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3. Trauma in War, Trauma in Life: The Pose of the "Heroic" Battlefield Correspondent
- University of Illinois Press
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3 Trauma in War, Trauma in Life The Pose of the “Heroic” Battlefield Correspondent “I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.” —Michael Herr As a war correspondent in the Spanish-American War, Stephen Crane covered the story for both the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers, as well as serving as the subject of continuous press coverage himself. As perhaps the second most famous writer reporting on the war in Cuba, Crane cut a romantic figure trying to outdo Richard Harding Davis, the dapper prototype of the nineteenth-century war correspondent (and the most famous writer there). Riding on a pinto horse in a gleaming white rain coat, Crane would gallop along with the American regiments and head off with scouting parties, rushing to the scene when he came to any fighting (he reportedly followed the Rough Riders during their actions on San Juan Hill). At one point, Davis ordered Crane, theatrically indifferent to his life, off an embankment as bullets whistled by. The other correspondents, both awed and perplexed by his risk-taking behavior and his cool in combat conditions, were as apt to report on the feats of Crane as they were the activities of the soldiers. “There was no fear in him,” one fellow correspondent reported, “so far as battle, murder, or sudden death was concerned.”1 Yet, beneath Crane’s bravado posture, was the body of a very sick man, already in serious decline from the tuberculosis that would kill him in a matter of months at age twenty-eight. There are those who believe that Crane’s “grim flippancy” in the face of danger was his way of dealing with an even greater trauma concerning his own health. Some biographers think Crane knew that he was dying before he left to cover the Greco-Turkish War in 1897, and that his later Spanish-American War coverage reflected the actions of a man who understood that his death would soon be at hand one way or another. This meant that Crane’s diffidence, his willingness to put himself in harm’s way, and his tendency to withdraw and retreat into reverie after battle may have been as much a reaction to his awareness of his fatal affliction as it was courage under fire.2 Contrast this picture with that of Ambrose Bierce, the misanthropic journalist -humorist–short story writer who was contemptuous of the patriotic war coverage by Crane and his fellow correspondents, called the conflict the “Yanko-Spanko War,” and did not bother to ask to cover the campaign even though he was one of the top journalists for Hearst at the time. Unlike Crane, who wrote about combat in his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, before he ever witnessed it, Bierce’s view of war was profoundly shaped by his experiences as a Union Army combatant in some of the most grisly conflicts of the U.S. Civil War, in which he was recognized for bravery and almost fatally wounded by a bullet to the head. Some historians now speculate that Bierce very likely suffered from the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and they have interpreted his lifelong cynicism and his darkly scoffing writings—as well as his reluctance to go back to the scene of military conflict—as a function of the psychological stress of dealing with his Civil War experiences.3 Bierce’s handling of the trauma of warfare may have been very different than Crane’s methods for dealing with the dangers of combat—but both men, considered among the great literary commentators on war, were examples of the dramatic impact of military conflict on the human psyche in eras before people talked about shell shock or PTSD or had much understanding of how the stress of the battlefield could affect one’s psychological condition. Trauma has played out in complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory , ways in the life histories of the fifty-six journalist-literary figures in this study who experienced the consequences of war in up close fashion. Although Crane lacked firsthand experience in the military (he was not born until six years after the Civil War ended), he is the one who is considered to have written the great Civil War novel and to have played a prominent role in producing the jingoistic war coverage associated with the Spanish-American and Greco-Turkish wars. Crane’s celebrity, his eagerness to cover the wartime conflicts of his day, and his willingness to...