Oregon Humanities

War and the Notion of Home

I was sitting in my office last week reading a final report that one of our recent Responsive Program Grant recipients submitted when I realized how much I don’t know about war, especially how the notion of “home” changes so drastically. The Southern Oregon Goodwill Industries, in partnership with a number of other local organizations, recently hosted a conference focused on returning veterans. The conference responded to the social, emotional, and economic challenges that returning veterans face, and explored various ways that communities can more fully support soldiers as they return home. The final report included a simple yet revealing analogy that one of the keynote speakers used to show the disconnect felt by many veterans coming home. Basically, imagine that the emotional current at home is set at 110 volts. When soldiers go to war, the current increases to 220 volts. Returning home, it’s hard, if not impossible in some cases, to re-adjust to life at the lower voltage. It’s like you need an adapter—hence, the efforts of the organizations involved in the recent conference in Southern Oregon.

Reading this grant report reminded me of a powerful book I read last year, The Good Soldiers, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Finkel. (Finkel will be reading at Powell’s City of Books in Portland on September 7, an event co-sponsored by Oregon Humanities.) The Good Soldiers follows the men and women of the 2-16 Rangers during the troop surge in Iraq in 2007. It’s an incredibly captivating, graphic, and personal look into the daily lives of the soldiers. The majority of the book follows the soldiers during their time in Iraq, but the chapter that struck me the most was the one that followed them home. Finkel recounts stories about how the soldiers filled their eighteen days of leave with as much as they could—shopping sprees, last-minute proposals, new car purchases—because really, might this be the last time they’re home? The stories are simultaneously inspiring and saddening.

But this is the story that has stayed with me: the battalion commander is preparing to go home to see his wife and children. His wife has planned a big Disney vacation and e-mails her husband in Iraq all the details, asking if they look good to him. He responds that he doesn’t care about the vacation plans, as long as he gets to see her and the kids. Her reaction to this isn’t relief—it’s anger and resentment at all the work she’s put into the planning only for him not to offer any input at all. For him, it’s about taking time off from keeping his troops alive and safe. For her, it’s about taking time off from being a single parent. As Finkel describes it: “His war. Her war. They [are] vastly different and largely unshared with each other.”

Before reading this book, I really had no idea how much war inevitably, directly, and unapologetically redefines what should be the safest and most reliable part of an individual’s life—his or her home. Finkel describes many soldiers’ post-war view of home as “less a place than an act of imagination … a realm fundamentally disconnected from what life had become.” We learn that one soldier from the 2-16 now calls home “the abnormal normal,” which makes me think of the last scene in The Hurt Locker where Sergeant James is standing in the grocery store aisle, just staring at the shelves. He’s there to buy groceries, but he can’t seem to do it because it’s too banal (in light of the bombs he’s been defusing in Iraq) or maybe because it’s too overwhelming (in light of the sudden unfamiliarity of home life). While the interpretation is left to the viewer, I think it’s an important twist to the voltage analogy—for many returning soldiers, maybe “home” is what operates at the higher 220 voltage. Regardless, there is still a disconnect and the need for an adapter.

About Annie Dubinsky

Annie Dubinsky is the program and development coordinator for Oregon Humanities.

26 August 2010 | Posted by Annie Dubinsky in Inside O. Hm. New Ideas
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