Once There Was a War

by John Steinbeck

Men cannot be treated as individuals on this troopship. They are simply units which take up six feet by three feet by two feet, horizontal or vertical. So much space must be allotted for the physical unit. They are engines which must be given fuel to keep them from stopping.

It is gratifying to see that our new Army has gone back to the old-fashioned virtues our forefathers lied about.

The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.

The trouble with generalities, particularly patriotic ones, is that they force people to defend things they don’t normally like at all.

We get along very well as individuals, but just the moment we become the Americans and they become the British trouble is not far behind.

When they want him to take up his rifle and fight he is quite willing to do so, but until someone suggests it, he is not going to worry about it.

Every one of these vehicles lying in the wreck yard has some tremendous story, but in many of the cases the story died with the driver and the crew.

At night they were very tired and there is not much to do in Africa after dark anyway. No love is lost for the Arabs. They are the dirtiest people in the world and among the smelliest. The whole countryside smells of urine, four thousand years of urine. That is the characteristic smell of North Africa. The men were not allowed to go into the native cities because there was a great deal of disease and besides there are too many little religious rules and prejudices that an unsuspecting dogface can run afoul of. And there wasn’t much to buy and what there was cost too much. The prices have skyrocketed on the coming of the troops.

Interesting thoughts on 1940s Northern Africa.

The combat troops sat on the luggage and waited. This was what it was all for. They had left home for this. They had studied and trained, changed their natures and their clothing and their habits all toward this time.

Every one is in a way dead already. And nearly every man has written his letter and left it somewhere to be posted if he is killed. The letters, some misspelled, some illiterate, some polished and full of attitudes, and some meager and tight. All say the same thing. They all say: “I wish I had told you, and I never did, I never could. Some obscure and impish thing kept me from ever telling you, and only now, when it is too late, can I tell you. I’ve thought these things,” the letters say, “but when I started to speak something cut me off. Now I can say it, but don’t let it be a burden on you. I just know that it was always so, only I didn’t say it.” In every letter that is the message. The piled-up reticences go down in the last letters. The letters to wives, and mothers, and sisters, and fathers, and, such is the hunger to have been a part of someone, letters sometimes to comparative strangers.

There are times in war when the sharpest emotion is not fear, but loneliness and littleness.