INQUIRY

INQUIRY • Volume 19, 2015
minefield, lost radio contact and made directly for the heat of the action,
overrunning slit trenches manned by the 277 th Volksgrenadier Infantry
Divison of the S.S. Second Army. Lieutenant Borg was shot in the head
while firing with his sub-machine gun on the soldiers who had overrun
his tank. Family legend had it that he was too vain to wear his helmet,
but I realized he may not have had time to put it on as he hung out of
the turret firing at the enemy. A colleague of mine, a Marine Corps
Vietnam veteran with whom I shared my research, agreed observing
tersely: “I never did any of that John Wayne shit.” My grandfather’s
tank crew kept firing “for a considerable period” until they were able
to recover his body and drive it back to safety burying him temporarily
underneath an apple tree in an orchard near Fontenay Le-Pesnel. His
two brothers were both serving nearby in Normandy at the time of his
death, but they no idea of each others’ whereabouts.
My grandfather left behind some letters, photographs, and
mementoes, a wife and one year old daughter, my mother. Over the
years I had heard many stories about Gerard Borg, about his charm and
erratic timekeeping, adventures in the Birmingham blitz and blackout,
his popularity with his fellow officers, and his death in Normandy.
The countless British war films, documentaries, military histories, war
poems and novels I’d consumed growing up, had filled in the blanks
left by the silences of family history. Or so I thought.
I thought my research would interest my grandmother so we
arranged to meet for tea. But when I arrived at the appointed time in
Stratford on Avon, England, the house was empty. On the dining room
table was a note saying that she had needed to go for a walk, so she’d
driven with my aunt to a country garden in the Cotswolds, ten miles
away. A slim stack of my grandfather’s letters, along with his campaign
medals and some newspaper cuttings sat next to a plate of biscuits and
an apple. There was also a yellowed clipping I had not seen before, a
copy of his brief death notice from the Birmingham Post, one item in
a long column, which ended, “No Letters Please.” Sitting there in the
empty house, I recalled that my grandmother had gone away to stay in
the country after Gerard was killed, leaving my mother, then only a year
old, with her grandparents in Birmingham. Even now, fifty odd years
later, it was too much, too traumatic to sit and talk about the details of his
death in wartime. Sitting in her empty house, I realized how that short
sentence, “No Letters Please,” continued to resonate down the years.
I learned another lesson there, I think, that you have to include the
personal and the human dimension in your research. And that silences
are always actively produced. How was it, after growing up in a British
culture saturated by the official and popular versions of World War II,
which told us what it was like, that there could be such deep silences
about the human and personal costs of war? Why was it that when
men and women came back from WWII, they confronted a culture of
silence, a home front that assumed it had heard about it already and
didn’t need to listen to these individual voices? What was it about
the work of the war writers I was studying that people didn’t want to
hear? The experience of modern warfare, I discovered, was about too
little and too much. The traumatic nature of total warfare was often too
much for civilians, soldiers or veterans to articulate: they were often
reduced to silence. Meanwhile an official war culture emerged during
WWII that said to its citizens, in the US, “This is a Good War,” or in
Britain, “This is a People’s War.” Those war cultures declared: “It’s too
big, too vast, too complex, too extreme for you to comprehend. Don’t
worry, we will represent it for you. Just go on. Don’t stop to grieve or
process what you’ve seen. We’ll take care of that. Keep going.” But,
as we all know, there can be a cost—psychological, ethical, social and
economic—to keeping going when bad things are happening in the
world. The question is: who’s going to bear that cost? Do we—so far
away and insulated from America’s recent wars and conflicts that we
have grown up with—live in a similar culture of war?
These days when I am talking to veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan
wars, or more rarely to Iraqi or Afghan civilians because they are so
far away, I try to be responsible in the ways that I ask my questions
or use their stories. Veterans encounter gestures all the time, “Thank
you for your service” in the street or airports, or drunken questions at
campus parties, “So…did you kill anyone…what was it like?” They
want to be part of an actual conversation that overcomes “the civilian
military divide,” but we have to listen carefully and allow them to help
us set the terms of the exchange of ideas, information and experience.
This takes time, and we are addicted to fast results. Our war culture
also encourages us to think we already know how to ask these questions
or that we should stop asking and remain silent. But it is our
responsibility to slow things down, listen carefully, act ethically and
seek out our own questions.
To conclude: Too often, I think, we relate to research as a noun,
something a bit abstract and end oriented that sits across from us like
an ideal or a product. The truth is that we very often discover, formulate
and reformulate our research questions as we go along. Better to
think of research as a verb, an activity that we do. The excitement is
in pursuing these questions in conversation. More helpful to think
of research directions, rather than finished topics. A good friend and
colleague, Mary Louise Pratt, now Professor Emerita in SCA, is fond
of saying, “People think only scientists discover things. But people
in the humanities discover things all the time.” True, and we can turn
that around and extend it: people in the sciences and social sciences
are interpreting, imagining, telling stories and working with narratives
all the time. In the 1950s, a fairly crusty British intellectual called CP
Snow famously warned the British that they were divided into “two
cultures,” scientific and humanistic, and that they would continue to
decline if they didn’t remedy this gap. He was exaggerating, of course,
the way intellectuals do, but we still recognize the problem. But I would
like to suggest that all of us, in our different disciplines, belong to a
culture of research that cuts across these great social divides, because
it is our intellectual responsibility to talk to each other and bridge
these gaps together.
Professor Patrick Deer addressing the audience during the 2015 Undergraduate
Research Conference at NYU College of Arts and Science.
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