TV Images Call Back a War and Pure Luck

I’m mildly ashamed to admit that I got hooked on “War and Remembrance” and spent far too much time watching Herman Wouk’s saga of World War II on television. I couldn’t let go of it, despite the fact its pace was slightly slower than our torpedo bombers that got wiped out at Midway and the acting range of its leading man ran the gamut from grim to grimmer.

I suppose my fascination was rooted in seeing a replay of history that I lived. I found myself over and over trying to remember precisely where I was when the events depicted were happening and finding that the recall built steadily. The more I watched, the more quickly I could immerse myself in those times--and the more graphic and detailed were my memories.

Three things in particular hit me. The first was the insularity of those years. Those of us who were involved in the military had a very narrow picture of what was happening. We saw what was before us--and that’s all. It engaged us totally; if it hadn’t, we might not have survived. And since I was in the Pacific, what was happening in Europe seemed terribly remote to me--a kind of interesting sideshow that kept intruding on the action in the big tent. I had no awareness, for example, of the Holocaust until after the war was over. This kind of tunnel vision is precisely why policy decisions should not be made by people at the vortex of an event. The big picture is simply not possible from that perspective.

Second was the camaraderie of those times. Seeing fighting men depicted in such detail--especially Navy pilots, which was my branch of the service--brought back very sharp, very specific memories of the men with whom I had served. The aura of danger which underlay virtually everything we did bonded men in ways that nothing else could. They were temporary bonds--as I found out when I tried to renew them after the war--but they were very real and very powerful at the time.

A corollary to this feeling was a recognition of my own Americanness--something of which I had never been aware because I hadn’t traveled before the war. I was thrown into close contact with troops from several other countries and for the first time recognized the very particular qualities of Americans to which I respond, especially humor and irreverence, which took on edges peculiar to the frontier culture in which they grew. This feeling has stayed with me very powerfully ever since. When I have despaired for this country--and even on a few occasions thought about living outside of it--I knew it wouldn’t be possible because the pull of those qualities was far too strong.

And, finally, I was hit by the absolute importance of luck in one’s life. Because claiming bad luck can frequently prevent us from examining and correcting bad behavior, we have come to accept the maxim that for the most part we make our own luck. But I think that’s only partly true--and even less in wartime.

That point was underscored to me by the detail of the Battle of Midway in “War and Remembrance.” Had we lost at Midway, it might have taken us another 5 years to recover, and so we had to sacrifice several dozen Navy pilots and a whole squadron of torpedo bombers that had to attack the Japanese fleet without fighter protection.

I was trained as a dive bomber pilot. I won my wings in early 1943 when the war in the Pacific was very hot. We were losing pilots at such a rate that there was an urgent need to train replacements. And so virtually my entire graduating class was diverted into instructor training. So, for 15 months instead of going to the Pacific I taught Navy cadets to fly. Although it didn’t seem like it at the time, that was pure good luck.

A few months later, I completed operational training in dive bombers and was awaiting assignment to an aircraft carrier when there was a sudden need for transport pilots. Since the Navy felt that after 1,000 hours in the air, pilots were interchangeable, a clerk in Washington again plucked my entire squadron and transferred us from dive bombers to transports. I spent the last year of the war flying toilet paper (as we liked to say) to combat areas and wounded back. I saw a lot of the war that way but from the cockpit of a transport instead of the bucket seat of a dive bomber.

Again, luck--pure and simple. Under normal circumstances, we have limited control over the events that befall us. In a war, we have virtually none at all. So I was lucky, and a great sense of that swept over me as I watched the battle scenes in “War and Remembrance.”

The name of the show was apt. We remember most vividly the things that etched our lives, and war--for better or worse--has to top the list. It was ironic that in the midst of “War and Remembrance,” there was a vivid TV retrospective on the 25th anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy. That’s at the top of the list, too.