Monday, April 15, 2013

Risking it all for a souvenir


Recently I've read Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, which follows the exploits of a company of the 101st Airborne through Europe in World War II. Now I'm reading All Quiet On the Western Front, which is a novel written by World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque that details the traumatic experience of German soldiers in the trenches.

In both books, a strange behavior of the embattled soldier is described: he will undergo extraordinary risks to his personal safety for the seemingly trivial reason of nabbing a "souvenir" from the battlefield.

In Band of Brothers--which is a nonfictional account--soldier Donald Malarkey suddenly bounds out from behind his cover during an assault on a German position, because he thinks he can see a Luger on the body of a dead German soldier. He runs out to the body, finds that it is not a Luger after all, and scurries back to his position unharmed. The only reason he is not shot dead is because the Germans assumed he was a medic.

In All Quiet on the Western Front, soldiers risk their lives scavenging No Man's Land for silken parachutes to send home to their wives and girlfriends as sewing material:
The parachutes are turned to more practical uses....Kropp and I use them as handkerchiefs. The others send them home. If the women could see at what risk these bits of rag are often obtained, they would be horrified.
Ruminating on this, Stephen Ambrose quotes Glen Gray, a war veteran (and, later, philosopher at Colorado College), who speculates that
[p]rimarily, souvenirs appeared to give the soldier some assurance of this future beyond the destructive environment of the present. They represented a promise that he might survive.
I suppose that is one plausible theory. To me, though, it seems that at least part of the explanation must have something to do with the fact that soldiers in those circumstances have trained themselves to disregard risks to their own personal safety in general. Being in denial about the extreme physical danger of a battlefield makes it possible to charge headlong into machine gun fire to assault the enemy, but perhaps a side effect of this denial is that a soldier will also take extreme risks for lesser, even trivial goals.

In any case, though, this is a very surprising and interesting behavior exhibited by soldiers in battle.

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