevancies at the Brevet. I talked and smiled as if I had not seen what I had seen only some ten hours earlier." The soldier often has too little time to think about what is happening to him. Or if there is time, too little to think larger thoughts.

Part of the power of Christopher Logue's War Music comes from its compression of heroic experience, so that the death of a hero in an ancient poem from a vanished civilization becomes for us a death in the present, for the present. In Logue's version, one of Patroclus's mortal killers, Euphorbus, is turned into the onomatopoetic "Thackta," and his spear cast is changed from behind the shoulders ("a Dardanian man hit him between the shoulders with a sharp javelin") to the thighs. Logue's poetry narrows and deepens the focus on mortality, capturing the awful sense of the growing separation between the dying man and the unconcerned Trojan warriors who are onlookers. There is full awareness of the shock of a wound, as much clinical precision as Fussell could desire, compressed to the point where we feel the thrust of Thackta's javelin along with Patroclus.

And all the Trojans lay and stared at you;
Propped themselves up and stared at you;
Feeling themselves as blest as you felt cursed.
All of them lay and stared;
And one, a boy called Thackta, cast.
His javelin went through your calves,
Stitching your knees together, and you fell,
Not noticing the pain, and tried to crawl
Towards the Fleet, and—even now—feeling
For Thackta's ankle—ah!—and got it? No . . .
Not a boy's ankle that you got,
But Hector's.

Standing above you,
His bronze mask smiling down into your face,
Putting his spear through . . . ach, and saying:
"Why tears, Patroclus?
Did you hope to melt Troy down
And make our women fetch the ingots home?
I can imagine it!
You and your marvelous Achilles;
Him with an upright finger, saying:
Don't show your face again, Patroclus,
Unless it's red with Hector's blood."
And Patroclus,
Shaking the voice out of his body, says:
"Big mouth.
Remember it took three of you to kill me.
A god, a boy, and last and least, a hero.
I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet
Somehow it sounds like Hector.
And as I close my eyes I see Achilles' face
With Death's voice coming out of it."
Saying these things Patroclus died.
And as his soul went through the sand
Hector withdrew his spear and said:
"Perhaps."

He spoke, and as he spoke the end of death closed in upon him,
and the soul fluttering free of his limbs went down into Death's house
mourning her destiny, leaving youth and manhood behind her.
(16.855-57, 22.361-63, Lattimore)

The final pages of The Ghost Road, Pat Barker's concluding novel of a trilogy about Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and other soldiers in the Great War who were patients of the psychologist William Rivers, builds to a similar crossover moment.

Prior was about to start across the water with ammunition when he was himself hit, though it didn't feel like a bullet, more like a blow from something big and hard, a truncheon or a cricket bat, only it knocked him off his feet and he fell, one arm trailing over the edge of the canal.
He tried to turn to crawl back beyond the drainage ditches, knowing it was only a matter of time before he was hit again, but the gas was thick here and he couldn't reach his mask. Banal, simple, repetitive thoughts ran round and round his mind. Balls up. Bloody mad. Oh Christ. There was no pain, more a spreading numbness that left his brain clear. He saw Kirk die. He saw Owen die, his body lifted off the ground by bullets, describing a slow arc in the air as it fell. It seemed to take forever to fall, and Prior's consciousness fluttered down with it. He gazed at his reflection in the water, which broke and reformed and broke again as bullets hit the surface and then, gradually, as the numbness spread, he ceased to see it.

To witness the death of others in war is to realize that the same thing can happen to you. One does not require a set piece on the battlefield to reach that point. It can happen simply by accident. Alvin Kernan tells of two pilots lost over the side of an aircraft carrier in the Pacific:

In an instant the plane was in the water off the starboard side, broken in half between the radioman and the pilot, neither of whom, knocked out by the crash, heads hanging limply forward, moved. Then in an instant both pieces were gone, the water was unruffled, and the ship sailed on. The quickness with which active life, so much energy and skill in the banking plane, disappeared as if it had never been, stunned me.
It was the instantaneous contrast of something and nothing that caught my attention, and like some eighteen-year-old ancient mariner, I went around for days trying to tell people what had really happened, how astounding it was.

