Part of a series of lectures we have had throughout the year. Dr. Kinder will look at the way hollywood has shied away from war wounds and how military propaganda is used to downplay the loss of life and limb in wars. In this talk, kinder will look at the history of american war through the eyes of five disabled veterans. We welcome dr. Kinder from Oklahoma State university where he is a professor of history and american studies. He is the author of paying with their bodies which came out two years ago. He is currently completing a zoos inthe history of world war ii. Please welcome Professor John kinder. Professor kinder thank you. [applause] kinder thank you for inviting me to speak with you this evening. This is a real pleasure and i look forward to the day im able to come back here, hopefully soon as a researcher. I want to point out from the physician. I am not a i am a historian and a cultural historian at that. Which means when it comes to war, i am less interested in medical advancement, the nuts and bolts of putting people back together, then in how we make sense of wars trauma. The extent to which we grapple as wehat has happened head into battle and then come home. That is what i am about. With that in mind, i thought we might begin today with looking at hollywood, which i consider ground zero. 1949, four years after the theof world war ii and sands of iwo jima has just reached theaters. For those who have not seen it, it stars john wayne in his most role, weight iconic john stryker. He is a marine. Art father figure he is tasked with leading the young platoon in a series of assaults culminating in an attack on the japanese stronghold in iwo jima. At the time it was released, critics praised it for the realism of the onscreen combat. U. S. Marine corpss participated in making the film in hollywood. Today, the film is best known for its ending. For those who have not seen it, i apologize because i am about to spoil it. Mountain,e top of the john stryker pauses to have a cigarette and is shot through the chest. It happens so quickly, you do not know what is happening. At one moment they are all there, celebrating, and then, the unthinkable has happened. John wayne is dead. How can this be . Wasite the ending, the film catnip for the generation raised in the afterglow of world war ii. Even today it is easy to understand why. Why the film was so appealing. Seem of iwo jima makes war heroic and honorable. It seems like a fasttrack to manhood for those brave enough to follow in john waynes footsteps. Plus, this is what i want to hammer home, the movie makes john waynes final seconds appear painfree. Instantaneous. His corpse is kept at a view of the camera. You really do not see anything. Perhaps john strykers organs were ripped apart as the bullet passed through his chest. Perhaps his back exploded in a volcano of blood and bone. Perhaps he evacuated his bowels as so many others do the last moments of life. We will never know. Prior to the 1960s, hollywood shied away from showing those sorts of details. With littlequickly more than a little squirt of fake blood. You would never know that enemy gunfire sometimes destroyed andes, faces, brains, genitals. This sanitize vision of wartime bylence can be chalked up the hollywood code which restricted trauma. But i think john strykers is indicated of a larger trend in American Culture. That is an unwillingness to a knowledge what happens happened to bodies in military conflict. We just do not think about it. We do not see it. When it comes to bodily trauma, Many Americans live in a world of willful ignorance. Tveralists rarely journalists rarely speak about severed limbs. They are more likely to speak about losses and casualties. As if moore was out injuries. As if war was without injuries. To would be hardpressed find out what happened to the injured. Hanks assuresom us they gave their lives for freedom. We are told their depths meant hs meantg deat something. There is no conspiracy. There is no larger force acting to keep this information away. Yes, in wartime the federal government maintains a long tradition of censoring the worst of the slaughter in order to maintain civilian morale. In world war ii, it was a conflict in which 50 Million People were killed and yet americans at home did not begin to see photos of g. I. Corpses until 1943. And they were free of bodily mutilation. They were basically men who had been killed and were laying down in the sand. Today technology has rendered most forms of censorship updated. , a ban was lifted. This are exceptions to pattern of absence. Have sharedns intimate details of their physical and mental trauma. On the whole, American Culture has long engaged in selfcensorship. Many of us do not think about wartime suffering. There are many reasons why. Unpleasant. Ut it is doing so would politicize the suffering. Supporting the troops, we are told, means focusing on the positive. And because, and this is my main theory, we have been trained not to care. War, for the vast majority of continues to be out of sight, out of mind. I want to spend our time together tonight to take a brief tour of the history of american war. Our guidepost will be five veterans, some famous, others forgotten, whose bodies were permanently altered during wars. What emerges is a portrait of a nation struggling and failing to come to terms with the human cost of military conflict. A portrait of war emerges that looks different than what you would see in a hollywood movie starring someone like john wayne. That is what i want to get a sense of tonight. We will start in the civil war. 1863, private joseph in virginiaighting when he was hit in the face by a shell fragment. The burning piece of metal took off part of his job, fractured his cheekbone and destroyed one of his eyes, leaving behind a gaping hole. Harvey sell into southern hands and was held prisoner for 11 fell into southern hands and was held prisoner for 11 days before doctors worked on him. It was a month and a half before he saw any real doctor. He was discharged on the account of physical disability in 1865. He took a job as a night watchman. When this photo was taken the following month, liquid and saliva continued to leak from the wound and much