In the Neighborhood of Zero: A World War II Memoir

Preface

Preface In the wake of September 11,2001,the George W.Bush administration,appealing to the deeply backgrounded American exceptionalist ethos, took advantage of the nationalist fervor precipitated by Al Qaeda’s attack on U.S. soil to launch its global“war on terror,”the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq in the name of (American) civilization. In a ruthless reduction of the cultural and political complexities of the planet, complexities in large part produced by the imperial arrogance and depredations of Western Europe and its contemporary heir, the United States, President Bush declared to the world,“You’re with us or against us.”Since then, and despite alienating the United States’s traditional allies and the vast majority of the people of the so-called Third World in the process of imposing American-style democracies on alien cultures, this president and his neoconservative intellectual deputies systematically exaggerated the threat to“American homeland security”to produce the sense of national emergency—the state of exception that has increasingly enabled the executive branch to ignore civil and human rights—and thus to facilitate the imposition of its paradoxical global agenda: the American Peace. Although the catastrophic possibilities of this extremist cultural and political strategy are immense, the strategy itself is not new. Indeed, it is one whose origin appears to be simultaneous with the origin of the American national identity itself. I am referring to the “American jeremiad,” which, since the New England Puritans, has had as its fundamental purpose the instigation of collective anxiety and an enabling sense of renewal xii . . Preface by focusing on a frontier beyond which is a wilderness inhabited by an evil enemy who threatens its security,unity,and civilizational energy.This strategy played a decisive role in the formation of the American national identity and its chauvinistic attitude toward “foreigners” ever since the Puritans adopted this appeal to the notion of a national “awakening”— reminding“backsliders” of their“chosen calling”—as a means of securing and renewing its disintegrating collective consensus, the“Covenant.” In a highly orchestrated speech to the American people on September 11, 2006, President Bush, commemorating the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, appealed to this Puritan/American tradition in the face of growing skepticism about the war in Iraq. It is not accidental that he concluded his speech by asserting that the “American calling” in the wake of the attacks on the American homeland was to win the global war on terror and,echoing the Jeremiahs of the American past,from Jonathan Edwards through Daniel Webster to Samuel P. Huntington, called for“a third Great Awakening.” The following memoir about my experience in World War II, written a long half-century later, particularly the“legendary”Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and the nearly forgotten firebombing of Dresden, is not, therefore, intended to be “objective,” simply another of the numerous narratives of that“good war”written by the official custodians of the American national memory or by ventriloquized American veterans who have contributed to the longevity of the exceptionalist mythology of the American national identity. I mean the mythology that“America,”different and superior to the decadent“Old World,”had been“elected”by God or History to fulfill His or Its benign purpose in the world’s wilderness. On the contrary, my memoir is frankly intended as a counter-memoir, a dissident remembrance of, a witness to, this“just war,”whose cumulative glorification has been recently reiterated in The Greatest Generation (1998), the encomium to the America of World War II and the American soldiers who fought it written by the popular former anchorman of nbc Tom Brokaw, and in The War (2007) produced by the prestigious documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. In thus offering this counter-memory,my purpose is not by any means Preface . . xiii to disparage the multitude of young men who fought, were wounded and maimed, taken prisoner, or died violent deaths during that terrible global war. It is, rather, to remember the singularity of the war and to call into question the insidious ideological uses to which the dominant culture in the United States has insistently put its “sacrificial” victory over the barbarian enemies in its aftermath: during the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and, not least, in the wake of Al Qaeda’s attacks on the American homeland, when the Bush administration, aided and abetted by the...