You Coward, You Servant, You Blind Man.

Allow me to open with how this has been a particularly difficult post to finish. I don't mean it was emotionally trying, or intellectually hard to get my head around, rather that I've written it up three or four times now and just couldn't get it to come out in a style I liked while still conveying what it was I was trying to say. I wrote my first draft, which by now bears at best a passing resemblance to this post, back on Memorial Day, for reasons that should become fairly clear as I progress. At any rate, it's finally done and polished enough so here we go.

I've been thinking a lot over the past several months on the subject of heroes. This should come as a surprise to precisely no one who's up on what I've been doing lately, so for those who aren't, a bit of background is necessary at this point. Since completing my comps back in May and spending, well, most of the summer in a non-academic coma recovering from the whole experience, I have since gotten to work on forming up what I want to do for my dissertation. During the whole reading process I did last year, there were any number of interesting things I came across that begged for further examination, but the one in particular I've decided to go with fits quite well into my particular field of study: International and comparative history with a focus on war, defeat, and aftermath.

What I'm very slowly getting around to revealing here is that I've discovered a phenomenon which I'd previously thought to be exclusively American to have occurred previously in other nations as well. I am speaking here of the myth of the secret camp, an outgrowth of POW/MIA advocacy. The American version of the myth, which anyone who lived through the 80s should instantly recognize from any one of a plethora of bad action movies, holds that some/all of the roughly 1600 American servicemen still unaccounted from the war in Vietnam are, rather than just being corpses no one ever recovered, being held in secret camps by the evil Vietnamese communists. Think Rambo: First Blood Pt. II, for just one of many examples.

In the process of reading all those books during the 2010 - 2011 academic year, I came across two previous instances of the myth, in two different countries: France immediately after the Great War, and West Germany following the Second World War. In both instances, popular movements arose following their respective wars which argued that their MIAs (over a quarter of a million in the case of France) were not, in fact, dead, but rather being held (in the French instance) being held by the sinister Huns or (in ther German one) by the nefarious Soviets for various cartoonishly-villainous reasons.

As in the American version of the myth, both of these have their basis virtually entirely in a poisonous mixture of wishful thinking, unreasoning hope, and leftover wartime resentment and political ideology. I'm obviously still in the process of researching how two of the three (the German and American, and I can't read French) versions compare with one another, but one thing has struck me about the two that is shaping up to be one of my core arguments, and why (at long last) I've been thinking about heroes quite a bit lately. It all has its roots in the two wars in question, and how the nations I'm examining dealt with them; it's hardly controversial to say that World War II, particularly on the Eastern Front, and the Vietnam War were dirty* wars, ones which their respective populaces struggled afterwards to find anything positive to salvage from the experiences. For both, their returning servicemen did not make particularly useful hero figures, the Germans as their soldiers were compromised by the atrocities of the Nazi state, no matter how much generals in high places tried to argue the Wehrmacht had fought its war with clean hands, and the Americans due both to the humiliation of a lost war and also by how fundamentally it had wrought social division and unrest at home.

POWs, however, are a different story. Time spent behind the wire, in both cases usually enduring privation and brutality either in Siberia or the Hanoi Hilton, was seen by both Germans and Americans as redemptive. Any wartime sins committed by those individuals were washed clean by captivity, by the experience of nobly if passively resisting the communist captor. And so, to make an already fairly lengthy story short, it's had me thinking about how societies denominate their heroes.

This isn't the first time I've given the subject some thought, but I've not been able to articulate my thoughts on the subject coherently until this research gave me the lens through which to do so. Consider how often, currently, you hear the word "hero" get tossed around. During the last dozen years or so I've found myself, if only on the subconscious level, get a bit leery whenever I hear someone labelled a hero, and I think I've finally figured out why: We do it too frequently.

This is where I get into the section that's likely to offend someone, so I'd preemptively apologize, if that was the sort of thing I did. Which it isn't. It strikes me that, in America today, basically anyone wearing a uniform is presumed a hero by default. Think of, well, basically any political figure or commentator speaking about the armed forces; can you recall a single instance where, at least once, American servicemen and -women get called "our heroes?" I sure can't, and I frankly, I have to wonder about the consequences of such a blanket assignation. After all, if anyone who does a hitch in the military is a hero, then how do we judge actual acts of genuine heroism, whether in the service or not? Inversely, if they're collectively all "our heroes," then where does that put someone like Lynndie England, or any other given war criminal that comes along?

Hell, I don't even need to dial up the rhetoric that high; is there the same equivalence of heroism between a marine that did a hitch during the battle of Fallujah and a sailor in the Naval Reserve that never left Newport News? I can't shake the feeling that by blanket-assigning everyone in the service as being heroes by default, we're irreparably cheapening the very concept of heroism. To say nothing of how obviously pandering are so many who, at the drop of a hat, bust out the "our heroes" line.

However, I'm most troubled by how much more frequently I've been hearing it since the inauguration of Iraq and Afghanistan. I'll grant that the beginning of a war is likely to crank the patriotic rhetoric up a notch or two, all other consideration excepted, but then my mind wanders back to those West Germans after 1945, or Americans after (let's say) 1973.

Are we really thanking heroes, or are we just trying to salvage something positive out of otherwise-tarnished situations?

*Just to get this potentially nightmarish complication out the way: all wars are dirty to one degree or another, and anyone claiming that one side or another in any war fought it with clean hands should be immediately suspected of advancing an agenda rather than being honest with history. All that said, for the purposes of this discussion, I think it's safe to say Germany in the Second World War and the US in Vietnam were notably dirtier wars than usual, though clearly not equally so.

