Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2021. x, 291 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$24.99, paper. ISBN 9780761872351.
Glenn Petersen’s War and the Arc of Human Experience is a harrowing, poignant, cultural, psychological, autobiographical account of the reciprocal influences of his Vietnam wartime experiences and life traumas. Beyond category, this memoir is more literary, cultural, and scientific than I can convey. Chapter 1 opens with Petersen’s account of running away from home and joining the Navy to obtain training so he could advance in the phone company where he was working. He then considers the pervasive military influence of the era’s films, television programs, boys’ model planes, and school air-raid drills, as well as the heroic ideals of Catholic martyrdom and folk protest music, whose anti-war themes escaped the minds of young lads. Readers also meet Petersen’s overbearing father whom Petersen escaped in order to create his own identity, and whose shadow loomed over his entire life. Chapter 2 recounts his boot camp training in radio avionics (just as the Gulf of Tonkin incident happened), the development of his soldier’s cynical ironic detachment, his awareness of the mortal dangers of working on flight decks, the torture endured in POW training exercises, and his assignment as a radar intercept technician to a flying Fudd radar platform.
Chapter 3 describes the everyday mortal dangers the 19-year-old Petersen faced—checking the rotating radar level in the unlit dome crouching and jumping over supports to avoid being crushed against a wall, trying not to stray overboard while feeling his way in the pitch dark while hauling a 113-pound radar scope on his back across the flight deck to the Fudd—along with catapult launches and cable-hook landings that had killed and maimed people. Avoiding electrocution while repairing a radar scope by touch without removing it during flight and dropping rescue flairs out of an escape hatch held against the wind with his body weight were also deadly risks Petersen faced. He could not have done his job had he focused on his own safety; he therefore repressed the terror that registered in his body.
Chapter 4 recounts the time when Petersen’s plane strayed over Chinese airspace and made a steep descent into antiaircraft fire—including guilt over a broken radar (which had prompted the pilot’s miscalculation), panic that he would be blamed, and irony that he could not thereafter mention the incident. Petersen recounts working non-stop: repairing equipment used in flight while on ship, hoarding supplies, and cannibalizing gear because it was vital to soldiers’ lives, and directing patrol aircraft to confront a Quaker ship carrying medical supplies to North Vietnam. During port calls, Petersen accompanied two older soldiers, an African American and a Puerto Rican with an ironic detachment who taught him how to have a good time. This is when he began drinking heavily and started forming a counter-cultural intellectual identity.
The next two chapters find Petersen daydreaming of his future and struggling to find his way after the military. As he flew over atolls in the Pacific he found escape in imagining himself conducting anthropological research on one of them after he’d read an account of fieldwork. Back in civilian life, he totaled several cars in alcoholic stupors and worked and attended state college—applying himself with the same concentrated effort from his military days, which earned him a scholarship to Columbia. The conundrum of wanting to both succeed and rebel hit him full force while studying theories about how people say, think, and do complexly interrelated and contrarian things. His studies suffered because of his involvement in anti-war protests until an incident when he found himself singularly willing to confront riot police while his compatriots escaped out a back window. Petersen found an ideal father in his adopted family on Pohnpei that he met while conducting research. He advocated for Micronesian independence as a redemptive act, became a member of their UN mission, then resigned when they were forced to support the US invasion of Iraq. Taking a teaching position in the CUNY system, Petersen married soon after earning tenure and had a daughter who changed his life.
Chapter 6 recounts the otherwise absent emotional attachment that Petersen experienced with his daughter, which led him to foreswear alcohol, navigate bureaucratic incongruities to get a PTSD diagnosis, and then try various treatments. The book’s title chapter describes Petersen’s social withdrawal without alcohol, his divorce, his experience of 9/11, and the liberating course he taught about the moral injury caused by war, and the deception and self-deception on which this book is based, including the necessity of speaking truth to power. The closing chapters consider the lingering effects of PTSD on his everyday life, his remarriage, and his issues and emotions involving security, trust, fear, anxiety, doubt, anger, sympathy, cynicism, betrayal, moral injury, pride, guilt, and confusion. Though ending on a hopeful note, Petersen’s account never achieves a resolution.
Petersen’s courageous gripping tale leaves much to ponder. It is the only anthropology book I know that considers the soul as something other than someone else’s supernatural belief. The Greek thumos or “spiritedness” that he identifies as his drivenness, military gung-ho-ness, and student seriousness is also the human desire for recognition—what drove Petersen so hard may have been the dogged hatred he carried from his father. While the reader learns in the Introduction that Petersen has a sister, and recounts that his mother and brother were unable to acknowledge his post war trauma, how his family dynamics might have contributed to his trust and betrayal issues remains unaddressed. At the same time, it is easy to relate to the everyday insecurities, angers, and frustrations of sharing a household with Petersen that he details in his penultimate chapter. Joseph Heller insisted that he wrote about modern bureaucratic society instead of simply war. The interplay of that society, social class, and family dynamics accounts for far more anthropology than we know. Petersen’s book is as hard to put down as it is important to pick up. It must be read.
Doug Dalton
Longwood University, Farmville