HowlRound: When my father was close to the end of his life, he told us that he wanted to be buried in his uniform. He meant his tenth Mountain Division uniform, the one he wore while fighting in Northern Italy in the final months of World War II. The same uniform he was wearing while on board a ship taking him from the European theatre to the fighting in the Pacific; they heard that a massive bomb had been dropped on cities in Japan, the war was over, and they could go home. The same uniform that was always stuffed in the closet, the attic, or the basement of houses we lived in as I grew up.
1 comment:
I wanted to read this article because it is so far outside my realm of experience. I do not come from a military family in any way. Although my grandfathers both worked for the US government in different capacities during WWII and my grandmother was part of the Spitfire Women and flew planes for the RAF, I didn’t know them growing up and looking through my grandmother’s flight logs is nothing close to actually spending time with someone who has served. So the only way I see of possibly gaining a better understanding of and empathy for that experience is through art. I really appreciate Lerman’s choice of conveying her message and story through dance and other, more interpretative. It reminds me of an essay I was reading a couple weeks ago by a Holocaust survivor who wrote that she does not live “with” her experience in Auschwitz, but rather “next” to it. Because she can remember and talk about the sequence of events she went through but she has to build a wall between her reality and the “deep memories” of the sensations she experienced: the thirst, the hungry, the freezing, and the fear. But if Lerman wanted to tap into the truth of memory, she would need to go beyond words. Because as far as I can gather, the truth of war lives in sounds and smells and visceral sensation, not in words.
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