Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, as we commemorate Memorial Day, Free Press columnist and Marine Corps veteran Aaron MacLean reflects on Herman Wouk’s World War II masterpiece “War and Remembrance,” and its unbearably human depiction of a war now increasingly confined to the history books.
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Strange young man that I was, I first encountered Herman Wouk by way of Gore Vidal, whose collected essays I purchased from the Crown Books at Springfield Mall in Northern Virginia when I was about 15. The son of a retired Army officer and a public school administrator, I had no idea who Vidal was, but it had an arresting cover with Jasper Johns’ American flags, and the essay I happened to flip to (a review of Robert Graves’ translation of Suetonius) had lots of sex. Sold.
Back at home, I turned to a stunt-essay that had run in 1973 in The New York Review of Books, in which Vidal reviewed all top 10 New York Times fiction bestsellers. The utterly cynical and nasty (and frequently funny) polemicism, implicitly in defense of Art and Language, was thrilling. His attitude toward his authors was that of a Kriegsmarine captain conducting unrestricted U-boat warfare in the waters off Nova Scotia: no prisoners.
