When you create soldiers, they are your responsibility forever, Alexandra Fuller says. She brings two perspectives to this realization.  One was the shattered lives of soldiers who, along with her father, fought on the losing side of the bloody war waged against the apartheid white Rhodesian government (now Zimbabwe.) The other was examining the cracks she found in herself, the residue of being a child when war is as much a given as the weather.

Ms. Fuller's memoir of her childhood, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, was internationally successful. While she thought of that book as a love story to her mother, Ms. Fuller also told the hard truth of Mum's racism and her commitment to white rule that both put the entire family at grave risk and shaped Alexandra's childhood.

But when readers forgave the writer and not Mum, Ms. Fuller remembers feeling suddenly that somehow she had pulled off an enormous, astonishing lie. That's hard, since she's troubled by present-day writers and artists she believes have become flashy at the cost of honesty, comfortable in the presence of lies.

So Alexandra Fuller set out to find her own truths, address her own questions: How much of the Rhodesian war, with its propaganda and racism and hatred, had intoxicated her? How much of all that poison had become part of the fabric of her own being?

She understood very early that landscape has character, Ms. Fuller says. So, in the company of "K," a formidable former White Rhodesian soldier and her traveling companion, she headed for places where the war had been fought.

Along the way, they encountered other soldiers, men whose devastated lives convinced Ms. Fuller that no one ever recovers from war. Why? Because when a society breaks the fundamental covenant of civilization -- creates a soldier by telling a person to kill -- those soldiers give up their lives, their sanity and their futures in the belief that they are protecting you. The result, she says, is that they belong to you forever and more frighteningly, you belong to them.

You cannot undo war any more than you can recover from it, she says of the soldiers as of herself. To say that you can is a lie. War spools on and on and on, she says, like a broken videotape, the only bits remaining are the nuggets of hatred strung together, becoming a kind of video game in which you live out the rest of your life.

War infantilizes people, Alexandra Fuller learned. Even the wrathful God on whom K now relies to control his self-destructive behavior cannot melt the terrified 17 year old still trapped inside the aging soldier. And Ms. Fuller? She is relieved to have broken free of the frozen survival mechanisms that served her well as a frightened 9 year old. And she's concluded that there is no good and evil, only good and bad choices.

In the end, Ms. Fuller says, the most sane thing she learned from confronting a lifetime of racism and war was ... compassion.

 

[This Program was recorded May 2, 2005, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.]