The following from "Hannah Coulter" by Wendell Berry
21
21
Okinawa
I married
the war twice, as you might say, once in ignorance, once in knowledge. And yet
I knew of it only what we suffered of it at home and what I read of it in the
newspaper at the time, and later the little I sometimes saw of it on television.
But of the actual experience of actual people in the war, I knew little. Of
what Nathan had actually known and done and suffered in the fighting on
Okinawa, I knew nothing.
That is
maybe not so hard to understand. Our life from the day we married until Nathan
died was like a stretched strand. We had our obligations to meet and our work
to do, the tasks overlapped and kept on, before the work of one year had ended
the work of the next year began. I don’t think Nathan himself dwelled more on
the war than he had to, but I think he had to dwell on it. I think he saw the
war as in a way the circumstance of the rest of his life. I know he dreamed
about it. I know he did not talk about it.
He did not
talk about it, I understood, because it was painful to remember, and for the
same reason I did not ask him about it. Now that I have taken the pains to
learn something about it, I had better ask if I really wanted to know. I did. I
needed to know, but I am not glad to know.
I learned
enough to know why I didn’t learn it any sooner. Nathan was not the only one
who was in it, who survived it and came home from it, and did not talk about
it. There were several from Port William who went and fought and came home and
lived to be old men here, whose memories contained in silence the farthest
distances of the world, terrible sights, terrible sufferings. Some of them were
heroes. And they said not a word. They stood among us like monuments without
inscriptions. They said nothing or said little because we have barely a
language for what they knew, and they could not bear the pain of talking of
their knowledge in even so poor a language as we have.
They knew
the torment of the whole world at war, that nobody could make or end or escape
alone, in which everybody suffered alone. As many who have known it have said
of it, war is Hell. It is the outer darkness beyond the reach of love, where
people who do not know one another kill one another and there is weeping and
gnashing of teeth, where nothing is allowed to be real enough to be spared.
Hell is a
shameful place, and it is hard to speak of what you know of it. It is hard to
live in Port William and yet have in mind the blasted and burnt, bloodied and
muddy and stinking battlegrounds of Okinawa, hard to live in one place and
imagine another. It is hard to live one life and imagine another. But
imagination is what is needed. Want of imagination makes things unreal enough
to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion.
People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have
no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same
time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the
same time?
I was
changed by Nathan’s death, because I had to be. Our life together here was
over. It was my life alone that had to go on. The strand had slackened. I had
begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only
remember. I began this practice of sitting sometimes long hours into the night,
telling over this story, this life, that even when it was only mine was wholly
Nathan’s and mine because for the term of this world we were wholly each
other’s. We were each other’s chance to live in the room of love where we could
be known well enough to be spared. We were each other’s gift.
But in my
telling I pretty soon had to reckon with Nathan’s silence about the war. Out of
all I knew of him came this need to know what he had known that I did not know.
I went to the library and found books. I found some imperfect and false books,
some picture books, for instance, that showed only the enemy dead. And I found
some that were true, terrible for being true, brave enough to be terrible
enough to be true. I didn’t find out what happened to Nathan himself, of
course, for what he knew will not be known again. I found out the sort of thing
you would have known if you were a soldier and were there on Okinawa in the
spring of 1945 when Easter and the beginning of battle both came on April
Fool’s Day.
You went
from an ordinary day in the ordinary world into the world of war, an exploding
world where you lived inescapably hour after hour, day after day, killing as
you were bidden to do, suffering as you were bidden to do, dying as you were
bidden to do. You were there to kill until you were killed. And this would
finally seem to be the only world there was.
It was a
world where no place was safe, where you or your friends could be killed in any
place at any minute.
You were
living, it seemed, inside a dark cloud filled with lightning and thunder:
thousands of tons of explosives, bombs and shells, machine gun and rifle fire.
The air was full of death. In some units, sooner or later, everybody was hit.
You see a
friend, shot and dying, lying in the dirt. A medical corpsman is kneeling
beside him, tenderly touching his face, making the sign of the cross over him,
weeping.
Mortar
shells are coming in as you open a can of food and try to eat. The friend
beside you is hit, his head blown off. His brains spatter your clothes and your
food. You start to vomit, and you cannot stop.
You are
standing beside your friend. A shell comes in and explodes. Your friend,
knocked down, attempts to leap up and discovers that he has no legs. He dies.
You cannot forget this.
You have
killed your enemy. You have seen his face as he died, the face of a living
young man dying. You cannot forget this. Compassion makes the suffering worse.
In the world of war everything makes everything worse.
Death falls
from the sky. It flies in the air. The ground fills with the dead. The rain
falls day after day. Mud makes everything worse. It is harder to bring up
supplies, harder to move, harder to bring out the wounded and to bury the dead.
Under fire,
you attempt to dig a foxhole, and you dig right into the body of a man, rotten
and full of maggots.
The dead are
blasted out of their graves. If you slip on a muddy slope and fall, you get up
covered with maggots. They are on your clothes, on your skin, in your pockets.
Flies are
everywhere. Recalling the words of politicians about gallantry and sacrifice,
one survivor said, “Only the flies benefited.” The flies spread dysentery. You
are wet, muddy, soiled with your own shit, and you live day after day, night
after night in the same clothes.
The
battlefield stinks of rotting flesh, excrement, vomit, the smoke of explosives
and of everything that will burn.
Because of
the stench and the noise and the never-ending fear, your rations, which are
never appetizing, become harder and harder to eat. You are exhausted, and you
cannot rest. As the weeks go by, you lose weight, maybe twenty pounds. You
know, from looking at your friends, that you no longer look like yourself.
