With the requisite annual homage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the perennial argument over whether or not we should have ended World War II by opening the nuclear age, the 60th anniversary of that war's end passes largely unnoticed. The 50th was its big moment, "The Greatest Generation" and all that, with spikes for Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the dedication of the World War II Memorial last year. An epic that loomed large in the national experience as The War is becoming what the Civil War was for young men and women of the 1940s, the prattle of grandparents. We've had wars since. Got one now, thanks.
The Iraq war already has hatched a TV series, so it was only a matter of time before post-traumatic stress disorder became a media fixation. The Vietnam war had been over nearly 15 years when a government study found that 15 percent of its veterans experienced PTSD. Last week, Stars & Stripes, the military newspaper, reported that recent studies found about the same percentage of Iraq veterans experiencing depression or PTSD. Some World War II vets came home broken, too, but mostly they forgot, earnestly.
"They ought to begin wars with a course in basic training and end them with a course in basic forgetting." So theorizes Tom Rath, paratrooper veteran and protagonist of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Published in 1955, Wilson's novel is usually considered a critique of careerist conformity, as the disaffected Rath courts upward mobility to soothe his dissatisfied wife. This impression was bolstered by the movie of the same title starring Gregory Peck, which was released in 1956 and which Fox Home Entertainment issued as a DVD this week.
Wilson, though, thought his novel was about his generation and its adaptation to civil life after world war. I brought it up recently here in discussing the 1960s TV show, Combat!, because author Malcolm Gladwell, in The New Yorker, had cited The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit as an example of how people used to be able to absorb trauma. Conversely, the literary and cinematic legacy of Vietnam established the expectation that trauma always induces its syndrome. Gladwell saw this as a hallmark of a society obsessed with its psychological fragility.
By contrast, Rath insists: "I've got to be tough. I am not the type to have a nervous breakdown." It was a more stultified time, true, with no Oprah to urge therapeutic unburdening, and a 10-year incubation period for psychological wounds. Last week in Las Vegas an Iraq veteran, arrested for killing a woman, claimed a confrontation with her companion triggered the combatant in him. He'd taken an assault rifle on his walk because, he said, he'd been threatened before. If nothing else, the case raises an intriguing question: Is it insane to trust in combat training and assault weapons on a Vegas beer run?
Tom Rath never attacks anyone, although he indulges a brief fantasy of killing a superior executive. His problem, at least as Sloan frames it, is that war had destroyed the innocent optimism he once shared with his wife, who upbraids him for his glib cynicism. But Sloan also indicates Rath was saturnine before the war. Remembering the party at which he met his wife, Rath recalls his misgivings as war approached: "It had been then Tom had started to acquire a permanent disrespect for experts and to equate pessimism with wisdom."
Despite Rath's determined forgetting, swaths of the novel are given to flashbacks, all in past-perfect tense, to highlight memory's dogged lodgment in the present. Among other things, Rath recalls the purposeful murder of a young German soldier, the accidental combat killing of a friend, and an idyllic tryst with an Italian woman. This extramarital liaison produced a son, as Rath learns from a former enlisted man in his unit, who is —ah, the symbolic flourish—an elevator operator in the headquarters of Rath's new employer. It also is notable that Rath manages an image-polishing project for a broadcasting mogul, who wants to raise awareness of, yes, mental-health issues.
In truth, as entertaining as his novel can be, Wilson wields a blunt instrument occasionally. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was old-fashioned in its time, with an omniscient but not particularly resourceful narrator. Plot lines fail to develop or they resolve too neatly. The novel's central failing, though, is its rejection of Rath's skepticism. Rath finally decides to tell his wife, Betsy, about his Italian dalliance, and to accept responsibility for his son. But he remains silent about the war in general, and Betsy extols the "courage" of hopeful optimism.
Gladwell exalts this courage, too, and he has a point that we have become an overly therapeutic society. But we are a better society for having acknowledged a need for therapy, or just plain talk. Too often we still confuse courage with silence. Stars & Stripes also reported that most Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with "symptoms of mental-health problems" are reluctant to seek available help, fearing stigmatization or career derailment.
World War II's pious rhetoric and propaganda prompted skepticism and ironic detachment among many of its veterans. Those traits, far from being impediments to mental health, are its signposts. They are needed particularly during a war launched on fabrications and sustained by fabulous optimism, a war whose veterans are not likely to forget.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.