Where are the poems that could help us grasp the meaning of our post-9/11 wars?

By Jason Dempsey

Best Defense office of the literature
of combat

As we approach the
end of our time in Afghanistan it would serve us well to reflect on the
poets of World War I, not only for their messages
but for what we have lost with the absence of an art form that was so
well-suited to provide a window into war. On the question of who writes of war
and how is it portrayed, World War I was unique for two main reasons: 1) almost
everyone fought, including those who saw themselves as artists first and
soldiers second, and 2) poetry was a widespread vehicle for artistic outlet and
social commentary, not yet pushed aside by radio, movies, and television. The
result of that ubiquity of poetry as an artistic medium, along with the ease
with which one could write it, even in a combat zone, is that we are inundated
with art from the Great War that was created by those who experienced it. From
Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves, we get a tactile feel for
the war paired with examinations of what it means for life writ large -- the
purpose of art, as it were.

Today, unfortunately,
those conditions don't hold. Artists and soldiers are, by and large, two
separate communities, and poetry is essentially dead as a medium for
mass-communication, supplanted by movies and music which are beyond the
technical capacity of soldiers in the field to create. The result is that
artistic interpretations of modern wars lag well behind their occurrence and
are, for the most part, derivative. Since the end of mass wars and the
dissolution of the draft, the record of "art" on war has been fairly dismal. From
the medium that most touches mass audiences we are presented with Top Gun, Navy SEALs, and The Hurt
Locker. Interpreting armed conflict in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, respectively,
each follows the same tired tropes, merely placing old stereotypes in new
settings. The gadgets, sets, and cinematography evolve but the story remains
the same. Even Saving Private Ryan,
for all its brilliance, could not, in its final moments, avoid the cinematic
safety blanket provided by a valiant last stand and a noble speech delivered in
a dying breath.

I've often wondered
what we would have learned if Owen had lived, or if T.S. Eliot had gone to war.
Owen, able to distill the horror of World War I and place it in the mundane
context of its execution, made a dramatic statement about the failures of
nation-states to achieve the patriotic ideals for which soldiers ostensibly
fight, and die. Had he lived through the war and had more time to contemplate
what had happened, one can only imagine the journey he might have taken us on. And
Eliot, of course, represents opportunity lost. Eliot could turn the experience
of a mere "house-agent's clerk" into blinding statements on love and faith, and
his musings on the aftermath of the Great War inform "The Waste Land," one of the masterpieces of the 20th
century. One can only imagine what he might have done with direct experience.

While many other
poets survived and made great contributions to our understanding of war, both
during and after the conflict, the gap left by Owen's death and Eliot's lack of
experience has only grown wider in the intervening century. Today, art on war
is stuck in a proverbial no-man's land. On one side are the soldiers, a
self-selected class with a corresponding lack of interest in questioning the
assumptions upon which we build our rationale for fighting, and often without
the tools to readily contribute on the rare chance they do. On the other side
of the trenches are the professional artists. Relying on field phones and
distant observation, their resulting interpretations of war are best understood
as personal introspection, or navel-gazing through the barrel of a gun.

Art has a role to
play in addressing fundamental questions, and few questions are more
fundamental than the choice of states to kill. On that question the poets of
World War I stood like lightning rods in attracting attention to the horrors
and stupidity of that conflict, and mankind is better for it. But in the years
since, as the soldier and artist have diverged, our understanding of organized
violence has become much more shallow. For today's artists war, if they go out
of their way to address it, merely presents an opportunity to recast old
narratives and put new faces on tired clichés. The result is a nearly static
discussion and an understanding of war that lags decades behind execution.

We entered the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan awash in nostalgia for World War II and devoid of the
ability to move beyond a superficial understanding of modern conflict, and we
have paid for it. Good books and memoirs have begun to emerge from these recent
conflicts but their release meets waning interest and a public that has already
moved on. One can't help but think of the opportunities missed with the
disappearance of poetry as a tool with which the soldier-poets of World War I
could immediately engage the public. Reading through those old poems, one feels
a sense of great loss, both for their disappearance and for the larger absence
of art from our conversations about war.

Jason Dempsey is the author of Our Army: Soldiers, Politics and American Civil-Military
Relations and is serving as a combat advisor in Afghanistan. The views
presented here are his own.