It goes on
without mercy, the fear unending, worst at night. At night the quiet sounds
worry you most. At night you never know the origin of a quiet sound. Is it a
friend or an enemy? Are you hearing things? Are you losing your mind? You have
to make up your mind that you will not lose your mind.
You find
where the enemy buried one of theirs, leaving a green branch in his canteen on
his grave. Compassion makes it worse.
You
performed the cruelties that were required and sometimes cruelties that were
not, and what would your folks have thought?
You fought
for days without knowing where you were, when the known world consisted of what
you could see, the few friends fighting on either side of you, and the unknown
enemy in front. You were lost in an enormous fact. The ones of you who were lost
in it may never quite have found your way out of it, and nobody outside it
would ever quite understand it. How far from home were you? How far beyond the
political slogans? You were one of an army of young men fighting to stay alive,
and you were fighting an army of young men who finally were fighting only to
die. They had to be killed, almost every one of them.
You knew the
terrible loneliness of the thought that your life was worth nothing. You were
expendable. You were being spent. Your folks could not have imagined what you
were going through, you could not want them to know, you would never tell them.
What saved
it from utter meaninglessness and madness and ruin was the love between you and
your friends fighting beside you. For them, you did what you had to do to try
to stay alive, to try to keep them alive. For them, you did heroic acts that
you did not know were heroic.
What saved
it were the medical corpsmen and stretcher-bearers who went out again and again
into the fields of fire to bring away the wounded, who brought something
angelic into that Hell of misery and hurt and destruction and death.
What saved
it was the enormous pity that seemed to accumulate in the air over it.
To read of
that battle when you love a man who was in it, that is hard going. I read in
wonder, believing and sickened. I read weeping. Because I didn’t know exactly
what had happened to Nathan, it all seemed to have happened to him. You can’t
give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering.
You can’t
give yourself to love for a soldier without giving yourself to his suffering in
war. It is this body of our suffering that Christ was born into, to suffer it
Himself and to fill it with light, so that beyond the suffering we can imagine
Easter morning and the peace of God on little earthly homelands such as Port
William and the farming villages of Okinawa.
But Christ’s
living unto death in this body of our suffering did not end the suffering. He
asked us to end it, but we have not ended it. We suffer the old suffering over
and over again. Eventually, in loving, you see that you have given yourself
over to the knowledge of suffering in a state of war that is always going on.
And you wake in the night to the thought of the hurt and the helpless, the
scorned and the cheated, the burnt, the bombed, the shot, the imprisoned, the
beaten, the tortured, the maimed, the spit upon, the shit upon.
The Battle
of Okinawa was not a battle only of two armies making war against each other.
It was a battle of both armies making war against a place and its people.
Before that
spring, Okinawa had been a place of ancient country villages and farming
landscapes of little fields, perfectly cultivated. The people were poor by our
standards now but peaceable and courteous, hospitable and kind. They hated
violence and had no weapons. They made music and sang when they rested from
their work in the fields. It was “a land of song and dance.” The people made
beautiful things with their hands: buildings and gardens, weaving and pottery.
They had survived conquest, poverty, storms and drouths, disease and hunger,
but they had met no calamity like the battle of 1945. It killed 150,000 of them
as the fighting drove them out of their homes and they wandered with their
children and old people into the fields of fire. They were killed by mistake.
Nobody intended to kill them, they were just in the wrong place. It was their
own place, but the war had made it wrong.
And their
beloved, lovely island was scoured and burned. Everything standing was
destroyed: houses, trees, gardens, tombs, towns, the capital city of Naha, the
beautiful castle of Shuri. I found books with photographs of beautiful
buildings, walls and gates, bridges and gardens, all “destroyed in 1945.” I found
a photograph of some tanks driving across little fields, leaving deep tracks.
I began to
imagine something I know I cannot actually imagine: a human storm of explosions
and quakes and fire, a man-made natural disaster gathering itself up over a
long time out of ignorance and hatred, greed and pride, selfishness and a silly
love of power. I imagined it gathering up into armies of “ignorant boys,
killing each other” and passing like a wind-driven fire over the quiet land and
kind people. I knew then what Nathan knew all his life: It can happen anywhere.
Like any
storm, it finally ended. Like any fire, it burnt itself out. Like all the
living, those doomed to die finally were dead. I imagined the quiet coming
again over the burnt and blasted land. I imagined a green slope somewhere
undestroyed where a fresh, untainted breeze blew in from the sea. I imagined
Nathan coming there alone and sitting down, facing home, knowing that he had
lived and would live, the quiet coming over him, rest coming to him. And I
imagined Port William, the town, the farmsteads, the fields and the woods, the
river valley and the long, slow river, taking shape again in his mind.
And so I
came to know, as I had not known before, what this place of ours had been and
meant to him. I knew, as I had not known before, what I had meant to him. Our
life in our place had been a benediction to him, but he had seen it always
within a circle of fire that might have closed upon it.
He was a
rock to me, but now I knew that he had been shaken. Okinawa shook him, and he
was shaken for life, and deep in the night he needed to touch me. I didn’t know
the reason then, but now I know that some old nightmare of the war had come
back to him and frightened him awake. And ever so quietly, ever so gently, so
as not to wake me, he would touch me. I would pretend to sleep on, so as not to
disturb him with the thought that he had wakened me. It was not a lover’s
touch. As I knew partly then but know completely now, he needed to know that he
was here and I was here with him, that he had come from the world of war,
again, to this. Reassured, he would sleep again, and I too would sleep.
Now I
remember, now I seem to dream again, that sleep of ours, helpless and dark,
precious and brief, somehow allowed within the encircling fire.
