War and the Arc of Human Experience (iv)
from anthropologist Glenn Petersen
"The stairs running alongside the house passed just below my parents' bedroom, and I crept up to the street as carefully and quietly as I could. It was 3:00 a.m. Earlier that evening, before they'd gone to bed, I had wheeled my Vespa away from where it had been parked outside their window. As I look back now, those last few steps seem to mirror the passage into manhood I'd embarked on. I moved away from the house and passed out of one world and into another."
First paragraph of "Why We Fight," chapter one of War and the Arc of Human Experience. The anthropologist Glenn Petersen looks back to his first step toward Yankee Station, between the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea, from where the Navy fought its war over the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.
What is this first paragraph? Ask a literary critic. Well, here a picaro, a young boy, begins his tale of life on the road.
The picaresque is a satire where a boy reports with telling incomprehension on the society he passes through while he matures. This kind of story has close ties to the enlightenment, to social science, and the study of war, as in Voltaire's Candide.
More specifically here is a scene of arrival characteristic of the genre of picaresque and satire which anthropologists have developed as ethnography. Over this first chapter Glenn introduces his study of a war in our characteristic and unique manner,
working from the specifics of the investigator's experience to the structure of the institutions he encounters, and beyond to place his findings in the context of what we know about our kind from the beginnings of our genus through speciation, prehistory and history around the world.
Many authors have bloviated about war. It is embarrassing. Perfectly good autobiographers, historians, and novelists abandon their grounding and sail off into oh pretty much the same blah blah blah.
Glenn Petersen rather has made his living lecturing on our species, on what is general and what is not. He has written the political economy, including war and peace, of all Micronesia, drawing on our profession's technique of literature reviewed in light of participant observation.
He brings that eye to his observations about his participation in his own war, flying over the peoples who long ago turned back from the archipelagoes to take the mainland again rather than continue out into the ocean.
He starts on a motor scooter, his wild ride down the California coast. As he begins life on his own in Santa Barbara, 16 years old, we hear about his childhood experience of the war books and movies that saturated his 1950s and my own 1960s.
A scholar and a scientist, not a professional storyteller relaxing into memory, he has revisited a sampling of them to find that well actually they were not so pro-war as all that.
By the same token he has looked at the numbers to find how few of his peers they nonetheless convinced to go to war. How in the world did Glenn come to ride a Vespa to Yankee Station?
Viet Nam letters has addressed War and the Arc of Human Experience by Glenn Petersen 7 times so far. The first posted on February 19, 2022, the second on March 7, 2022, the third on March 28, 2022. Then the fifth was May 30, 2022, the sixth on July 11, 2022, and the seventh on June 20, 2023.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.
Promotional copy:
My people, as many different anthropologists have referred to those whose lives we have shared and written about, are authors who started making books,
that is, organizing individual expression through an institution into a product then widely shared, because of the nation of Viet Nam. When you speak of Viet Nam and mean a war, I object,
but when you speak of the nation of Viet Nam and observe that its cause has occasioned one war after another, none may gainsay you. Oh, someone will,
just to have a fight. You know, to keep in practice for the next war. So, many of my authors have been the kind of people who involve themselves in war, who war reaches out and grabs,
bright and energetic young men who have not already been grabbed by some other institution, whether marriage or medical school. Here is my fourth note on just one of my people,
the anthropologist Glenn Petersen, who flew 70 combat missions over Ha Noi, in the back seat with the radio, before he started college. His book looks back to that beginning of his career in Micronesian area studies to consider war in general.
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