WWII

One time, a few years ago, I was laying around watching cable TV and, for no particular reason, was watching some WWII show on History Channel. I think it was "The Last Days of Adolf Hitler" or "War in the Pacific." Anyway, The Muse comes in and says, "Are you watching a World War II show?!?" Are you interested in that stuff?" Just instinctly, I said, "Of course, all men are interested in World War II."

A book I just finished reading, "Ordinary Heroes" by Scott Turow, reminded me of that. There was a time when I really, really liked Scott Turow. The Muse will tell you that I decided to go to law school because I liked Presumed Innocent so much. (It is certainly true that I read Presumed Innocent at a time when I was debating whether or not to go to law school, and that the trial work in that book was presented so well that law school seemed like a pretty decent option there in the fall of 1991, with the economy in a mild recession and me about to get a poli sci degree, although I had been thinking about going to law school for a while, at least since my senior year of high school, when I wrote my admissions essay for the UC's about liking to argue. Eat that run-on sentence, Strunk & White.) I read One L my first year of law school and, damn, that book pretty much nailed the experience. (I highly recommend it to anyone thinking about law school.) I really like Burden of Proof, too. Pleading Guilty, however, made me so angry that I threw it across the room when I finished it. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Ordinary Heroes at the beach on our big trip, but, hey, it was a $7 hardback.

Plus it was about WWII. Basically, it's about a just-retired, kind-of-flailing newspaper reporter whose father dies and who discovers really surprising stuff about his father's experience during WWII in his papers and pursues the story. The book then alternates between ever-briefer sections told by the reporter and ever-longer sections from the father's supposed description of his experiences. I really liked the stuff in the father's voice about WWII and pretty much found the reporter's stuff from now to be pretty lame. At some point, though, I felt compelled to look up something about the book on Amazon. Some review excerpted on Amazon said that the book wasn't very good and just repeated a lot of WWII cliches, at least until a particular harrowing scene during the Battle of the Bulge.

The funny thing was, I hadn't seen it that way at all. I was just really enjoying the WWII stuff. The part after the one harrowing scene -- where the father and his troop play dead for hours in the snow so that Nazi snipers won't shoot them -- was better, but it didn't seem like it was that much better to me.

That made me think about WWII some. I think that just about every American guy of my generation and probably the generations that followed the generation that fought in WWII has some level of fascination with it. I mean, there was one time that I watched my best friend from law school and his undergrad fraternity brothers sit around drinking cheap beer -- Henry Weinhardt's, I think -- and debate what Hitler's biggest tactical error was. Look at the way that Tom Brokaw talks about The Greatest Generation. Look at how popular WWII shooter games for XBox, GameCube and other game boxes are. Why do we, American males, do this?

I think it's basically because WWII represents the high point, at least so far, for the American male. Basically, in the popular imagination, the U.S. was forced into the war by a sneak attack (although FDR of course had been giving the U.K. help sub rosa for a while), went out and fought the people who perpetrated the sneak attack and their pure evil ally, defeated both of them after just horrendous fighting (although of course the Russians probably tend to believe, with more than a little justification, that the millions of people that they lost in the war had an awful lot to do with the Nazis' defeat) and then turned around and helped both Japan and Europe get back on their feet (although we undoubtedly did that in no small part to contain the Soviets). Unlike WWI, we didn't just get in at the end to break a deadlock, the resolution of which led to another war. Unlike Korea, WWII didn't end in a stalemate. Unlike Vietnam, we won. Unlike the Civil War, we weren't shooting each other. You have to leave aside the Japanese internment and enforced segregation in the military to make this vision work, but, it's one that pretty common and very attractive. And, at least for my generation, it's a way to think well of our grandfathers, which is always cool.

So that's it, I think. That's why the History Channel basically should be called the WWII Channel and why, if there's nothing else on, I will happily watch "D-Day: Invasion of Europe" on a slow Sunday afternoon.