of his face was numb. I found his story in a 6000 page history of medical advancements of the civil war. I chose harvey to show you for a few reasons. He fulfills any of our ofectations that we have disabled veterans. He was injured in battle and suffered a physical wound, one that remained visible after the war ended. Clichesembodies many that we gravitate towards when talking about disabled veterans. Some wounds never heal. War lives on in the bodies of those who fought. That is quite literally the case in harvey. Howlars often talk about the body is a site of traumatic memory emma unhealed memory, unhealed wounds opening and erecting after years of dormancy. They are portals to an earlier time. Evidence that the past is never really passed. That was the case for Joseph Harvey. He would never be able to move on from the war. He would never become what he once was. I like to think of him as our stereotype of a disabled veteran. , its injured, it is visible happened in battle, it lives on in his body. Yet he is also an outlier. During the civil war, twice as many troops were killed by disease as by atul wins. Battle wounds. Fever killedyphoid many. Crudel technology was during the civil war. Sometimes, the qr was worse than the sickness he was a 20yearold soldier from maryland who ingested mercury to treat a bout of pneumonia. Surgeons had to remove much of his face. I bring up cases like this not brutality of the civil war battlefield. Far from it come in fact. Advancements in manufacturing allowed bullets to blast apart troops with unprecedented speed. High casualties were not a tragic byproduct of civil war battles. They were the point of civil war battles. If we only focus on men like Joseph Harvey, we miss another part of the war story, the every day dangers that plague american were making to this day. For the 10,000 or so Union Soldiers that suffered wounds to we face, thousands of others dont like to think about and were permanently disabled far from the battlefield when they were hit by trains, when limbs fell on their heads, or when they were kicked in the face by mules. In the decades following the in 1868,death, americans struggled to come to terms with the civil wars legacy of destruction. End, somethings very strange began to happen, something we dont think about, which is that growing numbers began to see the conflict as an aberration. It was the last outburst of a brutal age. In the future, wars between what they called civilized nations, by which they meant white, would be shorter and more survivable. No sane nation would dare repeat the civil wars deadly formula of mass armies and industrial gunseaponry, not when the and bombs would only get more lethal. Prediction. The most optimistic predicted that International Arbitration replace largescale bloodletting. At the least, military physicians could take some comfort in the medical lessons they learned from harvey and thousands like him. , that masse dream warfare and mass casualties would disappear in the 20th century, which brings us to world war i and our second disabled veteran, boris pippen. No doubt many of you have heard of him. Removed from slavery, he rose to become one of the most important africanamerican artists, a journey that hinged in no small part on his experience in world war i. The date was september 30, 1918, barely a month after the ceasefire. His regimen was fighting northeast of terrace when he was hit by german machine gun fire. Bullets smashed through his right shoulder. He spent hours awaiting rescue. At one point, he fell into a ditch and was pinned beneath a corpse for hours before he was evacuated be on the front lines. After months of treatment, he was discharged with a steel plate in his shoulder and a pension of 22. 50 a month. Next decade, he scraped by, working a series of odd jobs, spending his nights decorating cigarette boxes as a crude form of occupational therapy. In 1930, pippin took up painting, using his left hand to prop up his right arm and guide the brush across the canvas. Pippins portraits and scenes of africanamerican life have been featured in magazines like time, vogue. You can see his work at moma and the metropolitan museum art. When the u. S. Entered world war i, many believed that men like pippin did not belong in uniform, let alone wielding rifles on the front line. I certainly wouldnt be the first person to bring up the of the fact that the United States waged the war with a white supremacist army. Racism was baked into all aspects of military life during world war i, from segregated recreational facilities to the violent harassment of blacks in. Niforms a postwar study coauthored by diagnoseds africanamericans with extraordinarily high rates of hysteria, poor emotional control, and venereal disease. For men like davenport and plenty of others like him, africanamericans in their view lack the intelligence and emotional discipline to be effective fighters. Instead, lack bodies were suited for one thing, manual labor. That was it. Allblack 369th infantry, better known as the Harlem Health fighters, only saw action when it was put under the command. White troops refused to fight alongside their africanamerican countrymen. The 360 not was so successful that the entire regiment won a citation from the french government. A quarter of a million new yorkers cheered as the hell fighters marched in a tickertape parade, right past where we are tonight. Such displays were not enough to alter the nations and militaries systemic devaluing of black bodies. Vets wereamerican lynched after world war i. Countless more were beaten, harassed, their houses set aflame. With his wounded arm and measly pension, pippin was able to survive the red summer of 1919. It would take another world war before the commanderinchief decided to desegregate the u. S. Military. Despite this, despite the 369th record, military leaders charged that men of color had little place in war, unless they were janitors or the targets of american firepower. This is the story up until world war i and world war ii. We have two figures. You might not recognize the name of our next veteran, but it is likely that many are familiar with his work. Russell, perhaps the most famous disabled American Veteran of world war ii, never saw action overseas. 