Our curiosity about war's mystery is pervasive. When there is no possible way of recovering a direct account of death in war, we will use every kind of ingenuity to reconstruct what the killing may have been like. Forensic pathology can even make up for a direct report of war. One earlier example of such an event is the Russian secret police's massacre of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest in 1940, a notorious war crime ordered by Stalin that was for some years attributed to the Germans. The executions were orchestrated so that each victim was compelled to go to his death completely alone. As the historian Allen Paul reconstructs the event in his book Katyn:

For the victims, these last seconds were marked, almost certainly, by disorientation and helplessness. It seems likely that their thoughts—geared so recently at hopes of reparation—suddenly swirled in fear and dismay as the first shots were fired outside the bus. . . . Only the bullets were merciful at this scene of slaughter. They pierced like estoques to the occipital bone, coursing upward from this small protrusion at the base of the skull, then passing through the brain to a point of egress between the nose and hair line. This angle suggests that each victim's head was bent forward and that the executioner stood close behind him, firing slightly downward. A shot thus aimed offered two practical advantages: it caused instant death and minimal loss of blood.

Until barriers of technology are breached, so that we at last can smell and feel as well as hear and see what happens to human bodies in war, we cannot imagine what people have to endure. The memoirs of E. B. Sledge about his service in the marines in the Pacific during World War II come as close as possible to the physical realities of war—the equivalent in prose to Goya's graphic designs in The Disasters of War, or the battles of the Iliad. One thing that Sledge wants to convey is what war is like to a culture based on indoor plumbing. "In combat, cleanliness for the infantryman was all but impossible. Our filth added to our general misery. Fear and filth went hand in hand. It has always puzzled me that this important fact is omitted from otherwise excellent personal memoirs by infantrymen. It is, of course, a vile subject, but it was as important to us then as being wet or dry, hot or cold, in the shade or exposed to the blistering sun, hungry, tired, or sick." This theme is laid out early at Peleliu, then reaches something like an apotheosis in the mud and maggots of Okinawa six months later. Although one's own dead (marines in this case) would naturally be removed, the enemy dead were often left to rot where they fell. It is not so widely appreciated, as it might be, that for all their geographical and temporal remove from the trench warfare of the western front of World War I, the Americans and Japanese went through essentially the same experience, and in far worse conditions because of tropical climate.

The bodies were badly decomposed and nearly blackened by exposure. This was to be expected of the dead in the tropics, but these Marines had been mutilated hideously by the enemy. One man had been decapitated. His head lay on his chest; his hands had been severed from his wrists and also lay on his chest near his chin. In disbelief I stared at the face as I realized that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine's penis and stuffed it into his mouth. The corpse next to him had been treated similarly. The third had been butchered, chopped up like a carcass torn by some predatory animal.
My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced. From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances. My comrades would field-strip their packs and pockets for souvenirs and take gold teeth, but I never saw a Marine commit the kind of barbaric mutilation the Japanese committed if they had access to our dead.

Sledge's resolve that American marines would never be guilty of such barbaric acts doesn't last even for the length of his own memoir. A friend named Mac comes in with a severed, dried Japanese hand, which he thinks would be more interesting than a tooth to have as a souvenir. Mac was

a decent, clean-cut man but one of those who apparently felt no restraints under the brutalizing influence of war—although he had hardly been in combat at that time. He had one ghoulish, obscene tendency that revolted even the most hardened and callous men I knew. When most men felt the urge to urinate, they simply went over to a bush or stopped wherever they happened to be and relieved themselves without ritual or fanfare. Not Mac. If he could, that "gentleman by the act of Congress" would locate a Japanese corpse, stand over it, and urinate in its mouth. It was the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war. I was ashamed that he was a Marine officer.

Sledge was outraged by the mutilation and dishonor meted out to his fellow soldiers, and to begin with he was capable of as much disgust at his fellow marines' similar treatment of the enemy. But by the time his memoir nears its end, in the trench warfare of Okinawa, it is only his own comrades' deaths that move him; dead Japanese did not bother him "in the least." Then he too was finally caught in the Yes and No of war, the contradictions that are as impossible for us to untangle as the feelings we have about Achilles strumming away on the lyre from EÅtion's city. And everywhere there is the abiding fascination with how they die—more truthfully, how we die.

Copyright notice: Excerpted from pages 116-135 of The Mourner's Song: War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam by James Tatum, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press and of the author.

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James Tatum
The Mourner's Song: War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam
©2003, 236 pages, 31 halftones. 6 x 9
Cloth $37.50 ISBN: 978-0-226-78993-4
Paper $16.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-78994-1

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• Another excerpt on the battlefields of Troy and Battery Wagner
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