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| Carentan, 1944 (Photo: US Army) |
“To remember a battle in which he has taken part,” wrote Louis Simpson, the American poet and World War II veteran who died last September, “a man must make himself innocent again — innocent of newspapers, books and movies. He must remember his actual life, the life of the body. Everything else is journalism.”
Simpson served in the 101st US Airborne Division of the US Army from 1943 to 1945, and experienced firsthand some of the most brutal battles of the war, including, after the invasion of France by allied forces on D-Day, the bloody battle for a small town called Carentan.
Some have described Simpson's poem describing that battle, Carentan O Carentan, as "cynical"; if so, Simpson, having endured the trials of battle and seen his compatriots fall around him, certainly earned the right to express such cynicism. But to me, Carentan is Simpson recalling something quite different, something Simpson himself pointed to above: remembrance of "his actual life, the life of the body."
It is impossible for me to read Carentan O Carentan without thinking of those men who have placed themselves in the service of their country and endured things that I will never have to endure; who walked down a sunny lane in Normandy one summer day as their enemies "aimed between the belt and boot and let the barrel climb." If we do not have to experience what these men experienced, surely it's our duty, at the very least, to listen to them, and to always remember that our freedoms are inseparable from their sacrifices. All else, as Simpson might put it, is journalism.
