Finding Joy in War
War is, unsurprisingly, not a happy time. The older I get, the more I realize how crazy it is that the draft age is just 18 years old. I imagine my friends from high school and the people I’m meeting now in college- guys who play D&D, who want to be doctors or engineers, who are star athletes or who sit on the sidelines- and I try to think about them going to war. Going to train to fight and kill, then getting shipped off to Germany or France or England in order to die for a war that, at the end of the day, isn’t theirs. When we think about it, the people who declare war are not the people fighting it. Those are people who live in lavish houses, who don’t have their food rationed, who don’t see their family for years, who don’t have to worry about death. And yet, those same people send men who have only just reached adulthood, and decided that it’s a perfectly logical idea for those boys, who are basically children, to go out and die for “their country”. It’s baffling to me.
When we looked over the letters from these men, the most alarming thing for me was their humanity. As someone who grew up with grandparents who were Holocaust survivors and attended Jewish day school, I am pretty familiar with the horrors of World War 2. However, of the Holocaust literature I’ve read, I haven’t read any letters. Any story from the Holocaust is emotionally difficult, and yet you can still remove yourself from them. The published stories you read have been polished and edited for the public’s consumption. There are no grammatical errors or post scripts, and the story flows from beginning to end. Letters are completely different and much more personal. When these young men were sending their letters, they weren’t thinking to themselves, “I must make sure to make sure my editors include this in their biography of my life,” they were focused on reassuring their loved ones and also receiving reassurance from people back home. When I read these letters, I felt as if I was invading the soldiers’ privacy. Those letters weren’t meant for me. There wasn’t a regular flow to them. They were real people who just wanted to know the stats from their college basketball games or buy their college rings. Reading their post scripts as they scribble an additional well wishing to a family member or friend really just reminded me that these men were primarily students, first and foremost, not soldiers.
