Warring with Words

The two bombs dropped on Japan were terrorist actions. The calculation was terrorist. The indiscriminancy was terrorist. The small groups of terrorists operating today are, by comparison, humane killers.

—John Berger, “Hiroshima” (1981)

Experience whispers that the pity is not that we used the bomb to end the Japanese war but that it wasn’t ready in time to end the German one.

—Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (1981)

Gonna lay down my burden   Down by the riverside. I ain’t gonna study war no more.

—Traditional Gospel Song (first recorded in 1920)

I can hear their voices singing. I’m a gonna lay down my burden / Down by the riverside / Down by the riverside—their inflections slightly different from the lyrics, lilting and unified but burdensome. I try to join in in my mind, ain’t uh gonna study war no mo, I ain’t uh gonna study war no mo; but, listening, I find it especially hard to betray my own legacy. I did, after all, wake metaphorically to the sound of guns. The concussion reverberated all the way from Stadkill, Germany, where he died on 1 January 1945, to the school grounds in Hamburg, Arkansas, where I heard the news. I felt the weight of war in my six-year-old bones as I leaned against the outside wall of the lunchroom listening to my mom trying to explain that my older brother, Dub, was gone.

Still in a state of shock, confused about my needs, she must have repeated the official language to me, must have said that he was missing in action. I suspect now that as she sought solace from the comforting women, she more than likely was distancing herself from the crippling loss by telling them he was mia. The acronym was there on the printer tape pasted to the Western Union telegram, easy to repeat. Whatever else she said to me, besides the word gone, is lost. I recall the quietness, the whispering, and the heaving in her voice as she huddled over me. But the word gone made the felt shock real, embedded it in my active memory.

I grew up listening to them—my sister, my mother, Dub’s fiancée, other women around town living without their men at war—I listened to them deny death, heard them utter hope against hope that Dub was still alive. There were, after all, no identifiable remains. The War Department had told them that there was no body. Nobody there in the grave. Some day, the women persisted, he would make his way back to town, walk into the bus station with that winning smile spread across his face, grab his mom, and lift her in a twirling dance, all the while exclaiming, “See, mom, see mom, I told you so. I told you I’d make it back.”

But he didn’t. And neither did so many of the others. Their names are inscribed on the Ashley County Veterans Memorial on the courthouse lawn: 37 who died in World War i, 88 in World War ii, 15 in Korea, 8 in Vietnam, and 1 during the first war in Iraq. Undoubtedly the town’s fathers and mothers are still counting—the latter numbers rising over time.

Only a few of the missing from World War ii trickled back into Hamburg following the Allied victories and celebrations—parades, dancing in the streets, church suppers. B. A. Courson somehow survived the Bataan Death March and became the sheriff. His tall angular body was rail thin and slightly bent the rest of his life. I see him, now, fixed but shimmering in my mind’s eye, the image indelible. I’m dead sure that no one ever came close to knowing what the war cost Mr. Courson as he lived out his life with family and friends in that small close-knit community in southeast Arkansas. I’ve heard that there were serious disruptions and disappointments for him and those closest to him—heard too that he died in a car wreck (“like Patton,” they were likely...