[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21st century veterans’ stories!]
On two important lessons about veterans that we can draw from Alfred F. Young’s book about George Robert Twelves Hewes.
I wrote at length about Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (2000) in this 2012 Beach Reads post. I’d ask you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back for a couple further thoughts about Hewes as a Revolutionary War veteran.
Welcome back! In that post I focused mostly on Hewes’s role in and then 1820s memories of pre-Revolutionary events like the Boston Tea Party and Boston Massacre, which are also the main focal points of Young’s book. But Hewes did go on to fight in the American Revolution as well, both as a militiaman and as a privateer, and I think that’s as important part of his story that can also help us engage with a couple broader layers of veterans’ experiences. For one thing, I would say that we can sometimes focus on veterans’ wartime experiences as if they exist in a vacuum, or at least as something distinct from the rest of their story; but while of course war is its own thing, it’s also always part of a soldier’s ongoing and larger life story, and more specifically it always follows on whatever had come before for that individual. While most soldiers likely don’t take part in events that directly lead up to the war as Hewes did, they certainly do all live in the society that is experiencing those pre-war events and trends, and I have no doubt that for nearly all of them that means they come to the war with existing perspectives and ideas that have to be considered as part of their wartime experiences.
By definition, veterans also return from their wartime experiences (something that is of course far from guaranteed for soldiers serving in a war). Most of our narratives of returning veterans focus, understandably, on the ways that they carry the war with them for the rest of their lives, a subject I’ve written about many times in this space. But what Hewes and The Shoemaker remind us is that veterans also play a role in shaping our stories, narratives, and collective memories of the wars that they take part in. That they don’t generally do so as overtly as Hewes did through his contributions to 1820s commemorations, or for that matter as overtly as many of the folks and texts I’ll write about in this week’s series, doesn’t change the fact that every time a veteran talks about wartime experiences, tell stories of the war, participates in a meeting or gathering or conversation related to those subjects, and so on, they are helping shape our collective memories of that conflict. That can mean many different things in practice, but no matter what it’s a key role that veterans play, and one that the Shoemaker helps us remember and think about.
Next veteran’s story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?
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