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17 January 1914—28 August 1993

Show Me a Good War

Some ten million men were conscripted into the U.S. military during World War II. Fifty thousand of them requested and received conscientious objector status. Some served as noncombatant medics. Others chose to go to prison. Twelve thousand opted to serve in labor camps scattered across the nation. The poet William Stafford was one of the latter.

Born in Kansas shortly before World War I erupted, Stafford grew up hearing elders—teachers, relatives, neighbors—talk about how horrible the conflict had been. So he arrived at his pacifist convictions while still quite young. When drafted in 1942 during World War II, it was only natural that he petitioned for conscientious objector status. For the next four years he performed hard manual labor in the camps—first in Arkansas, then in Illinois, and finally in California—for $2.50 a month. In Arkansas he was nearly lynched by a mob infuriated by his pacifism. After his release from the camps and his return home, a childhood friend threated to kill him for his “treasonous” opposition to the war. His first book, Down in My Heart, was a semi-autobiographical novel about life in the camps.

Stafford didn’t begin publishing poetry until nearly twenty years after the war ended. But his verse attests to his continuing opposition to it and to all wars. (Once asked whether he believed he could fight in a “good” war, he replied, “Show me a good war.”) In “These Mornings,” Stafford meditates on what happens when warplanes bomb cities. Both buildings and people are blown up into the sky or down into the earth, he writes, leaving nothing but hideous scars on the land. In “Ground Zero,” he reflects on the uncanny sidewalk photographs of victims created by the flash of the atomic blast at Hiroshima. Their shadows, he muses, are now ours. Our condoning of such an unimaginable mass killing leaves us spiritually anemic, shadow-like. And in “For the Unknown Soldier,” Stafford fleshes out the abstract word enemy by reminding readers that the “unknown enemy soldier” is a person who, just like us, marvels at a beautiful sky or carries a laughing baby to a park. He challenges the patriotic blindness that darkens our awareness of the “enemy’s” humanness.

Stafford’s lifelong opposition to war wasn’t strident. Although he understood and sympathized with the motives behind loud anti-war demonstrations, he neither approved of them nor participated in them. His style was quiet conversation, poetic evocation, and “living a life of witness by seeing the good in the enemy.” As he once said about his conscientious objection to World War II, “I can’t stop war, Jesus couldn’t stop war, Eisenhower couldn’t stop it. [But] I could decide there would be one person not in it.”