You asked many of your subjects if they feared death. Do you fear death?
At this stage in the game, I'm 89 years old, I have two martinis a day, two cigars a day, my wife's gone and my friends are gone too. I've had a good run. However, I'm greedy. So I want to do a couple of books. I probably won't finish them, but it makes the day go quicker. So do I fear death? Not especially.
How did the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 change our perceptions of death?
Well that's a good question. You see, I'd started the book long before that. Has it changed my perception of life and death, you mean? If anything, it's italicized it. If anything, more than ever, [the Sept. 11 attacks were] a tragic, stupid event, a barbaric event that has made the book even more pertinent than it may have been before. And I find this ironic and tragic at the same time.
How can I put it? What has happened has made us more vulnerable. We are not the Fortress America. I think that's the last thing Thomas Paine had in mind 200 years ago. Following "Common Sense" he wrote "Rights of Man," and in that he spoke of this new society, this open society, and he said it could lift the world, lift it. I'm talking about 1791 he was writing it. He didn't mean for us to be Fortress America. If we are Fortress America, then we are against "Them," whoever "Them" is -- the rest of the world, of course. So suddenly it's happened. We are vulnerable and in this vulnerability, I hope we're more human. You see, to err is human, to be vulnerable is human and so, in a sense, I'm looking now to find something hopeful that's come out of this, ironically enough, that we ourselves may recognize what it is to be "the other."
So you think the attacks should teach us all how to empathize?
You know, when we saw that picture of that little girl running, the Vietnam shot, that little terrified girl, napalm around her -- remember that? That should be our little girl from now on. That's the thing you see. That little girl should be considered our little girl.
Remember Einstein? I still lean on Einstein. I love to quote Einstein because no one dares contradict me. Einstein said shortly before he died, he was so overwhelmed, his own findings led to Hiroshima, subsequently -- the irony -- he tore his hair when he learned about Hiroshima. He never expected [the bomb] to be dropped on human beings, and then he said something along the lines of, "Everything in the world has changed with the split atom except one thing -- the way we think." We have to think anew. If we don't think anew we're in the soup.
And are people now thinking anew?
Remember, all my books have dealt with the extraordinary possibilities of ordinary Americans. And we saw it of course with the tenacity of the firefighters and the cops and the paramedics and everybody. So the ordinary American, I think, senses something deep down, inchoate though the feeling is, that our spokesmen, politicians or whoever they are, don't understand at all.
Will the current campaign -- this long War Against Terrorism we've embarked upon -- become another Vietnam for the United States?
I don't know. I wish to hell I knew because there's no precedent for this. It won't even be Vietnam because Vietnam was a country, where of course we had no business being to begin with. It was an obscene misadventure. Now, there are groups, there are fragments, we know that. Afghanistan is a fragmented land and it's one warlord against another, and even the Northern Alliance, when it comes to human rights, have not been overwhelmingly great. I think we have to have this new move, a whole new Einsteinian approach. I return to him all the time.
For "The Good War" you collected oral histories of soldiers from World War II. Do you think the war experience is universal? Will the oral histories of the soldiers currently in Afghanistan sound the same as those you collected for "The Good War," or have we lost something over the last 50 years?
Well, we have lost something in the last 50 years. I think the Cold War's aftermath is still around and about. Now, ironically enough, our ally is Russia. Here we go again. Archibald McLeish wrote a wonderful piece during the most frigid parts of the Cold War for Harper's, I think, and he said, "We are enthralled to them," -- the Soviets -- "and they're enthralled to us. No matter what they do, we'll do the opposite. No matter what. And no matter what we do, they'll do the opposite." So I thought of that, and that still hovers even though things have been reversed now. There's Putin and Bush -- buddy-buddies: the irony. But no, it can't be the same. It's different.
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