Life, August 14, 1944

[gildedcentury.livejournal.com]

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting - thank you!

See, they were saying the same thing during World War I, when songs like “How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)” and “Stony Broke in No Man's Land” reflected the awareness that - as always! - the war fought to defend a society, destroyed that society and things were not going to be the same - that men who'd fought the most horrifying nightmare the world had (yet) seen, “are not going back to their push-carts or their sweatshops” when it was all over. (This turned out to be untrue: Most of them were all too glad to return to that normal world, even if - as this ad points out - they were sometimes strangers to it.)


The same was true of World War II - the guys who'd fought in the Pacific Theatre didn't talk about it because no one who hadn't been there would understand, and they'd rather not remember it themselves. When Saving Private Ryan came out, its famously shocking D-Day landing sequence brought many surviving veterans to say, Thank you. This is how it was. Finally, someone has told it right.

And of course, Vietnam was the same story (http://www.fredoneverything.net/HarpVet.html) told in its time.

…Then it was over. The veterans came home. Suddenly the world seemed to stop dead in the water. Suddenly the slant-eyed hookers were gone, and the gunships and the wild drunken nights… Suddenly the veterans were among soft, proper people who knew nothing of what they had done and what they had seen, and who, truth be told, didn't much like them…

But by then, the problem could be admitted. In World War II, it was no less a problem - but every man faced it privately, individually, and dealt with it as best he could.

[itskelp.livejournal.com]

could not get over the phrasing of "his women folks". . .what the. .

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Oldthinkers unbellyfeel femlib.

[innostrantsa.livejournal.com]

Doubleplusgood comment.

[cuddyclothes.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. It's true, both World Wars left soldiers in limbo afterwards, suffering from having experiences they did not know how to describe. (A must-see movie about WW1 is "Paths of Glory" w/ Kirk Douglas.) It's unusual to see a piece address this issue in a straightforward manner. An excellent post-war movie is 'The Best Years of Our Lives'. Can you tell I'm a movie buff?

It's also fascinating to see a long ad for a newsmagazine. Today it would be three sentences, if that, and a picture. Oh, wait, it has nothing to do with Beyonce'. Scratch that.