Stunde Null

This is going to be a fairly self-indulgent, so if you're not looking for me to narrowly focus in on my recent life then best move on. If you are, they read on.

As should be entirely obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to this or anything else I've said for the past few years, I'm currently attending graduate school to earn a doctorate in history. A little over a week ago, I passed an important milestone in my progress towards that degree: my comprehensive exam. I mentioned last time that this was sorta a big deal with not inconsiderable prep work going into it; it's honestly hard to exaggerate just how much you have to do to get ready. While I read a few books last summer, I only really got going last September. But, I already bored and frustrated you last time with the rundown of how the exam goes, and so refrain from doing so a second time.

The test itself commenced on 3 May. The way we do it here at SUNY Albany is you're admitted to a small, windowless room, in which you have a laptop on which to answer the questions asked. You're allowed scratch paper to jot down ideas or, more commonly, as much of your book list as you can remember for future reference, and that's about it. My first professor, coincidentally my committee chair, had me answer three questions out of four in the three hours I had for his written section; all the others had me just choose two out of four, and unsurprisingly I was able to write much more extensively for them, not that I feel I did bad on my first. After each morning session I got a one hour break for lunch before taking on the next one. It's hard to describe for anyone who hasn't done it, or something roughly similar like, say, the bar exam, just how intense an experience it is. Three hours grinding away on two-three questions, writing like your life depends on it. I averaged about eleven-twelve pages for each professor, which taken together means I wrote about a forty four-page exam in the space of twelve hours.

I don't know if this is standard for all universities and suspect it probably is not, but my department at least leaves it up to the student in question to determine his/her own schedule for their test, and as such I elected to take a day off after my written exams before I faces the final bit, the oral examination. The time just to get my equilibrium back was key; I think I might've looked over the answers I'd given in the written for maybe fifteen minutes, the rest of that day was entirely, gloriously, unproductive. I watched some TV, played a video game at one point, and tried (mostly successfully) to not second guess myself or get massively freaked out about the final session to come.

That's not to say that I wasn't feeling some butterflies when, the next morning, I headed up to the department seminar room to face my committee. The parking lot is on the far side of the building from the office so I found myself with a long walk down the hallway to get there, which was frankly a borderline-surreal experience. It's singular; you're afflicted of that simultaneous feeling of anticipation and worry, coupled with the knowledge that you're about to face the moment, win or lose, live or die, and each step brings it that much closer.

And then, it starts. The actual questioning is a half hour per professor, and despite what experience I have in stage performing and public speaking it's still remarkable how quickly the time goes by. In practice each went pretty well; I got tripped up once or twice on authors I couldn't recall precisely or arguments that had fallen by the wayside. I parried the thrusts, engaged with the historiography, and generally kept my head above water for the full two hours.

Afterwards, they have you step out while they discuss among themselves your performance. It was, I think, maybe seven or eight minutes, but was so amped up at that point I doubt I recall it accurately. My suspicion is they took about thirty seconds to all agree I'd passed and the rest to just let me stew in my own juices.

I doubt I'm leaving anyone on tenterhooks here to only at this point reveal that I ended up passing, as in fact I did. That weekend ended up being a whirlwind of drunken excess in celebration of so doing and also being free of any pressing obligation on my time. Massive hangovers are worth it, every now and again.

Lurker at the Threshold

This is going to come off a bit self-interested, compared with my last post but frankly I'm so far from the point of caring I don't even remember what it looked like on my way past. Yesterday I finished the last book I had to read for my PhD candidacy exam, also known as the comprehensive exam or comps, for short. For those of you not so mentally derang- errr, properly motivated to consider going to graduate school, allow me to point out what a goddamn task it's been getting from there to here.

I don't know how representative this will be outside of my particular discipline of history, but I've reason to believe within the humanities at least it's roughly representative. Coursework, the actual taking of classes that is, generally takes about four semesters; I came in with a MA already so I had advanced standing of 30 credits granted from the work I'd already done, meaning I had a mere 36 more to earn. Anyway, once you've got that complete the big hurdle to advance from PhD grad student to PhD candidate is your comps, a massive exam to make sure you've got the requisite knowledge in the field to be a professor yourself one day. You pick four professors within a set of requirements of which I'll not bore you and they each assign you forty books to read, from which each can essentially ask you anything they like; at 160 books, wise students take at least two semesters to get through this process. I started mine in early September 2010, and concluded last night.

The rule of thumb is to try to knock off a book a day, which is both worse and less bad than it sounds; on days when you've got a short little 120 pager which reads easy you feel like a god. When it's a 500+ page bit of dense New History crap from the 1960s you doubt your fitness not only as a grad student but also as a basic human and contemplate instead joining the French Foreign Legion. It's really hard to describe to someone who hasn't done it just how physically tiring it is to sit and do nothing but read a book and take notes on it for eight to ten hours a day, day after day, week after week.

Anyway, the end now is in sight. I've got a week from today, exactly, before day one of my test. The exam itself is split into two parts, written and oral, the latter of which I'd normally not be above making a juvenile joke about but can't find it in me to do so. Over the first two days, you have four three-hour sessions in each of which your professors in sequence ask you a number of questions about, well, basically anything they like from the books you read for them. It goes without saying you're expected to be able to cite author and book to back up whatever it is you have to say, for each, out of any of the 160 books you had to read. Following that, there's a third day where in the space of two hours, each professor gets a half hour in which to grill you extemporaneously. Usually but not always this is to either fill in blanks from the written session or force you to take a position on some pet peeve/crusade of theirs.

In sum total, it comes to fourteen hours total of exam. It's closed book, of course. Mine starts in a little under one week from today. Wheeeeeeee....