A Hard Job of Education A Hard Job of Education
SPIRITUALLY, the veteran is a busy man. If he is not, he should be, for grave things are being asked of him. The demands of the present are urgent and crucial and not apt to be disregarded. Those of the future seem no less urgent. Indeed, this future impinges on this present with tremendous force. But the demands which are likeliest to be overlooked, which it would be most convenient and comforting to overlook, are those of the past—the immediate past—the past of the war just ended. They, too, have their urgency and must not be avoided.
Whatever else the veteran returning now to college does with his past, whether he be the beribboned survivor of heroic combat or the weary graduate o£ unheroic drudgery, he must not leave that past alone. Yet that is, understandably, what he would most like to do, display it for a moment, then put it away with the ribbons and the souvenirs, sprinkle it, perhaps, with moth powder and clamp down the lid. But an honored tenet of our creed states that the unexamined life is not worth living. It would seem to follow that an unexamined past is not worth preserving. There, then, is the problem. Busy as he is with his present and his future, the veteran must find time, aomehow, to examine and assimilate his past. He must take possession of it and render it, in his own terms, useable. And it is the task of the college to enable him to do that.
There are serious hindrances to the process. It is a job of education of a peculiarly advanced nature, and the veteran brings back with him certain acquisitions which render it subtly more difficult. The button that he wears, his age, the places he has been, these are potential obstacles which may encumber him in his hard venture of self-knowledge. The college's function is to aid him, as we have said, but these things complicate and obscure his erlation to the college, to its faculty and its civilian student body, making that aid harder to give and to receive.
First the button and what it stands for. It is a bright, exclusive little symbol. It is a barrier between those who wear it and those who do not, and most of the faculty, by virtue of their years, do not. But if its effect on the beholder is forbidding, its effect on the wearer is apt to be treacherous. It carries with it now a still considerable prestige based, it may be, on dubious premises. Still untarnished, it calls attention to itself and may appear, unless everyone is quite clear-headed, as a badge of privilege. Under its spell, for instance, the veteran may forget the eagerness of his enlistment, the relief and release he felt at his induction, the actual scarcity of hardship beside the abundance of easy living in his war years, the good food, good pay, and good luck that came to him, and, forgetting all these, grow to think of himself as one who nobly wrought and willingly endured and now returns with all responsibilities discharged. In view of that danger, it might be wiser to put the button away with the souvenirs and walk less conspicuously but more honestly back into a civilian world. But he will not, of course, by the mere fact of an unadorned lapel, be rid of all the implications of his veteran status.
His years, too, are a mingled blessing. The Latin stem of the word veteran is vetus, meaning old. Now the veteran discovers, with a start, that he is three or four or five crowded years older, it may be, than the civilian classmate at his side, and he is seized by_a new aspect of selfconsciousness. He is old. He is, to be sure, never too old to learn but he may suspect, as well, that he is old enough to know better. The youth of seventeen, fresh from high school or prep school, challenges him with a mental agility, an acquisitiveness, a nervous adaptability to the whole business of lectures and exams, notes and theses, and the veteran may find himself no longer able to answer that challenge. Here, certainly, the college can help him. Although he may ask no special considerations because of his years, his is a special case. Teaching must be adjusted to suit him. It is as unfair, for instance, to hold him to rigid mechanical requirements designed for students years younger than he, as it is to overvalue his maturity and confuse it with superior talent. The college must shape itself to the veteran, but the essential and the hardest adjustment is his and not the college's.
Then the places he has been. He is a member of history's widest travelled generation. With an understandable pride, he tries to bring his travel to bear on his studies. Is it Rome that concerns the class? He knows all about Rome, for he has been there. The French character and culture? He talked to Frenchmen and was unimpressed. The Taj Mahal? He flew over it. The course of the Pequod? He sailed those waters with the fleet. Travel, he reassures himself, broadens one. But education is concerned more with depth than with breadth, with penetration than with scope. And the mere range and reach of the veteran's travel may mislead him, for too often it was only rapid peregrination. It is fading already into unreality. He was off the coast of China, passed through London, saw Manila from ten thousand feet, had ten days' leave in Sidney. But it is possible that the only place he knows is still the home town, the only people the next-door neighbors of his pre-war life. The travels, the" miles of this earth's surface covered, like the maturity, the veteran status itself, seem now, back at college, not so impressive as he anticipated. Perhaps he would be better off without them.
