Lee Miller explores the nexus of war, sacrifice and hardshipthrough Norman Mailer's 1948 classic, TheNaked and the Dead.
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On this Veteran’s Day, it is appropriate to examine andsalute the deep level of sacrifice made by American soldiers who have fought inwar. This sacrifice is tenfold more difficult when one acknowledges the layersof illusion within a fighting army, a theater of conflict and a patrioticsociety—maya that the foot soldiermust accept as reality and endure, along with other basic sacrifices. Thesoldiers recognized today are mostly survivors from the past decade of conflictin Iraq and Afghanistan, who faced the same layered sacrifice that author and WorldWar II veteran Norman Mailer so vividly described in his 1948 classic, The Naked and the Dead.
The Naked and the Deadis a prodigious and ambitious book. On one level it is a story about war and theorganization of armies and societies. On a different level it explores therelationship of humans to myth. It was published to significant acclaim whenNorman Mailer was only 25 years old and three years removed from the Pacific theaterof WWII. Mailer imitates the writing style of Leo Tolstoy’s Ana Karenina by constructing a collageof intertwined characters.
The book essentially follows the agonizing capture of Anopopei,a South Pacific island, by a US Army unit during World War II. But this is along ordeal and allows ample time to for “Hennessey” (aka Mailer) to explorethe society of his Army unit. There is a strict aristocracy within the formallyranked group. The Jew (Goldstein) and the Latino (Martinez) are both minoritieswithin the tribe who endure vicious discrimination. Wilson is a whiteSoutherner who simply wants to get drunk through the whole ordeal, escape themyth through substance abuse. Hearn is from a high-class Midwestern family in the“real world,” and for this reason he is allowed to play chess with the general.Yet when Hearn puts out a cigarette on the dirt floor of the general’s tent, heis sent on a risky recon mission as punishment. The Army’s aristocracy is evenstronger than “normal” American society. Croft, a platoon sergeant, is a truemilitary man who looks eagerly toward advancement thought the established Armystructure. He cares deeply about each mission and strives 100 percent to moveup the established ladder. Hearn, on the other hand, cares 0 percent for the Armymyth, the mission or advancement, which leads to strong conflict between thetwo unit leaders. Here, Mailer shows that within a culture motivated byfalsehoods and myth, aristocracy and rigid class lines are essential to hold agroup together.
Mailer’s masterful stroke in The Naked and the Dead is his ability to expose the myths thatmotivate a WWII Army unit. There is palpable fear at the beginning of the book,as the men play cards on a boat, the night before the initial assault on theisland. They invade the next day, under light air cover, and secure the westernpoint with light resistance. Snipers occasionally attack at night, while theyspend months building a camp, an airstrip and a road. When the area is secure,the Army leaders never allow the men to grow comfortable; otherwise, they wouldlose their motivation to press on to “victory” over the Japanese.
Yet pressing on to conquer the whole island is myth. Mt.Anaka is a sharp brutal peak at the center of the island, symbolic of nature’spower high above the conflicts of man. The jungle is too thick to cut ormaintain a road. After months of futility, a reconnaissance mission is finallyordered to determine another avenue of attack upon the Japanese side of theisland. The recon platoon takes a boat to a “Biblical” paradisiacal cove on theother side of the island, and attempts to cross raging streams and mountainridges one foot wide and 1,000 feet up, to spy upon the Japanese camp. Wilsonis shot by a sniper and the rest are stopped by a large hornets’ nest that theycannot circumnavigate.
In the end, the American Army has no other choice but anhonest frontal assault. When they do this, they find a wildly undersupplied,abandoned, decimated and starving cluster of Japanese troops, the naked and thedead. All of the parrying between sides in war and within the American Army wasbased upon a myth. Knowing this makes the soldier’s sacrifice, of WWII andtoday, infinitely more difficult and admirable.
Lee Miller is theauthor of the Bengali novel, Kali Sunset(www.clovercreekpress.com), thestory of how Hinduism influences Mrs. Sona Choudhury’s family and life in 20thCentury India.
