Last night at Movie Group someone finally asked the inevitable question about my thoughts on the situation with Iraq. Those good friends are the only people to whom I would voice my real opinion. I am neither a coward nor ashamed of my stance, only less willing now to go where angels fear to tread in social settings. Chances are good enough that I will put my foot in my mouth without hazarding down the path of global politics. I am one of those souls afflicted with the curse of being misunderstood even when my intentions are thoroughly innocent, so I’ve cultivated some hard won and I hope judicious caution.

My Movie Group family asked the question of me not to start an argument, though we did have a spirited discussion, but because I’m an historian and they wanted to know how I see things through that lens. With any other assemblage I would only have said something I do mean; I hope the Powers That Be in the Universe guide the leaders involved to make the best decisions for the future of the world. To my friends, I spoke with equal sincerity but with greater elaboration and, as I knew I would, came away no worse for having done so. That’s why they are my friends.

After dinner we watched Ian Holm in The Emperor’s New Clothes, but all my thoughts were not on Napoleon. I kept thinking about a World War II displaced person, a former Luftwaffe officer, who ran a drive-in back in the Little Town. I’ve often wondered how H.W. felt about slinging burgers after serving in Hitler’s air force, if he saw it as several steps down in the world. He could not help but be aware of the deep hatred the town’s veterans harbored for him. Papa consistently referred to H.W. as a “Nazi son of a bitch.” On one occasion the two men exchanged harsh words in the post office and my father, whom I never saw raise his hand against another man, shoved H.W. against the wall and offered to whip him on Main Street for God and everybody to see.

Then came the year H.W. managed to convince my old boss at the paper, R.C., to run a feature story on H.W.’s wartime service complete with a photo of his younger uniformed and Swastika-bedecked self. This was no small feat as R.C. served with the Marines in the South Pacific and was one of the most fiercely patriotic men I’ve ever known. The newspaper article about H.W. generated so much additional ill will toward the man that the sheriff’s department kept a close eye on his business for several weeks. I have no idea where H.W. lived but I’ll bet his neighbors ducked behind the sofa when a car drove through the neighborhood a little too slowly.

We ate hamburgers from H.W.’s place and I tried not to stare at the only real Nazi I’d ever seen. For me, raised on World War II lore, Nazis were the consummate bad guys. H.W. spoke with a thick German accent, the loathsome speech of the “enemy,” but he seemed friendly enough when he took our orders and filled little paper cartons with French fries. Even though I wanted to, I never worked up the courage to ask H.W. about his side of the war. The idea seemed vaguely treasonous and perhaps even a betrayal of Papa.

In recent years I’ve seen a number of documentaries uniting former enemies, soldiers from either side of this or that battle brought together to discuss the complete picture of their part of the war. At least for the cameras the old warriors seem to achieve some peace with one another and apparent resolution of previous animosities. I don’t know if it was because H.W. served in the German Luftwaffe or if Papa genuinely did not like the man, but no such peace initiative would have worked in their on-going and private war.

I used to tell my students that war brutalizes both sides in an attempt to blur the lines for them and make them see that to the other side “we” were the enemy. Papa’s friend B.H. brought that home to me in a vivid manner one afternoon as we sat under the pecan trees in his front yard talking. B.H. served in the South Pacific and spoke of a friend who received a medical discharge.

“Was he wounded?” I asked.

“No, B.H. said, taking a drag on his home-rolled cigarette and knocking back a glass of whiskey. “He started liking the war a little too much. Collected the ears of Japanese soldiers. Colonel finally put a stop to it when he caught my buddy getting ready to cut the head off a dead Jap major.”

“Why was he going to do that?” I asked, horrified and fascinated at the same time.

“Said he wanted to boil it down and make a lamp out of the skull.”

That story has stuck with me for many years. I’m sure in time of war the armed forces get their share of enlisted sociopaths, but what if that fellow was just a boy driven to madness by the fighting? I’ve always wondered what happened to him. Did he “recover?” If so, could he ever forget the things he’d done? My Mother’s oldest brother never recovered from the trenches of the First World War and sank deeper and deeper into the bottle until finally, fifty years later, his gun went off while he was “cleaning” it. A single rifle shot finally stilled the old gunfire that haunted his memories.

Even in last night’s film Ian Holm played Napoleon as a man both greedy to regain his lost power and haunted by the life of war he’d led. Finally when he saw an asylum full of mad men, all claiming to be Napoleon, did he realize the price his wars exacted and go quietly into the anonymity his mistaken identity offered. Although a fictional and fanciful look at an alternate ending to Bonaparte’s life, the film reflected the desire many warriors must have to leave their former selves behind, to go back to being ordinary and normal.

So when I think of war these days I think of H.W. He survived the conflict, came to a new country, and attempted to start over. I’ve heard that he first tried to settle in the central Texas community of Fredericksburg with its deep German heritage but faced even more social censure there. Those transplanted Germans dealt with the xenophobic fears of their neighbors through two world wars and wanted no hint of an association with a former Nazi. So H.W. came to the Little Town and ran his business, hated by every World War II veteran in the community but essentially unmolested. I have no idea where he went when he left the Little Town or what became of him.

And I have no idea if he really was a Nazi or if he joined the party and fought as a matter of his own survival. My father had no way of knowing those details of H.W.’s life nor did any other man in the community. The reality that the German people lived under a dictatorship meant little to those graying warriors. In her youth R. knew Werner von Braun and other of the German scientists who came to the United States after the war. She tells the story of one of their wives saying, “When you awake in the night to find a Gestapo officer standing at the foot of your bed with a gun to your child’s head and they ask if you are a good Nazi, there is only one answer you can give.”

So you see, my thoughts on war are tangled with images of conflicts past, those about which I read in books and those passed on to me by the men who fought them. There is written history and there is personal, experiential history. That latter is a thing no historian can know or analyze. It’s a private world. I don’t know if H.W. hated his neighbors as much as they hated him but I do know the war never ended for any of them and in these troubled times that perhaps troubles me most.