If these are the obstacles to his education, what are the advantages? What special equipment does the veteran bring to the tasks of assimilating his past and preparing for his future? If that past was a genuinely fertile experience, if the war years were, for him, not merely violent but viable, he may not be so badly off, despite the obstacles. Any answer is risky generalization, but only by generalizing can we answer. So let us move back a year or so to examine a generalized figure who may be a type and pattern of the American fighting man. And, to give our generalizing a spurious air of the concrete, let us commission our typical specimen an Ensign in the U. S. Naval Reserve and put him in the cockpit of an F6F, where he might very well have been a year or so ago. And not to be initially disrespectful, let us salute him. He helped to win history's largest war. We are forever in his debt.
But looking at him closely we are struck, at once, by how much he got along without. He stripped down for combat, this Ensign, and in the process jettisoned some of the things we had assumed were essentials. One was a cause. He helped to win the war, to be sure, but did it without any real sense of what he was winning. The wonder is not merely his political naivete —and politically naive he was to an extent which history must be hard put to it to match—but the degree to which he was undisturbed by the whole question of aims and causes. He shunned discussion of the war's political meaning, closed his mind to an awareness that he might share motives with, say, the Filipino or the Australian, dismissed as suspect any political considerations whatsoever, rated Fascism with the Zero or the Baka-bomb, a possession of the enemy, an object for which he was not responsible.
In a deeper sense than the political, he was without a cause, or better, equipped only with a rudimentary and negative one. He avoided discussion of the question, but, if pressed, he would finally advance his theory of what all the fighting was about. Then he would echo the shallowest slogans of the home-front propagandists. He was fighting because Pearl Harbor had been attacked. He was fighting for his right to a coke at the corner drug store or his right to throw bottles at the umpire or, simpler still, to teach the little unprintables a lesson. If one suggested to him any possibilities of a brave new world, he pointed out that the old one was good enough for him. If one mentioned the four freedoms, he had a label readypropaganda. The only concept with which he identified himself was the status quo. That he conceived in the most unblushingly materialistic terms.
But perhaps his values, his devotion to the intangibles of life, were preserved deep within his nature, inarticulate or, at least, unvoiced. Perhaps. If so, the concealment was perfect. In his reading, for instance, there was no indication of their existence, for he read trash. Sometimes it was pious trash, like The Robe, sometimes pornographic trash, like Amber, but trash was all he asked from the wardroom library and round and round it went. In the war plays of the twenties, fighting men, under the stress and tension of combat, often had recourse to the consolations of poetry. Our Ensign was of sterner stuff. The closest he came to poetry was "I Wanted Wings" or "Bless 'Em All"—verses more singular for vigor of expression than lofty sentiment. And his reticence extended, too; to matters of religion. Perhaps there were .few atheists in foxholes, cockpits; or life rafts (although in Sidney an Atheists in Foxholes Society was formed, an American fraternity complete with membership cards and honorary Australian sisters), but there was small evidence of religion in ready rooms or BOQ's. In all, our Ensign gave so little indication of any awareness of spiritual values that it is probably safe to assume that those, too, he had jettisoned, or never bothered to acquire.