1944, as some 50,000 troops landed on the beaches of normandy, he was serving as an Army Instructor when a defective explosive blew off both of his hands. Russell was sent to walter reed in washington, d. C. Where he spent months recovering, and this was agonizing. Of all,n pain, but most he was worried about spending the rest of his life as an amputee, as he wrote in his disabledaphy for a veteran in 1944, rehabilitation was not a realistic prospect. I had plenty of time to figure out if i was right. This was his attitude. A second andse for point out that this term he uses, rehabilitation, this isnt a generic term for any kind of medical treatment. It meant something very specific. Rehabilitation was an integrated orthopedics,ces, jobs training, psychological counseling, aimed at helping disabled veterans reintegrate into society as economically workers. E it was conceived as a modern approach to what they called at the time the problem of the disabled veteran. It was seen as an alternative to the days when government largess was consigned to pensions and old soldiers homes. Today, we take this sort of thing for granted. If you are wounded in war, the government will help put you back on your feet and get you working again. This idea of rehabilitation has been the backbone of federal day,y for veterans to this but during world war i, this was considered an experiment. If it was successful, it would transform war itself. Writing in october of 1917, and opined,ddy roosevelt the cripple, in the sense of being a helpless or useless cripple, will largely be eliminated, and out of this war will have come another step in the march of mankind towards the better and more just life. World war i rehabilitation did not live up to this lofty promise, but with each new war, new cohorts of physical therapists and prosthetics designers have recycled the same old promise that you get from Teddy Roosevelt. Todays Wounded Warriors have the best care of her, and thanks to advanced technology and research, the disabled veteran will soon be a thing of the past. They literally believe this. Todays Wounded Warriors have the best care ofwith each new we no such thing as disabled veterans. Teddy roosevelt believed this 100 years ago, and we are hearing this today. Back to harold russell. In recovery, he happened to see a documentary film about a world war vet who had been successfully rehabilitated. He was intrigued, and after some training, he went on to star in his own film, called barry of us he is shownhich performing various tasks with his hook prostheses. About three world war ii vets, attempting to transition to civilian life. A critical and Box Office Smash in 1946 for its therayal of homer parrish, former quarterback who lost both of his hands in a naval attack. Hands in a naval attack. He won two academy awards, one for best supporting actor, and another for bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans. Russells portion of the film mainly focuses on his character homer and his anxieties about a burdening his families, especially his fiancee wilma, with his disability, and in his most poignant scene, hes struggling to take off his hooks , and wilma talks him into bed as if hes a baby. We are not really sure what is going to happen to homer 5, 10, 20 years down the road. We sense he is going to get married. There is still a lingering sense of doubt. Russell,rajectory for his transformation from helplessness to hopefulness, from depression to rehabilitation, seemed to mirror the optimism of postworld war ii victory culture. He was a disabled veteran for called the good war. He seemed to embody so many traits. That is three. On october 26, 1967, navy pilot iii wasney mccain flying a Bombing Mission overhung noise when his plane was downed by a surface to air missile. He eject it at 500 miles per hour, breaking both arms and his right knee in the process, landing in a shallow lake, attacked by locals and later trucked to a colonial prison, which was nicknamed the hanoi hilton. Medical care was extremely scarce. Doctors failed to properly set his broken bones. He lost one third of his body weight to dysentery and forced starvation. An admiral,on of yet he consistently thwarted his to use him as a political pawn. They wanted to turn him into this propaganda figure. Then came the torture. The beatings, the agonizing nights. Mccain tried to commit suicide wrote,but as he later every man has his breaking point, and i had reached mine. He signed a confession, thanking the vietnamese people, calling himself a black criminal. 5. 5 years astal of a prisoner of. Four decades later, he still has limited flexibility in his knee and has difficulty raising his arms much higher than what we see in the photo. One cant talk about mccains pow experience without reflecting on the relationship between war and politics. Pows, manyorean war, of whom were assumed to be brainwashed, returned home under a cloud of suspicion. Suspicion came from collaborating with the enemy or this sense that they might have done so p or john mccain, by contrast, was a national hero. Hair,ematurely whitened evidence of his willingness to suffer on americas behalf. Its important to point out that the politics of the disabled body saturated wartime u. S. Culture. On the one hand, you have fromes who were paralyzed the waist down with a gunshot to the spine. He and many others displayed their disabled bodies as signs of protest, as signs to protest the inhumanity of the vietnam war. You have that on one side, but mccains injuries were meant to symbolize something different. Faith, faith that the war had been worth it, faith in duty and country and the righteousness of american violence. To today, mccains identity as pow is essential to his political credibility. You cant understand mccain and his political clout without understanding his disabled body. Recordings of north vietnamese propaganda forecasts featuring john mccains voice have been circulating online. The Mainstream Press has largely ignored these broadcasts, and for good reason. For one thing, mccain has admitted to taping a false confession after days of abuse. Yet some of the darker corners of the rightwing internet ha