Yet he was brave, this Ensign, with a courage that could match the frenzied courage of the Kamikaze. Surely there must have been an ideational and cultural basis for that courage. He had the healthy animal bravery of young manhood the world over, but he must have had a core of values upon which to fasten that human trait. He did have such a core, and it was a natural product of his background and the society he represented. He fought for the team Now, to be sure, he called it the squadron the air group, the outfit, our bunch, but finally it was simply the team under a new name. His allegiance never extended much beyond this immediate unit. He seemed incapable of conceiving in larger terms. Even the fleet, the Navy, seemed too big for his emotional grasp, to say nothing of the country or the United Nations. No, his devotion was still to the team. He missed, perhaps, the cheering, and the game was rougher than usual, but the imagined goal for which he flew and fought and, if necessary, died was the winning score, the backslapping in the shower room, the familiar, satisfied nod of the coach. The decades of American football, basketball, and baseball, the whole mythology of American athleticism, bore fruit in the skies of the Pacific.
Our Ensign was at his best in the combat zone, at grips with the enemy (Would opponent be a better word?). In the rear areas, on liberty, on rehabilitation leave, he showed to poorer advantage. He did not think much of the people he met, the Chamorros, the Filipinos, the Hawaiians, or the Australians. Apparently he never wondered what they thought of him. He did not, for that matter, think much of his brothers in the other branches of the service, the gyrenes or the dogfaces. But that attitude was mutual. His most biting scorn he reserved for the war worker back home, who seemed to him to be on perpetual strike, reporting to the factory only often enough to draw fabulous, unearned wages. But all such considerations as these were only incidental to our Ensign's noncombatant career. The primary concerns were monotonously constant, to get a drink and to find a woman, in the shortest possible time and for the simplest possible purpose. That was the drive and focus of his life ashore. Rehabilitation, he knew quite well, was a military word for alcohol and sex.
It is probably true that the veteran who is coming back now to college never fitted into the outlines of this generalized figure. His presence in the classroom and the library seems to guarantee that, if that Ensign was the norm, this veteran is the exception. If so, that is splendid. But our veteran served side by side with that other figure, shared the war years and the combat hours with him. And it is inevitable that the honest and earnest veteran in our midst was affected by that shared experience. The unsavory aspects of that companionship form one of elements he must now examine and understand. He must grasp the meaning of that too numerous comrade in arms. And if the fighting man who has served as model for our portrait is not back now on the campus, where is he? And to what extent is the college veteran concerned with him, responsible for him, in competition with him? The veteran himself must work out the answers to these questions.
Actually, the war generation, although it has been through much, is still untried and unproven. In the broadest social terms, and the deepest human terms, the generation has still to show what it can do. That is the final importance of the task of selfexploration which the veteran must perform. If, out of a full assimilation of the war experience, he can achieve some full awareness of his works and days, he may justify himself and help to justify the war he fought. If, baffled and forgetful, he yields the controlling role to our imagined Ensign, his generation may betray its past and produce only a new confusion, a new collapse of values, a new barbarism.
THE AUTHOR photographed on the flight deck of the "USS Yorktown" in March 1945. The article which he has written takes quite a different tack from that which the editors originally suggested, and while it represents a wholly personal point of view, the editors greatly respect the background of experience against which Professor Finch writes.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
John Finch knows naval aviators. As Air Combat Intelligence Officer with two stripes, he put in plenty of time loafing with them on the flight deck getting a tan; briefing them in the ready room before strikes; watching them worry superstitiously in early dawns before they took off on missions; checking their stories when they came back; packing up their gear and writing letters home when they got killed; discussing planes with them endlessly and politics occasionally; sharing liberties with them when, tensely relaxed, they hit port. With two combat tours, each six months long, Lieut. Finch saw Naval flyers at their worst and at their best. From February to July, 1944, he worked with a land-based fighter squadron (VF-34) in the Solomons, Bougainville, and Green Island. From December to May 1945 he was ship based with VBF-3 aboard the USS Yorktpwn (Essex Class Carrier), which took him to the Philippines, South China Sea, Formosa, and Iwo Jima. The climax of his naval career came with the first carrier raids on Tokyo. He has known the anticlimax of billets in the States and Pearl Harbor. Professor Finch, age 34, now teaches a course in Modern Poetry, and next year he is to take over American Poetry under the new English Department syllabus. He did his undergraduate work at Wesleyan University and his graduate work at Harvard University where his chief interest centered on the writing of Henry James.
